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

though it was six times larger than any of the other works. They did not make many demands but asked me to add Liu Shaoqi,²³ whom I had omitted, and to make minor changes to Deng Yingchao²⁴ and Deng Xiaoping.²⁵ My painting Red Star over China was given center stage at the exhibition, hung right in the middle of the circular exhibition hall. The exhibition organizers wanted to award me with a gold medal, but no medal was attached to the “Excellent Work Prizes,” so my entry was placed first on the awards list. At the end of the exhibition, NAMOC acted swiftly to purchase the work for their collection because both the Military Museum and the National History Museum also wanted it. I was paid 7000 RMB: just enough to buy a plane ticket to Australia two years later. At the time, it was a huge sum of money, the equivalent of several years of salary for me.

My Red Star over China is painted on a six-panel canvas. The featured individuals are mostly people who had met with Snow during his visit to the Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region in the summer and autumn of 1936. It also includes some important people active in the region up to the summer of 1937, as well as others outside this period, such as Liu Zhidan,²⁶ who was killed in battle in Shanxi in 1936.

At the time, the Red Army consisted of three armies: The First, Second, and Fourth Front Armies. The Central Committee of the CPC was located within the First Front Army, so it was also known as the Central Red Army that established the Chinese Soviet Republic in the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. For six years the Central Red Army fought off successive KMT government “encircle and exterminate” campaigns and, in October 1934, finally broke through the KMT encirclement blockade in Jiangxi and began the historic Long March. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, Mao Zedong took command of military strategy; and in the spring of 1935, after the Central Red Army joined forces with the Fourth Front Army led by Zhang Guotao in Western Sichuan, the two armies were reorganized into left and right columns to march north in a parallel formation. However, the left column—with Zhu De as commander-in-chief,