Before the Long March, China had two sides: the nationalists and the communists. Both sides wanted to rule the country. This brought the Chinese Civil War. Chinese nationalists used 500,000 soldiers to remove the communists from Jiang Xi. They failed four times before. Now the nationalists changed the way to attack the communists, using encirclement (make a circle around the enemy army) to stop them from running away. The Communists leader Borgu tried to fight 500,000 soldiers face to face. But the problem is that the Jianxi communists just had 86,000 soldiers and more than half of them just had a broadsword and no guns. They failed to push the nationalist army back, so they tried to go to meet another communist army in Shaanxi. 