Editing Long March (section)

===Luding Bridge===

{{quote box |quote =  Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn't really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn't that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.| source= — [[Deng Xiaoping]], Quote according to [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], 2005<ref>Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "America and the New Asia." Michel Oksenberg Lecture. Asia-Pacific Research Center. Stanford University, 09 Mar 2009. Lecture.</ref>}}

The [[Battle of Luding Bridge]] has been portrayed as a glorious and heroic moment in Chinese Communist history, analogous to the Texan [[Battle of the Alamo]].  The official account of the battle depicts exhausted and depleted Communist forces in a desperate situation, where they must fight across a bridge that is guarded by the numerically superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his warlord allies.  The Communists send a small volunteer force that braves a hail of gunfire to climb across the bridge on underlying chains and assault the enemy positions on the other side, hence securing the bridgehead for the rest of the army to cross.

However, there is evidence that differs from the official account of the battle. This suggests that much of the fighting was dramatized by Communist leaders for propaganda purposes. Authors Andrew McEwen and Ed Jocelyn who retraced the route of the Long March, interviewing survivors along the way, said that a woman in her early 80s recalled that local people led the way across the bridge and were all shot and killed.<ref>''The Economist'' Apr 27, 2006.[http://www.economist.com/node/6849932 "China's Long March: The Long and Winding Road."].</ref>  Author [[Sun Shuyun]] quotes a witness who said that there was a small enemy force on the other side armed with guns that could "only fire a few metres". They panicked and fled.<ref>Shuyun, Sun. The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth. 1st. New York City: Anchor Books, 2008. p. 145</ref>