Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context By Jiawe ...

Over the past thirty years, I have read widely on the international communist movement that inspired so many intellectual luminaries of the world in the early decades of the twentieth century. While I have come to the view that many problems of the movement stem from Leninism, I have never revised my positive view of Snow’s book: it is a historical document, an archival record of those times, and, as such, his book cannot be compared with later “historical” accounts even if they are authored by famous writers such as Jung Chang.³ For example, in Mao: The Unknown Story it is claimed that the Red Army’s capture of Luding Bridge in 1935 was a fabrication.⁴ The authors Chang and Halliday make this assertion because of the 1997 testimony of an elderly woman who claimed she was present and had witnessed that the Red Army did not fight the Kuomintang (KMT) forces on the bridge. In October 2005, the Melbourne newspaper The Age reported that the witness could not be located, but the Sydney Morning Herald reported that another elderly woman had come forward to testify that fighting did take place on the bridge. The accounts of these two elderly eyewitnesses, of course, negate one another, and it is clearly pointless to go to the trouble of digging up such unreliable “eyewitnesses.”

In contrast is the Comintern military advisor Otto Braun⁵ who was a genuine eyewitness to the event, and he had a strong motive for hating Mao Zedong. In his memoirs published as Chinese Notes he records how the Red Army found the only available boat on the Dadu River. Under cover of machine guns, a platoon of soldiers crossed the river, and with hand grenades destroyed the enemy guards to establish a beachhead. The next day KMT planes began to bomb the crossing. As a result, the 2nd division of the Red Army received the order to attack Luding Bridge, and the 1st division that had already crossed the river attacked from the rear: this was why the battle of Luding Bridge ended so quickly. The KMT forces consisted of the Sichuan troops of Liu Wenhui,⁶ drawn from the militias of various Sichuan warlords who distrusted one another and were at odds over many matters with Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT government. Even together, they were a weak fighting force. It should be noted that