Seventeen thousand miners and railway workers walked off the job in Anyuan, on the edge of Pingxiang, at two in the morning on 14 September 1922, in a strike organised by Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Li Lisan that won all seventeen of its demands without a single shot fired.
一九二二年九月十四日凌晨两点,萍乡安源境内一万七千名矿工与铁路工人集体罢工;这场由毛泽东、刘少奇与李立三共同组织的罢工,提出的十七项要求全部得到满足,过程中未开一枪一炮。
Liu Shaoqi negotiated directly with the mine’s management as the workers’ plenipotentiary, an experience that helped launch a career that ended with him serving as President of the People’s Republic of China from 1959 to 1968; Li Lisan went on to lead the party’s labour movement nationally before later falling from favour, while Mao’s own involvement became the subject of one of the most reproduced paintings in history.
刘少奇当时以工人全权代表的身份,直接与矿方展开谈判,这段经历也为他日后的仕途铺路,他后来于一九五九年至一九六八年间出任中华人民共和国主席;李立三此后领导全国工人运动,却终究失势;而毛泽东当年的参与,则成为了后来一幅历史上复制次数最多的画作的题材。
According to the historian Elizabeth Perry’s own account of the site, the statues later erected at Anyuan rank the three men in an order that arguably reverses their actual role in the 1922 strike; a towering statue of the young Mao stands at the base of the memorial staircase, a three-quarter-sized Liu Shaoqi stands beside the workers’ club he personally rebuilt, and a half-sized bust of Li Lisan sits tucked into a corner, a hierarchy of memory rather than of history.
据历史学家裴宜理对这处遗址的记述,后来在安源竖立的这几座塑像,其排位顺序,可以说恰恰与三人当年在这场罢工中的实际角色相反;毛泽东青年时期的高大塑像矗立在纪念馆台阶底部,刘少奇的四分之三身像立于他亲手重建的工人俱乐部旁,而李立三的半身像,则被安放在一处并不起眼的角落——这排位反映的是历史记忆,而非历史本身。
Two Paintings, One History, Only One Survived
两幅画作,一段历史,只有一幅留存至今
In 1962, the painter Hou Yimin completed Comrade Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Miners, which hung in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and correctly credited Liu as the strike’s central organiser; during the Cultural Revolution, the painting was destroyed, Liu’s face and name crossed out on the surviving prints that had already circulated.
一九六二年,画家侯一民完成了《刘少奇同志和安源矿工》,这幅画曾悬挂于中国革命博物馆,正确记述了刘少奇在这场罢工中的核心组织者身份;文化大革命期间,这幅原作被销毁,而已流传在外的印刷品上,刘少奇的面容与姓名均遭涂抹划去。
It was replaced on the museum’s walls by Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, painted in 1967 specifically, in the artist’s own words, to correct what the Cultural Revolution’s organisers called a distortion of history, and to give Mao a role in the strike that, according to the historians who have since studied the episode, he had not actually fulfilled. An estimated 900 million copies of the painting were printed and distributed, while Liu Shaoqi, denounced as a traitor during the same campaign, died in 1969 under house arrest, having been denied medicine for his diabetes.
这幅画后来被刘春华的《毛主席去安源》取而代之,画家本人曾表示,这幅画创作于一九六七年,正是为了纠正文革发起者所称的”历史歪曲”,赋予毛泽东在这场罢工中一个角色——而据此后研究这段历史的学者所述,这一角色其实并非他本人当年真正扮演过的。这幅画估计印制发行逾九亿份,而刘少奇本人则在同一场运动中被打成”叛徒”,于一九六九年在被监禁期间,因未获及时用药医治糖尿病而离世。
Anyuan’s mine itself remains within Pingxiang’s boundaries today, its surface buildings partly preserved as heritage sites alongside the memorial hall, in a city whose GDP reached ¥121.1 billion in 2024, up 4.6 percent, with a permanent population of just 1.797 million, among the smallest of any prefecture-level city in Jiangxi.
安源煤矿至今仍位于萍乡境内,其部分地面建筑与纪念馆一同被保留为文物古迹;这座城市二零二四年GDP达一千二百一十一点四四亿元,同比增长百分之四点六,常住人口仅为一百七十九点七万人,是江西省内规模最小的地级市之一。
Getting to Pingxiang means a high-speed rail journey of around 40 minutes from Nanchang, or a short flight into Nanchang Changbei International Airport followed by a road or rail connection, since Pingxiang has no commercial airport of its own.
前往萍乡,可乘坐高铁,从南昌出发车程约四十分钟;若乘飞机,则需先抵达南昌昌北国际机场,再转乘公路或铁路前往,因为萍乡本身并无民用机场。
Visitors climbing the memorial staircase at Anyuan today still pass beneath the same towering statue of Mao Zedong first, exactly as the site’s designers intended, regardless of whether history itself remembers the strike in the same order.
如今,登临安源纪念馆台阶的游客,首先经过的依旧是那座高大的毛泽东塑像,一如当年设计者的安排——无论历史本身,是否真的以同样的顺序,记住了这场罢工。
