The armband of the Red Army guerrillas in the eight southern provinces when it was reorganized into the New Fourth Army (1938) was as follows:
In 1939, as the New Fourth Army marched north and south of the great river, the armband of the New Fourth Army was as follows:
In 1940, the armband of the New Fourth Army looked like this:
In January 1941, after the Kuomintang reactionaries launched the "Anhui Southern Incident" that shocked China and foreign countries, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the cancellation of the new Fourth Army. In order to oppose the perverse actions of the Kuomintang reactionaries, our Party resolutely decided to rebuild the New Fourth Army headquarters in Yancheng. With the development and growth of the New Fourth Army after the reconstruction, it is necessary to design a new New Fourth Army armband to unify the symbol of the New Fourth Army.
This design task was given to several teachers in the Fine Arts Department of the Central China Branch of Lu Xun Art Institute. One of them is called Zhuang Wuzhou.
At that time, Zhuang Wuzhou was a young teacher in the LuYi Fine Arts Department. When he and another teacher, Xu Xingzhi, handed over the armband of the New Fourth Army to the acting commander, Mr. Chen, he was immediately impressed by his simplicity and far-reaching meaning.
What does their design look like?
They used blue to represent the blue sky, white to symbolize the bright future of the Chinese nation, and the Chinese War of Resistance will surely achieve the final victory; the outer inner circle, blue and white oval pattern as the base map, taking the first letter "N" of the English "NEW" (new), the Arabic numeral "4", "ARMY" (army) the first letter "A" to form "N4A". They also added a five-pointed star on each side of the top of the word, and marked "1941" in the middle to commemorate the martyrs who died in the "Anhui Southern Incident".
Today, why do we say Zhuang Wuzhou, because he is somewhat special, and even when Mr. Chen at that time learned of the origin of the designer Zhuang Wuzhou, he was deeply surprised and praised.
This is because Zhuang Wuzhou is not a mainlander, he is Taiwanese. As we all know, Taiwan was occupied by Japan at that time.
Zhuang Wuzhou was born in 1914 in a small fishing village in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. When he was 14 years old, his father Zhuang Qingqing was harassed and interfered with by the Japanese for teaching Chinese, so he took Zhuang Wuzhou back to his ancestral hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian Province, and sent him to the Western Painting Department of Xiamen Art Professional School.
After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, he threw himself into the ranks of literary and artistic resistance against Japan, participated in the Jinjiang County Anti-Enemy Branch, and together with li shuoqing, Huang Zixia and other people in the art world, founded the "Anti-Enemy Pictorial", joined the Jinjiang Comic Society, and was hired as the deputy editor of "Current Affairs Comics".
In the autumn of 1940, when the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army met in northern Jiangsu, Chairman Liu and Mr. Chen decided to establish the Central China Branch of Lu Xun Art Institute and recruit talents from Shanghai. Zhuang Wuzhou came to Yancheng from Shanghai during this period and became a professor in the Department of Fine Arts of Central China.
In 1941, after the Anhui Incident, Professors of the Fine Arts Department such as Zhuang Wuzhou received the design of a new Armband of the New Fourth Army, and they designed such a new armband. The New Fourth Army used many kinds of armbands before and after, and this armband designed by Zhuang Wuzhou was the longest used and was used until 1946.
Because Zhuang Wuzhou was the foundation of Japanese at a young age in Taiwan, he was later transferred to the Enemy Engineering Department of the Fourth Division of the New Fourth Army and was responsible for anti-war propaganda work against Japan.
In July 1941, the Japanese Kou launched a "great sweep" of the anti-Japanese base areas in northern Jiangsu, Zhuang Wuzhou unfortunately fell into the hands of the enemy, fortunately he escaped the disaster because he could speak Japanese, and took the opportunity to escape on the way to the "Special Workers Training Center" in Xuzhou by the Japanese army, and then carried out guerrilla anti-Japanese operations in Fujian and Shanghai. Towards the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Zhuang Wuzhou returned to Shanghai and participated in the group exhibition of the "Shanghai Fine Arts Writers Association" produced by the left-wing cultural group.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Zhuang Wuzhou returned to Taiwan and established a family and taught fine arts in Taipei. So why did he drop his paintbrush again, change his name to Zhuang Suo and stop painting?
That was because on February 28, 1947, the "228" incident occurred, under the white terror of the Kuomintang, Zhuang Wuzhou, who had worked in the New Fourth Army, changed his name to Zhuang Suo in order to save his life, and hurriedly left Taipei to avoid living in southern Taiwan and returned to his birthplace of Kaohsiung. Especially after the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, the white terror intensified, zhuang Wuzhou simply put down his paintbrush, hid his beloved painting art, and was bent on being a fishery practitioner.
It was not until 1977, 30 years later, that the retiring Zhuang Wuzhou picked up the paintbrush again and created works to depict the Yanfu area, such as "Spring on the Battlefield", which reflected the soldiers of the New Fourth Army resting under the windmill, "Anti-Japanese Home" under the oil lamp, "Anti-Japanese Home" where children could read under oil lamps, his mother spun yarn, and his father wiped his gun.
On November 18, 1997, Zhuang Wuzhou (Zhuang Suo) died of illness at the age of 84. Before his death, Mr. Zhuang instructed his son to send his painting collection and the original oil paintings of Yanfu Fengwu to the New Fourth Army Memorial Hall and the Collection of Lu Xun Art School in Yancheng, in order to fulfill his wish.