To the Chinese Company of the International Brigades

This silk banner proclaims: “To the the Chinese Company of the International Brigades, unite the Chinese and Spanish peoples! Down with the common enemy of Humanity: the fascists!”. Signed by Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai, it was made in the Communist controlled zone of China in late 1937 or early 1938 and arrived in Spain, by way of France, a few months later. Having published a number of articles praising the work of the International Brigades in Chinese Communist newspapers, especially Jiefang Zhoukan (Liberation Weekly), Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders wanted to have a Chinese company created in the International Brigades. That is why they sent the banner. At the same time, the Chinese members of the IBs were petitioning André Marty, the commander, for the same thing.

Historians have documented around twenty Chinese members of the IBs, and it is unlikely that the number was anything close to the hundred claimed by contemporary propaganda. Even so, the Chinese volunteers, led by Xie Weijin (1903-1978), also known as Lin Chin-sin, wanted to organize themselves into a separate unit, as the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion and the Jewish Naftali-Botwin Company.

Perhaps because the number of Chinese volunteers was too small, Marty did not believe that creating a Chinese unit was necessary or appropriate and the wish of the Communists in Yan’an and the volunteers in Spain went unfulfilled. Xie Weijin did take the banner with him, even when he left Spain in the Winter of 1938-1939. There is a photograph that shows a group of Chinese volunteers in the concentration camp in Gurs, France, along with other comrades, possibly Spanish Republicans or member of the International Brigades from other countries, posing in front of the banner.