Edgar Snow

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Edgar Parks Snow (17 July 1905 – 15 February 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 a full 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.

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Career

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

Snow arrived in Shanghai in the summer and stayed in China for thirteen years. He landed at work with the China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell, a Missouri School of Journalism graduate. He became acquainted with influential writers and scholars, including Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen's widow, and a promoter of change. During his early years in China, he favored Chiang Kai-shek, saying that Chiang had more Harvard graduates in his cabinet than in Franklin Roosevelt's. Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist living in China, arrived in India in 1931 with an introduction letter from his Nehru. He gave it to Mumbai and Sarojini Naidu, who took it 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, in which three British communists were involved, and three Indian writers published three articles on India.

When he became a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post and extensively traveled around China, often on assignment for the Chinese Railway Ministry, he made a name for himself. He toured famine districts in Northwest China, toured Burma Road, and wrote about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Helen Foster, who was working in the American Consulate until she could begin a career in journalism, married him in 1932. For her professional duties, She and Snow discovered the pen name "Nym Wales." Snow and his wife arrived in Beiping in 1933 after a honeymoon in Japan, as Beijing was called at the time. They taught journalism at Yenching University, the leading university, part-time, and Chinese scholars, learning to be fluent. In addition to writing a book about Japanese aggression in China's Far Eastern Front, he edited a collection of modern Chinese short stories (translated into English), Living China. They borrowed books on current affairs from the Yenching library and read Marx's principal texts. The couple became acquainted with the anti-Japanese leaders on December 9th. Snow was invited to visit Mao Zedong's headquarters through their links on the underground communist network.

Snow sent a letter from Soong Ching-ling (who was a politically influential backer of the Communists) to his home in June 1936 and arrived in Xi'an. Zhang Xueliang's army, which had been coerced out of his Manchurian base when the Japanese invaded in 1931, ordered Zhang and his followers to join the Communists in order to defame the Japanese and allowed Snow to enter. George Hatem, a former member of the Party, was accompanied by Snow, whose presence on the trip Snow did not mention for many years. Snow had been planning to write a book about the Communist Party in China and had even signed a deal at one point. However, his most important contribution was his interview with the party's top leaders. There were no reliable reports about the Communist-controlled areas in the West when Snow wrote. Agnes Smedley, among other writers, had written extensively about the Chinese Communists before the Long March, but none of these writers had visited them or even conducted interviews with their chiefs, which had emerged during the Long March.

Snow was transferred across the military quarantine lines to Bao'an's Communist headquarters, where he spent four months (until October 1936) interviewing Mao and other Communist leaders. He was welcomed by crowds of cadets and troops who yelled slogans of praise, and Snow later recalled, "the effect pronounced upon me was highly emotional." Mao Zedong narrated his autobiography over a ten-day period. Though Snow didn't know it at the time, party leaders carefully planned Mao for these interviews and edited Snow's drafts. Snow claimed that he had been under no pressure but made revisions to the book at the behest of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and even American communists who were worried that Mao was causing international splits.

Snow yearned to Beijing in the fall after returning to Beijing in the fall. He began with a short article in China's Weekly Review, followed by a string of Chinese-language pages that quickly translated into Chinese. Red Star Over China, first published in London in 1937, was an immediate best-seller. The book is lauded for introducing both Chinese and foreign readers to the Communist Party, which was otherwise well-known, but not so much to Mao Zedong. Mao was not dead, as had been reported. Mao was a sincere communist, a patriot pledged to fight the Japanese invasion and world-wide fascism, as well as a political reformer, not the pure military or radical revolutionary revolutionary who had been active during the 1920s.

In the first four weeks after its debut, Red Star over China's first four weeks sold over 12,000 copies, making Snow world-famous. The book was quickly adopted as a "standard" introduction to China's early Communist Party.

The Snows became founding members of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 (Indusco). Indusco's aim was to establish worker' cooperatives in areas that were not governed by the Japanese, through which Chinese workers would be able to access stable jobs, education, consumer, and industrial products, as well as the ability to control their own farms and factories. Snow's time in Indusco primarily concerned his chairmanship of the Membership and Propaganda Committee, which oversaw both public and financial assistance. Indusco was eventually successful in establishing 1,850 worker's cooperatives. In 1939, snowbirds visited Mao in Yan'an.

Snow covered the Nanking Massacre (December 1937-1938) and even reported on Japanese reactions to it, saying: "Because we knew" is the proper response.

In his 1941 book Scorched Earth, he wrote an article about the Nanking Massacre.

Snow met Wataru Kaji and his partner, Yuki Ikeda. Both Kaji and Ikeda survived a Japanese bombing attack on Wuchang and visited him at the Hankow Navy YMCA. Snow met them again in Chongqing a year later, and he was reminded of it:

Snow toured Japanese-controlled areas of Asia shortly before World War II was declared in 1941, releasing Battle for Asia, his second major book about his findings. After writing the book, Snow and his wife returned to the United States, where they separated. The Saturday Evening Post sent him overseas in April 1942 as a war correspondent. Snow went to India, China, and Russia to report on World War II from the viewpoints of those nations. He shared his impressions of the Battle of Stalingrad with the American Embassy in Russia. Snow's defenses of various undemocratic Allied governments were denounced at times as blatant war propaganda rather than impartial journalistic analysis, but Snow defended his reporting, saying:

Snow was wrangling over whether Mao and the Chinese Communists were really "agrarian democrats" rather than devoted communists bent on totalitarian rule by 1944. People On Our Side, his 1944 book, outlined their participation in the war against fascism. Mao and the Communist Chinese were portrayed as a social power in a speech that wanted a democratic, free China. Snow wrote for The Nation that the Chinese Communists "happen to have renounced, years ago now, any intention of establishing communism [in China] in the near future." Snow returned from the belief that the Chinese communists were a political party after the war.

People on Our Side (1944); Stalin Must Have Peace (1947), while living in Russia.

Helen Foster was divorced by Helen Foster in 1949 and Lois Wheeler married his second wife, Lois Wheeler. Christopher (born 1949) who died of cancer in October 2008, and Sian (born 1950), a Chinese city Sian), who lives and works as a translator and editor in the Geneva area, not far from where her mother lived for many years prior to her death in 2018.

Snow became a point of worry after World War II because of his links with communists and his highly regarded treatment of them while he was a war correspondent. During the McCarthy period, he was interrogated by the FBI, and he was then ordered to reveal the extent of his Communist Party membership. Snow lamented about the one-sided, conservative, and anti-communist mood in the United States in published articles. He wrote two more books about China in the 1950s: Random Notes on Red China (1957), a series of previously undiscovered China information that was of concern to Chinese scholars; and Journey to the Beginning (1958), an autobiographical account of his Chinese experiences before 1949. Snow found it impossible to make a living off his writing in the 1950s, so he left the United States. In 1959, he and his wife immigrated to Switzerland, but he remained an American citizen.

In 1960 and 1964, he returned to China and interviewed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, interviewed numerous people, and spoke to many others. The Other Side of the River, his 1963 book, details his journey, including his reasons for denying that China's 1959-1961 Great Leap Forward was a famine.

In 1970, he and his partner, Lois Wheeler Snow, made a last trip to China. He stood next to Mao at the National Day parade in Beijing on October 1, the first time an American was given the award. Snow came to his office one morning before dawn for an informal interview lasting over five hours, during which Mao told Snow that he would welcome Richard Nixon to China either as a visitor or as President of the United States. Snow and Time magazine have reached an agreement with Time magazine to publish his final interview with Mao, which includes the Nixon invitation, since the earlier interview with Zhou Enlai was also published. The White House paid attention to Snow's visit but dismissed him and his pro-communist reputation. Zhou Enlai sent a team of Chinese doctors and including George Hatem to Switzerland when Snow came down with pancreatic cancer and returned home after a surgery.

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