Chapter 7
Peking
Words and Action
Helen Foster had arrived in China determined to become a rich and famous great author. Born in Cedar City, Utah, she was of English heritage, with some Welsh on her mother's side. To Helen, her Foster forebears who had come to Massachusetts in 1635 were builders of a "uniquely Puritan civilization, all English and a yard wide." She herself was "strong for the principle of law in the British tradition" and "strong for Western civilization and Protestantism." The work ethic, individual initiative, personal morality and fidelity, and an activist sense of mission loomed large in her makeup. "I had always thought out everything for myself," she wrote in her later years. 'As a result, I had a kind of instinct for being a prime mover and for getting other people to bestir themselves, even the Chinese who are quite immovable usually."[1]
She saw her marriage to Ed as a partnership dedicated to work and achievement, with a responsibility on her part to press Ed on (prod him, he often said) to ever higher levels. "Together we decided to do everything left undone by Americans in the Far East before us." She liked to repeat a remark made to her by their good friend, Marine officer Evans F. Carlson, "Keep criticizing and pushing Ed. It is the making of him." Not that Peg needed much encouragement! James Bertram, a young New Zealander Rhodes scholar and close friend of the Snows in the Peking days, also thought "Peg spurred Ed into doing his best work." A lifelong admirer of Peg (and Ed), Bertram pictured their marriage as "a beautiful give-and-take in the earlier years." Acknowledging that she could be "scolding" at times, he rejected as "very wide of the mark" any notion of Peg as being "continually nagging." The late Harvard sinolo-
gist John K. Fairbank who, with his wife, Wilma, socialized with the Snows in Peking, described Peg in less flattering and perhaps male-slanted terms, as "driven by ambition," and in "obvious rivalry with Ed." In Journey , Snow wrote of her as "the very unusual woman who was to be my frequently tormenting, often stimulating, and always energetically creative and faithful co-worker, consort and critic" during their married years in China. There was indeed a delicate balance in her relationship with the proudly independent and highly sensitive Ed; its dynamics were evident both in their signal accomplishments together and in their eventual estrangement. And not unlike Ed, Peg equated engagement in the Chinese revolutionary cause with her English-American values, though with more of a compulsively "do-gooder" missionary fervor than Ed's more restrained humanist-journalistic impulses. Her "prime mover" part in the wartime Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, with its self-reliant and democratic producer ethic, embodied many of the principles she held dear.[2]
Helen's father, John Moody Foster, graduated from Stanford University in 1906, the year before her birth. A chemistry and geology major, he taught science at an academy in Idaho, where he met and married a fellow teacher, Hannah Davis. After a teaching stint in Utah, he moved on to law school at the University of Chicago and practiced law out west specializing in mining claims. Interested in physical culture and women's athletics, he encouraged Helen in such training. He expected top academic performance from his children, and Helen obliged as a straight A student. Her parents were civic-minded people (in their Chicago days, her mother participated in the women's suffrage movement), though her father was a remote personality. "He never raised his voice, never showed his feelings, and seldom talked at all." In this he was unlike his daughter—always an animated, rapid-fire talker (and writer) with a mind "that races along at a 90 m.p.h. dip," Carlson wrote of her. Though Ed was engagingly sociable (his "Irish charm" side, Helen described it), his quietly unassuming manner ("well-bred," she said) perhaps reminded her of the father she greatly admired.[3]
After a few years at the University of Utah (like Ed, she did not stay to graduate), Helen worked for the American Mining Congress, an influential silver lobby. Having passed the necessary civil service examinations, she landed an overseas post as private secretary to the American consul general in Shanghai, Edwin S. Cunningham. China was on the silver standard, and she was expected to report back on and promote the cause of silver. "I thought of myself as 'Miss Silver' when I sailed for China in 1931."[4]
Trimly built, with a round, blue-eyed "baby doll" face, in her words, Helen Foster was an outstanding example of "beauty and brains." (She mentioned turning down twenty-one proposals of marriage before accepting Ed.) She had a sharp intelligence ("a rapier style," according to Bertram) that could sting those against whom it might be directed, and an avid intellectual appetite. (In later life her favorite reading was the Encyclopaedia Britannica .) She too planned to travel around the world, write travel books and "at least one good novel," and not marry "until I had accomplished something on my own." Before sailing for the Orient, she assiduously collected press clippings on China (part of her silver lobby job), including virtually everything Ed had written. She also made arrangements with a Seattle-based press association to write pieces to help revive the dormant tourist business in the "glamorous" East. Neither silver nor tourism would hold her interest for very long. "Shanghai is a marvelous place for an enterprising young person with ideas," she wrote home in October 1931. "It is a total loss for many things, but I see so many opportunities that I can hardly decide what to do." Peg Foster was an enthralling image of the wholesome America the dispirited Ed still longed for—a distinctive and all-American girl.[5]
The Snow-Foster courtship developed rather fitfully. After their first meeting in Shanghai in August 1931, Ed was soon off to cover the Yangtze flood, then to the Manchuria front; after his bout of illness in December came the Shanghai war the next month. But there had been opportunities in the fall of 1931 and the next spring for jaunts to the nearby "tourist" cities of the Yangtze delta—Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Wuxi. These were mostly in connection with Peg's tourist promotion activities. (In Hangzhou, a passing coolie expressed his appreciation—ding hao ! [the tops]—of Peg's looks.) Then Ed was holed up for most of the summer and fall of 1932 in the crash writing of Far Eastern Front .
Neither of them seemed temperamentally suited for the matrimonial bond—at least not yet. Ed was wary Of being "tied down," and Peg was set on her travel and writing. Nor was Peg willing to enter into an affair with the infatuated Ed. Yet their free-spirited ambitions and interests were themselves sources of mutual attraction. "We believe or disbelieve in about the same things, have similar dreams, aspirations, hopes and sinicitis [sic ]," Ed wrote to Mildred and J. Edgar. "She is free-lance, one of the romantic free company like myself, and our plans seem to coincide." Ed also enthused over Peg's literary talent. As a poet, "some of her things will make Shelley and Blake seem quite as dull as my old razor blades." (Peg would have many of her poems published, and three of
them were later reprinted in a Saturday Review Treasury anthology.) Snow came up with the "Nym Wales" nom de plume Peg wrote under into the 1950s and was always supportive and proud of her China writing accomplishments.[6]
Peg finally agreed, on a blustery day in December 1932 on the Shanghai Bund, to marry Ed. To mollify her protests that she had not yet written her first book nor traveled to all the unexplored places, Ed worked out an extensive South Seas honeymoon itinerary. After that they would relocate to Peking where the couple could live inexpensively and settle in to do their writing. Peg insisted also on a high noon Christmas Day ceremony in "nice and clean" Tokyo. (She was beginning to take charge.)
Snow made the plans for their trip through a Japanese steamship line, surprising perhaps, considering his hostility to Japan's actions in China. But Japanese passenger-freighters regularly plied these less traveled routes and were also the least expensive. Snow in fact enjoyed holiday visits to Japan and in Shanghai his Japanese acquaintances included journalists (and once, a woman friend). His view of Japan was tinged with respect for that nation as a dynamic latecomer to the imperialist club in the East, successfully challenging a declining Western dominance that Snow had little faith in or liking for. Besides, he wanted a closer look at this rising force in Asia and arranged with Epes to submit copy on the trip to help defray expenses. (He parlayed the wedding episode into a slickly charming "Christmas Escapade" account for Travel magazine.) Epes also agreed to the move to Peking. Ed carefully avoided linking his travel plans with a honeymoon, but Epes, in cabling approval, added, "Incidentally, happy honeymoon!"[7]
The Christmas Day ceremony in the American Embassy in Tokyo was handled by Snow's former Shanghai roommate, John Allison, a foreign service officer in the embassy and a future American ambassador to Japan. Typically, Ed broke the news to Mildred and J. Edgar in a tardy letter from Shanghai that reached them only after the event—reminiscent of his 1928 leave-taking from New York. ("Oyez, I am getting married," he announced. "Do not laugh; it does look rather silly, but then it appears to have happened to both of you.") A Tokyo newspaper friend cabled the story back home, and the Snow and Foster families' first knowledge of the marriage came through their local papers on Christmas morning. Ed had been just as circumspect in spreading the news in Shanghai, Madame Sun being one of the few to know. She had already met and liked Peg; she arranged a Chinese banquet for the two and gave them an American-made percolator.[8]
After a train journey through Japan, the couple sailed from Nagasaki as the only Caucasian passengers on their Japanese ship. Peg was something of a clothes horse in those days and took aboard (much to Ed's annoyance) a large wardrobe trunk with attire for every possible occasion. (Before leaving Shanghai, she had insisted on outfitting the reluctant Ed with a full set of English-tailored clothes—which lasted him through his remaining years in China and after.) The cruise was a "shakedown" one for Snow in adapting to the marital state in general and to Peg in particular. His even-tempered affable manner could mask a touchy quality. He brooded a bit in his diary at Peg's uninhibited tendency to voice her irritations and criticisms. He noted a few such mild reactions in his entries during the honeymoon trip, but it all seemed par for the conjugal state. "Hmmm," Ed jotted down at one point with "several minor complaints" by Peg, "trials of married life begin." In a last gasp of the freelance spirit, he facetiously mused that he had thought his father "demented" when going about the house "muttering lines of Shakespeare to himself, ... but now I realize that it was only that he was married." But more important, marriage and a home in Peking marked the end of what Snow called his "nomad" existence, and the start of the most fruitful and significant stage in his career.[9]
The two-month honeymoon included visits to Formosa, the East Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao, and the southern China ports up to Shanghai. The newlyweds had taken along volumes by Fabian socialists H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and read to each other aboard ship. The democratic socialist concept appealed to them; they were less impressed by the Fabian gradualist approach. "We thought it was typically British, slow as cold molasses in December," Peg remembered.[10]
Aside from the Indies, the trip was a reprise of some of Snow's 1930-1931 travels. His impressions of Dutch and British rule in the East Indies did nothing to change his hostile view of European colonialism, but he came away further convinced of Japan's determined and effective pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The disciplined and centralized Japanese state and society could mobilize its resources completely and rapidly, the military was in firm charge, and Snow thought there was little chance of civilians regaining control for at least another ten years. He found the Japanese foreign minister he interviewed in Tokyo to be "cold, haughty, with old samurai pride and insolence." The Formosa sojourn reinforced his earlier opinion that Japanese rule was "certainly an improvement on three centuries of Chinese rule." Although conquest is
"never a palatable thing to a proud people, if it must be in the Orient then perhaps the Japanese rule of Orientals is preferable to any Western rule," he recorded. Aside from the army and its methods, ordinary Japanese colonizers were less prone to the "deep disdain of race and color that white men bring." Discussions with the ship's officers were lively: "The real extent of Japanese distrust and dislike of America [was] hitherto not grasped by me."[11]
In Borneo Snow met British colonials who had found the status they lacked at home. Ed pondered the role of an "inferiority complex" applied to nations, as "possibly explaining to a great extent England's conquests, France's, Japan's." In Bali the Snows encountered a New York Jewish schoolteacher couple on a sabbatical trip around the world. Ed's diary entries exhibited both his naturally warm interest and liking them as individuals and yet a trace of his homegrown sense of their "otherness."[12]
The reputedly more enlightened Dutch role in the Indies was no more attractive to Snow than the English and. French varieties. Bali was the one exception—which he found to be a seductively alluring and still unspoiled oasis in the expanse of European empire. "The body is taken for granted here, as is sex itself. ... And [that] is good." The gentle Balinese, their art, music, dancing, and social organization he thought together admirable. They needed nothing the West could offer, he concluded. In Journey , Snow dwelt nostalgically and luminously on his Bali experience. Bali became a metaphor for his Vision of a nonpredatory, nonviolent world, though "it was too late to export Bali to the white-skinned people," he sadly acknowledged. At a stopover in Hong Kong on the return trip to Shanghai, Snow met Shaw, then on a world tour. Shaw twisted the British lion's tail with some Shavian anticapitalist "Bolshevik" epigrams in a Hong Kong University lecture. Snow dearly savored the performance.[13]
Snow's impressions of the Japanese and of their colonial enterprise were embodied in an article he wrote up soon after the honeymoon, on the decline of Western prestige, similar in theme to Far Eastern Front . Its equanimity at the prospect of a Japanese-dominated new Asian order was the product of Snow's disdain for the European record in Asia, for the Kuomintang's in China, and for the failure of both to face up to the Japanese challenge. Nor should America take on the task of pulling European imperialists' chestnuts out of the fire. "It is perhaps well, after all, that an Eastern country inherit the mandate that the West was given, for nearly a century, but did not know how to use," he remarked to his fa-
ther at this time. He would soon dramatically alter his thinking on the nature of the Japanese threat and on ways to deal with it.[14]
By early March 1933 (coincident with Tokyo's conquest of Jehol) the Snows had moved to Peking. They spent a couple of weeks in the cavernous Grand Hôtel de Pékin on the broad Avenue of Eternal Peace, directly across from the legation quarter diplomatic enclave. The hotel's roof garden, overlooking the yellow-tiled vista of the Forbidden City, was then a favorite night dancing spot for Peking's social set—which soon included the Snows. The couple rented a new Chinese-style house dose to the massive wall surrounding the city proper. It was the first of three residences before they left the old capital in the wake of the Japanese occupation in 1937. These Peking years saw their immersion in a social and cultural way of life that seemed removed from the harsher China realities and perils of the times. Peking, surrounded by its massive city wall, within which the now unoccupied imperial palaces of the Forbidden City stood surrounded by their own wall and moat, presented to foreigners an image of old China at its most authentic: towering gates, broad avenues, and innumerable lanes (hutongs ) lined with gray walls behind which were one-story residential compounds with their interior courtyards and gardens. Foreigners, in the fashion of a now vanishing Chinese scholar-gentry elite, occupied the grander compounds, complete with a retinue of servants, each with an assigned household status. Of that period, John K. Fairbank wrote in his China memoir, "We savored the amenities of foreign life in China. Only gradually did we become aware of the prospects of Japanese invasion and social revolution that were all too soon to burst over the land."[15]
This gracious if somewhat weary city had a charm and ambience that ensnared virtually all Westerners who came there. Most of the diplomatic corps still preferred their Peking embassies to the new seat of government in considerably less attractive Nanking. Officially, the city's name had changed in 1928 to Peiping (northern peace). But the inhabitants and foreign residents largely ignored this. Peking (derived from the French Pékin ) was the preferred designation by foreigners and Western-educated Chinese. The Chiang regime never did succeed in winning the hearts and minds of the city's residents. "I think Peiping will still be PEKING despite all that the Nanking crowd can do about it," Ed wrote his father soon after settling down there.[16]
In contrast to foreign-dominated, business-centered Shanghai, which seemed to personify all the evils and vulgarity of its hybrid Sino-Western modern civilization, "gentle Peking," as an American expatriate fondly
recalled it from the 1930S, remained a quiet stronghold of the old China favored by its ingrown foreign community enjoying the perquisites of the good life. Even the ricksha men had the courtesies and manners, along with the Peking-accented Mandarin speech that was part of the city's style. Still, as China's foremost academic center, Peking spawned major intellectual currents of change, both liberal and radical, which the May Fourth Movement of 1919 highlighted with its anti-Confucian individualism, anti-imperialist nationalism, and call for science and democracy as the path to a modern China. From the prestigious National Peking University had come the first leaders of the Chinese Communist party and the nation's most influential liberal reformers. The American missionary-founded Yanjing University, Qinghua (then, Tsinghua) University (established with American Boxer Indemnity Fund support), and Rockefeller Foundation-financed Peking Union Medical College were other major institutions in the city and its outskirts. Peg Snow attended classes at Yanjing, and Ed would do some teaching in its Missouri-linked journalism department. The two Snows and the students were to have a special connection in the anti-Japanese movement to come.
The Sino-Western Peking set lived by rules of "proper" etiquette, complete with calling cards. A round of dinner parties, teas, receptions, polo, the racetrack (where a Snow gamble paid off handsomely enough to help keep him from the grind of a regular Associated Press job), art and antique collecting, the Peking Club, and weekend excursions to nearby western hills temples, marked the social routine. It was a cultivated community of educated Chinese, foreign diplomats, missionaries, journalists, and Western expatriates seeking the wisdom and life-style of traditional Chinese high culture, antiquarians and sinologists. Many of the Westerners studied Chinese at the Peking (North China Union) Language School run by the American Board of Foreign Missions. The study of Chinese language and culture was popular among the foreigners (in contrast to the attitude of Westerners in treaty-port Shanghai); Ed undertook his first sustained study of the language, and Peg of Chinese philosophy, art, and economics. There were some notable personages in the Snows' circle. Evans F. Carlson, then adjutant of the U.S. Marine legation guard, and his wife, Etelle, were good friends. Another was Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant and iconoclastic Jesuit paleontologist-philosopher who challenged church orthodoxy with his social-ethical application of evolutionary theory. Peg had many spirited and intellectually stimulating discussions with him, as they strolled atop the city wall. James
Bertram vividly remembered Teilhard "in full flight in argument with the attractive and irrepressible" Peg. Transient visitors who became their friends included Pearl Buck and her future husband, Richard Walsh, whose John Day publishing house and Asia magazine were print outlets for the Snows; J.P. Marquand, John Gunther (doing the Asia volume of his popular Inside series), and the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who gave Ed and Peg their beautiful white greyhound, Gobi.[17]
Among their friends in the younger sinological community were John and Wilma Fairbank, and Owen and Eleanor Lattimore. Agnes Smedley would visit with the Snows on trips from Shanghai to the city. Ed and Peg were close to a number of the Peking-based correspondents, especially F. MacCracken (Mac) Fisher of the United Press. He too (as well as James D. White of the Associated Press) was a Missouri journalism product and had been a student in the Department of Journalism at Yanjing University from 1931 to 1933. He shared the Snows' intense hostility to mounting Japanese aggression in northern China, knew and sympathized with the student leaders, and would do much in tandem with the Snows to publicize the emerging anti-Japanese student movement in late 1935. (In Chungking after Pearl Harbor, Fisher headed up a newly created American information service in China, which became the Office of War Information there.)[18]
Particularly as Snow took on his Living China work, he also maintained links with a very different, leftist group of writers and young Chinese translator-assistants. He also met at intervals with Lu Xun and others in Shanghai in connection with the project. A private language tutor came daily at a total cost of $5 per month for both Snows. While Ed's spoken Chinese reached serviceable levels, for written materials he remained heavily dependent on translations. His reading competence in Chinese by then was "just enough," he later recalled, "to check translations and to do a very slow translation of bai-hua ," or vernacular, texts. But even for full-time Western students of the language, achieving genuine reading capability was a daunting ordeal. As Fairbank remarked of his Peking Language School days, "Some refuse to believe the writing system can be the way it is and suspect a conspiracy." Even Snow's limited but serviceable competence in the language made him an exception among American reporters in China of his time. Peg, who worked closely with Ed on the Living China project, developed her own contacts with writers and artists, did much research on the literary scene, and contributed a substantial essay on the modern Chinese literary movement to Ed's volume.[19]
Low living costs were a key to the foreigners' Peking life-style. It was one in which, as Snow put it, "a newspaper correspondent [and a poorly paid one at that] could become accustomed to living in the style of a bank president." The Snows' comparatively small first house had six rooms and bath, plus servants' quarters and bath. Located along one of the city's residential lanes, it was a typical one-story walled compound with interior courtyard of trees and garden where freshly blooming plants could be constantly replenished at minimal expense. (In recent decades the compound has become a crowded multifamily dwelling.) All this, and a staff of servants, could be had for little more than $1,000 U.S. per year. Rent plus servants' wages (including a fine cook) came to about $25 U.S. per month. Imported luxuries, such as Ed's Camel cigarettes, Maxwell House coffee, and Gillette razor blades, were the much more costly extras. Small coal-burning stoves provided the winter heat, mostly reserved for Ed's office-library, Peg complained. Silk-padded long Chinese gowns were the indoor winter wear of choice for the Snows. Their street lane (Mei Cha Hutong) translated unglamorously as "coal residue" or simply "Clinker Street," Ed informed his father.[20]
The low cost of living was just as well, given the declining fortunes of Con Press, Snow's single steady source of income. Within weeks of the couple's arrival in Peking, Epes informed Ed that his salary would be reverting to $80 per month. The "bottom has almost fallen out" of the newspaper world in America, he lamented. Snow's efforts to obtain work with the New York Herald-Tribune in the summer of 1933 were unavailing. Fortuitously he had sent off his "Decline of Western Prestige" piece to the Post , a long-shot gamble, he thought. An acceptance check for the incredible sum of $750 U.S. duly arrived in the mail, followed by a congratulatory letter from the editor, George Lorimer. Though Snow had been intent on alerting his readers to the facts of Japanese power and ambition, his opposition to any American military involvement may have had particular appeal to the isolationist-minded Post .[21]
The Post windfall not only resolved immediate financial pressures, it was enough to cover nearly a year's expenses. It also bolstered Ed's determination to pursue his freelance mode of writing and established. a connection with the Post that would ultimately blossom into a decade-long regular relationship. The magazine, Snow later estimated, paid him nearly a quarter million dollars, most of it during the 1940S. Even the occasional Post check during the Peking years made all the difference. He was able to take some unpaid leave from Con Press for final revision of Far Eastern Front , and to undertake the even less commercial Living
China work. He could devote himself to Chinese studies, read widely with special attention to fascism and communism, and take on a part-time journalism teaching assignment at Yanjing. None of these activities paid many bills (not even Peking ones); and the infrequent pieces he did for Asia , the Herald-Tribune magazine, and other journals paid very modestly, as did his stringer arrangement with the Daily Herald .[22]
Snow's only "steady" income (reduced in value even further by a sharp drop in the exchange rate in late 1933) vanished entirely with the demise of Con Press at the end of 1933. Despite what had been the meager financial rewards of this affiliation, Snow and Horace Epes had developed a genuine long-distance affection and esteem for each other. Their correspondence has a gentlemanly civility, graciousness, and warmth we rarely associate with "hard-boiled" journalistic images, particularly of the depression-era thirties. Yet these characteristics were always a hallmark of Snow's professional relationships—which tended to become long-lasting personal friendships. This was already the case with J. B. Powell and would be equally so of Snow's dealings with the editors Ben Hibbs and Martin Sommers of the Post , with the publisher Bennett Cerf and with Snow's editors at Random House, with his literary agent Henriette Herz, and many more.[23]
The Sun did come through in the spring of 1934 with a grand retainer of $25 for a monthly feature article. Notwithstanding this slim sum, Snow was comfortable with this kind of arrangement, which also allowed him to retain his professional identity as Peking correspondent of the Sun . He had already turned down an Associated Press offer to be their regular correspondent. "I am doing this," he wrote the Sun's editor, "because I think there is a definite need for a writer, on the scene, who can give in magazine articles a wider interpretation of Far Eastern news events than is possible in ordinary newspaper correspondence."[24]
Snow's situation had been buttressed by a move in January 1934 to the village of Haidian on the outskirts of Peking and directly adjacent to Yanjing University. A Chinese banker friend and Yanjing alumnus rented the Snows his newly built modern retirement villa, complete with small swimming pool, for even less money than their Peking house. With an acre of gardens and trees, and a picture window view of the western hills and the Summer Palace, the spacious residence was the perfect setting for the more contemplative study and writing Snow had in mind. It was also ideal for his new teaching chores at the university.
The Snows remained at their Haidian retreat until the summer of 1935. While Ed taught a course on feature writing, Peg enrolled in virtu-
ally full-time academic work at Yanjing. The two also bicycled to nearby Qinghua University for a class in the history of Chinese philosophy under the noted scholar Fung Yu-lan. (At a "confessional" session at Peking University in 1970, the then elderly philosopher described himself to Snow as "a reactionary academic authority" now being remolded along the revolutionary path charted by Mao. "'So I must now regard. your work [on the history of Chinese philosophy] translated by Derk Bodde as a poisonous weed?'" Snow recounted in his diary. "'Oh yes," said he, `a big poisonous weed.' [laughter] `Then I am still under its influence,' said I.") Ed and Peg each had separate studies in opposite wings of their U-shaped compound. At teatime in the afternoon Ed would usually read aloud to Peg his morning's writing, which they discussed in detail. He "edited and cut and re-wrote tirelessly," Peg recalled. He was a "natural" writer and journalist, who "enjoyed his work always." Ed worked on his short story translations, wrote some magazine articles for his major income, kept up his stringer Daily Herald connection, and did occasional mailers for the Sun . He continued to work sporadically on the Yunnan travel book. "The year has been thoroughly enjoyable," Snow wrote Epes in April 1935, "but financially a bust—particularly with, the steep drop in value of the deflated dollar."[25]
Ed had taken on the Yanjing teaching assignment in part to get some lecturing experience. In his perennial hopes for at least a visit to America, he had tentatively agreed to do a lecture series in the States in the fall of 1934. "I do not like to lecture, I'm miserably unconvincing at it," he, wrote J. Edgar in the spring of 1934, "but just now it seems to offer the only possibility of financing my much-needed visit to the States." In truth, public speaking never really did suit Snow's more deliberate, soft-spoken style. Nevertheless, his Yanjing course proved popular, and his public talks after his return from the Red area would fascinate his listeners. But like all his previous plans for a return home, the 1934 lecture project was unrealized.[26]
Instead, Snow was offered the opportunity, from his publisher Harrison Smith, to do a book on Chinese communism. He was offered a $750 advance in March 1934, which "in a moment of optimism" he accepted, promising to finish a manuscript by the end of the year. As already noted, he had been interested in such a project as early as 1932, but his efforts had come to naught; "at the last moment the CP's [Communist contacts] through whom I worked became suspicious of me, and disappeared; I never saw them again." Snow had never relinquished his interest in the subject. The task, however, was an intimidating one,
given the dearth of reliable information in print, either in Chinese or foreign languages. What was available (chiefly propaganda tracts, official handouts, gossip, and hearsay) could not be depended on for truth or accuracy. "This means," Snow told Henriette Herz, "that if a book on Chinese communism were to be of real value it would imply a large amount of original research." And to be "valid," he added, "it would have to include at least one visit to an important Red area, for first-hand study."[27]
As Snow himself soon realized, 1934 was a particularly unpropitious year for attempted journalistic forays to the central China Red base. The Red armies were then waging a desperate battle against the Nationalists' fifth and final annihilation campaign. Squeezed ever tighter by an encircling blockhouse strategy, the major Communist forces slipped through the blockade in the fall of 1934 and began their epochal 6,000-mile Long March, reaching a Communist base in remote northern Shaanxi in the fall of 1935. But even though "the whole of Soviet China may be obliterated," Snow felt in early 1934, the Communist movement will continue to exist and grow, "sub rosa , on a national scale. It will definitely be an important factor in the immediate destiny of China and the Far East, even if it does not become the dominating factor." A properly documented book on the subject, he prophetically noted, "should be one of the most vital and interesting imaginable." Yet Snow continued to harbor the conventional Marxist wisdom that "a successful mass revolution" was unlikely to develop "until the industrialization of Manchuria produces a proletarian leadership for the backward peasant millions of China."[28]
For the time being, as Snow later recounted to Ambassador Johnson, he found it impossible "to write such a book without ever having seen a `Red' soldier." He did take a stab at a more academic approach to the project by applying to the Guggenheim Foundation for a two-year grant to study the agrarian crisis in China, with particular reference to communism. Despite strong backing from a diverse group of distinguished people, Snow's proposal was turned down in favor of a presumably less controversial proposal by a Columbia University psychologist to study Chinese facial reactions to differing emotional stimuli—on the assumption "that starvation looked `different' on a Chinese face," Snow bitingly observed. He expected the rejection, noting to Epes in April 1935 that foundations like the Guggenheim "generally choose projects that are pretty safely moss-covered, and unlikely to get anyone agitated ... save a few intent scholars." Snow's contract with Smith and Haas was taken over by Random House with the merger of the two publishing firms in
1936. Meanwhile events were moving in ways that would bring a convergence of time and circumstances for Snow's opportunity to meet his first Red soldiers. Red Star would appear three years after the original contractual deadline, but at a far more propitious time and as an immeasurably more significant book.[29]
The Yanjing-Haidian period brought Snow's first sustained contact with China's tiny and elite student-academic community. Yanjing provided a very pleasant and attractive setting, with its pastoral, wooded campus, lovely "No-Name" lake, and modern Chinese palace style architecture. Bertram remembered the campus of those years as "one of the most attractive college settings I have known." Bertram recalled also the "misleading" impression given by "these elegant women in their colourful slit gowns cycling demurely about the grounds, the men in slacks and pullovers, American campus style." Yanjing was a progressive Sino-American Christian institution with partial extraterritorial immunity. It was under the liberal leadership of J. Leighton Stuart, later to be America's last ambassador to the Nationalist government on the mainland. Less subject to the repression of student activism in the state universities, Yanjing's students (and to a lesser degree Qinghua's) could function much more freely. (Students from the state-run National Peking University, within the city, "who wanted to read the Marxist classics with impunity borrowed them from the Yenching library.") Yanjing students came largely from Westernized, influential, and affluent urban business and professional families, and they were generally imbued with a strong anti-Japanese nationalism. The admission of a number of Manchurian refugee students after 1931 added strongly to such sentiments. An American missionary school such as Yanjing, John Israel writes, "produced free-thinking, socially conscious, politically active undergraduates." Unlike other colleges, it had an active student government organization and a sympathetic college administration. The school would take the lead in the famed anti-Japanese student movement of December 1935, with its journalism majors in the vanguard. Snow's rapport with those students would have its special significance in that historic event. But first we need to look at Snow's political state of mind as he reacted to European and Asian developments before that occurrence.[30]
By the mid-1930s the fascist powers in Europe had joined Japan in mounting an attack on the crumbling Versailles world order. Fascism's ultranationalist expansionism, its smashing of all domestic leftist and liberal opposition, and its proclaimed anti-Bolshevist crusade, gave cre-
dence to the Marxist-Leninist view that fascism had discarded the facade of bourgeois democracy in the attempt to save a dying capitalism from the forces of the proletarian socialist left. This view jibed with Snow's opinion of the "moribund" state of world capitalism and of the need to move on to a more "rational" system of planned socialist economics. In China, he saw the Kuomintang regime as a dictatorship of the right, waging a relentless war against the revolutionary left, adopting in the process many of the trappings and methods of fascism. This included creation of the militarized and rabidly antileftist Blue Shirts, and of a youth corps modeled on European fascist counterparts; inculcation of the "leader" principle around the Generalissimo, and the use of German and Italian military advisers.[31]
Snow highlighted this picture of the Kuomintang in a scathing mid-1935 article: "Arrest, torture, imprisonment, possible death are penalties threatening all, from the pale Pink to the deep-dyed Red." But Nanking's efforts to build a fascist-style nationalism, he wrote, did not fit its compliant pro-Japanism. The Chinese, Snow concluded, were "too old a people, too cynical and too fundamentally realistic to be made into flag-waving cousins of the Italians and the Germans. And they are far too hungry." (The Chinese people were always the saving grace for Snow. "What a wonderful if also terrible place China," he wrote at this time to Richard Walsh. "It is good to get back to her after a sojourn among the darkly sane and regimented Japanese.") The real possibility that the Nationalist government might collaborate with Tokyo in the latter's declared aim of "saving" China from communism only sharpened Snow's viewpoint. And reading books about fascism, Snow much later wrote to antifascist author George Seldes, "helped me see what it was necessary to oppose in the world even if I didn't yet see clearly what was worth supporting."[32]
Japan's role now took on a much more ominous character for Snow, in contrast to his earlier somewhat complacent reaction to Tokyo's imperial ambitions. To Charlie Towne he had observed in March 1933 that "conquests merely rejuvenate, do not destroy China." The Chinese people are "satisfied" that in fifty or a hundred years, "the little islanders will be absorbed, and the fruits of their strenuous adventures will be enjoyed by their [Chinese] posterity. A curiously reasonable people, the Chinese." Following an extended trip to Manchuria (now become Manchukuo) in the fall of 1933, Snow described the Japanese military's moves to transform that vast and resource-rich area into a formidable political, economic, and military redoubt and base for future expansion.
But in noting the great migration of Chinese into the region, Snow added, "They go north because years of misrule under Chinese satraps have ruined them economically," and while "Manchukuo is no earthly paradise," it "still offers the Chinese peasant greater safety, security and opportunity than his erstwhile Middle Kingdom." And through their attachment to the soil, "it is these sturdy immigrants who may ultimately reclaim Manchuria for China."[33]
By 1935, however, Snow argued precisely against this thesis in an Asia article subtitled, "The belief that China always absorbs her invaders is challenged by the record of Japonization in Formosa." Snow now force-fully rejected this oft-expressed Chinese maxim as merely a rationale for Nanking's do-nothing policy toward Japan. Nippon was not only effectively assimilating Formosa but had undertaken a similar process in Manchuria. Under Japanese hegemony, "the Chinese people stand to lose.... the liberty to build up a new civilization according to their own will and choice." When that happens, Snow quoted Madame Sun, "a nation ceases to exist." China had at most a decade to save itself, but that would take a "revolutionary program of coordinated social, economic and political change"—an impossibility under the nation's present leadership and policies.[34]
This scornful view of the Chiang-led Kuomintang remained at the heart of Snow's unremittingly bleak view of China's prospects . In a mostly unflattering portrait of the Generalissimo in 1934, Snow had implied that Chiang might have reached some "understanding" with the Japanese whereby his central China base would be safeguarded in return for a free hand to Tokyo in the north. In further pursuit of this theme, Snow wrote a fellow journalist in mid-1935 that Chiang's military buildup was more likely aimed not against Japan, but at creating "a first class police force" to "patrol" the country for the benefit and profit of Tokyo. All in all, "In my time in China, I cannot recall when the situation looked more hopeless."[35]
Convinced as he was of the imperatives for radical change in China, and of the fascistic, appeasement-prone proclivities of Nanking, Snow gave closer attention to the alternatives from the left. He would soon find renewed hope for China in the courageous anti-Japanese demonstrations of the Peking students, and even more among the Red revolutionaries in the northwest. These rising forces seemed to mesh with an emerging international antifascist front in which the Communists, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as their central bastion, appeared to be the principal spearhead. (In the context of such a front,
Snow noted decades later, liberal-minded foreign visitors to the Chinese Red area "needed to believe that there were people in China as good as the Reds seemed to be.")[36]
All this activism whetted Snow's interest in the Soviet Union and in Marxist-Leninist writings on fascism and world politics generally. He had reported to his father in March 1934 on "a most illuminating talk on Russia" given in Peking by a Harvard scholar returning from several years study in Moscow. Snow was impressed by the latter's opinion that Russia now held the "key to the peace" in Europe. The Soviets were now "one of the strongest nations on earth and have joined the `status quo' powers against the revisionists [aggressors]," he told J. Edgar.[37]
Snow did his more systematic reading of Marxist literature (begun earlier in India) during his Haidian-Yanjing "sabbatical" year away from more active newspaper work. The books came mainly from the Left Book Club of England, organized by the influential left-wing socialists Harold Laski and John Strachey, and the publisher Victor Gollancz—who would later bring out the best-selling English edition of Red Star . At the request of the Yanjing president, J. Leighton Stuart, Snow prepared a lecture on fascism to the faculty in December 1934. For it he consulted an array of sources ranging from the Marxist works he had been reading to the writings of Hitler and Mussolini and lesser fascist ideologues. The lecture, self-consciously academic in tone and heavily larded with citations, was a bit out of character for Snow. It lacked the personally experienced, vividly anecdotal, "human" qualifies he usually brought to his work. Nonetheless, it was not only a skillful and well researched effort; it also gave insight into Snow's evolving political perspectives.[38]
Snow described the generally accepted elements of European fascism: militarism, ultranationalism and glorification of war, racial-cultural doctrines of supremacy, single-party dictatorship, demagogic leaders, and terrorist tactics against all opposition. But he moved on to a considerably more radical interpretation. Fascism, despite its socialist rhetoric, preserved and defended capitalism. It was a counterrevolutionary response "to the social and economic problems which the decay and ever-nearing collapse of modern capitalism are everywhere posing today," he declared. Fascism appeared precisely to avert socialist revolution. In essence, it was capitalism without democracy. Snow acknowledged that fascism and communism were both dictatorial. Yet the latter, he emphasized, saw "proletarian dictatorship" as a necessary but transitory "evil" on the way to "a classless society." Fascism viewed the "Absolute State" as "the ultimate political form."
Snow put the principal blame for the defeat of the socialist forces in Europe on the social democratic parties and leaders. When in power they had practiced a "self-defeating" reformism, throwing away the chance for genuine socialist change. And in the crunch, as in Germany in 1932-1933, while the capitalists moved to save themselves against a rising Communist revolutionary tide, the social democrats in effect opted for fascist dictatorship rather than for a genuine social revolution under proletarian rule. (Actually, according to William L. Shirer, though the Socialists did not cover themselves with glory in the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the Communists bore a heavy share of responsibility, precisely by attempting to narrow the political choices to the extremes of right or left.)[39]
The lecture—in itself unimportant, its subject one for which Snow lacked firsthand knowledge and relied heavily on pro-Communist sources—nevertheless gives us a glimpse of Snow's political thought on the threshold of a dramatic new stage of his China journalistic career. His disdain for the "reformist" European socialist parties mirrored in part his China experience, where moderate political alternatives seemed hopeless and almost irrelevant. Revolution (as Ed wrote Howard in 1935) was the only "vote" available to the Chinese. This conviction was further buttressed by Snow's larger, Marxist-colored world view: Western capitalism (and colonialism) in terminal crisis, with socialism as the inevitable next stage of social development. The Soviet Union symbolized the socialist future, while fascism represented a regressive capitalism. But while Snow fell back on Marxist theory to justify a dictatorship of the left, there was a critical difference between his view of it as a "temporary evil," and that of contemporary Communist pronouncements that hailed the Soviet "dictatorship of the working class" as "the highest type of democracy, socialist democracy ." The realities of Stalin's rule would become increasingly evident to Snow (never an ideologue) in the Moscow trials and purges of the middle and later 1930s. He continuously grappled with what he saw as the "good-evil" equation of the Communist system. He tried to balance what he regarded as the greater good of the social and material advancement he felt revolution had brought to formerly feudal societies, against the lesser evil of the absence of (never experienced) political freedoms. It remained an unresolved dilemma for him and would come sharply to the fore on his later visits to Communist-ruled China beginning in 1960.[40]
In the China of 1935, however, such issues seemed marginal at best. "There is one thing about the left movement [in China] that most peo-
ple can't understand," Peg Snow wrote Richard Walsh at that time—reflecting Ed's views as well. "These Leftists are always the most intelligent, most promising, and most popular students and teachers in China. They are not a little fringe of disgruntled intellectual dilettantes as in America, for instance, but the leaders in every sense."[41]
By the summer of 1935 the Snows had moved back into Peking, where Ed again plunged into his journalistic activities. The Daily Herald had upgraded his status to special correspondent, and he retained his Sun connection. Once more, the couple found an ideal place to live at an inexpensive price. It was a foreign-style rather palatial residence, shared with a Swedish geologist who spent half the year back in Sweden. The large compound, adjacent to the ancient east wall of the city, boasted steam heat, marble baths, a tennis court and stables, and a garden greenhouse Ed used as his summer office. He spent a month in Manchuria that summer, gathering material for articles. The 2,000-mile trip took him as far as the Outer Mongolia frontier. He wrote Howard, in a strangely prophetic comment, that though a Russo-Japanese war could come in a year, "there is not historic necessity for it till, I figure, about 1945." The Japanese had done more to modernize Manchuria, he told his brother, than the Chinese had accomplished in all China since 1911. "They [the Japanese] are cocky, self-assured, conscious of their role as empire builders." "The Chinese," he remarked, in line with his now pessimistic view of the entrenched nature of the Japanese conquest, "fade more and more into the background, becoming mere rural scenic effect."[42]
In the fall, Tokyo began to tighten its hold on northern China by maneuvering to set up an "independent" North China, à la Manchukuo. Orchestrated by the Kwantung Army's master intriguer, General Doihara, the Japanese sought by a combination of bribes and threats to force the regional Chinese commander, General Song Zheyuan (Sung Cheyuan), to declare the "separation" of the northern China provinces that were already partially under Japan's control. The Nanking government, it seemed, would be unable or unwilling to intervene. This was the situation by mid-November when the students in Peking gained an inkling of what was about to transpire.
There is some controversy on the relative roles of various actors in the drama that ensued. Was the December Ninth Movement essentially a spontaneous reaction of youthful patriotic outrage at the sellout of northern China? Did the Chinese Communist party (whose organized presence in Peking was then virtually nonexistent) play a part, leading or
otherwise? Did the Snows provide the initial "spark" to the students that set off the demonstration? The truth seems to be all of the above, in the order of importance listed.
The Snows had become close to a number of the Yanjing students, primarily from among those in Ed's journalism classes. They included Manchurian refugee students who tended to be among the most ardent anti-Japanese activists. The students visited the Snows first at Haidian, and then at their new Peking home in the later months of 1935. They discussed the impending crisis, and the Snows shared with them their own intense antifascist views, with special reference to the Kuomintang. Ed and Peg in turn gained an appreciation of the latent power of China's idealistic and patriotic students, who might yet be the nation's salvation. Though a minuscule fraction of the population, the students commanded a respect traditionally accorded the intellectuals as voices of the nation's moral and political conscience. And since they came from the more influential families, the college students were handled a bit more circumspectly (but only a bit) by the suppressive machinery of the Nanking government. Snow was the recipient of the natural esteem Chinese students accorded their teachers; beyond this he exemplified the liberal American values and style they had come to admire as Yanjing students. His friendliness and warm support solidified their feeling of trust.[43]
The Snows provided a safe haven for student leaders to meet in strategy sessions. The couple gave inspiration and encouragement, offered tactical suggestions, and channeled information that Snow came by as a correspondent. (The students referred to the Snow house as "a window to the fresh air.") Ed could offer foreign press coverage, while Peg reported on the student movement for Powell's China Weekly Review . Among other things, Snow arranged for the delivery (apparently through Agnes Smedley) of a letter from the students to Madame Sun in Shanghai, and for her reply in which she urged the youths on to action. As one of the Yanjing activists later recalled, Snow used the pronoun "we" rather than "you" when talking with the student leaders.[44]
Those (Chinese and Westerners) who were then involved with the Snows retained sharp impressions of their widely disparate personalities and styles. Peg struck them as highly emotional, impetuous, excitable ("talking like a machine gun"), and free with her energetically expressed opinions and suggestions. (Give the students "the devil for their inactivity and sleepiness," she wrote the Yanjing student leader Zhang Zhaolin in November 1935. "Why be a vegetable?") But they also saw her as a re-
sourceful and original thinker, and a tireless worker for the causes she embraced. Li Min, secretary of the Yanjing Student Association and Peg's special protégé, would often visit the Snows carrying a small suitcase that Peg filled with antifascist materials she had typed up for Li Min to take back to the university. Peg wrote a lengthy and impassioned poem on the expected cave-in of northern China to the Japanese, "Old Peking." Published in Asia , it was translated into Chinese by Li Min and had wide impact among the students. It was all emotionally draining for Peg. The "impact of China was tremendous on me," and "I would be half dead from nervous and physical exhaustion," she later recounted. As a Western friend put it, Peg both "rocked the boat and propelled it forward."[45]
Ed, by contrast, came across as quietly thoughtful, gentle, unruffled, and much more reserved in passing judgment or offering advice. At the same time he was one who enjoyed talking with friends, old and new. Peg probably described him best in her account of the student movement: very popular with the students and teachers, he had "a naturally democratic and easy manner," was "casual but friendly, and did not force his opinions on anyone, but confined them to his typewriter which was always busy." She aptly characterized herself as "full of overflowing affection for the human race in general, but spiced with acid comment on people and things of which I did not approve." She could be counted on for some verbal fireworks in her spirited discussion-arguments with Ed; on the whole, however, the two operated as a highly effective and productive team. The students relied on and confided in them both.[46]
During the fall of 1935 the students watched with growing dismay as library and museum collections were packed and moved south in anticipation of the impending separation of northern China. Rumors had it that the universities themselves would be relocated. As student leaders gathered in the Snows' house in early December, Ed kept them abreast of the latest developments. Peg, with Ed's concurrence, urged a mass street demonstration as a replay of May 4, 1919. The students apparently had been working on the same idea. Of course, the street demonstration tactic was a time-honored one in modern China where more "civil" avenues for open discourse and dissent were closed. The Snows alerted members of the Peking press corps of the planned event, and at the demonstrations on December 9 and 16, the presence of the Snows and other Western correspondents (with cameras) inhibited police violence. (On Ed's advice, student organizers held a press conference for foreign journalists on December 12.) The United Press's Mac Fisher, with his
own Yanjing ties and his reportorial links to the local English-language press, was a particularly valuable ally. "The students dearly loved Mac.," Helen Snow later related, "an affection which grew with every news article [of his] that appeared in the Peking Chronicle or the North China Star ."[47]
At the December 9 demonstration, nearly a thousand Yanjing and Qinghua students marched five miles to the west gate of the city, only to find it barred to them. But some students had slipped into the city the previous evening and were able to join two thousand marchers from Peking-based schools and colleges. The Snows walked alongside, with Peg irrepressibly shouting slogans and exhorting the students. It was a triumphant beginning, despite some beatings and arrests and an icy water hosing of the marchers. Ed cabled the news to his London and New York papers that evening, and dispatches by the other correspondents gave the event world coverage. It was even reported in the censored Chinese press. "Nym and I were ordinarily no parade-watchers," Snow later wrote, "but we took our place beside the leaders of this one proudly."[48]
December 9 was followed by a student general strike, and a much more massive and well-organized demonstration on December 16 in which up to ten thousand students from twenty-eight schools and colleges participated. On this occasion, Snow climbed atop the Qianmen (front gate) tower, where he used his new movie camera to film the event. Lu Cui, the vivacious Qinghua standardbearer, emerged as the hero of that day when she crawled under a bolted city gate in a thwarted attempt to unlock it and allow entry to the city for her five thousand fellow marchers. The police hauled her off into custody. Snow soon appeared at the police station and was able to interview her and express his sympathy and support. During a Kuomintang crackdown the Snows gave her sanctuary for some days and helped spirit her away by train for Shanghai, where she worked on organizing student associations.[49]
The movement mushroomed and spread throughout China in the spring and summer of 1936 among students, workers, and business and professional circles. Despite Kuomintang repression of left-wing activists, a National Student Union was formed, and a Shanghai-based All-China National Salvation Association. In the wake of the December demonstrations, students from Peking and Tianjin went to the surrounding countryside to rouse the peasants. (The Snows came out on a frigid January day to see the Peking students off to the villages. Ed gave them an elaborately packaged box of chocolates he jokingly told them
contained "tear gas bombs" for their protection.) As for the northern China autonomy scheme, Japan was forced to retreat from its more ambitious plans. Buttressed by the strong expression of public opinion, General Song demonstrated considerably more backbone in dealing with the Japanese. All these developments encompassed the December Ninth Movement of 1935-1936. It "was the beginning of the end of China's non-resistance policy," Snow would recount.[50]
In the personal style of Journey , Snow headed his account of December 9, "We [he and Peg] Spark a Rebellion." And Helen, firmly convinced of her "prime mover" role, declared in her China memoir, "It is a charming irony that Doihara and all his mobilized armies had to retreat when faced with two little anti-Fascist Americans living on U.S. $50. a month—but armed with a piece of the truth." To a considerable degree these extravagant estimates of their part in the movement rested on assumptions about the lack of direct Communist input. Nor were the Snows anxious to find any—an attitude easy to understand at a time when CCP people in the Kuomintang-ruled White areas operated in secrecy and anonymity, even from fellow members. An organized party apparatus in northern China was probably created only at the end of 1935, and left-leaning students would have found it truly difficult to make such contacts. As one of the December Ninth leaders later recalled, "The Party, where are you? At that time we had not yet joined the Party. Under the White Terror and during those dark days, where could we find the Party!" And neither were such students apt to parade Communist sympathies openly. Thus Snow could declare in Journey that "there was not a Communist" among the student leaders who came to them for advice and support.[51]
Later Communist claims to an initiating and directing role in the December Ninth Movement were undoubtedly overstated. Nevertheless, leftist and Communist influence among the student leaders was significant and was to some degree channeled through the Snows' "safe house." The recollections of a number of these leaders, though colored by the party's line, attest to this. The testimony of Huang Hua (then known as Wang Rumei), one of the Yanjing students closest to the Snows who would become a top foreign affairs figure in the Communist regime, is pertinent. Acknowledging in an interview for this book that the student movement had "a kind of spontaneity," he insisted that the party underground, though small, had been active also. More important (and perhaps more accurately), he noted that he and other left-minded students had some covert access to Communist pronouncements such as
its August 1 Declaration calling for a united anti-Japanese front and an end to civil war. He had already read Marxist tracts and was inspired by accounts of the Long March and the Red Army's arrival in northern Shaanxi that had appeared in the Tianjin press. But direct contact with the Communist party came only through individual student (or ex-student) Communists whom the other students met at the Snows, and probably elsewhere, perhaps on the eve of the first December demonstration. David Yu (Yu Jiwei) in particular, who carried larger party responsibilities in northern China, soon took a guiding hand in the student movement. "I could see they were taking instruction from David," Helen Snow later recalled of the meetings in her home, "but I had no idea he was anyone important." Chen Hanbo, one of the participants in these sessions, remembered David Yu as "a spellbinder" whom the others "adored." "We got to know the Beijing leaders of the underground Party organization in [the Snow's] small sitting room," he added. David Yu would also be an initial intermediary for Ed's 1936 Red journey.[52]
Snow had a Peking reunion in 1960 with some of the student activists he had known in 1935 and 1936. One of them, Yao Yilin, told him that he and David Yu held party meetings at the Snow house. In his notes on the reunion, Snow commented, "I suspected that but didn't care to know too much about it." (David Yu became: mayor of Tianjin and was a state minister in the Peking government at the time of his death in 1958 at age forty-six. Yao became a party economic expert and one of the top state leaders.) Snow seemed prepared to believe in 1960, as then claimed by Yao and others, that the demonstrations were planned by the "tangjen " (party people) and that "participation of foreigners (as protective screen of newsmen) was merely fortuitous as was likewise my advice and encouragement that such an action be taken."[53]
Probably reflecting this 1960 experience, Snow afterward down-played the "spark" version in Journey . The "few pages devoted to the student rebellion were not offered as history entier but were obviously presented as an aspect of personal adventure," he wrote in 1966. Though the party did not "direct" the December 9 demonstration, he added, "From its inception and throughout its growth into a mass movement, student anti-Japanese action served to provide sanctuaries for radical youth which effectively ended the Communist Party's isolation in urban China." In fact, by spring 1936 the party was already in a key position in the organized student national salvation movement. But perhaps most to the point was Snow's observation in Journey , "This experience taught me that, among all the causes of revolution, the total loss of confidence
by educated youths in an existing regime is the one indispensable ingredient most often neglected by academic historians of the phenomenon." Ironically, December Ninth leaders such as Yao Yilin would find themselves one day arrayed against another generation of such disenchanted youth.[54]
The surging left-propelled anti-Japanese movement had given Ed a new confidence in the resistance potential of the Chinese people. It thus added urgency to his long-held desire to visit the Reds and also did much to create an opportunity for such a journey. And Snow's role in the December demonstrations had opened the necessary underground contacts for him and solidified his credentials as the ideal non-Communist Western journalist to report the Reds' story to a wide Chinese and Western audience. In so doing, Snow would find himself even more caught up in the events he recorded.