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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.
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, who was working in the American Consulate until she could begin her own career in journalism. She and Snow hit upon the pen-name "Nym Wales" for her professional work. In 1933, after a honeymoon in Japan, Snow and his wife moved to Beijing, as Beijing was called at that time. They taught journalism part-time at Yenching University, the leading 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.
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): 107–122 107. 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.
Snow reported on the Nanjing 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 District 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".
In this international cataclysm brought on by Fascism 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 Communism who were bent on Totalitarianism 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 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).
In 1949 Snow divorced Helen Foster and married his second wife, Lois Wheeler. They had a son, Christopher (born 1949) who died of cancer in October 2008,Sian Snow in her comment, August 29, 2012 to: "A compelling, historical and bittersweet film" by local filmmaker on Edgar Snow, U.S Journalist, an article by Catherine , in Living in Nyon, April 20, 2012 and a daughter, Sian Snow (born 1951), named after the Chinese city Sian (now Xi'an), Ailleurs, ma maison (A Home Far Away), documentary by Peter Entell, 100 min., Show and Tell Films, Arte, Radio Télévision Suisse, SRG SSR, 2012 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. On October 1, he stood next to Mao during the National Day parade in Beijing, the first time an American was given that honor.Dikötter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution (2016), p. 245.
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. Edgar Snow: Citizen of the World , University of Missouri – Kansas City Archives (UMKC) and Lois Wheeler Snow, The Edgar Snow Project (http://edgarsnowproject.org edgarsnowproject.org)
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.
The White House followed this visit with interest but distrusted Snow and his pro-communist reputation. 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.
In 1973 Lois Wheeler Snow went to China to bury half of her husband's ashes in the garden of Peking University. In 2000 – together with her son Chris – she traveled to Beijing in support of women who lost their children in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. One of these mothers was under house arrest and refused visits by others, while another was arrested after receiving financial assistance from Wheeler Snow. Wheeler Snow issued statements of protest to the international press and threatened to remove her husband's remains from Chinese soil. In her letter to the Chinese ambassador in Geneva, Wheeler Snow expressed her wish that the people of China be liberated from oppression, corruption and misuse of power – just as she and her husband had expressed in 1949.
Other historians have been more critical of Snow. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's anti-communist biography , 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.Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, London (2005), , p. 106.
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."Jonathan Mirsky, " Message from Mao" (review of Hamilton. Edgar Snow: A Biography) New York Review (February 16, 1985).
In , 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.Feigon, Lee, Mao: A Reinterpretation, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002,
Death
Snow died on February 15, 1972, the week President Nixon was traveling to China, before he could see the normalization of relations.Thomas, Season of High Adventure pp. 335–336. He died of cancer, at the age of 66, at his home in Eysins near Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland. After his death, his ashes were divided into two parts at his request. One half was buried at Sneden's Landing, near the Hudson River. The other half was buried on the grounds of Peking University, which had taken over the campus of Yenching University, where he had taught in the 1930s. His final book, The Long Revolution, was published posthumously by Lois Wheeler Snow.
Evaluation by China scholars
Snow's reporting from China in the 1930s has been both praised as prescient and blamed for the rise of Mao's communism. Some Chinese historians have judged Snow's writing very positively. John K. Fairbank praised Snow's reporting for giving the West the first articulate account of the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership, which he called "disastrously prophetic." Writing thirty years after the first publication of Red Star Over China, Fairbank stated that the book had "stood the test of time... both as a historical record and as an indication of a trend."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. 13 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."
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Categories: American Reporters And Correspondents, American Political Writers, American Male Non-fiction Writers, Writers About China, American Expatriates In China, University Of Missouri Alumni, Columbia University Graduate School Of Journalism Alumni, Writers About Communism, Writers From Missouri, 1905 Births, 1972 Deaths, Academic Staff Of Yenching University, 20th-century American Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century American Male Writers, China Hands
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