Al Jazeera begins a series of special reports in the run-up to October 1:

One of the key episodes of the war was the so-called Long March, when Mao led his forces on a strategic military retreat through harsh terrain to evade the nationalist Kuomintang army.

In the first of our series examining communist China at 60, Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan travels to China’s southeastern province of Jiangxi, where the Long March began.

The Financial Times put together a timeline of the history of the PRC which revisits key events.