Chapter 8
Redstar-Struck
In the Land of the "Better" People

Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, back from Europe invigorated and drug-free, had been transferred to Xi'an in the northwest in 1935 with his Northeast (Dongbei) Army. He had been ordered by the Generalissimo to do bade against the Reds, now ensconced some 150 miles to the north after completing the Long March. Marshal Zhang, designated the deputy commander of Bandit Suppression Headquarters, moved against the Communists in October and November 1935 but suffered resounding defeat. His army, restive, homesick, and intensely anti-Japanese, fought half-heartedly. Prisoners taken by the Communists (including many officers) were released carrying the Reds' message of unity in resistance to the common external enemy. A similar theme began to appear among the ranks of the Northeast Army and in the schools and the press in Xi'an, spread by the hundreds of youths who flocked there in the aftermath of the December student demonstrations. (Journalism students from the Snows' Peking circle were especially influential as editors of a major army paper.) Marshal Zhang, and the commander of the smaller regional Northwest Army, were won over to the Communists' anti-civil war call, and by the spring of 1936 a de facto truce prevailed, with close liaison between the two camps. The Red security chief Deng Fa was secretly staying in the Young Marshal's own residence when Snow arrived in Xi'an in June.^[1]

The atmosphere was tense and conspiratorial. Chiang Kai-shek's Blue Shirts hunted down suspected Communists in the city, while Marshal Zhang gave protection and encouragement to leftist-inspired anti-

Japanese activities. These cross-purposes would shortly lead to the historic Xi'an Incident in December. Meanwhile, they were the backdrop for Snow's appearance there, at the optimum moment when Xi'an offered a covert gateway to Red northern Shaanxi for this American journalist with the right (left?) connections.

Snow embarked on his trip in a more buoyant temper than earlier over China's prospects in the deepening Far Eastern crisis. In the post-December patriotic upsurge, backed by the Communist revolutionaries in the northwest, he had discerned genuine prospects for effective popular resistance to Japan, and to the appeasers in Nanking. Perhaps the mood he now detected in China was best exemplified in a volume published in Shanghai that year by leading literary figures headed by the renowned social realist writer and close ally of Lu Xun, Mao Dun (Shen Yanping). The book brought together contributions randomly solicited from people of all strata throughout the nation and designed to reflect "the face of China" on one particular day, May 21, 1936. As the anti-Japanese Mao Dun summed it up, behind the portrayal of "the ugly and the evil, the sacred and the pure, and the light and the darkness, we can see in it optimism, hope, and awakening of the masses of people." For Snow, the new mood promised at long last a practical, progressive, and authentically anti-imperialist means for thwarting Tokyo's empire builders. "China's cause was now my cause," he later wrote of the onset of war in 1937, "and I linked this sentiment with a commitment against fascism, nazism and imperialism everywhere."^[2]

As he waited in the early months of 1936 on final arrangements for entering the Red districts, Snow produced a series of articles on the Far Eastern situation and American policy options. The themes were vintage Snow: a plague on all Asia imperialisms, and opposition to any American military involvement there. These opinions were updated, however, by his growing apprehension over Japan's European fascist links and ambitions, and by his newfound faith in the ability of a Chinese "people's war" to frustrate those ambitions. It therefore allowed him (for the time being) to hold to his non-interventionist position in a China-Japan conflict he now regarded as inevitable. It is instructive to compare these articles with one written just prior to Snow's student movement experiences. It was based on his previous summer's visit to Manchuria and underscored again the key role that region was scheduled to play in Japan's plans—"Empire in Manchuria foreshadows empire in China." Tokyo's takeover was complete, with the Chinese there reduced to "vegetable subjects." The Japanese were taking no nonsense

from the white man either, Snow added, cognizant as always of the color issue in Asia. "All the anguish of wounded pride accumulated over Western acts of discrimination against the yellow man here finds its outlet in Japanese authority, as colonial masters, of yellow over white." Their former inferiority complex had been transmuted into "an equally Freudian superiority complex." And Tokyo's envoys were finally getting "respect" in Western capitals. Only through defeat in "a major foreign war" (involving the United States, Britain, and/or Russia) could one "now envisage any failure of Japanese imperialism," Snow concluded. How long the latter's empire in China could stand "in the fluid world of today" Snow left to the "speculation" of his readers.^[3]

A few months later Snow was reaching quite different conclusions, expressed in a two-part series for the Post and a follow-up in Foreign Affairs . (A serious bout of malarial fever and dysentery had delayed his work.) He was no less pessimistic on prospects for China under a supine and "tottering" Chiang Kai-shek: the country was going bankrupt at a "breakneck" speed accelerated by "every economic and political obeisance" Nanking made to Tokyo. China, self-destructing since 1931, had lost the chance to construct "a modern capitalist nation of will and power and social progress." Again raising the likelihood of a Japanese collision with the Western powers, Snow asked rhetorically, "Is it too late for us to keep out?" Much as he had in Far Eastern Front , Snow warned against America being sucked into a conflict to maintain "the international status quo in the Far East." There was no American stake in China even remotely worth the costs and sacrifices involved. Applying his earlier prescription specifically to the United States, he urged Washington speedily to relinquish its special privileges and military presence in China. America had no empire to defend—let others fight their own wars. This was "in no sense a policy of isolation, but an active policy of insulation," he maintained.^[4]

Snow acknowledged that Tokyo's "Imperial Idea is not going to die until it is killed" but now added his conviction that the Chinese themselves were "fully capable" of this task. Tokyo's relentless advance "will shortly provoke an effort of resistance that will astound the world," against which Japan "will break its imperial neck." The effort would come from the growing mass of patriotic Chinese "disgusted" with the policy of "the compradore regime which rules them." In the final extremity, Nanking itself would be forced to fight, Snow predicted, to avoid "destruction by universal insurrection of the Chinese people." The ensuing struggle for self-determination would likely lead to the demise

of imperialism ("reversals of fortune," Snow called it) not only in China but "elsewhere" in Asia, by setting in motion "revolutionary developments of great consequence." A nonimperial America need not fear these eventualities, Snow argued. Her true interest lay in peaceful commerce, and its great expansion actually required a revolutionized, emancipated China. "Beyond that we need ask for nothing. Beyond that, we can, in justice demand nothing." The thesis that a capitalist (but nonimperialist) America could live peacefully and profitably with social revolutionary Asian nationalism remained a cornerstone of Snow's thinking to the end.^[5]

Snow's anti-British empire, no foreign entanglements approach was, as before, congenial to the conservative and nativist-isolationist Post editor, George Lorimer. Ed discreetly saved the fuller exposition of his views on China's revolutionary future for the more academic pages of Foreign Affairs . Lorimer, after all, found even the New Deal much too "socialistic" for the Post's taste. In Foreign Affairs , Snow focused on Japanese Prime Minister Hirota's call for a joint anti-Red front with Nanking. This proclaimed duty to save China from bolshevism could be "the vehicle" for Japan "to ride into China," Ed wrote. But even should the Generalissimo seriously consider some such collaboration as a short-term expedient, the Chinese Reds, now "expressing the growing political will of the Chinese masses," had in effect closed that door to him. In the current national crisis, the Communists saw the opportunity to lead the struggle "not only for social and economic but also for national liberation." In contrast to the Chinese "warlords," the Reds have nothing to lose by war with Japan, "and there is a socialist world to be won." For Chiang to cast his lot with Tokyo against the Communist forces would fatally compromise him among virtually every segment of Chinese society. China's leader, Snow prophesied, would characteristically stall for time, while making "a supreme effort" finally to annihilate the Reds. But he faced the inexorable choice of war or submission. When "the bombs begin dropping at his feet it is possible to believe that he will fight." The Reds, however, might well take that power of decision away from him. In that case, Chiang will have only two alternatives: "Japan, and the preservation of capitalism but the loss of China's independence; or communism, and the end of capitalism, but China still sovereign."^[6]

In early 1936 Snow understood the nationalist-cum-revolutionary message of Chinese communism. Indeed, he saw the CCP as the key to a successful resistance war. In this sense, his journey to northern Shaanxi would be one of confirmation and reinforcement as much as of discovery. The

China scenario he had sketched touched on the central issues then in (largely sub rosa) dispute within the Communist camp. The CCP and its Comintern mentors were in general accord in pushing for an end to civil war in China and for a unified "national defense" government against Japan. The ascendant Mao leadership, however, saw these objectives from the vantage point of Chinese revolutionaries on the spot. For Moscow, Soviet Russian foreign policy and security considerations were primary,. Already moving toward rapprochement with Nanking, the Russians pushed vigorously for conciliation between the Communists and the Nationalists. The Soviets looked to a unified and ostensibly democratic China under the Generalissimo, prepared to take on Japan. Mao, on his part, focused on the growing Communist-supported urban national salvation movement, and the CCP's mobilization of the peasantry, as the keys to creating an anti-Japanese national front—preferably without Chiang. Mao envisioned a principal role for the Communists in a resistance war and contemplated active Soviet support for the Reds in such a conflict.^[7]

On the Marxist theoretical level, the issue boiled down to an assessment of the class character and goals of an upcoming China-Japan war. To the Comintern forces it was a "bourgeois-nationalist" battle for China's independence led by the Kuomintang, with any subsequent "proletarian-socialist" stage relegated to an indefinite future. For Mao, however, the resistance struggle would itself be an integral part of an ongoing revolutionary process. Ultimate socialist objectives depended on how effectively the Communists did their work during the wartime phase. And—Mao declared to Snow in Bao'an in July 1936—the peasants' demand for land reform must be met, without which "it is impossible to lay the broad mass basis for a successful revolutionary struggle for national liberation." The current "national democratic" stage of the revolution, Mao more bluntly told Snow in Yan'an in 1939, will "after a certain stage ... be transformed into social revolution ." The present "becoming" would "turn into its 'being'—unless our work in the present phase is a failure," Mao added. Snow was already prepared to react sympathetically to Mao's dialectical linkage of resistance and revolution, and to the concomitant challenge to the Kuomintang. It would give Red Star its markedly prophetic character. And rather curiously, Snow and his book would serve both as surrogate vehicle and target in the often-obscure CCP-Moscow dialogue on these questions. First must come the story of Snow's sojourn in the land of the Reds.^[8]

Snow's growing convictions about the major role the Communists were soon to play rekindled his interest in investigating the Reds for him-

self. The Communist troops were now potentially within striking distance of Japanese military operations in northern China, underlining their claim to be a patriotic vanguard force. With the auspicious truce on the Shaanxi battlefront, the Red zone became accessible through Xi'an, an 800-mile rail journey from Peking. For the Communists here was a highly opportune moment to publicize their anti-Japanese unity stance and image among the nation's now very receptive urban circles. It was a critical moment for the CCP, its supplies and troops depleted by the massive Long March losses, and awaiting another "final" Kuomintang annihilation campaign. The Mao leadership was intent on putting the greatest possible pressure on Nanking (with whom it had opened inconclusive secret negotiations), while seeking alternative political strategies.^[9]

As a trustworthy but non-Communist Western journalist, Snow appeared ideally suited to bring out the Reds' story. He had broad access to the bourgeois media in China and the West as well as extraterritorial protection for what he wrote. Not only would his reports carry more weight than those by an avowed Communist, but the very fact of his independence from Communist tics made him more likely to grasp the broader implications of the message Mao wished to convey. Thus Snow, who had already been an inadvertent channel for Communist contacts with the Peking students, would now become the "medium," in his later words, "through whom [Mao] had his first chance, after years of blockade, to speak to the cities of China, from which the Reds had long been isolated."^[10]

Snow apparently first made overtures for the trip through David Yu, whom the Snows had befriended and sheltered after the December student movement. David, an important if youthful functionary in the tiny party underground in the north, left in March 1936 (wearing an old tweed suit of Ed's) for Tianjin, where he contacted the newly arrived northern China party chief, Liu Shaoqi. David soon wrote the Snows that Ed's "problem" would be "settled a few days later.... I think they have no reason to refuse your requirement." "When shall Ed start his travelling," he queried them in a follow-up note. Hearing nothing further from this source, Snow went to Shanghai in May to enlist Madame Sun's help in expediting matters. This seemingly worked; he was shortly put in touch with a Northeastern University professor (and secret party operative) in Peking, who passed on to him an invisible ink letter to Mao, and instructions for contacting the Red underground in Xi'an. That letter, Snow was told on his 1960 visit to China by the Shanghai mayor, Ke Qingshi, had been authorized by Liu Shaoqi and written by Ke.^[11]

As Helen Snow pungently noted, "Ed packed up his sleeping bag, his Camel cigarettes, his Gillette razor blades, and a can of Maxwell House coffee—his indispensable artifacts of Western civilization." Still feverish from a series of last-minute inoculations, and with his cameras slung around his neck, Snow hastily slipped out of Peking on the midnight train for the two-day ride to Xi'an.^[12]

There are a number of variations on this basic (and documented) scenario. In Snow's own accounts he emphasized Madame Sun's role, leaving out David Yu. Rewi Alley, whose Shanghai house held secret radio equipment for communicating with the Reds in the northwest, stated that a "call" had come for an "honest" foreign journalist and a Western-trained doctor. According to Alley, Madame Sun then asked Snow if he would go and he consented. But whatever the sequence of events, Snow was the one who took the initial step. Hamilton, in his Snow biography, recounts the part supposedly played by a Russian émigré professor at Peking University named Sergei Polevoy. As told by the deceased man's son, Polevoy had links to important Chinese Communist and Comintern figures in China in the 1920s, and in 1936 Snow approached him as another potential go-between. Ed may have raised the matter with the Russian, who continued to have left-wing contacts in Peking, and who visited the Snow home on one occasion. For someone whose Chinese Communist ties had been largely through the Comintern, Polevoy appears to be little more than a bit player. Harrison Salisbury in his book on the Long March surmised that a Comintern "recommendation" to the Chinese Reds to "establish international connections" may have "opened the way" for the Snow invitation. But this surmise is hardly plausible. In Comintern jargon, "international" meant connections and loyalty to the Moscow center, particularly so during the years of Stalinist centralization of power over the international Communist movement. The Russians were indeed suspicious of Mao's "nationalist" (China-centered) orientations, and unenthusiastic at his elevation to party leadership during the Long March, without the imprimatur of Stalin—not to mention the continuing disagreement on how best to deal with the Kuomintang. The lone foreign Comintern representative with the Chinese Communists, the German Otto Braun (known to the Chinese as Li De) regarded Snow cautiously in Bao'an, "rebuffed" his inquiries about the Red Army and the CCP, and (perhaps from a later political perspective) saw in Snow's compilation of "invaluable information" on the Reds the possibility of an American "secret agent" connection. At any rate, Snow's reports were bound to highlight dramatically

the political (and revolutionary) profile, history, and policies of the Chinese Communists, something the Comintern seemed anxious to avoid in the delicate pre-united front maneuvering in China. There is little reason to believe the Comintern initiated or pushed the idea of a Snow visit.^[13]

On more mundane levels, Snow, as a working journalist, was busy making his financial arrangements. He remained under contract for a book, and Red Star , in addition to its other attributes, would also be the big "off-the-beaten-track" travel book he had always wanted to write. And he thought in those terms. "I shall call it `I Went to Red China'," he jotted in his diary during his northwestern stay. With plans for the Shaanxi trip falling into place by the beginning of June, his London and New York editors enthusiastically offered the necessary support in return for a series of exclusive articles. "If I succeed" (in interviewing the Red leaders), "it will be a world scoop," Ed wrote the Daily Herald . On his return from Red territory, he impressed on the Herald editor the value and uniqueness of the copy he was sending him. "I do not know that anything of the sort has occurred elsewhere in modern journalistic history, for the situation is so unusual that it can scarcely have had a counterpart." The total bill Snow ultimately submitted to the Herald and the Sun , covering his expenses from June 14 to October 25 (including the cost of substitute coverage during his absence from Peking) came to $1,334.50 Chinese currency—about $450 U.S.! Almost four months of "no frills" living in Red China ran him well under $100 U.S. Compare that with our high-powered, high-living media stars of today. He had made no agreement (with the Reds or anyone rise) as to what he would or would not write, he assured Ambassador Johnson, "and wherever my personal sympathies may lie I continue to be from Missouri." For the Communists, of course, this stance was one of Snow's assets.^[14]

In Xi'an Snow put up at the new guest house, interviewed the provincial governor (a former Communist himself), and the commander of the Northwest Army, Yang Hucheng (who would be one of the ringleaders in the December coup against the Generalissimo), and awaited his secret contact. It soon emerged in the person of a rotund gentleman in a gray silk gown called Pastor Wang. A theology graduate of St. John's University in Shanghai, Wang had served under the warlord "Christian General," Feng Yuxiang. Now he was one of a clandestine network of Communist liaison agents who shuttled between the Red and White Chinese words. He had carried out high-level missions for the CCP, including the initial truce arrangements with the Young Marshal. In true

conspiratorial fashion, Snow and Wang produced their halves of a card with English verses and matched them up. For the better part of a week Pastor Wang (whose name was Dong Jianwu and who spoke excellent English) briefed Snow on the Communists, colorfully interlaced with many personal yarns and reminiscences. Wang and Liu Ding, another important operative from the Shanghai underground who was then functioning as secretary to Marshal Zhang, introduced Snow to Deng Fa, the Red security chief staying with the Young Marshal. Deng Fa, nattily dressed in the attire of a Kuomintang official, was bursting with glee and high spirits in disclosing his identity to Snow during a jaunt to the Han tombs west of Xi'an. It was he who briefed Snow on the particulars of travel and other arrangements for the Red area. These three key contacts, Pastor Wang, Liu Ding (a German-educated engineer known to his foreign friends as "Charles"), and Deng Fa, would all come to tragic ends. Deng was killed in a plane crash in 194-6, while the other two underwent persecution and imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution years, in good part for the extensive (and dangerous) liaison work and foreign connections they had put to the service of the revolution. When Rewi Alley privately told Snow in 1970 of Liu Ding's mistreatment, Snow "snorted and used a Chinese obscenity." As for Pastor Wang, in December 1970 he was being denied emergency medical attention as a "bad" element but, on word that Snow was coming to Shanghai and wished to see Wang, was hastily hospitalized. He died before Snow's arrival.^[15]

Snow additionally met up with George Harem in Xi'an, a young American doctor also heading for the Red base. He had been part of a close-knit circle of foreign radicals in Shanghai, among whom Rewi Alley and Agnes Smedley were prominent. They often provided safe houses and communication channels for the party and its operatives. These radicals gravitated around a left-wing bookstore and a Marxist study group in which a German Communist intellectual, Heinz (or Heintz) Shippe, held forth as guru. Hatem was a politically less sophisticated member of the group. Raised in Buffalo and North Carolina of poor Lebanese immigrant parentage, he studied medicine on scholarships at the American University in Beirut, and at the University of Geneva. As an adventurous young man, he took off for Shanghai in 1933 and set up a practice that consisted largely of' "cleaning up" women from the brothels "until the next dose," he related. Treating venereal diseases was a lucrative business for a Shanghai doctor but not what had brought Harem (known as "Shag") to China. Appalled at these conditions, he

was further radicalized by what he saw while accompanying Alley on the latter's factory inspection tours for the Shanghai municipal council. Hatem was attracted to the bookstore and the study group and was influenced by the intensely committed Smedley. She in turn introduced him to Charles (Liu Ding). Hatem's office was sometimes used for secret cell meetings while the young doctor stood guard. Based on these connections, Hatem agreed to be the medical person the Reds wanted and joined Snow in Xi'an for their shared odyssey. Both would be crossing their "Red Rubicon" (in Snow's phrase), but on divergent lifetime paths.^[16]

Hatem, a warmly engaging, amiable, and gentle personality, entered the Red districts hardly knowing a word of Chinese. (Snow's Chinese was adequate for both.) Hatem would devote the next fifty-two years of a remarkable medical career to the Chinese Communist cause. At his death in Beijing in 1988 he was a revered medical figure. He had taken a Chinese name, Ma Haide, and married a beautiful and charming Chinese actress, Zhou Sufei; they had two children and four grandchildren. After the Communist victory in 1949, he led a campaign that eliminated venereal disease and prostitution (a vindication of his early Shanghai career). In his later years he concentrated on leprosy, using his "remaining energies," he told me in 1987, to "help rid the world" of that disease. He and Snow became lifelong friends; Dr. Ma and Alley, and to an extent Madame Sun, would be Snow's major links to China in the cold war decades and serve also as his "progressive prods." Hatem would lead a Chinese medical team sent to Switzerland to minister to Snow in the final weeks of his terminal illness in 1972. Oddly, Hatem never appears in the pages of Red Star nor in any of Snow's writings until the 1960s. Harem had requested this omission, evidently fearing (in the case of Red Star ) that such publicity might endanger his Shanghai friends and contacts. Actually, Hatem's absence from Snow's account of their expedition probably enhanced the narrative quality of Red Star , in which the image of the lone intrepid (and attractive) foreign explorer was especially effective.^[17]

Snow and Harem finally took off one morning in early July in a Dodge truck that belonged to the Northeast Army. Their destination was Yan'an, then still in Kuomintang hands and the last major outpost bordering Red territory. From there they proceeded on foot, with a single muleteer guide and a donkey to carry their gear, including medical supplies Harem was bringing. Ed's cameras, watch, and good leather shoes offered tempting targets for bandits of whatever variety or politi-

cal coloration, he nervously thought. In fact a Red detachment sent to escort them had been sidetracked by a dash with anti-Red marauders. The fantastic contours of the treeless orange-yellow loess landscape in this heartland of ancient Chinese civilization lent an eerie tension to their excursion into the unknown and unpredictable. The "infinite variety of queer embattled shapes—hills, like great castles, like rows of mammoth, nicely rounded scones, like ranges torn by some giant hand, leaving behind the imprint of angry fingers," Snow described the scene. The "incredible and sometimes frightening shapes" could also take on a "strange surrealist beauty." The peasants' habitats were carved into the loess, with entire cave villages honeycombed into the hillsides. Snow's description remains the perfect rendering of its impact.^[18]

After a two-day trek, Snow and Hatem arrived at a village headquarters to be greeted by a bearded slender soldierly figure who turned out to be Zhou Enlai, the thirty-eight-year-old commander of the East Front Red Army. He welcomed Snow in halting but intelligible English, as a "reliable" journalist, "friendly to the Chinese people." Over the next couple of days he briefed Snow on the extensive itinerary planned for him and responded at length to Ed's queries on Communist policies, strategies, and history, and on his own background. Snow found this attractive, cultivated, and ardent revolutionary of Mandarin antecedents to be "every inch the intellectual"—a "scholar turned insurrectionist." More generally, he noted in his diary at the time, the Reds he encountered "go about remaking the world like college boys to a football match.... Every house rings with singing at night, laughter and good humor." The lads ("little Red devils") who did chores for the army had a "personal dignity" Snow had never before seen in Chinese youngsters. They were "cheerful, gay, energetic and loyal—the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth." Snow was thus launched on his compelling portrayal of Chinese communism "with a human face"—of many distinct and attractive visages. "It is the human epic in the story of the Red Army that interests me, and the politics only secondarily," Snow perhaps disingenuously assured his Herald editor after his return to Peking.^[19]

Significantly, Zhou Enlai's comments to Snow on the dynamics of a resistance war hardly squared with the contemporary Comintern line. The revolution, he declared, would "probably come to power on the vehicle of the anti-Japanese movement." And as for Chiang Kai-shek, the "first day of the anti-Japanese War" will "put a stamp of doom on his hegemony." But as events unfolded in China and led to a KMT-CCP

rapprochement, Snow would be urgently entreated by Zhou to keep such remarks out of his book. Irritated at this, Snow discarded as well much of Zhou's biography because the personal story had been so inter-larded with strongly anti-Chiang material.^[20]

After a further two-day journey on nags well past their prime, and accompanied now by a twenty-man Red Army escort, the two travelers arrived at the Red headquarters in Bao'an. (The following month, both men received gifts of two fine horses captured by the Reds from Moslem forces.) On entering the walled town, in a valley among the surrounding hills, they were greeted by welcoming banners, a military band, and (with the exception of Mao) the top echelon of Red leaders in residence. "It was the first time I had been greeted by the entire cabinet of a government, the first time a whole city had been turned out to welcome me," Snow recorded. "The effect produced on me was highly emotional." Bao'an, Snow remembered, "was the rain of a once sizable frontier city reduced by years of war and famine." Snow and Hatem were put up in what Ed called the waichiaopu (foreign office) compound, in a small hut with two mud kangs (sleeping platforms) and a simple table and benches. After sleeping outdoors during the journey, it looked like "the genuine Waichiaopu article" to Snow. An unexpectedly lavish banquet followed, at which they were joined by government functionaries including Mao, still looking sleepy, with his "mass of black hair uncombed." All in all, a typically courteous Chinese welcome to special guests.^[21]

Mao struck Snow as "a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure," and someone who "may possibly become a very great man." However, Snow added, "I never met a Chinese Red who drivelled `our-great-leader' phrases," an obvious jibe at the Stalin cult. Snow was then not privy to Mao's political downgrading before his comeback at the Zunyi conference during the Long March in January 1935. Nor, for that matter, was he aware of that watershed event itself, nor of the continued challenges to Mao's leadership. Snow's powerfully impressive portrait of Mao and the famous Mao autobiographical centerpiece in Red Star significantly enhanced the Red leader's prestige and renown in China and abroad and undoubtedly added to his political "capital" on the road to his own "great leader" status.^[22]

In rounding out his portrayal of the chairman, Snow pictured Mao in earthy human terms: searching for lice under his belt or removing his trousers in the heat of the day—both in Snow's presence; and as a "plain-speaking and plain-living" leader who strolled of an evening casually and

unobtrusively among the townsfolk of Bao'an. But though he had "the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant," Mao was also a classical poet and student of philosophy, a person who delighted at the sight of a lovely moth in the candlelight. It was the beginning of a lifelong attraction for Snow; interestingly, he was not only the first foreign journalist to interview Mao but also the last to do so, in December 1970. And with singular impact on both occasions.^[23]

There was immediate rapport between the forty-three-year-old Chinese "peasant-born intellectual turned revolutionary" and the thirty-one-year-old middle-class heartland American turned "friend" of China and the revolution. Snow not only responded to Mao personally, but also to the Red leader's peasant populism, his determined commitment to both national and social revolutionary goals, his friendly overtures to America, and his independent-minded though cautiously expressed distancing of himself from Moscow. It was a Maoist package Snow could identify with and enthusiastically communicate. As for Mao, after reading the Chinese translation of Red Star , he stated to a Yan'an cadres' conference that the book "truly represented our situation and introduced our party's policies to the world." He conveyed the same opinion to Snow personally in 1939.^[24]

Mao generally slept until midmorning, breakfasted almost to noon-time, then worked late into the night. His meetings with Snow took place in the evenings, on an irregular schedule, in the leader's spare, candle-lit cave dwelling. The two men would talk well into the night, often ending with a shared meal at midnight (or later). In this poor and primitive first bastion of the Red forces in the northwest, cave living was the norm. The Red Army "academy" occupied a cave-lined cliffside for its classrooms, and the students sat on stone stools.^[25]

Mao devoted an extraordinary amount of time and attention to the Snow interviews, which totaled some twenty thousand words. At Ed's request, the Yanjing student Huang Hua followed Snow to Xi'an and Bao'an to be his interpreter. (He left Peking just days before final exams and graduation.) Huang arrived too late for the Mao interviews but accompanied Snow on his subsequent travels through Red territory. Wu Liangping, Mao's secretary, served as Snow's initial interpreter. Wu, a Long Marcher, had been educated in Shanghai and at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and spoke fluent English and Russian. Snow's interview notes, based on Wu's oral translation of Mao's replies, were re-translated into Chinese by Huang Hua, read and corrected by Mao, then translated again into English by Huang. At the same time, Snow

practiced much more of his own spoken Chinese during his northwestern sojourn than in his previous two years of "desultory" study of the language in Peking.^[26]

At the base of the Mao-Snow relationship were overriding political considerations on Mao's part, and professional journalistic ones on Snow's. Later, as China's leader, Mao could discard or take up the Snow connection as it suited his and China's larger political purposes. Yet between the two men there remained an extraordinary personal thread from beginning to end of their meetings. "I've missed you a great deal since you left," Mao wrote Snow in March 1937, alerting Ed to shifts in CCP policies. "We are all grateful to you," he added. And in their very last conversation in December 1970 Mao could, rather disarmingly but not unmeaningfully, tell Snow, "from our first meeting thirty-five years ago up to the present, ... we have remained unchanged and treated each other as friends." The "basic relationship between us two has not changed," he reiterated.^[27]

Much of what Mao had to say to Snow in 1936 (beyond his autobiographical narrative) was directly cited or attributed to Mao in Red Star ; other comments, often made more informally, remained in Ed's notes and diaries at the time. But they all clearly provided the background for Snow's own analyses of Chinese Communist policies and prospects. On the strategy of a resistance war, Mao articulated his concepts of a protracted, mobile, guerrilla-style struggle, based on a mobilized and revolutionized peasantry. It assumed an independent and major role for Communist-led forces, within the framework of an overall national front. Mao further declared that the Soviet Union could not remain neutral "in the struggle against Japanese imperialism." Once "the Chinese people have their own government and begin their war of resistance," the Soviets will be "in the vanguard to shake hands with us." It was a point of view that could only cause irritation and discomfiture in Moscow. The U.S.S.R. was then particularly intent on discouraging any unilateral CCP anti-Japanese (and anti-KMT) actions, such as the Reds' recent thrust into adjacent Shanxi province. The strategically located new northwestern Red base was uncomfortably near Russian-dominated Outer Mongolia. The Soviets feared the Chinese Communists might provoke Chiang and the Japanese into joint anti-Soviet moves.^[28]

Mao, though evincing his loyalty to the Comintern, and openly praising the leaders of the internationalist (pro-Moscow) faction of the CCP, did not hesitate to criticize earlier Comintern-guided policies and agents in China that had led to disasters for the Chinese Communists in 1927.

He emphasized, in so doing, his own maverick and radical agrarian policies of that period. He castigated Michael Borodin, Stalin's chief political agent in China from 1924 to 1927, for his "rightist" stance of being "ready to do everything to please the bourgeoisie"; Mao's remarks seemed to have much relevance to the contemporary controversies over Communist united front policy. Though Mao spoke of the common ground and interests a Communist-ruled China would have with its "brothers" in the U.S.S.R., he stressed that any future socialist "world. union" could succeed only if each member nation retained full sovereignty and could enter or leave at will. "We are certainly not fighting for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow!" "Who is Moscow's `Moscow'?" he tellingly asked Snow. The Chinese revolution, Mao declared, was already the "key factor in world revolution"; when it achieved power, the peoples of many colonial countries "will follow the example of China and win a similar victory of their own." (This last was a foretaste of the later CCP call to such countries to follow "the path of Mao Zedong.") Mao's account of his own intellectual and political development against the backdrop of dramatic revolutionary events in China during his student years in Changsha underscored the indigenous Chinese and diverse foreign influences on his thinking before he finally embraced Marxism at age twenty-seven in 920.^[29]

The Red leader naturally had a compelling interest in portraying himself and his movement as staunchly patriotic defenders of China's national rights and interests. But at the same time the China to be saved was a China to be transformed. Mao was determined to pursue a course designed to ensure, first and foremost, the survival, growth, and eventual triumph of the forces of the revolution. In retrospect, Mao's historic talks with Snow not only underlined the continuing Communist national contest with the Kuomintang but contained equally the opening salvos in a still nascent Maoist challenge to the Stalin-controlled international Communist establishment. Snow, as the messenger, would be branded with a permanent "mark of Mao" in Moscow's eyes.

Peg's first (and only) news of Ed came through a secret Red Army courier (and former Tianjin student) named Wang Ling, who showed up at her door one September day with a letter for her from Snow. Ed's letter, written after his first weeks in northern Shaanxi, was composed in one of the rather naive but creative "codes" the two Snows henceforth adopted for such missives. He had begun work on his "botanical collection," he informed Peg. "There is a tremendous number of wholly new

specimens here unknown to the scientific world and the project is a much greater one than I imagined." Life there was "an austere affair"; his chief worry were the bugs, "which I am also collecting for the Smith-sonian Institute: fleas, ants, spiders, bedbugs, lice, mosquitos, flies, etc. I'm being devoured by epidermal inches." But the experience was worth all that and more. "It is exhilarating in many ways but most of all because of contact with heroic young scientists working under conditions just as bad (or worse) as for me." He wished Peg were there to share the experience. "What lively conversations and discussions you could have here; the air sparkles with intelligence." But the health-conscious Peg, he felt, would have trouble with "the bugs and the filth you despise." It was probably no accident that Ed used the "scientist" symbol for the Reds.^[30]

Peg instantly took Ed up on his "half-invitation" and, with the surprisingly enthusiastic encouragement of Wang Ling, prepared for the journey to Xi'an and entry to the Red district. Actually, Peg's earlier articles on the student movement had made a strongly positive impression in Bao'an. Wang Ling in fact inquired of Snow on the latter's arrival there (as noted in Ed's diary), "Why my wife had not come along. He extracted a promise from me that she would come next time." To Wang's remark to Peg that Ed would be "surprised and glad" to see her, Peg retorted, much to Wang's amusement, "No, he won't be glad, he'll only be surprised."^[31]

Peg had taken over Snow's Daily Herald and Sun correspondence in his absence and used this newspaper work as her chief cover in Xi'an, where she arrived at the guest house in late September. (She asked Mac Fisher to handle Ed's newspaper duties in Peking in her absence.) Charles (Liu Ding) soon visited, sportily dressed in golfing tweeds and cap. He was much less sanguine (or enthusiastic) than Wang Ling had been on the prospects of smuggling Peg into Red territory. The situation in Xi'an had become increasingly tense and risky. Peg, however, felt her youthful appearance and college gift apparel worked in her favor. ("I was certainly harmless looking and a little vague in manner, looking upon everyone as a friend.") Charles apparently thought otherwise. Perhaps in part to mollify her and speed her departure back to Peking before Ed's soon anticipated return to Xi'an, Charles arranged an interview for her with the Young Marshal, after which she would leave for Peking where her story could be cabled to the Herald . The interview turned out to be a bombshell. Marshal Zhang responded to Peg's questions with his characteristic candor. Possibly incautiously, the lead sentence in her ca-

bled report was Zhang's declaration that, "If the Chinese Communist armies can sincerely cooperate with us under the leadership of the Nanking Government to resist the common invader, the problem of China's civil war can perhaps be settled peacefully." The dispatch in the Herald appeared under the heading "Prefers Red Army to Japanese." As the first public statement of Zhang's stand against Nanking's anti-Red policy, it was bound to ring alarm bells in Nanking and was a prophetic foretaste of the drama to come. Thus, while chagrined at her failure to pierce the blockade, and reluctant to leave the "good story" unfolding in Xi'an, Peg nonetheless returned home with a major journalistic coup of her own. (In Red Star , Ed would prominently feature a Xi'an report by "Miss Nym Wales.")^[32]

Meanwhile, Ed had embarked on a monthlong inspection of the "real" Red Army on the Gansu front. Traveling horseback and accompanied by a young Red "Foreign Office" functionary, the trip took him through much of Communist-ruled territory, and added further to his collection of Red Chinese portraits. Peasant hosts along the way were invariably "kind and hospitable," sharing their crude huts and meager food with the "foreign guest." Despite minor grumbling, they were unanimous in their support and appreciation for the Reds, in contrast: to their experiences under White rule. In the primitive "industrial center" of Wu-ji-chen, an earnest-minded Communist engineer who had come to the northwest from Shanghai "complained" to Ed that the workers spent "entirely too much time singing !"—which, to Snow, epitomized "their spirit of socialist industry, even if they lacked its materials!" In his diary, Snow recorded a less welcome reception from a landlord's family. Going up to the house in search of food to buy, he found two women in rags sitting on the kitchen floor. To his food inquiry, "they replied in a surly tone, we are poor people, we have nothing." Snow's Red Army companions "explained" that such landlords buried their wealth and put on their poorest clothes when the Reds arrived. Most of them fled; generally only the smaller landlords remained.^[33]

At Commander Peng Dehuai's First Front Army headquarters, the soldiers "believed they were fighting for their homes, land and country." Personal morality among the youthful peasant warriors of this unique army was puritanical. ("I think easily more than half the Red Army must be virgins.") They were fiercely and patriotically anti-Japanese, with an extraordinary spirit and morale founded on a deeply instilled "revolutionary consciousness." Snow viewed a stimulating theatrical performance by the Red Army Players and compared the experience to the

Peking scene: "a contrast of life and death, between a living force and a dead one, a young and growing culture, and an old, disillusioned, spent and diseased one," he recorded.^[34]

The harrowing details recounted to Snow of Kuomintang atrocities against the civilian populations in the central-southern areas recovered from the Reds had only steeled the Red Army's resoluteness. It had "marked the matrix of their minds with a class hatred ineradicable for life." Snow was also told of instances of Red terror in central China against landlords and White officers at a time (1930) when the party had been dominated by "the Li Li-san line and the Trotskyists," but he saw no evidence of any such violence during his four-month stay with the Communists. He observed a landlord family under arrest, was aware of "several political prisoners" jailed in Bao'an, and knew ("from unrestricted inquiry") of just two civilian "counter-revolutionaries" executed in that period. "During all my stay in the Soviet districts," a diary entry stated, "I never saw a child struck or mistreated, a woman abused nor an old man offended." He had not even witnessed "a fistfight either between a soldier and soldier or between a soldier and civilian." In a subsequent interview with an official of the Red internal security forces (Political Defense Bureau), recorded in his diary but not in Red Star , Snow was informed that only sixty prisoners (mostly spies) were then being held in the entire Soviet district, and that in the year since the Red Army had arrived in northern Shaanxi, "not over twenty political prisoners had been executed." As to the level of political "freedom" allowed, the security chief assured Snow, "Nobody is arrested for only expressing an opinion or saying a sentence or two against the regime, but consistent exposition of anti-Soviet views is not allowed and is punishable."^[35]

The story of doughty General Peng Dehuai symbolized the new "people's army": after a bitter, deprived peasant childhood, he ran away from home at sixteen to become a soldier and rose to high officer rank in the Nationalist revolutionary army in the mid-1920s. Peng became a Communist and led his troops in revolt in 1928 and joined Mao and Zhu De on their mountain stronghold. His military exploits and inspired leadership under the incredibly harsh living and fighting conditions he and his men endured were legendary. He was second only to Zhu De in command of the Red Army; the latter, in fact, was then still en route to the northwest with the Fourth-Front Army of Mao's political rival, Zhang Guotao. Snow depicted Peng as "a gay, laughter-loving man," with an "open, forthright, and undeviating" manner and speech—rare qualifies among Chinese, Ed thought. Snow's extended interviews with

Peng resulted in one of the more influential sections of Red Star —the Red commander's outline of the military and political principles and tactics of Red partisan warfare. These tenets remained at the core of Chinese Communist strategy up to the climactic final battles of the 1946-1949 civil war. As recorded by Snow, they would become something of a text for anti-Nazi partisans in wartime Russia, and for revolutionaries in India and Southeast Asia. As Commander Peng summed it all up, "We are nothing but the fists of the people beating their oppressors." For Snow, Peng's recital of his revolutionary military experiences and successes against overwhelming odds must have seemed the living example and proof of his own growing faith in the efficacy of people's war against both foreign aggressors and domestic oppressors.^[36]

On his return to Bao'an in September, Snow had final interviews with Mao and Zhou Enlai in which they transmitted to him a new and more conciliatory united front line. Based on a variety of domestic military and political considerations, it reflected as well intensifying pressures on the CCP from Moscow. By this time the Red Army had ceased offensive actions against Nanking's troops and had now officially embraced the formula of a CCP-KMT united front under a democratized, firmly anti-Japanese Nanking regime—"a national defense democratic government." But with Chiang still evidently determined to launch another major offensive against the Reds, Mao privately criticized the Comintern's "faulty understanding" of Chinese realities. An internal party directive affirmed the CCP's leading role and stressed the party's continuing intent to unite with anti-Chiang, anti-Japanese armies as the key to, "pressuring Chiang" to resist Tokyo. Mao still believed that unity could. be obtained "only through struggle" and "could not be bought cheaply," the historian Jerome Ch'en notes.^[37]

Mao's ambivalent and skeptical approach to the possibilities of rapprochement with the Chiang government, and his views on how and on what basis it might be achieved, were candidly expressed to Snow in their September talk. The "meeting of the minds" of the two on these is.-sues was evident from Snow's diary account. (It was actually Snow who raised doubts regarding Chiang's aims and motives, with Mao concurring.) Mao did talk of "the reunion of the two parties" as essential to effective prosecution of a resistance war and called for "a united people's democratic government" whose writ the Communists would implement in the Soviet district. And given such a truly "national salvation front," the Red Army would place itself under a unified command. But Mao added, "One thing is certain: the Red Army will continue to exist

and will have the right to expand, as the army of a revolutionary base whether or not it is known as the Red Army, the Anti-Japanese Salvation Army, or something else."^[38]

Pressed by Snow as to whether the CCP was now prepared to postpone "class or agrarian revolution" until national independence had been "firmly established," Mao replied in somewhat circuitous fashion. The "anti-Japanese program cannot be realized without relief to the peasants." Agrarian revolution, he observed, had been carried out in "bourgeois democracies" and was a requisite for the development of capitalism. "And the main point is that just now we are not against capitalism but imperialism." Wouldn't Chiang try first "to eliminate or narrowly limit Communism as a military force," Snow queried, and went on essentially to answer his own question. Only after achieving such an objective would the Generalissimo be willing to make some political concessions, Ed observed. This in turn would enhance, not limit, Chiangs full control of the terms of war and peace with Japan. "As I saw it," Snow's diary version continued, "Communism now offered the sole opposition to Chiang's dictatorship and as such the only force capable of challenging or modifying his power of decision on the Japanese question."

Snow reasoned that the Nanking leader would make one final effort to destroy the Red Army, or at the very least confine it to a small economically backward area that would severely restrict its expansion possibilities during a war. Chang might then grant the Reds some sort of recognition politically. He would thereby augment his own political prestige and power, seem to "unite" the nation behind him, gain major support from the Soviet Union, and perhaps active assistance from Britain and America too. Mao "in general agreed" with Snow's analysis but added that after "testing" the Red Army in battle again, Chiang would "perhaps conclude" it was best to give up the ten-year anti-Red struggle and join hands against Japan. A new attack on the Reds would only result in strengthening them militarily and politically. In the end, Snow summed up Mao's view, Chiang "would be obliged to submit to the United Front with his own role minimized therein." The CCP, however, was stronger politically than at any time since 1927 "and destined during the national liberation struggle to reach a maximum never before attained." In the current negotiations with Nanking, Mao declared, the CCP was ready to "cooperate" in the unlikely case that Chiang could be "persuaded" to take on Japan. But if the Generalissimo preferred civil war, "the Red Army was also ready to receive him."^[39]

In a follow-up talk with Zhou Enlai, the latter told Snow that he saw "little real hope or possibility" of reforging the mid-1920s union with the Kuomintang. Too much had changed. There was now a strong Red Army, a large Soviet area, and a Communist party with ten years of fighting experience and an independent status. The Communists "will no more give up this Army and the Soviet district than will Chiang Kai-shek relinquish his hegemony of the Nanking government." Chiang's current negotiations with the Reds, he stated, "are part of his strategy to destroy it, or minimize it as much as possible." Even as a new stage of CCP-KMT unity was finally threshed out the following year, Snow himself never really abandoned the views he had expressed (and heard) in these interviews—nor for that matter did Mao. As delineated in the final pages of Red Star , at a time of proclaimed amity between the two parties, it would cause problems in certain Communist circles.^[40]

As Snow waited in Bao'an for a suitable moment to slip back into the Nanking-controlled "White world," he worked on his notes, and re-laxed among his new Red friends. There were tennis foursomes, and Snow-initiated "high-stakes" (in matchsticks) poker sessions with the Communist elite, occasionally including Mao. But with Nanking troops gradually replacing Marshal Zhang's Dongbei forces along the Red front, it became imperative to leave while a friendly outlet still remained. When Snow finally departed on October 12, the Red hierarchy and cadets turned out to see him off, as they had welcomed him four months earlier. And again, the late-sleeping Mao was the sole exception.

The experience had been an "exhilarating" one. Snow had met the revolution and its revolutionaries in the full bloom and hope of youth,. The "little devils" with the Red Army seemed the perfect metaphor: "the incarnation of the spirit of the army—boundless energy, the endless stream of youth, the eternal hope rising anew in China." Snow had feint himself in the company of valiant Davids who, despite their losses and privations, stood confidently ready to take on the Goliath forces arrayed against them. All good things seemed possible and attainable. A genuine bond had been forged with these "undevious and scientific-minded?' Chinese with whom he had been as comfortable "as if I were with some of my own countrymen." On leavetaking, "I felt that I was not going home, but leaving it."^[41]

There was still one trauma to endure on arrival in Xi'an—the disappearance of his precious bag of notebooks, diaries, films, and documents. Somehow, inadvertently, it had been thrown off his Dongbei truck at an ordinance depot north of Xi'an. At Snow's insistence, the dri-

ver immediately turned back while Ed waited in agonized suspense for the bag to be found and brought back to the city. And none too soon. All roads were blocked the very next morning, as the Generalissimo flew into Xi'an on a surprise visit to complete preparations for a "final" assault on the Reds, and to staunch the powerful anti-civil war, anti-Japanese currents in that supposed stronghold of the Bandit Suppression campaign. (Snow suffered a mini-reprise of this experience in 1965, when flying home to Switzerland from a China trip. His briefcase with his China notes and interviews had slid beneath his seat to the rear of the plane. Frantic that he might have left it behind somewhere, Snow joyfully hugged the stewardess who eventually located it.)^[42]

While in Xi'an, Snow met up with Smedley, who was staying at the famous Tang-era hot springs resort at Lintong—the scene of the Generalissimo's "arrest" that December. The two had dinner at the home of Dr. Herbert Wunsch, a German dentist and CCP contact. There they had a happy reunion from Shanghai days with the prominent leftist writer Ding Ling. Arrested in 1933 by the Kuomintang, she was now living under cover at Wunsch's home before breaking through to the Red district to the north. (In a strange mischance, on the day of the Xi'an Incident Dr. Wunsch would be shot down by anti-Chiang soldiers of the mutinous Northwest Army as he tried to enter the Xi'an guest house.) A few days later Ed turned up at the door of his Peking home "grinning foolishly behind a grizzled beard and looking like the cat that had swallowed the canary," Helen recalled in her inimitable, slightly disparaging style. He plucked from one of his many bundles "an old grey cap with a red star on its faded front," put it on, and pranced about the room "pleased as Punch" at his coup while demanding of the cook fresh eggs, milk, and coffee.^[43]

A quarter century later, on returning home from his initial visit to the People's Republic of China, Snow thought back to his pioneering 1936 journey:

I had gone to the Northwest before any other Westerner and at a dark moment in history for the Chinese Communists as well as for all China. I had found hope for the nation in that small band of survivors of the Long March and formed a favorable impression of them [the "better" people] and their policies of that day against my own background of seven years of life in China. I admired their courage, their selflessness, their single-minded determination to save China (under their leadership) and the outstanding ability, the practical political sense, and personal honesty of their high Commanders.

To a certain extent Snow had become a vicarious extension of their cause, which he saw as China's cause at its best. Though "I was not an active participant in the revolution, I could not deny some responsibility. The words I wrote had helped bring others to action."^[44]

Thus as Snow surfaced again in Peking, against a backdrop of fast-moving, climactic events, his words would themselves become factors in a many-sided and not always clearly discernible drama.