In July 2016, in honor of the 80^th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army's Long March, the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) invited domestically-leading artists to form a creative team. Elaborately forged over four years, The Long March made its debut in the 2016 NCPA Opera Festival and enjoyed great success. From October 22^nd to 31^st, The Long March will be performed on the NCPA stage once again. 

   
NCPA invited the composer YIN Qing and the playwright ZOU Jingzhi to forge the music and libretto of the opera The Long March, while also inviting directors TIAN Qinxin and YANG Xiaoyang to lead a first-class domestic creative team to put the historical event of the Red Army's Long March on the opera stage. The NCPA Vice President ZHAO Tiechun explained that the opera The Long March is the 50^th opera produced by NCPA, and its creative process took as long as four years. For the new round of performances in October, NCPA has further revised the opera according to opinions from all parties to make it closer to the historical facts and imbue it with more artistic expressive force. 
 

The composer YIN Qing introduced the course of continuing careful revision after the debut of The Long March, and the highlights of the cast in the round of performances: "After the preliminary round of performances, we successively convened creative meetings four times to research the polishing and revision of the next step. NCPA once again presented and revised an overall list of plays or operas with our main creative team. The revision range was not very large but the plot was made more reasonable and the figures more distinctive. The cast of performers for the second round of performances is very strong, including such excellent young singers as LI Xintong and WANG Hexiang. In NCPA, many artists can rehearse while developing together. The group atmosphere is very important.”     
It is particularly worth mentioning that on October 22^nd, 1936, three main forces of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army were joined in Huining, Gansu Province, which marked the victorious end of the Red Army’s Long March. Starting the journey of the second round of performances on the same day 80 years later is especially memorable. 

The Long March gathers WANG Hongwei, WANG Haitao, WANG Zhe and 

   
This round of performances of the opera The Long March will be led continuously by tenor YAN Weiwen and whole-heartedly joined by WANG Hongwei, WANG Haitao, WANG Zhe, GONG Shuang, HUANG Xunguo, ZHANG Long and others to constitute a folk-style cast of vocalists. The bel canto team is composed of youth tenor WANG Kai and stationed NCPA resident vocalists LIU Songhu, GUAN Zhijing, WANG Hexiang, WANG Chong, LI Xintong, as well as excellent youth singers LIANG Yufeng, CHEN Ran, WANG Yifeng, LI Yang and LÜ Yuanjie.