This Week in China’s History: May 29, 1935
The scene could scarcely have been more spectacular.
The Dadu River, swollen by spring snowmelt in the Himalayas, thundered through the gorges of Sichuan. Amid soaring mountains, reaching tens of thousands of feet into the Sichuan sky, a narrow bridge stretched across the angry, roiling waters. It was, in reality, barely a bridge at all — wooden planks that could normally be walked on had been removed in an effort to prevent crossing. All that was left were rough chains, suspended 50 feet above the waves.
Explosions and gunfire added to the chaos as 26 commandos, exhausted after months of constant march and running battles, crept across the bridge, struggling to hang onto both the bridge and their weapons. Artillery shells landing in the river threw spray onto the iron chains, making the crossing even more treacherous. Four commandos fell to their deaths in the river.
The remaining 22 managed to cross, and once on the other bank fought against long odds to overwhelm the defenders and secure the Luding Bridge, enabling the Red Army to cross the Dadu River and escape from the KMT forces pursuing them. From there the Red Army could continue the Long March that would eventually lead them to safety in Yan’an, where it would regroup and grow in strength, eventually surviving to take all of China.
According to American journalist Edgar Snow in his book Red Star Over China, “the crossing of the [Dadu] River was the most crucial single incident of the Long March. Had the Red Army failed there, quite possibly it would have been exterminated.”
Snow’s account is singularly responsible for the image of Luding Bridge outside of China, and in particular for the cinematic image of the battle: “No time was to be lost. One by one, Red soldiers stepped forward to risk their lives…and soon they were swinging out above the boiling river, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly toward them.”
It is a gripping account and, one imagines, inspiring as well; it became one of the CCP’s origin myths. But is this what happened? Was there a dramatic battle suspended high above the river raging below?
No less a figure than Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 himself raised questions about Snow’s account. In a conversation with former American national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Deng described the dramatic battle: “Well, that is how our propaganda presents it.” He went on to imply that the battle had not been dramatic at all, but “a very easy military operation.” Rather than a heroic success against long odds, Deng offered, “there wasn’t really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets.”
Others contend that even Deng’s telling was embellished. Authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their book Mao: The Unknown Story, claim starkly that “there was no battle at the Dadu Bridge.”
How do we make sense of these widely disparate stories, from a spectacular and heroic battle to a run-of-the-mill capture of a bridge to, well, nothing at all? Simply put, how do we evaluate sources?
Snow is praised by many scholars — including luminaries like John King Fairbank — as being the West’s window into Mao’s revolutionary China. No other source provided firsthand accounts from Yan’an, the CCP’s military base, and no other source contradicted the official views of America’s Chinese allies, the Nationalists, who disparaged the Communists as anarchic bandits.
Snow’s version of events has the air of authenticity. Snow traveled to Yan’an and met with Máo Zédōng 毛泽东, Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来, Zhū Dé 朱德, and other CCP leaders. And Snow reportedly worked diligently to ensure accuracy, taking notes from his conversations and then writing copy in English that was translated into Chinese so that his subjects could double-check.
Yet, Snow’s reporting was secondhand. The American journalist was not at Luding Bridge, or anywhere else on the Long March. Donald Zagoria, reviewing Red Star years later, noted that Snow’s “sympathetic portrayal of the Communists is somewhat naive.” This possibility is important to consider when reading passages that put the CCP in an almost mystical light. “Never before,” Snow wrote of the taking of Luding Bridge, “had the Szechuanese seen fighters like these — men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings or madmen or gods?” Compelling prose, to be sure. Objective reporting? Perhaps not.
Halliday and Chang take a view of Mao that is 180 degrees from Snow’s admiration, but may suffer from the same flaw of trusting sources unquestioningly. They base their claim that the Luding Bridge battle never took place on the statements of an eyewitness recalling what had happened more than 60 years after the fact, along with circumstantial evidence about the number of casualties that the Communists incurred and the timeline of events.
Numerous reviewers point to the flaws in Mao: The Unknown Story. In fact, an entire book was dedicated to evaluating Chang and Halliday’s work. Historian David Goodman calls it a “demonography” built on the premise that “there is not one scintilla of good” in Mao or his actions. Gregor Benton and Steven Tsang see, ironically, that Chang and Halliday’s book “inverts the error of the Mao worshippers”: rather than seeing Mao as infallible, they “argue that Mao sprang from the womb a monster. Armed with this opinion, they simplify complex casualties in favor of a myopic focus on the machinations of a single tyrant.”
The point of the Battle of Luding Bridge, though, does not rely on the naivete of Edgar Snow or the vengeance of Chang and Halliday. As Deng Xiaoping said, “We needed [the heroic story] to express the fighting spirit of our forces.” The account, almost certainly exaggerated, and perhaps wildly so, has become an essential part of the CCP’s origin story. The victory in the civil war relied on the “Yan’an Spirit,” forged during the Long March and made plain in feats like — especially — the crossing of the Luding Bridge.
The PRC’s leaders relied on the legitimacy conferred by the Long March into the 1990s, and that relied in turn on the myth of the Luding Bridge. There are few better subjects for the propaganda posters of the 1960s than broad-shouldered soldiers gritting their teeth against a hail of bullets, creeping resolutely across the chains of a bridge swinging over the Dadu River. That image motivated generations.
Whether it happened or not.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
