Edgar Parks Snow (July 19, 1905 – February 15, 1972) was an American journalist known for his books and articles on communism in China and the Chinese Communist Revolution. He was the first Western journalist to give an account of the history of the Chinese Communist Party following the Long March, and he was also the first Western journalist to interview many of its leaders, including Mao Zedong. He is best known for his book Red Star Over China (1937), an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.

Background

Edgar Parks Snow was born on July 19, 1905, in Kansas City, Missouri. Before settling in Missouri, his ancestors had moved to the state from North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas. He briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri, and joined the Zeta Phi chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

Career

Snow moved to New York City to pursue a career in advertising before graduating. He made a little money in the stock market shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929. In 1928 he used the money to travel around the world, intending to write about his travels.

China

Snow arrived in Shanghai that summer and stayed in China for thirteen years. They borrowed works on current affairs from the Yenching library and read the principal texts of Marxism. The couple became acquainted with student leaders of the anti-Japanese December 9th Movement. It was through their contacts in the underground communist network that Snow was invited to visit Mao Zedong's headquarters.

Red Star Over China

thumb|right|Edgar Snow with [[Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi in Beijing in 1960.]]

In June 1936, Snow left home with a letter of introduction from Soong Ching-ling (who was a politically important supporter of the Communists) and arrived at Xi'an. The Communist-held areas were blockaded by Zhang Xueliang's army, which had been forced out of his Manchurian base when the Japanese invaded in 1931, Zhang and his followers wanted to work with the Communists in order to oppose the Japanese and allowed Snow to enter. Snow was accompanied by George Hatem, who had worked with the Party, whose presence on the trip Snow did not mention for many years at Hatem's request. Snow had been preparing to write a book about the Communist movement in China, and had even signed a contract at one point. However, his most important contribution was the interviews that he had conducted with the top leaders of the party. When Snow wrote, there were no reliable reports reaching the West about the Communist-controlled areas. Other writers, such as Agnes Smedley, had written in some detail about the Chinese Communists before the Long March, but none of these writers had visited them or even conducted interviews with the leadership which had emerged during the Long March.

Snow was taken through the military quarantine lines to the Communist headquarters at Bao'an, where he spent four months (until October 1936) interviewing Mao and other Communist leaders. He was greeted by crowds of cadets and troops who shouted slogans of welcome, and Snow later recalled "the effect pronounced upon me was highly emotional." Over a period spanning ten days, Mao Zedong met with Snow and narrated his autobiography. Although Snow did not know it at the time, party leadership carefully prepared Mao for these interviews and edited Snow's drafts. Snow claimed that he had been under no constraint, but made revisions in the book at the request of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and perhaps American communists who worried that Mao was creating splits in the International movement.

After he returned to Beijing in the fall, Snow wrote frantically. First he published a short account in China Weekly Review, then a series quickly translated into Chinese. Red Star Over China, published first in London in 1937, was an immediate best-seller. The book is given credit for introducing both Chinese and foreign readers not so much to the Communist Party, which was reasonably well known, but to Mao Zedong. Mao was not, as had been reported, dead. Snow reported that Mao was a sincere communist, a patriot committed to resisting the Japanese invasion and world-wide fascism, and a political reformer, not the purely military or radical revolutionary that he had been during the 1920s.

In the first four weeks after its publication, Red Star over China sold over 12,000 copies, and it effectively made Snow world-famous. The book quickly became a "standard" introduction to the early Communist movement in China.

China during World War II

After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the Snows became founding members of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association (Indusco). The goal of Indusco was to establish workers' cooperatives in areas which were not controlled by the Japanese, through which Chinese workers would be provided with steady employment, education, consumer and industrial goods, and the opportunity to manage their own farms and factories. Snow's work in Indusco mainly involved his chairmanship of the Membership and Propaganda Committee, which managed public and financial support. Snow again visited Mao in Yan'an in 1939.

Snow reported on the Nanking Massacre (December 1937 to February 1938), and he even reported on Japanese reactions to it, stating: <blockquote> <small> In Shanghai a few Japanese deeply felt the shame and the humiliation. I remember, for example, talking one evening to a Japanese friend, a liberal-minded newspaper man who survived by keeping his views to himself, and whose name I withhold for his own protection. "Yes, they are all true," he unexpectedly admitted when I asked him about some atrocity reports, "only the facts are actually worse than any story yet published." There were tears in his eyes and I took his sorrow to be genuine. </small> </blockquote> His report on the Nanking Massacre appeared in his 1941 book Scorched Earth. </blockquote>

His time reporting on the Second Sino-Japanese War would appear in his 1941 book "The Battle For Asia".

Later journalism

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, in 1941, Snow toured Japanese-occupied areas of Asia and wrote his second major book, Battle for Asia, about his observations. His 1944 book, People on Our Side, emphasized their role in the fight against fascism. In a speech, he described Mao and the Communist Chinese as a progressive force which desired a democratic, free China. Writing for The Nation, Snow stated that the Chinese Communists "happen to have renounced, years ago now, any intention of establishing communism [in China] in the near future." They had a son, Christopher (born 1949) who died of cancer in October 2008, and a daughter, Sian (born 1951), named after the Chinese city Sian (now Xi'an), who lives and works as a translator and editor in the Geneva region, not far from where her mother lived for many years prior to her death in 2018.

In 1970, he – this time with his wife, Lois Wheeler Snow – made a final trip to China.

In December 1970, Mao Zedong called Snow to his office one morning before dawn for an informal talk lasting over five hours, during which Mao told Snow that he would welcome Richard Nixon to China either as a tourist or in his official capacity as President of the United States.

Snow reached an agreement with Time magazine to publish his final interview with Mao, including the Nixon invitation, provided the earlier interview with Zhou Enlai was also published. When Snow came down with pancreatic cancer and returned home after a surgery, Zhou Enlai dispatched a team of Chinese doctors to Switzerland, including George Hatem.

Death

thumb|right|Half of Edgar Snow's ashes are buried on the campus of [[Peking University, Beijing, alongside Weiming Lake.]]

Snow died on February 15, 1972, the week President Richard Nixon was traveling to China, before he could see the normalization of relations. He died of cancer, at the age of 66, at his home in Eysins Fairbank agrees that Snow was used by Mao, but defended Snow against the allegation that he was blinded by Chinese hospitality and charm, insisting that "Snow did what he could as a professional journalist."

Other historians have been more critical of Snow. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's anti-communist biography Mao: The Unknown Story, describes Snow as a Mao spokesman and accuses him of supplying myths, asserting that he lost his objectivity to such an extent that he presented a romanticized view of communist China.

Jonathan Mirsky, a critical voice, stated that what Snow did in the 1930s was "to describe the Chinese Communists before anyone else, and thus score a world-class scoop." Of his reporting in 1960, however, he says that Snow "went much further than those who reckoned that Mao and his comrades would take power." He contented himself with assurances from Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong that while there was a food problem, it was being dealt with successfully," which "was not true", and "had Snow still been the reporter he had been in the 1930s he would have discovered it."

In Mao: A Reinterpretation, a work sympathetic to Mao, Lee Feigon criticizes Snow's account for its inaccuracies, but praises Red Star for being "[the] seminal portrait of Mao" and relies on Snow's work as a critical reference throughout the book.

Works

  • Far Eastern Front. H. Smith & R. Haas, New York, 1933.
  • Harrap, London
  • Red Star Over China (various editions, London, New York, 1937–1944). Reprinted Read Books, 2006, ; Hesperides Press, 2008, .
  • Scorched Earth. Gollancz, London, 1941. Published in the US as
  • Random House, 1944.
  • Random House, 1945.
  • Random House, 1947.
  • Journey to the Beginning. Random House, 1958.
  • Marzani & Munsell, New York, 1962.
  • Gollancz, London, 1963. New ed., Penguin Books, 1970. .
  • Random Notes on Red China 1936–1945. East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1968.
  • The Long Revolution. Random House, 1972

References

References and further reading

  • Hamilton, John M. (2009) Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. Louisiana State University Press.
  • Dimond, E. Grey. Ed Snow Before Paoan: The Shanghai Years. Diastole Hospital Hill, Inc., University of Missouri–Kansas City, 1985.
  • Farnsworth, Robert. Edgar Snow's Journey South of the Clouds. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.
  • Farnsworth, Robert. From Vagabond to Journalist: Edgar Snow in Asia 1928–1941. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
  • French, Paul. Through the Looking Glass: Foreign Journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao. Hong Kong University Press, 2009.
  • Mirsky, Jonathan. "Message from Mao", New York Review (February 16, 1985): 15–17. Review.
  • Shewmaker, Kenneth E., Americans and Chinese Communists, 1927–1945: A Persuading Encounter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971)
  • Snow, Edgar. Journey to the Beginning. New York: Random House, 1958. Memoir.
  • Snow, Lois Wheeler. Edgar Snow's China – A personal account of the Chinese Revolution compiled from the writings of Edgar Snow. Random House, New York, 1981.
  • Edgar Snow Memorial Foundation website
  • Edgar Snow Archives at the University of Missouri in Kansas City