In the organizer's words:

Book presentation: The Long Bicycle March - 7,000 kilometers through the Middle Kingdom
Film poster of the movie Book presentation: The Long Bicycle March - 7,000 kilometers through the Middle Kingdom

with Christian Y. Schmidt

A high-risk adventure: the two China experts Christian Y. Schmidt and Volker Häring were the first Westerners ever to cycle the entire route of Mao Zedong's Long March on e-bikes. This route took them through almost the entire country: the Chinese Red Army covered almost 7,000 kilometers from the subtropical south of China across the Tibetan plateau with its snow-covered mountains and passes more than 4,000 meters high, before finally settling on the hostile loess plateau in the northwest of the country. It took the soldiers a year to cover the distance; Schmidt and Häring just under five months. However, Schmidt and Häring's incredible tour was also a research trip

research trip in the footsteps of the Bavarian professional revolutionary and Soviet secret agent Otto Braun. In China, he is known as Li De - Li, the German. After his arrest in 1928 during the Weimar Republic, he fled to Moscow and was sent from there to China. Here it was

Braun who organized and led the Long March in October 1934 until Mao Zedong took over the leadership role in 1935. This power struggle with Mao makes Li, the German, a famous, albeit controversial, figure in China to this day, while Otto Braun is hardly known in his home country. Schmidt and Häring also want to change this with their book. But contemporary China is not neglected either. Even the two China experts Häring and Schmidt were constantly amazed along the way at how much even the most remote areas of China have changed in the last twenty years, and they have numerous conversations with locals about how they feel about this development.

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