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.Fairbank, John D. "Introduction". In Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism. New York: Edgar Snow. 1968. . p. 11 He briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri,Curators of the University of Missouri. Edgar Parks Snow Papers . University Archives: University of Missouri–Kansas City. July 08, 2010. Retrieved July 7, 2014. and joined the Zeta Phi chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.Curators of the University of Missouri. "About Edgar Snow" . The Edgar Snow Foundation. 2013. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
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. He quickly found work with the China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell, a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He became friends with prominent writers and intellectuals, including Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen and an advocate of reform. During his early years in China, he supported Chiang Kai-shek, noting that Chiang had more Harvard graduates in his cabinet than there were in Franklin Roosevelt's.
He travelled to India in 1931 with an introduction letter to Nehru from Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist living in China. He delivered it in Mumbai and Sarojini Naidu introduced him to her Communist sister Suhasini, who took him around to see mill workers. He met Gandhi in Simla, but was not impressed. He covered the Meerut conspiracy case trial in which three British communists were involved, and wrote three articles about India.
He began to make an international name for himself when he became correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and widely traveled throughout China, often on assignment for the Chinese Railway Ministry. He toured famine districts in Northwest China, visited what would later become the Burma Road, and reported on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
In 1932, he married Helen Foster, a US Consulate employee who later had a career in journalism. She and Snow decided upon the pen-name "Nym Wales" for her professional work. In 1933, after a honeymoon in Japan, Snow and his wife moved to Beijing. They taught journalism part-time at Yenching University, and studied Chinese, becoming modestly fluent. In addition to writing a book on Japanese aggression in China, Far Eastern Front, he also edited a collection of modern Chinese short stories (translated into English), Living China.Fairbank, John D. "Introduction". In Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism. New York: Edgar Snow. 1968. . pp. 11–12 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.Thomas, Season of High Adventure, 107–125.
Red Star Over China
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. pp. 42–46.
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.Brady pp. 46–47 .
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.Brady p. 47 .
In the first four weeks after its publication, Red Star over China sold over 12,000 copies,Israel, Jerry. "'Mao's Mr. America': Edgar Snow's Images of China". Pacific Historical Review. 47.1. (Feb. 1978): 107–122 . Retrieved July 7, 2014. and it effectively made Snow world-famous. The book quickly became a "standard" introduction to the early Communist movement in China. His literary agent in Japan, Yoko Matsuoka translated the book, as well as many of his other works, into Japanese.
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. Indusco was eventually successful in creating 1,850 workers' cooperatives.Hamilton, John Maxwell. Edgar Snow: A Biography. United States of America: John Maxwell Hamilton. 1988. . p. 2 Retrieved July 7, 2014. 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: 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. His report on the Nanking Massacre appeared in his 1941 book Scorched Earth.
Snow met Wataru Kaji, and his wife, Yuki Ikeda. Both Kaji and Ikeda survived a Japanese bombing attack on Wuchang and met him at the Hankow Navy YMCA. Snow met them again a year later in Chongqing and he was reminded that:
Japan was full of decent people like them who, if they had not had their craniums stuffed full of Sun goddess myths and other imperialist filth, and been forbidden access to 'dangerous thoughts,' and been armed by American and British hypocrites, could easily live in a civilized co-operative world if any of us could provide one.
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. After writing the book, Snow and his wife returned to the United States, where they separated. In April 1942, the Saturday Evening Post sent him abroad as a war correspondent. Snow traveled to India, China, and Russia to report on World War II from the perspectives of those countries. In Russia he shared his observations of the Battle of Stalingrad with the American Embassy. At times, Snow's defenses of various undemocratic Allied governments were denounced as blatant war propaganda, not neutral journalistic observation, but Snow defended his reporting, stating:
In this international cataclysm brought on by fascists it is no more possible for any people to remain neutral than it is for a man surrounded by bubonic plague to remain 'neutral' toward the rat population. Whether you like it or not, your life as a force is bound either to help the rats or hinder them. Nobody can be immunized against the germs of history.
By 1944, Snow was wavering on the question of whether Mao and the Chinese Communists were actually "agrarian democrats," rather than dedicated communists who were bent on totalitarian rule.Hamilton, John M., Edgar Snow: A Biography, LSU Press, (2003) , p. 167; Shewmaker, Kenneth E., Americans and Chinese Communists, 1927–1945: A Persuading Encounter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971) 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." After the war, Snow retreated from the view that the Chinese communists were a democratic movement.
While working as a correspondent in Russia, he wrote three short books about Russia's role both in World War II and world affairs: People on Our Side (1944); The Pattern of Soviet Power (1945); and, Stalin Must Have Peace (1947).