China's biggest cultural drop this year isn't a sneaker collab or a designer capsule. It's a 90-year-old, 12,500-km march. And yes, there's merch.

Jiangxi Province, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and Guizhou, Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces: six provincial-level regions in six weeks. From early June until late July this year, China International Communications Group organized a business journey that invited several of its employees, this author included, to retrace the footsteps of the Red soldiers.

This trip was all about commemorating the original drop that concluded 90 years ago this month, the content nobody actually planned for: the Long March (1934-36).

Quick historical facts: From October 1934 to October 1936, the Red Army, encircled by the Kuomintang party regime's troops, pulled off a major strategic relocation, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC). The epic journey the Reds traveled saw them clawing through some of the most unforgiving terrain China has to offer. Its significance? The Long March became the turning point that kicked open an entirely new chapter in Chinese history and saw the CPC eventually come into power.

As a Sinologist who explores China through the twin lenses of fashion and urban culture, wondering not just about what people are wearing but also why they're wearing it, I set out on this trek asking the question: How do the Red Army and their Long March continue to influence national trends at play in China today?

The answer is an entire tourism economy and a generational identity project, all wrapped up in one color: Red.

Gen Z returns 

A Red tourism industrial complex can be found in small, remote places like Tucheng, Xishui County in Guizhou, home to the Red Army Women Street, among other revolutionary sites, where 29 female Red Army soldiers were quartered in January 1935. They carried stretchers, nursed the wounded, sewed and cooked, as well as fighting alongside their male peers. This town is also home to a memorial hall honoring the 4,113 women who, in one way, shape or form, joined the Long March.

Droves of guided tours pass through the street, and the food and beverage scene in the surrounding area is generating income long after the museum and revolutionary sites have closed for the day. The town has leaned into it: Many eateries there now operate under a "one shop, one specialty" model, and some of the local spicy dishes have become as fiery of a draw as the Red sites themselves.

Vendors selling typical snacks like sweet potato rice balls and sweet potato taffy mentioned to Beijing Review in casual conversation that sales typically double during holidays. And the tour buses keep coming, hungry for history and hearty bites.

Quick foodie facts: The Long March route maps almost perfectly onto China's chili belt, the area in which chilies are grown and consumed with the most enthusiasm. Also, today, revolutionary-themed restaurants along the line serve up Red (pumpkin) soup, Red noodles and Long March dry rations with a sip of Red Army cola, which is in fact an alcoholic beverage guaranteed to keep you warm on the inside.

Another standout example is that of Xisuo, a village in Barkam City, Sichuan, inhabited mostly by members of the Jiarong branch of the Tibetan ethnic group. The village has been given a makeover thanks to its proximity to historical sites from China's revolutionary era (1921-49), attracting Red Culture aficionados and history buffs.

Infrastructure has followed, including the paving of dirt roads and the introduction of a school bus to take primary and middle school students from the village on the winding 8-km journey through the mountains to school.

One local woman told Beijing Review how her Tibetan hotpot restaurant has gone from surviving to thriving. Many residents there have been dabbling in opening homestays; the woman said hers has done well enough that she's opening more.

Young people no longer need to relocate to larger cities to earn a livelihood. One reason for this is the "earning money at the doorstep" phenomenon. The term refers to young graduates returning from cities to open businesses in their hometowns because now, they can. Red tourism, combined with infrastructure investment and policies to narrow the national urban-rural gap, has created demand where there was little to none a decade ago.

Young people around China are enthusiastically embracing global coffee culture, and creating their own, and the trend is particularly evident in the coffee shops dotting the village, run by local Gen Zs. One café in the village was decorated to the nines in local Tibetan style and offered a menu items infused with local specialties. Fancy a yak milk latte, anyone?

A green team 

The story of the Long March today is now no longer only Red. It's also green, incorporating mountains, rivers, marshes, grasslands or, in other words, green tourism. For example, Jinggangshan, a city in Jiangxi that was home to the CPC's first rural revolutionary base, promotes a type of Red-green integration tourism that pairs revolutionary site visits with forest hiking and ecological homestays.

Quick fitness fact: Jinggangshan's local government is throwing its weight behind the ongoing national campaign to promote fitness and has been developing dedicated hiking and trekking routes as part of a "sports + tourism" push.

At the Zoige Marshland in Sichuan, that once claimed many Red Army soldiers' lives, a raised walkway offering some of Mother Nature's most stunning marshland views, with rugged mountainscapes as the backdrop, cuts through the very terrain. You can also get dressed up in the traditional attire of the Tibetan ethnic group or Red styles and treat yourself to a glossy-worthy photoshoot in this place, a service now offered around China as part of the "travel shoot" trend.

In both Guizhou and Sichuan, recreational vehicle (RV) glamping sites offer towering views of where the Reds once crossed the mountains from the former province into the latter—wearing sandals woven from straw, mind you.

Quick fact: China is encouraging regions to develop distinctive RV tourism routes as part of a wider effort to unlock RV consumption and cultivate RV camping as a new growth area, according to a guideline released on September 18.

And the sales numbers don't lie. Year-on-year search growth for Red tourism products went up 130 percent in the first half of 2026, according to Chinese travel and ticket booking platform Tongcheng Travel's 2026 Red Tourism Consumption Trend Insight Report, released on August 25.

Even more interestingly, interactive revolutionary site visits with tags such as "real-scene missions" saw booking growth rates double that of overall scenic areas on the platform.

The 'Long Merch' 

Reenactments and live shows are hot right now.

Near the site of the Luding Bridge in Sichuan, where a major battle took place in 1935, you can get the fighter experience through a virtual reality (VR) shooting game, uniforms included. Several provinces run Follow the Commander Into the Attack events, where tourists don period uniforms, grab prop rifles and charge a simulated revolutionary era town alongside actors. The related hashtags on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok, and lifestyle bible app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) for that one alone have hit over 500 million views combined. The static exhibition is dead. Long live the immersive experience.

On Douyin, the hashtag "my Red Culture travel" had racked up over 1.5 billion video views and 380 million reads on microblogging platform Sina Weibo as of late September. The immersive battle experience of the Loushan Pass, located in the Dalou Mountains, a limestone range straddling the Guizhou-Sichuan border, has been particularly popular online. The site's Red tourism had hit 76 million impressions on RedNote as of late September, while short videos of the Loushan Pass immersive battle experience visitors can engage in there had pulled in 180 million views.

Quick fashion fact: The earlier-mentioned straw sandals soldiers wore to cross the mountains are now available on Taobao, Alibaba's online shopping Valhalla, tagged "guochao straw sandals" and "Red Army vintage." Guochao, also known as China Chic, literally means "national tide," but refers to items, from toys and tech to food and fashion, that are embedded with traditional Chinese cultural elements.

The sandals typically sell for 39 yuan ($6) a pair—the original Long Merch, adversity rebranded as a summer slipper.

This is the Red thread: still walking, still selling, still trending 90 years on.

(Based on the author's firsthand reporting during a six-week journey along the original Long March route in June-July) 

The author is a Dutch Sinologist and an editorial consultant with Beijing Review 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

Comments to elsbeth@cicgamericas.com