Edgar Snow

Edgar Snow (19 July 1905 in Kansas City, Missouri – 15 February 1972 in Geneva) was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He is believed to be the first Western journalist to interview Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, and is best known for "Red Star Over China" (1937) an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.

Biography

Snow studied journalism at the University of Missouri, where he joined the Zeta Phi chapter of Beta Theta Pi, but moved to New York City before graduating. He made some money in the stock market and sold out before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Wanting to use the money he embarked on an around the world tour in 1928, but never made it past Shanghai. He stayed in China until 1941.

He quickly found work with the China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell, a fellow graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. In his early years he was an enthusiast for Chiang Kai-shek, noting that he had more Harvard graduates in his cabinet than there were in Franklin Roosevelt's. In 1932 he married Helen Foster Snow, who was working in the American Consulate until she could begin her own career in journalism. In 1934 the couple moved to Beiping, as Beijing was called at that point, to teach journalism at Yenching University. They borrowed works on current affairs and the classics of Marxism from the Yenching library and became acquainted with student leaders of the anti-Japanese December 9th Movement. Through their contacts with the underground communist network, Snow was invited to visit Mao Zedong's headquarters.

In June 1936, Snow and his friend George Hatem, whose presence was kept secret, went to Xi'an and from there were taken through the military quarantine lines to Bao'an, where he spent nearly three months. Snow had been preparing to write a book on the Communist movement in China for several years, and had even signed a contract at one point. However, his most important contribution was the interviews he conducted with the top leaders of the party. After he returned to Peiping in the fall, he wrote frantically. First he published a short account in China Weekly Review, then a series of publications in Chinese. Red Star Over China, published first in London in 1937, was 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, and Snow reported that Mao was a political reformer, not the purely military or radical revolutionary he had been during the 1920s. After the outbreak of war in 1937, the Snows were founding members of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. Edgar again visited Mao in Yan'an in 1939.

Snow and his wife returned to the United States in 1941, but they soon parted, and divorced after the war. 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 perspective of those countries. In Russia he shared his observations on the Battle of Stalingrad with the American Embassy. At times, Snow's defense of various undemocratic Allied governments took on the character of 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. [Hamilton, John M., "Edgar Snow: A Biography", LSU Press, (2003) ISBN 0807129127, 9780807129128, p. 229.]

By 1944, Snow was reporting that Mao and the Chinese Communists were actually "agrarian democrats", not dedicated Communists bent on totalitarian rule, a view encouraged by Mao and his party leadership. [Hamilton, John M., "Edgar Snow: A Biography", LSU Press, (2003) ISBN 0807129127, 9780807129128, p. 167] [Shewmaker, Kenneth E., "Americans and Chinese Communists, 1927-1945: A Persuading Encounter", Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971) ISBN 080140617X] 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 who desired a democratic, free China, not a communist one-party state. [Hamilton, John M., "Edgar Snow: A Biography", LSU Press, (2003) ISBN 0807129127, 9780807129128, p. 167] Writing for the left-leaning publication "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." [Hamilton, John M., "Edgar Snow: A Biography", LSU Press, (2003) ISBN 0807129127, 9780807129128, p. 167] After the war, Snow would retreat from this view of the Chinese communists as a democratic movement. The Communist Party of China Snow described in the book would, under Mao's leadership, defeat the Nationalists and seize control of the country as the People's Republic of China in October 1949. The Communist takeover was in the end, highly undemocratic; Mao himself later acknowledged that a total of 700,000 Chinese were killed between 1949 and 1953 during the 'revolutionary struggle' for power. [Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon, "", Jonathan Cape, London (2005), ISBN 0224071262, p. 337: "Mao claimed that the total number executed was 700,000, but this did not include those beaten or tortured to death in the post-1949 land reform".]

Because of his prior relationships with communists and his highly favorable treatment of them as a war correspondent, Snow became an object of suspicion following World War II. During the McCarthy period, he was questioned by the FBI and asked to disclose the extent of his Communist activities. In published articles, Snow lamented what he saw as the one-sided, conservative, and anti-communist mood of the United States. Later in the 1950s, he published two more books about China: Random Notes on Red China (1957), a research aid for scholars containing previously unused China material; and Journey to the Beginning (1958), an autobiographical account of events prior to 1949. However, Snow found it increasingly difficult to make a living through his writing, and he decided to leave the United States in the 1950s. He moved with his second wife, Louis Wheeler Snow,to Switzerland, but retained his American citizenship.

He returned to China in 1960 and 1964 and interviewed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In 1969, he made a final trip to China and was told that President Richard Nixon would be welcome to visit either officially or as a private citizen. The White House followed this visit with interest but distrusted Snow and his pro-communist reputation. [cite book|author=Tyler, Patrick|title=A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History|publisher=New York: Public Affairs|year=2000|page= pp. 81-86 ] When Snow came down with cancer, Zhou Enlai dispatched four Chinese doctors to SwitzerlandFact|date=August 2008. Snow died on February 15, 1972, the week President Nixon was traveling to China, and did not live to see the normalization of relations.

After his death, his ashes were divided into two parts, one of which was buried near the Hudson River and the other scattered at Peking University, which had taken over the campus of Yenching University, where he had taught in the 1930s.

Snow's reporting from China in the 1930s was both praised as prescient and blamed for the rise of Mao's communism. His biographers present him as the most important link between China and the United States, but a recent biography of Mao describes Snow as his "spokesman," implying that he lost his objectivity to present a romanticized and partial view. [Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon, "Mao: The Unknown Story", Jonathan Cape, London (2005), ISBN 0224071262, p. 106] Another critic concluded that what he 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 "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." [Jonathan Mirsky, "Message from Mao," New York Review (February 16, 1985).]

Works

*"Living China: Modern Chinese Short Stories"
*"Red Star Over China" (various editions, London, New York, 1937-1944)
*"The Battle for Asia"
*"Far Eastern Front"
*"People On Our Side". Random House, 1944.
*"Stalin Must Have Peace". Random House, 1947.
*"China, Russia, and the USA"
*"Red China Today: The Other Side of the River"
*"The Long Revolution"

Further reading

* Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon, "Mao: The Unknown Story", Jonathan Cape, London (2005), ISBN 0224071262, p. 337:
* Hamilton, John Maxwell. "Edgar Snow: A Biography". Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988.
* 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) ISBN 080140617X
* Snow, Edgar. "Journey to the Beginning". New York: Random House, 1958. Memoir.
* Thomas, S. Bernard. "Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China", Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. [http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft9p30098q;query=;brand=ucpress]

References

External links

* [http://www.umkc.edu/University_Archives/INVTRY/EPS/EPS-INTRO.HTM Edgar Snow Archives at the University of Missouri in Kansas City]