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

Chiang Kai-shek did not give the order to let the Red Army escape, as fictionalized by Jung Chang. Zhang Guotao,⁷ another of Mao’s sworn enemies, also wrote his memoirs during the 1970s. He describes how when his Fourth Front Red Army entered northern Sichuan in 1933, the mutual distrust between the warlords allowed his forces to establish themselves there and to rebuild troop numbers to what they had been before their defeat. Years later, in 1949 Liu Wenhui in fact led his troops to join forces with the Red Army, so clearly that part of history is not the simplistic picture presented by Jung Chang.

Snow’s account was written in 1936, when these events were just beginning to unfold. When he met the Red Army, the three forces of the Red Army had not joined up yet. As an outsider and a non-communist, Snow would have known little of the real situation. Indeed, many facts did not become clear until recent times, more than half a century after the events took place. For example, what came to be known as the Futian Incident (1930),⁸ which constituted the earliest purge of “counter-revolutionaries,” did not become widely known in China until as late as 2000. Hu Yaobang,⁹ a survivor, traced the origin of Mao’s trumped-up cases to the Futian Incident and found that Mao had decided on his strategy in December 1930. This first case of brutal party “cannibalism” in the name of revolution therefore took place six years before Stalin’s purges. In a single stroke, Mao had cadres from the Jiangxi Provincial Committee and officers of the 20th Army of the Red Army killed by their own comrades. According to present official estimates in China, at the time 100,000 CPC members fell victim. When Hu Yaobang suddenly fell from power, this report that he had approved was shelved for more than a decade and was only published in 2000,¹⁰ thirteen years after I had completed my painting Red Star over China.

Snow was a humane American with the keen observation skills of an outstanding journalist. He conducted many interviews, including with Mao Zedong and other high-level leaders of the CPC, ordinary soldiers, youngsters called “little red devils,”¹¹ and ordinary civilians. He was