PART 3
RED STAR OVER CHINA, AND ELSEWHERE

Chapter 9
Writing and Making History

Snow had planned to hole up for a while after his return from the northwest and quietly get out his films and articles (oddly, through Japanese-held Dalian) without censorship problems. But rumors of his "execution" by the Reds, carried widely by the wire services, forced him to surface almost immediately. He divulged the main facts of his trip at a hastily called Peking press conference at the American embassy; his story, published abroad, was reported back to China and throughout the Far East. The next weeks and months were filled with frenetic activity. Ed rushed to develop his films and send them off to his agent in New York. Aside from their monetary and journalistic value, they were incontrovertible proof of his journey, which Nanking publicists were now calling a "hoax." Peg had "never been more thrilled" than to view the prints of the Red leaders. While Ed prepared his formal Mao interviews for speedy publication, she pored over his notebooks and spent days "happily" captioning and annotating the photos.^[1]

The Mao interviews appeared in Powell's Review in November; with its wide readership among China's business, professional, and intellectual circles, it added to the groundswell for national unity. The Herald received the interviews in London just in time to run them together with the sensational news of Chiang's December 12 kidnapping-arrest in Xi'an. Life paid a thousand dollars for seventy-five of Snow's photos and featured many of them in two prominent photographic-essay displays early in 1937. A series of some thirty articles, the core of Red Star , followed for the Herald . The paper promoted him to chief Far Eastern correspondent, and he covered the first three years of the China war for the

Herald. Asia ran six of his Red Star -related pieces during 1937, and in an article for the Post , Snow made use of the rifle he had once considered for his book ("I Went to Red China"). His news, he wrote the Herald in February 1937, "is causing a mild sensation here in the Orient."^[2]

Snow sent Ambassador Johnson a copy of the Mao interviews, which the latter forwarded to Washington. It was an example of the mediating part Snow increasingly tried to play between China's revolutionaries and American policymakers. Johnson's rather snide references to "Mr. Mao Tse-tung" was an early sign of the frustrations the journalist would encounter in such efforts. (Roosevelt, with whom Snow established a personal relationship from 1942 until F. D. R.'s death in 1945, appeared to be the exception.) America's wartime foreign service officers in China fared worse for their efforts when they tried to alert Washington to the decisive role the Chinese Communists would play in China's future. Snow's ability to get through to his readers, especially in Red Star , would be quite another matter.^[3]

The Xi'an Incident of December 12 put a world spotlight on the very forces and issues that were at the heart of Snow's recent experiences and writing. The forcible detention of the Generalissimo, who had again flown up to Xi'an to put an end to the anomalous situation there, was to be a crucial turning point for China despite its strangely anticlimactic ending. For Snow, this exercise in "military persuasion" by the Northeast and Northwest armies of the Young Marshal and General Yang Hucheng, respectively, substantiated his belief that only maximum pressure could force Chiang to alter course. In an eight-point declaration issued by the Young Marshal the generals called for an end to civil war and. for united resistance to Japan under a reorganized, broadly representative Nanking government, guarantees of democratic rights, and release of all political prisoners.^[4]

The Communists, after some initial rejoicing at Chiang's seizure, soon took a more conciliatory tone (evidently with some pressure from Moscow) and used the situation to press their united front proposals on him. At the invitation of the Young Marshal, the astute Zhou Enlai led a Communist delegation to Xi'an for direct talks with the captive Chinese leader. (Zhou had worked closely with Chiang in the united front days of the 1920s.) In the end the Generalissimo was released on Christmas Day to nationwide acclaim. The Young Marshal (against Zhou's advice) voluntarily accompanied Chiang back to Nanking in the reverse role of a penitent. Though "pardoned" by Chiang after sentencing by a military court, Marshal Zhang remained in custody of the Generalis-

simo and his successors, on the mainland and then in Taiwan. It was the Young Marshal's final quixotic act of patriotic, if naive, loyalty. There were no publicly announced or signed agreements at Xi'an, and Chiang in fact soon removed or reorganized the rebellious forces in the northwest and imposed control by Nanking troops along the front with the Reds. The latter, on their part, had utilized the crisis to expand their holdings and in January 1937 had occupied Yan'an, which became their famous wartime capital. Nevertheless, Chiang's anti-Communist crusade was ended, and with much theatrical sound effects and political posturing, the two sides inched gradually toward reconciliation during the spring months of 1937. Statements on renewed CCP-KMT cooperation were issued separately by the Communist party and the Generalissimo in late September, more than two months after Japan's attack in July.^[5]

Snow, completely immersed in writing his articles and book, had arranged with the Herald for Jim Bertram to cover the Xi'an events in his stead. Under the tightened security and travel restrictions during the crisis, the young New Zealander took a circuitous route from Peking that brought him to Xi'an two days after Chiang's release. Snow had entrusted Bertram with a bulging sealed envelope to pass on to the Communists (presumably for Mao). "Keep it in your inside pocket," Ed advised him. "We don't want any of Chiang's Blue Shirts reading that little lot." Fearing a police search at one point in his travels, Bertram hurriedly burned Snow's letter in a moment of pure panic. Bertram stayed on in Xi'an, where he and Agnes Smedley, who had arrived there before Chi-ang's arrest, made daily radio broadcasts to the outside world that did much to counter the highly slanted version of the Xi'an affair then being circulated by Nanking. There was still a tension-ridden atmosphere in the city, and the northwestern revolt did not wind down until February. Radical younger coup leaders then escaped to the Red lines; General Yang Hucheng (who had taken an adamant and more threatening line toward Chiang) was eventually arrested by the Nationalists and held prisoner until his murder in Chungking by KMT special agents just before the capture of that city by the Reds in 1949.^[6]

Snow's reactions to the Xi'an developments were expressed in an important talk he gave in January 1937, when the situation in the northwest remained fluid and unresolved. Ed, as we know, never enjoyed such speechmaking and lacked a flair for it—compounded in this case by one of his bad head colds. But he was speaking on a topic (the Reds and the northwest) on which he now had unrivaled personal experience, and he

could deal with the Xi'an affair with special insight and some authority. He gave his talk at the monthly dinner meeting of the men's forum of the Peking Union Church. The group represented a cross-section of the foreign community, including members of the diplomatic corps; the gatherings, held at the Peking Hotel, were black-tie affairs. It was far indeed from a radical setting. Ed insisted on wearing his favorite Shang-hai-tailored Harris tweed outfit, asserting both personal comfort and independence. His lengthy presentation was a great success. Many in the "intensely interested" audience of some two hundred "nearly turned handsprings over him afterwards," Peg exuberantly reported. The chairman of the meeting, "an old diehard" from the British embassy, "announced afterward that so far as he was concerned the Reds could march on Peking any day if they can do all the things Ed related in his talk!" Snow's talk, forwarded to Randall Gould, was published in full in Gould's Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury in early February. (Ed worried a bit that his disclaimer to be examining the background to the current situation "from the viewpoint of the Chinese Communists" would be overlooked.)^[7]

To Snow, the Xi'an events marked the direct clash of two opposing currents in China. The Nanking regime represented one—"Rightist, fearful of any mass movement whatever, opposed to democracy, opposed to any compromise with the Communists or any opposition which can threaten its dictatorial hegemony of power." On the world scene, the Kuomintang leaned toward the fascist powers, with an extremist minority seeking joint action with Japan first against the Chinese Reds and then against the U.S.S.R. As for the other side, its position was best summed up in the Young Marshal's eight-point declaration. It found its support "among the anti-Japanese armies, the national patriotic associations, the student movement, all opposition progressive political parties, the Red Army, etc." It was aligned with "the worldwide democratic front" of the western democracies and the Soviet Union.^[8]

Given these views, Snow was shocked and incensed at Moscow's reaction to Chiang's detention at Xi'an. Apparently anxious to dissociate the Soviets from any hint of involvement in the Xi'an revolt, and to affirm support for Nanking, both Pravda and Izvestia , the Soviet party and government newspapers respectively, harshly condemned the act. In their eyes, it undermined the growing national unity under Chiang and "objectively" aided and abetted the Japanese aggressors. In a clear statement of the crux of Moscow's China policy, Izvestia declared, "In as much as the Nanking government conducts the policy of resistance against Japa-

nese aggressors, the united popular front struggle against Japan should be regarded by all its participants not as a front against Nanking but as a front together with Nanking." Snow, in a memo he penned at the time, referred to this statement as an "observation which is no doubt made possible by the long-range field glasses in Izvestia's office but which is imperceptible to the naked eye of the observer on the spot."^[9]

The Soviet stance could not be attributed to any "misunderstanding" or ignorance of the facts, Snow felt. He himself had sold to the Tass office in Peking copies of the set of articles he was writing for the Herald and the Sun , and he had confidentially briefed Tass on the cooperation between the Reds and the Young Marshal (as he had briefed two military attaches in Peking, the Soviet and the American [Colonel Stilwell]). Peg Snow, in her impassioned and best "prime mover" fashion, had immediately taken off for the Tass office (dragging a reluctant David Yu along), in a futile effort to hold up distribution of the Russian press materials. In Red Star , Snow would pointedly write that the Japanese "had met their masters in propaganda in Moscow's press." In the latter's denunciations of Marshal Zhang and their "hosannas" to Chiang Kai-shek, he added, the Soviet media had "invented a story ... so antipodal to the facts that even the most reactionary press in China had not dared to suggest it, out of fear of ridicule." It was but one such "anti-Soviet" remark in the book not calculated to endear Snow to Moscow.^[10]

Snow much later wrote that this had been "one of the personal experiences which would convince me that as long as Russia made Comintern policy it would always and everywhere be made first of all in the strategic interest of the U.S.S.R., as the Kremlin saw it—or, more baldly, Soviet Russian communism first, and international communism second." He might have added that the Soviets expected the international movement to adhere to these same Moscow-first principles. Snow also revealed at that time that he had been told by Madame Sun in 1937 that Mao had flown into "a rage" on receipt of a telegraphed Moscow "order," soon after Chiang's capture at Xi'an, to release the Generalissimo. Snow's opinion of the Soviet response to the Xi'an crisis reflected his always ambivalent, if not contradictory, attitude toward the U.S.S.R. For Snow, the Russians were the major antifascist power and a still potentially dynamic revolutionary force in world affairs. But his independent leftism made him bridle at the idea of Stalinist overlordship of the Chinese Communist movement. "I am dubious about [the Reds'] relationship to Moscow (especially since the recent mass executions)," he had written Ambassador Johnson in early 1937.^[11]

Ironically enough, the Xi'an Incident provided the lever that opened the way for the united front under Chiang that the Kremlin had so assiduously sought. It also enabled the CCP to reach agreements with the KMT that included the minimal guarantees Mao had stipulated to Snow in Bao'an for such a united front. In the aura of conciliation in the early stage of the China war, and with the Generalissimo at the height of his political prestige and popularity, all sides—Nanking, the Chinese Communists, and Moscow, seemed in relative harmony. Longer-term issues and conflicts were largely in abeyance. Snow's book, in which he looked beyond and beneath surface amity, would be an irritant in this respect—not least in its provocative but prophetic title.

Snow showed his northwest movie film and photos, and bits of his Red Star manuscript, to selected groups of Yanjing students, while his Mao interviews in Powell's Review were translated and published in the student newspaper. Thus inspired and informed, a student group (with the help of a map drawn up by Ed) made its way to Yan'an in the spring of 1937, posing along the way as a vacationing college youth group. The students talked with Mao and other leaders, rode horseback with Smed-ley, and practiced shooting. Back in Peking, they in turn passed on their experiences to other students, some of whom undertook a similar trip. Snow thereby had an early impact on what would become a migration of many educated youth from the northern China cities to the Red areas, stirred by the national resistance stance of the Communists.^[12]

Snow was also anxious to get his account to a wide Chinese audience as quickly as possible. It was all in keeping with his growing role as en—gaged participant in as well as reporter of China events. A student from the Northeast named Wang Fushi (known then as Fullsea Wang), who had studied at Yanjing and knew the Snows, supplied the answer to Snow's quest. His father had worked closely with the Young Marshal in Peking and ran a newspaper there financed by Zhang. The Snows rushed material to young Wang, who not only did much of the translating into Chinese but served as editor and publisher. Through his father's newspaper plant, a book of some three hundred pages, complete with maps and photos, was secretly printed in five thousand copies by March 1937. With the innocuous tide of "Foreign Journalists' Impressions of the Northwest," it included much of (and in some instances more than) what later appeared in Red Star plus Snow's men's forum talk, and related materials from Western and Communist sources. The book, appearing in the post-Xi'an climate of uncertainty and confusion, circulated widely and did much to acquaint urban educated circles with the

Communist message—particularly through the Mao interviews, and Snow's analysis of the Xi'an affair. Snow later noted that this early partial version of his book (which made its underground appearance many months before the publication of Red Star in England and America) "provided countless Chinese with the first authentic information about Chinese Communists." Mao himself soon received a copy, presented personally to him by Wang Fushi, who went to Yan'an, as Helen Snow's interpreter, shortly after the book's publication.^[13]

A Chinese translation of the regular English edition of Red Star was just as rapidly (and covertly) produced in Shanghai by February 1938, and again with Snow's active cooperation. He was then back in Shanghai and had given a copy of the newly arrived London edition to a member of a group of anti-Japanese, Marxist intellectuals who met secretly each week as the "Tuesday foram," in the Shanghai foreign concession area. (Chinese Shanghai had already fallen to the Japanese after a lengthy battle.) The foram group of twelve, apparently with the approval of the Communist party underground, took up the translation project as a collective task. They raised the necessary funds among themselves and by selling tickets to prospective readers to be redeemed when the book appeared. The group created their own publishing house, collectively translated the work, and rushed it into print with the cooperation of patriotic printing workers. Snow provided a special preface, in which he waived his copyright for this edition. The book, under the title Xixing Man Ji (Journey to the west), went through four printings by November 1938 and was widely circulated in occupied and free China and in Communist-controlled areas. It remained the standard Chinese version of Red Star for the next decade. Strangely enough, Snow's classic was considerably more accessible to Chinese readers before 1949 than for the quarter century following the Communist victory.^[14]

The Snows took on yet another project in the months preceding the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in July 1937, designed also to advance united front policies along the lines of the Young Marshal's Xi'an declaration. An intensely earnest-minded American, J. Spencer Kennard, visited the Snows one January day in 1937, with an offer of one thousand dollars gold from the Friends Society (Quakers) to found a journal of "applied Christian ethics," with Snow as editor. Though fully involved in writing his book, Snow found this an offer he couldn't refuse, especially with Peg ready as always to take charge of yet another China "missionary" endeavor, and be the "active Snow" in the venture. An editorial board was quickly assembled, including a few liberal Yanjing professors,

Chinese and American, together with the two Snows, and Ida Pruitt, a China-born missionary social worker and writer who would become a major figure in another Snow undertaking—the Indusco movement. The Snows corralled John Leaning, a coolly sophisticated but strongly antifascist young Englishman then passing through Peking, as editor. There was a total dash of personalities between Leaning and Kennard, which added fuel to the usually argumentative free-for-alls of board meetings. Attendance at these meetings, Ed later observed, "was worth the price [$150] of a share" in the joint enterprise. The journal was baptized democracy (with a small d ), and the editors quickly dispensed with Kennard's originally stipulated "Christian ethics" subtitle. Only five issues of the semimonthly appeared—from May 1 to July 8, the last dated the day after the Japanese attack on northern China and Peking, which ended the journal's brief life. Yet in those few months it had provided another valuable channel for spreading excerpts from Snow's Red Star (including his portrait chapter on Mao), and for much discussion of the state and fate of democracy in China and the world. J. Leighton Stuart, president of Yanjing University, contributed his thoughts on the outlook for democracy in China (a sharp contrast to one written by Peg), and also an "appreciation" of Chiang Kai-shek. The predominant motifs of the journal were anti-Japanese, antifascist, and pro-united front.

"To our astonishment," Snow wrote in 1940, "the magazine proved very popular, and subscriptions were coming in nicely when we had to fold up." Hubert Liang, the journalism chair at Yanjing and a member of the editorial board, wrote to Peg decades later, with some hyperbole, that the magazine had been "an immediate, sensational success, taking China's intellectual world by storm." Kennard and others made efforts to revive the journal in 1939-1940. He again approached Snow, who rook the position that the initiative should now come from liberal elements within the country. With China now at war, there was "nominally a United Front, nominally the right of free speech and organization. If the Chinese liberals will not now demand and fight for their right to democratic processes, no amount of foreign agitation will get very far." While these remarks reflected Snow's jaundiced view of Nationalist-ruled wartime China, they did not really jibe with his continuous firm support for, and personal practice of, progressive foreign intervention in China's affairs. The revival idea remained stillborn.^[15]

All these activities further undercut Snow's standing with the Nanking authorities. His post-Bao'an writings had aroused the ire of the Chinese government, Ambassador Johnson informed him. Similar news had

come from "other quarters," Ed replied to the American envoy in February 1937. In answer to a somewhat threatening letter from the foreign ministry's director of intelligence and publicity, Snow rejected the charge of "propaganda" leveled at his work. For the real thing, he dryly pointed to the lurid (and manifestly false) tales on the Xi'an affair that had been circulated by the government news agency. His reports on the Reds, Snow told the official, could help provide the facts and understanding so vital to bringing about "a strong, united and effective China." As an American journalist, Snow rather loftily concluded, "I have a right (as a Chinese journalist has in America) to publish the truth as I find it."^[16]

The Nationalist regime specifically banned a lengthy list of Snow reports (in Chinese translation) on the Reds. And after Snow returned to the States in 1941, the Generalissimo apparently personally directed the Chinese ministry of information carefully to monitor Snow's published pieces in America, and to funnel refutations of his "false propaganda" to "friendly" American media outlets. In February 1944, American Ambassador Gauss reported from Chungking to the secretary of state, the "opinion" of Chinese observers that "the Generalissimo and many high ranking Kuomintang officials are convinced that the favorable publicity received by the Chinese Communists in the past resulted from (in their view, the distorted) picture drawn of conditions in that area by Edgar Snow." Gauss's observations referred to a projected trip to Yan'an by foreign correspondents, reluctantly agreed to by the Kuomintang. The ambassador shrewdly added that "Kuomintang critics" thought the trip "may result in the Kuomintang having to face 'eleven Edgar Snows' instead of just one." Yet, as we will see, in the early wartime united front years the Nationalist-Snow relationship was, at least overtly, a more compatible one.^[17]

Snow faced other, more personal, complications and interruptions as he worked on his book in the winter and spring of 1937. He fainted one March day from a kidney stone attack, and was taken to the Peking Union Medical College hospital where the stone was removed by cysto-scope—without anesthesia. Infection set in, entailing a lengthy and painful convalescence. He would be plagued for the remainder of his life by recurring kidney infections and urinary tract problems. Ed had his operation on the same day that proofs for the inaugural issue of democracy arrived at the Snow house. Peg was a bit nettled that Ed wasn't around to oversee the unfamiliar task of making up the dummy for the print shop. She and Leaning managed, however; they dropped it off at the printers and only then proceeded on to the hospital to see how Ed was faring.^[18]

Peg had worked clsely with Ed in transcribing his northwestern notes and was particularly intrigued by the life stories he had brought back, most especially by the Mao autobiography. "As soon as I read Mao's story," she subsequently recounted, "I knew I would have to go to the Red areas to write down some more of them." For her, these personal narratives were "the best sources of history" on the Communists. According to her various accounts, Helen Snow argued vehemently with Ed to keep Mao's autobiography intact for his book. Snow, she asserted, felt the many Chinese names and details might be too much for his readers and was at first inclined to cut and rewrite much of it. Mao's story, of course, did become a classic centerpiece of Red Star , and an enduring and indispensable source on Mao's early life, education, and rad-icalization. The Communist leader was himself a talented communicator and could relate his life in pithy, colorful, and personal terms. His narrative was thus exceptional not only as a paramount primary document but as an engrossing read, and Snow surely appreciated this. He did lighten it a bit by deleting some of the Chinese nomenclature.^[19]

But the debate between the two Snows, at least as Helen told it, did illustrate their very different writing philosophies, and perhaps talents as well. Her overriding concern was didactic—delivering the message, "boring though it might be to some potential readers." Her China books and monographs contain rich and valuable source material on the Chinese Communist movement and its protagonists, but they did not yield "the one good book" of wide popular appeal she always aspired to write. Yet when she moved away from doctrinal-political instructive material to a more personal vein, her writing took on considerable verve and color with sharply etched characterizations. Possibly poetry has been her most effective literary mode, including a talent for Ogden Nash-style versifying. (The most absorbing and "literary" of her China books is the intimate and wrenching story she took down in Yan'an in 1937 of a Korean Communist active in the Chinese revolution in the 1920s and 1930s.) "It's a kind of do-gooder public service," she remarked of the hurried writing (for immediate Chinese translation) of her Inside Red China in 1938, "just giving out information, not being a writer." Her work, she observed, "was an example of plain facts plainly explained." Her painstakingly recorded and cherished Yan'an notebooks gave her "an exaggerated sense of every small detail anti scrap of paper.... History was sacred to me." Red Star , she readily acknowledged, had "charm., humor, the sense of discovery, and suspense. And it is written to make the story more attractive." She considered her own work to be "medicinal." While Ed could communicate, "I can diagnose and prescribe."^[20]

When David Yu (now evidently able to surface more safely in the new political climate) informed Helen that a major party conclave was to meet in Yan'an at the beginning of May, she dropped everything else and prepared for the trip to Xi'an and Yan'an. It would be a rare chance to gather many additional accounts from important Communist figures Snow had not met. She was particularly intent on collecting material about revolutionary activists who were women. Ed, still finishing up Red Star and slowly recovering from his painful kidney ordeal, watched her pack for the journey with mixed feelings. It would be an opportunity for her not only to do a book of her own, but to obtain additional photos and updated information for his book. And he always supported her journalistic and literary endeavors. (When Peg's Inside Red China was accepted by Doubleday the following year, Ed wrote her from Hankou that he thought the book "will at once establish your name and reputation." He signed off, "With salutations to the Great Nym, from Mr. Wales.") Yet there were the worrisome health risks and other dangers she would face. And he would be left to fend for himself—with a retinue of servants, of course. Offsetting Peg's absence, though, might be the benefit of a less frenetic setting in which to do his work. All in all, it was an example of their supportive-competitive partnership in action. In a note to Ed, written on the way to Xi'an, she gave some long-distance medical advice-commands on diet and rest, "as you look very thin now and bad generally (and act worse!)."^[21]

In Xi'an Peg encountered a situation very different from what Ed had found the year before. Nanking troops had taken full control, with the Young Marshal's forces dispersed elsewhere in China. "The whole atmosphere here is very depressing," she wrote Ed. Despite the united front negotiations then underway, the local authorities were intent on preventing journalists, especially another Snow, from entering the Red districts. The police were "grinning for you," she warned Ed, advising him to stay away from the city. Under constant police surveillance, Helen was "nervous, frightened, but resolute." "What an incredibly horrible country," she told Ed. "Thank God for extraterritoriality among these feudal-savages." "Be sure to get your book out immediately and don't waste any more time," she enjoined him, "because I'm leaving China after this experience!" But despite all the hyperbole, she intrepidly managed a celebrated midnight "escape" from the first-floor window of her room at the foreign guest house. With the unlikely connivance of an adventuresome China-born young American Standard Oil man, she slipped out of the city at dawn in a "borrowed" military car and reached the Communist lines at Sanyuan north of Xi'an on April 30. The Amer-

ican, Kempton Fitch, was a member of a pronouncedly pro-Nationalist missionary family. But, "political opinions aside," he wrote Snow after depositing Helen at the Red Army outpost, "a lone American always sticks up for another lone American, and it seems that a young man always assists a lady in distress." As to whether Helen was, in his estimation, one of those women who "make the grade in a bit of adventure," he observed in somewhat inverted gallantry, "your wife is not one of these, if such exist, and should not be allowed to roam around without the gentle hand of restraint ever at her elbow."^[22]

Helen was deferentially received, both in her own right and more specially as Ed's wife. Snow was "famous" in the Red areas, George Hatem had earlier informed Ed, while Agnes Smedley wrote Snow from Yan'an shortly before Helen's arrival that "They [`our comrades'] all like you, admire you—both your work and your personality." Mao and Zhu De paid a joint courtesy call on Helen soon after her appearance in the Red capital. (Ed himself had failed to meet Zhu the previous year; the Red commander had arrived at the northwestern base in late 1936, after Ed's return to Peking.) In the press of events, however, Mao showed considerably less urgency in meeting with her than had been the case with Snow the previous year. Helen had planned on a relatively short stay, but it was well over four months before she was able to leave. It was a tense and critical period in united front negotiations, and she had to bide her time into the summer waiting for definitive political pronouncements, and for appointments with Mao and other leaders. The onset of war in July, and torrential rains that made travel impossible, further delayed her departure until mid-September. In due course she had her talks with the Red leaders and their surrogates and assiduously collected dozens of autobiographies. Most of the latter were eventually published by Stanford. She returned with enough material for four books, and for much other writings over succeeding decades. "I've been a prisoner of these notebooks for twenty-three years," she wrote when compiling her Yenan (Yan'an) notebooks in 1961.^[23]

The remarkable and rather intimidating Agnes Smedley was also in Yan'an during Helen's stay, and they left together for Xi'an by horseback with a Red Army entourage. Helen had a gingerly relationship with this moody, often charming, and demanding woman. A painful back injury Smedley suffered in August intensified the problems; she had to be carried by stretcher for much of the ten-day journey. Smedley's intense feminism had stirred up a minor storm among the socially conservative Communist wives in Yan'an. The dance lessons she gave

and the square dance parties she organized did not help. These functions attracted the male hierarchy and the new wave of young people from the cities, but not the wives. Smedley later told Snow about a particularly bizarre and violent quarrel involving Smedley, Mao's wife, He Zizhen, Mao himself, and a beautiful young actress called Lily Wu (Wu Guangwei). Wu had come to Yan'an early in the year and became a confidante and interpreter for Smedley. She made quite a splash among the men, including Mao, who got into the habit of visiting Smedley and Wu (who had adjoining cave accommodations) for conversation, and exchanges of poetry with the educated and modern-minded Chinese actress. One night He Zizhen showed up and bitterly berated Mao, accusing him of a romantic liaison with Wu in which Smedley had colluded. In the upshot of all this Wu was sent off to the war fronts, He Zizhen ended up in the Soviet Union, later divorced by Mao, who then married another young actress, Jiang Qing. As for Smedley, her departure, whether or not it amounted to banishment, undoubtedly caused much relief in Yan'an.^[24]

Smedley took up other, probably equally intractable if less nettle-some, causes in Yan'an and enlisted Snow's help from Peking in dealing with them. Bothered by hordes of possibly plague-carrying rats in the cave at night (as was Helen, who woke everyone in her compound with screams whenever a rat was caught in a trap set under her cot), she undertook a one-woman rat extermination campaign. As Snow told the story, "Soon after her arrival [in Yan'an], she wrote to ask me to ship from Peking, where I was living, 2,000 rat traps ! ... I sent in a suitcaseful at a time, whenever I heard of a student or journalist going in that direction, until I exhausted Peking's supply of rat traps." But this crusade also came up against some Yan'an social realities. "I distributed [the traps] free," Smedley subsequently ruefully reported, "but soon I found they were being sold in the market!" She followed this up with further urgent requests to Snow for hybrid corn seed, and literature on chemical farming, public hygiene, medicine, birth control, and much else. He was unable to find a phonograph she wanted for her dance sessions, but she procured one from Shanghai together with worn records of American folk songs. Snow related all this after Smedley's death in England in 1950 and the burial of her ashes in Peking. He ended, "I suddenly seemed to see the evil rats scurrying for cover" and "hear, above the sweet fragrance of the noble mimosas [of Peking], the faint music of an old phonograph record grinding out, `She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes."'^[25]

Compared to this older stalwart revolutionary, Helen Snow must have appeared (misleadingly) as something of an ingenue. "Peg Snow," her admirer Jim Bertram has remarked, "was surely the only foreigner to make a Red Army uniform look chic." Normally very thin, she contracted dysentery, ate only sparingly of a few "safe" foods, and left Yan'an weighing less than a hundred pounds. (When finally back in Peking she needed a spell in the hospital to recover, in a room at the German Hospital that came complete with a picture of Hitler on the wall.) Ed had sent some care parcels of American canned and packaged foods for her, Hatem, and Smedley, but only one parcel arrived, catching up with them on the way back to Xi'an. "I can't imagine where you get the idea that `everything' can be bought here, or that when I climbed out of a window I was able to take a truckload of food with me," she testily wrote Ed in late June. But since she never paid much attention to what she ate, "except for starving it doesn't bother me in the least."^[26]

Many of Peg's letters to Snow from Yan'an (carried out by courier and mailed to a secret mailbox in Peking) apparently did not come through at the time, adding to Ed's worries about her and to his uncertainty and consequent irritation as to when she would be returning. She did send out many of her notebooks and films and a letter brought back from Yan'an by a visiting group of American Asian specialists, including Owen Lattimore. Ed was able to include some of her photos in Red Star . When she left the Red capital, traveling on foot or horseback, Helen carried all her remaining notebooks (without covers) in an improvised belt under her coat.

The Communists would have preferred that Snow come to Yan'an for briefings on the party's now much more conciliatory line toward Chiang and the Kuomintang. In lieu of this, they pressed him through Helen to take account of these changes in his virtually completed book. Snow had already been obliged to revise the final chapters to reflect post-Xi'an developments, he informed Helen in early June. He worried that the trend of events was undermining the main thrust and significance of his book. He remained skeptical on prospects for democratic changes under the Kuomintang, was deeply suspicious of Chiang's motives and plans, and felt, as he acidly expressed it to Helen, that the Reds had "[thrown] in the sponge." The "obvious meaning" of the Xi'an Incident was now clear, he confided to her. In effect, the Communists had conceded national leadership to the Kuomintang "for possibly many years to come, that, and nothing more. It weakens the whole structure

of my book very much, but that is nothing." Chiang's "decisive" and "perhaps unavoidable" victory was now "abundantly manifest."

In reply, Helen warned, Ed would "make a lot of enemies if you say [in the book] what you did in your letter about the united front position here, and it may be very harmful for them [the Reds] also." Such criticisms were now considered "Trotskyist," she added. "The Communists are giving up everything to organize a legal movement in the white districts," she continued, "and reestablish the CCP in working order for a mass movement there along purely political lines under the democratic slogan, etc., etc." In essence, Helen was delineating the position advanced by the influential internationalist wing of the party led by Wang Ming. (Later in the year, Wang flew into Yan'an from Moscow and was effusively greeted at the airstrip by the entire party high command.) Mao would in due time counter this line, which Maoist historians castigated in terms reminiscent of Snow's 1937 views. Actually, it was Zhou Enlai and not Mao who was pushing Snow to delete anti-Change remarks and anecdotes confided to Ed the previous year. Mao apparently shared his friend Snow's apprehensions about Change's intentions. In a confidential letter to Ed, shortly before Japan's attack, he expressed "anxiety and dissatisfaction" over negotiations with the Kuomintang.^[27]

Tell Zhou "not to worry," Ed wrote Helen on July 26; he had instructed his publisher to delete the entire Zhou chapter from Red Star . "Don't send me any more notes about people reneging on their stories to me, as it's much too late to do anything more about it." Snow did use some Zhou Enlai biographical material (shorn of anti-Chiang barbs) in a Post article he was then doing. In it he highlighted Zhou's role in securing the Generalissimo's release at Xi'an and noted that he was once again working with Chiang as he had done in the mid-1920s. Snow, however, did not refrain from making his usual point that Chiang's obsessive anti-Red campaigns had allowed Japan to take over large chunks of China.^[28]

In his late July letter to Helen, Snow also brought up "the purgation in Moscow," suggesting to her that she question the Yan'an people on their "attitude toward this, and what it means, and why it doesn't shake their confidence, and why this couldn't happen in China, etc." Snow's caustic queries reflected not only his current annoyance with the Chinese Reds, but his distaste for the Stalinist dictatorship and his distrust of the CCP's Moscow connections. Yet Snow remained convinced that the U.S.S.R. was Japan's primary target, and that the Soviets would become a key player in deciding the China conflict. No one in either the

Communist party or the Kuomintang "really believes that the war against Japan can be won without Russian help," Snow wrote in his November 1937 Post article. "Everything in this struggle depends on whether or not Russia is drawn in." Readers of this book should keep in mind that the optimism Snow had felt in 1936 for a successful Chinese war of resistance had been predicated on his vision of a broadly based revolutionary anti-Japanese coalition spearheaded by the Reds, a "people's war"—the only kind he considered to be both effective and worthwhile. In a diary entry soon after the start of the war he derided the "naive" view of many Peking intellectuals that "the Reds would be the ideal rulers of China if only they'd give up social revolution!"^[29]

Thus, while Snow remained uncertain and uneasy over the new direction of Communist policy, he also continued to affirm his belief in the Reds' ultimate revolutionary destiny. Their moderated line, he observed in his Post article, seemed "to remove the fight for Socialism .in China to a remote future" and would likely then be waged "within the framework of democracy, rather than by armed insurrection." He nevertheless wondered whether the Red leadership in the course of a protracted struggle would "prove ingenious enough to transfer the loyalty and devotion of its following to the banners of pure Chinese nationalism," without destroying the "political morale" originally derived from "the immediate practical gains of class warfare." But taking his cue from his 1936 talks with Mao, Snow declared that the Reds were "serenely convinced" that the war would inevitably lead to "a mighty victory of Socialist democracy" in Eastern Asia. As the party "best able to mobilize, train and lead the peasantry" in a long and costly conflict, and with an army most expert in mobile warfare, "the Communists think they will be able to conclude the war with a firm grasp on national leadership, as well as with the credit for a great triumph over Japan." Red Star would strike an even stronger similar note.^[30]

For now, however, the realities of China's humiliating defeats in northern China and his deeply pessimistic views on the immediate course of the conflict had put Snow into one of his despondent states. The passive, inept, and disastrous Chinese defense of Peking, witnessed by Snow in the weeks after Japan launched its war in northern China on July 7, further soured him. "Well, it's all over," he recorded, after Chinese forces evacuated the city on July 28. "The idea of organizing the people for a `Madrid' never entered the old fool's [the commanding general, Song Zheyuan] head." It had been a "debacle and sell-out." No Nanking troops or planes had come up from the south to join the fight-

ing. Chiang would fight only if Japan invaded "his territory" south of the Yellow River. Even then, Snow gloomily (and inaccurately) felt, the Generalissimo could not be depended on to conduct a sustained and serious struggle. As for the Communists, he bitterly noted, they were most likely to follow a "live and let-live" policy toward Chiang, in which case "we can expect little more from Red leadership."^[31]

Snow's dark mood was accentuated by his loneliness and worry about Helen, from whom he had heard nothing since the start of the war. The accumulated strain of the intense work and activity of the past year (his book had been finally completed just days before the Japanese attack) had also taken its toll. After covering the fighting around Peking, he was expected by the Herald to go down to Shanghai to report on the battle raging there, but his uncertainty about Helen kept him immobilized. His expenses were mounting, and monies due him from the Sun and Herald were not coming through. The Post and other journals wanted war articles from him, which he felt unable to produce. Added to all this, his Peking house had become a refuge for many Chinese on the Japanese blacklist. In mid-August he and Jim Bertram shepherded such a group, including Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai's wife, herself an important leader in the party, to Tianjin on a refugee-packed twelve-hour train trip. (Deng had been living secretly in the western hills outside Peking taking a tuberculosis rest cure.) Ed got her through the Japanese security check, in Tianjin, with Deng posing as his amah, and into the safety of the British concession.^[32]

These were "mostly days of worry and misery," a diary entry reads from Tianjin at the beginning of September, where he had returned again, unsure whether to go on to Shanghai or to meet up with Helen, perhaps in the seaside resort city of Qingdao on the Shandong coast. After ten "miserable and expensive" days, and some garbled and confused telegraphic messages from Helen, he took a steamer to Qingdao together with Bertram, to await further clarification. "Everything about my personal life is in chaos," he brooded. He had been "a lousy traitor" to the Herald , which had ordered him to Shanghai a couple of weeks earlier. Two pieces for the Post remained unwritten, and hinging on them, "the possibility of becoming their regular correspondent in this war." Other journals were "clamoring for copy. What a pity that I cannot write a line! ... I am so afraid something has happened to [Peg] that I cannot sit or stand still a moment; must be always moving and with people to keep from worrying about her. Nor can I write a line, except this sort of thing which gives direct expression to my nervous apprehensions."^[33]

Ed and Bertram proceeded to Xi'an where they just missed Peg, who had left hours before by train for Qingdao. She was taken off her train and returned to Xi'an. (The Snows later passed the express on which she had traveled, wrecked by Japanese bombers with many passenger fatalities.) Ed found her to be "rather pale and thin" but "in good spirits." In Xi'an, Snow saw Smedley and visited with old Red friends from Bao'an at their Xi'an liaison office, now functioning openly and legally, though under police scrutiny. Ed and Peg went on to Qingdao while Bertram entered the Communist areas for his own stint with the Reds.^[34]

For almost two weeks the Snows enjoyed the lovely, deserted beach at Qingdao, still untouched by the war. "Days of rest with Peg," Ed recorded. "Sleeping, eating, sunbathing, long talks and quarrels and talks. Joy of reunion; tears and roses." Ed took passage for Shanghai on October 9, in time for the final phase of the fierce battle there. "These have been costly and chaotic months in my personal life," he wrote the Herald from Shanghai, in appealing to them for some reimbursement of the heavy expenses he had incurred since the start of hostilities. Peg returned to Peking, to close up the house and get medical treatment for her recurring dysentery. She arrived in Shanghai by ship in late November, a few days before the Japanese victory parade there. She brought with her, Snow glumly noted, "14 trunks and 13 pieces of hand luggage, poor kid." Snow preferred to travel light. Helen still carried around her waist the notebook-stuffed "life belt." The two were soon involved in another momentous chapter in their China lives, with Helen as usual setting the pace. They would initiate a movement for the kind of grassroots mobilization of human and material resources Snow always believed crucial to the Chinese war effort.^[35]

The first copies of Red Star arrived from London just before the end of the year and were soon sold out—a small sample of the strikingly successful reception the book was getting first in England and then America. It came as a surprise to Snow, and a great boost to his morale (and finances). There would be some equally unexpected, but unpleasant, jolts from the left.

Chapter 10
The Strange Life of a Classic

Snow's dejection in the early months of the China conflict extended also to his expectations for Red Star . Despite "bits" that were "surprisingly good reading," he wrote Helen about the completed draft, "I'm afraid I can't say much for it." Besides, he added in a further letter to her in Yan'an, he believed the American public took "a noticeably waning interest" in the Chinese Reds since they had buckled under to the Nationalists. Yet it was precisely Snow's book that stirred Western interest, sympathy, and admiration for the Chinese Communists and helped inspire an optimism about China's prospects that Snow himself for the while noticeably lacked.^[1]

The "truth is," Ed dispiritedly wrote his father from Tianjin in September, "that I am a little tired and tired especially of the Orient." (Though once again he added the refrain: a return home would have to wait, perhaps for the duration of the war.) As for the China hostilities, all wars were much alike "so far as human suffering and brutality and stupidity are concerned"; this one particularly "seems a rather sordid and unglorious business." Whereas he felt China, now in a "fight or perish" situation, should in the end prevail, it would be because of "greater endurance at hardship and misery." Japan would finally break economically, rather than militarily. (It was a point he had once dismissed as wishful thinking.) Great power intervention was also to be expected. He reiterated his oft-expressed conviction that Russian intervention in one form or another "will come and will be decisive." He predicted to J. Edgar that America would be involved no later than 1940. The Japanese military, bogged down on the China mainland, he prophetically

continued, would become increasingly reckless, as probable Western sanctions sapped Japan's resources. It was a cheerless kind of "optimism" that had little of his prior expectations for China of an entire people fully mobilized for war under broadly based leftist-patriotic leadership.^[2]

Rather incongruously, the eventful and calamitous course of the first six months of hostilities that so depressed Snow appeared to his American publisher to be fortuitous "timing." It was "almost a miraculous break," Bennett Cerf exuberantly declared. Red Star reached the bookstores "just in time to have the headlines on the front pages of every newspaper in the country act as an advertisement for our book!" And "throwing caution to the winds," Cerf predicted sales of at least a hundred thousand. Red Star appeared first in England, published by Victor Gollancz, one of the founders of the Left Book Club Snow had long subscribed to. Available there in an inexpensive edition as a selection of the club, the book became an immediate success, selling over a hundred thousand copies in its first weeks. In America (a larger but much more insular market), the Random House edition had considerably lower total sales of 23,500. This was nevertheless a new high for a nonfiction work on the Far East. (The attacks on the book in the Communist press and the party's boycott undoubtedly cut into the potentially substantial demand on the left.) Its reissue in Random House's Modern Library series in 1944- sold an additional 27,000 copies. Actually, the 1938 Random House edition may have just missed becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which would easily have put sales over the hundred thousand mark its publisher had anticipated. Cerf later confided to the Snows that only the negative vote of Heywood Broun, a member of the club's board and a selection judge, had prevented this. (Richard Watts of the Herald-Tribune informed Snow in 1939 that Broun had told him he did so "because he thought another book would come out next month disproving Red Star .") It was a strange political twist since Broun, a popular newspaper columnist and author, was noted for his leftist views. He later converted to Catholicism and broke with the left (events apparently unconnected with his stance on Red Star ) shortly before his death in December 1939.^[3]

Of course, more than timeliness, the empathic public response to Red Star reflected awareness of the tragic realities of the conflict Americans were reading about—especially the great human cost and material devastation of the protracted battle for Shanghai, and the Japanese military's savage terror against the civilian population of Nanking following its occupation in December 1937. In Shanghai, Snow recorded in his

diary: "In the midst of this tragedy of a people one can talk—talk is a release—and yet to write of it is difficult. Difficult because one realizes the emptiness and limitation of words and everywhere the necessity for action." But Red Star would be a prime example of just how potent words could be.^[4]

Snow's book touched a responsive chord, particularly among intellectuals in the West searching for resolute heroic figures on the bleak landscape of unchecked aggression in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The uncertainty surrounding a purge-ridden Soviet Union, and the passivity toward and even abetment of the aggressor states by the Western democracies, added to the somber perspective. Thus Harold Isaacs noted in his later volume on American images of Asians that Red Star had made its "deepest impression on increasingly worried and world-conscious liberal intellectuals." It had been "well and widely received," with an impact far beyond its relatively limited sales figures. Among the almost two hundred influential Americans Isaacs interviewed, Snow's volume was cited second only to Pearl Buck's blockbuster popular novel and film, The Good Earth , as a key source of their picture of the Chinese. Harry Price, the Snows' good friend in Peking who taught economics at Yan-jing before returning to the States, wrote them from New York: "I don't know any book that is being more discussed now," and "time and time again I have heard people say, 'Well, I had no idea that the Communists in China were really like that!"' Snow had "scotched" the Communist "bug-a-boo," particularly among those "most responsible for influencing and determining American foreign policy," Price enthused. Roosevelt told Snow at their first meeting in 1942 that he "knew him" through Red Star and enlisted Ed as one of his unofficial wartime overseas sources of information. In a 1938 interview with Admiral Harry Yarnell, then commander of the U.S. Asiatic fleet, Snow described the Reds in much the same terms as he had in his book, to which the admiral responded, "Well, they sound just like oldfashioned patriots to me." Snow's vividly and dramatically written account of the epic Long March made especially inspiring, even thrilling reading. Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's outspoken secretary of the interior, told another former Yanjing colleague of Snow's, after reading Red Star , that "any people that can do what the Red Army did during the Long March and after" were "positively invincible."^[5]

There was an amusing sidelight to the attractive picture Snow's writings on the Reds were evoking in America. A coffee company wished to use Ed's published photo of Mao and Zhu De seated at a table on which

one of the company's coffee cans was prominently displayed. But the photo was hardly evidence of a thirst for American coffee in tea-drinking China; it showed merely that salvaged empty coffee tins made highly useful containers for the supply-starved Communists.^[6]

Aside from a few cautious caveats that Snow had perhaps painted too bright a picture of the Reds, mainstream reviews in England and America were lavish in praise. The book was hailed as both a stunning and significant journalistic coup and a writing achievement of the first magnitude—an "epic story, superbly told," his own Daily Herald declared. Snow had turned out an engrossing personal adventure travel book, told in his most engaging and colorful style, as well as a fascinating, Marco Polo-like depiction of previously inaccessible "Red China." ("A Chinese State Hitherto Unknown to Us," the Herald-Tribune headlined its review.) Pearl Buck, the China novelist and 1938 Nobel laureate, called Red Star an "intensely readable" and "extraordinary" book, "packed with incident and information, living with unforgettable character sketches, every page of it is significant."

Red Star was replete with appealing and confidence-building portraits of Red leaders, commanders, and soldiers; their selfless fortitude, indomitable spirit, and historic destiny were epitomized in the Reds' year-long trek to the northwest. The book read very much like a modern morality play of good against evil that transcended its immediate Chinese setting. Snow's good friend Marine Captain (later Colonel) Evans F. Carlson was especially intrigued by this moral dimension. Carlson read Snow's book in manuscript in Shanghai and resolved to see this very special army for himself. With Ed's encouragement and help, he spent months with Zhu De's Eighth-Route Army forces on the northwestern war front. A deeply religious man of strong convictions, Carlson came away convinced that he had witnessed among the Reds a unique exam-pie of Christian ethics and brotherhood in practice. (He had told Zhu De, Carlson divulged to Snow on his return, that he "would be glad to serve under him any time.") He transmuted the Communists' egalitarian principles into his own concept of "ethical indoctrination" and applied them to his famous Marine raider battalion during the Pacific War. Carlson adopted the logo of the Snows' Indusco movement, Gung Ho, as his motto and in the process put it into the American vocabulary.^[7]

Red Star's delineation of the Communists' highly effective mobile warfare techniques, their solid base among an awakened and responsive peasantry, and their anti-Japanese nationalism and supreme confidence

in final victory uplifted Western readers dealing with the mostly disheartening war news from China. It "may portend the long-predicted awakening of the Chinese people and the ultimate frustration of Japanese imperialism," the New York Times reviewer thought. Despite Snow's (and Mao's) careful emphasis on the Reds' Marxist-Leninist credentials and goals, it all left a lasting impression that these revolutionaries were only so-called Communists. What Snow had found, literary critic Henry Seidel Canby asserted, "was an agrarian revolution and an organization so Chinese in its character as to suggest that 'Communist' was an inaccurate term of description." If Snow's book "has been correctly interpreted, the significance of Red China is not that it is red but that it is Chinese," the New York Times seconded. "The 'Red bandits' bear a dose resemblance to people whom we used to call patriots," the Times reviewer added. And Pearl Buck compared the book to the classic Chinese "Robin Hood" novel, Shui Hu Chuan (Water margin), in which a brotherhood of "good bandits helped the poor and despoiled the rich." It was a reaction that saddled Snow, unfairly, in later less sympathetic times, with responsibility for the "agrarian reformer" view of the Chinese Communists. Still, on a less simplistic level, Snow had accurately pinpointed the indigenous peasant-oriented characteristics that would give Maoist communism its distinctive qualifies. The New York Times reviewer drew the inference that though the Chinese Communist leaders had read a good deal of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, "they were largely influenced by the immediacy of events in China itself."^[8]

John Gunther described Snow's book as "one of the best books of historical journalism ever written." Gunther and his wife, Frances, spent time with the Snows in Shanghai in the spring of 1938 while gathering material for Gunther's Inside Asia . Ed found him a keen-minded, sharp questioner, interested "in every cause with a strong man or interesting character in it." He "has royalties blood in his veins," Snow quipped. Frances Gunther came up with a bon mot on the Generalissimo: "There's Methodism in his madness."^[9]

The British journalist Freda Utley, who would in time become a bitter anti-Communist crusader against Snow in America, lauded Red Star in 1937 as "a piece of brilliant and unique reporting." (She mildly suggested that a "slightly more critical approach and fewer personal histories of leaders might be preferred by some readers" but immediately added that the book was "of absorbing interest.") She had been a member of the British Communist party but left after six disillusioning years in the Soviet Union and the purge of her Russian husband. She retained

liberal persuasions m the later 1930s and was receptive to me view of the Chinese Communists as "a different breed" from their Russian counterparts. Oddly enough it was Utley, following her own journalistic experience in China in 1938, who proclaimed the thesis that the Reds had become merely a party of "social reformers and patriots."^[10]

Red Star was not only timely; it took on a more enduring "timelessness" precisely because the Mao-led CCP had no intention of "throwing in the sponge," as Snow had feared. (In Shanghai, early in 1938, he brooded as before over this "surrender" to Chang, which he attributed to Russian intervention and pressure at the time.) The very title of his book voiced his underlying conviction that the Communists were still ordained, even required, to occupy a central place in the war and after. Soviet and Western Communists tended to see this in reverse. "Little remains" of the period Snow wrote of, stated a reviewer in December 1938 about the revised edition of Red Star in China Today (a journal subsidized by the American Communist party). "The 'Red Star Over China' is a closed episode" of a civil war period now replaced by the "wholly fulfilled" essential of national unity. When a truncated Russian version of Snow's book appeared in 1938, it carried the blandly apolitical rifle Heroic People of China . ^[11]

Despite the book's extraordinarily influential role in fostering an admiring Western opinion of the Chinese Reds (though also in part because of it), the Comintern had major complaints against Red Star and voiced them forcefully through surrogates in the American Communist party. As Harry Price had written to the Snows, "It is curious that the right-wing press and journals have sung your praises most highly, with potshots coming from left-wing groups. Apparently the latter are not satisfied that you think 'to the line.'"^[12]

The American Communists were placed in an uncomfortable position in mounting their attack on Snow. Rather than give him high marks for his powerfully admiring portrayal of the Chinese Reds whose exploits against the Japanese invader were now heralded daily in the Communist press, the Daily Worker simply ignored Snow's book until he had produced his slightly "laundered" revised edition later in 1938. Yet at the time it was deemed essential to counter his "Trotskyist slanders" against the icons of international communism—Stalin, the U.S.S.R., and the Comintern. Aside from more fundamental political considerations, reviewers needed to alert readers on the left who could easily be "dis-armed" by Snow's book. "We have presented this critique of 'Red Star Over China,'" a lengthy analysis in the American party's political organ declared, "with the aim of placing its readers on guard."^[13]

Snow had indeed referred to Stalin's "dictatorship" and contrasted his "great leader" image to Mao's unpretentious and "Lincolnesque" persona. (Snow told a "horrified" Madame Sun in mid-1938 that he thought the new Soviet "Stalin Constitution" an "excellent" vehicle for keeping the Communists in power, but a "joke" as a democratic instrument.) More substantively, Snow implicated the Stalin-led Comintern in the disasters that befell the CCP in 1927. He also took a hard look at the alternative policies advanced by the Trotskyist opposition at the time. He judged that Trotsky's more radical proposals would have had even more detrimental results. In any case, Snow concluded, the Trotskyists, in pursuing their own political agenda, had greatly exaggerated Comintern culpability for an outcome largely predetermined by "overwhelmingly adverse" objective conditions. Stalin subsequently tightened his grip on both the Soviet Communist party and the Comintern, Snow noted (with a skeptical aside for the Moscow trials)—the Comintern itself becoming "a kind of bureau of the Soviet Union, gradually turning into a glorified advertising agency for the prosaic labours of the builders of Socialism in one country." Snow added fuel for the Trotskyist fire building under him by asserting that in the event (as was likely) the Soviets were drawn into an expanded Asian conflict, they would be in a position decisively to influence the outcome of the Chinese revolution. The success of that revolution might thus hinge on whether the U.S.S.R. was able to move from "a programme of Socialism in one country to Socialism in all countries, to world revolution," he wrote in his conclusion. This last reflected Snow's continuing conflicts on the Soviet world role. On the one hand, as he also wrote in Red Star , he felt that the non-Soviet Communist parties "have had to fall in line with, and usually subordinate themselves to, the broad strategic requirements of Russia" (the Stalinist "Socialism in one country" syndrome); on the other, he believed the U.S.S.R., as a fundamentally "progressive" anti-imperialist socialist power could be expected, when push came to shove in world affairs, to act in tandem with Asian revolutionary nationalism. Snow would eventually find Soviet-sponsored "socialism in all countries" to be primarily an expansionist projection of the interests of "socialism in one country."^[14]

The harsh and even vindictive American Communist reaction to Red Star was expressed in a review in China Today , and more exhaustively and authoritatively in a lengthy commentary in the party's theoretical organ, The Communist . The editor of China Today was Max Granich, back from Shanghai with his wife, Grace, from their party-assigned task

as editors of the now-defunct Voice of China . Granich read Snow's book on board ship in galley sheets given him by Ed. The Granichs had become friends of the Snows through Madame Sun. (Granich later remembered a Peking dinner with the Snows. Ed, who always enjoyed his drink, took along an ample supply of brandy, solemnly informing Granich that it was needed to kill off any germs ingested with the food.) On reading Snow's book Granich immediately felt Ed's offending Comintern chapter to be "pure Trotskyism." "I said, 'Oh my God oh my God, what he has done,'" he recalled.^[15]

The China Today reviewer, Philip Jaffe (writing under a pseudonym), was a Far Eastern specialist and editor of the left-wing monthly, Amerasia . He and his wife were in the American foursome that visited Yan'an in June 1937 while Helen Snow was there. He carried "greetings" from the American party chief, Earl Browder, to the Chinese Communist leaders. He met Snow in Peking before going into the Red base, and the two had talked of Ed's nearly completed Red Star . "What was it," Jaffe now rhetorically asked in his review, "that impelled a man of Snow's remarkable reportorial ability to write the most glorious pages about the Red Army of China and its leaders, and at the same time pepper them with unsubstantiated attacks against the Soviet Union, Stalin, and the Communist International." While it was certainly "difficult not to believe that Snow is a Trotskyist," Jaffe magnanimously chose to think Snow was not "a conscious counter-revolutionist." It was more a case of theoretical ignorance, a misunderstanding of the Chinese revolution, and just plain "confusion" on Snow's part. Jaffe's review appeared some four months after Red Stars publication in the United States. His "kinder" judgment on Snow was presumably based on his awareness of changes Snow was making for a revised edition of the book—changes Jaffe later claimed were made "in part with my assistance." Actually Snow was much irritated that his intended revisions had been leaked to the Communist party. The changes consisted mostly of eliminating a number of obvious "anti-Soviet" buzz words and phrases that Snow needed no help in identifying. While the revised version was still far from being politically correct from Jaffe's point of view, he held out hope that Snow would continue to mend his ways. "And then," he concluded, "we may hope for the final corrections which will make Red Star Over China the important book it should have been." (Both Granich and Jaffe, who later broke with the Communists, would come to regard Red Star as "a great book.") Meanwhile Harold Isaacs, in his own 1938 classic and genuinely Trotskyist-oriented book on Communist policy in the

Chinese revolution, sharply rebuked Snow for having "lightly parroted calumnies" against the Trotskyists. Adding further to the ideological stew, Snow found his book being used by a reviewer in Powell's Shanghai journal to substantiate a pro-Trotskyist view of the united front and the resistance war as an example of Communist betrayal of revolutionary goals. Snow felt obliged to write a lengthy rebuttal separating himself and Red Star from these opinions.^[16]

In his diary Snow reflected on these attacks by Jaffe and Isaacs. Both concluded that "I know nothing of the Chinese Revolution," he noted. "It's all very amusing, but really not so amusing as tragic because both these people fancy themselves working for the betterment of man in a quick and big way." The Comintern and its Trotskyist foes both embrace the myth of their own "scientific" godlike infallibility. "If you disagree or see another point of view you are an ignoramus." As a critical-minded friend of the left, Snow would face the problem often in the future.^[17]

In Shanghai, he was enduring similar attacks from Western Communist circles there. "How childish these people are," Ed jotted in his diary in December 1937, "always carrying out their Boy Scout duty by finding a Trotskyist daily!" Heinz Shippe, the intellectual leader of the Shanghai Marxist circle, spearheaded the assault. Formerly connected with the German Communist movement, he had writing connections with Comintern and Soviet publications. He also wrote on Chinese affairs for Western journals under the pen name Asiaticus. In Pacific Affairs (the journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations), Asiaticus launched into a long-winded, highly theoretical Leninist disquisition on the various stages of the Chinese revolution. Aimed specifically at discrediting Snow's Red Star views, it all boiled down to his affirmation of the orthodox Communist position on the current united front phase of anti-Japanese resistance, which he characterized as "bourgeois nationalist" in content and leadership by the Kuomintang. "As such," he declared, "it is distinctly different from the later period of struggle to realize Socialist revolution for China." Any attempt, "open or covert," to intertwine the two stages would only isolate the Communists from "the national and democratic revolutionary front." In his rejoinder, Snow showed himself no slouch at Marxist dialectical discourse. Even though the struggle against Japan "has been initiated by, and is still under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, with the loyal cooperation of the Communists," he summed up, "it is a grave error in dialectical thinking to imply from this that the Communists would not be prepared, if conditions imposed the task upon them, to accept the full hegemony of the revolutionary war themselves?"^[18]

Snow was restating his bedrock convictions on the direction, character, and goals of China's resistance war, which he had spelled out in his Red Star conclusions and linked to the sentiments he had heard in Bao'an:

They [the Communists] foresaw that in this war it would become necessary to arm, equip, train, and mobilize tens of millions of people in a struggle which could serve the dual surgical function of removing the external tumour of imperialism and the internal cancer of class oppression. Such a war, they conceived, could only be conducted by the broadest mobilization of the masses, by the development of a highly politicized army. And such a war could only be won under the most advanced revolutionary leadership. It could be initiated by the bourgeoisie. It could be completed only by the revolutionary workers and peasants. ^[19]

Though Snow contemptuously rejected the allegations of Trotskyism leveled at him, he was nevertheless feeling the pressure to make some "corrections" of his more "inflammatory" comments. In the overheated political atmosphere engendered on the left by the Stalinist purges, the Trotskyist label was an especially heinous one—a synonym generally for apostate "spies and traitors" to the cause. Shippe had visited the Snows in their Shanghai apartment and, according to Helen Snow, had threatened politically "to destroy" Snow and his book. Particularly in view of the substantial influence the American party. had in intellectual and cultural circles during the 1930s, these charges were creating barriers to the progressive audience Snow wished to reach in support of the Chinese resistance fighters. And the U.S.S.R., after all, was the single main power giving substantial aid (through the Kuomintang) to China. Snow had received a much gentler (and more honest) hint in that direction from Madame Sun (herself an admirer of Stalin) in Shanghai. She told Ed his book was "wonderful" but when pressed further by him responded with a smile, "Well, you are perhaps too frank in some places." Helen, who always gave primacy to getting the word out, was urging Ed to remove any impediments to this goal. In his Pacific Affairs polemic with Shippe, Snow had already indicated a willingness to alter possible "errors of judgment and analysis," some of which concerned the Soviet Union. "The views I have expressed are subject to revision."^[20]

Later, in July 1938 in Hankou, Communist leader Bo Gu (Qin Bang-xian), who was linked with the internationalist wing of the party, told Snow that he had been "a little too strong" in his criticism of the Comintern. As to Snow's final chapters with their perspectives on the Communist role in the resistance war, "you are quite right," Bo Gu remarked,

"but we don't want to talk about these matters now." Mao apparently saw these things in a somewhat different light. He had been the one to pass on to Snow much of the criticism of earlier Comintern policy, and he would shortly again begin to assert policies in keeping with the political perspectives so effectively outlined and publicized by Snow.^[21]

Thus Snow was much reassured to learn, also in Hankou in July, of Mao's personal reaction to Shippe's critique of Red Star . (Shippe had been going around Shanghai "telling everybody," Snow earlier noted in his diary without comment, that Mao and Zhou Enlai agreed with Shippe on Red Star .) Through Rewi Alley, he now heard that Shippe had gone up to Yan'an to present his views directly to Mao, only to be harshly rebuffed by the Red leader. It was "a serious offense" to attack Red Star , Mao reportedly told Shippe. Snow "is our good friend, and to attack him is a counter-revolutionary act." A devastated Shippe returned to Shanghai, where he told Smedley of his ordeal. As Smedley relayed this to Snow, Shippe kept repeating that "Mao was really too cruel" to him.^[22]

The hostile response of the American Communists to Red Star seemed to confirm Snow's contentions on Soviet Russian control and use of the world Communist movement to further its overriding strategic and political ends. It was a point Snow was quick to make in a curious letter to the party head, Browder, whom he had never met. Snow wondered, in citing the Communist ban on his book, at "the logic behind the decision." His book was an honest, first-hand account, and its "testimony was on the whole warmly sympathetic to the Chinese and the world revolutionary movements," he argued. It had won "understanding and support for Communists, not only among influential foreigners, but among Chinese themselves." Having said this, Snow then deftly referred to his much criticized point on the Comintern as a bureau of the Soviet Union: "I am somehow unconvinced that a banning of the book at the behest of some arbitrary order, necessarily proves such a remark to be incorrect." On the contrary, he maintained, it tended to support "the critical view I expressed." Snow then carried this point considerably further. Had the decision "rested with those responsible for the boycott," his book would never have been published, the manuscript probably burned, "and it is just possible that its author might have been shot." In another jab Snow added, "I am convinced that I have been of more service [to China and the Chinese Communists] than the people who banned my book in New York." His few ("good humored") critical comments on the Comintern, Snow continued, were "extremely re-

strained" in utilizing the "abundant information" at ms disposal. If motivated by the "malevolence" ascribed to him, he might have employed such material "in a very harmful manner indeed." As his contribution to what he evidently anticipated would be some backtracking on both sides, he concluded by informing Browder that "some weeks ago" he had "voluntarily" asked his publisher "to excise certain sentences from any new edition of my book—sentences which I thought might be offensive to the party." Snow couldn't forego a parting shot: "By the way, the last time I saw your old friend Chou En-lai he asked me to send you his warm regards." It was all a clear example of the duality and conflict between his China-engendered radicalism and his liberal-minded in-

stincts.^[23]

The changes Snow did make for a revised edition appearing later in 1938 took out most of the "slanderous" comments that the Communists considered most egregiously "anti-Soviet." Snow partly rewrote a brief chapter that softened and revised his original. assessment of Comintern responsibility for the strategic political and military decisions made during the final pre-Long March phases of the Jiangxi Soviet that contributed to its defeat. He did not tamper with his more substantive critique on the Comintern's China policy, on the Stalin-Trotsky controversy, arid much else the left had found objectionable. However, the "corrections" were deemed satisfactory enough to enable the party to extricate itself from its increasingly awkward "dog-in-the-manger" rejectionist stance on Red Star . Actually, the major change in the new edition was an add-on section on the first year of the China war and its probable future course.^[24]

The party's Daily Worker , which now belatedly reviewed the book, pronounced it "a serious improvement" over the original. But while welcoming the "modifications" Snow had made in his earlier "malicious" and "slanderous" statements, the reviewers held that the book still contained "serious flaws" on matters of Soviet Russian and Comintern history and policies. The criticism centered now primarily on Snow's allegedly woeful ignorance on issues far beyond his depth. Snow, "lacking in ideological equipment, has proved unjust to himself and to history." Despite such weaknesses, Red Star was "a valuable and rich book"; with "the above criticisms and reservations we can strongly recommend this book to all friends of China." Max Granich, in a brief review in China Today , added his stamp of approval. While also regretting the continued. inclusion of material "which seriously compromises the political content of the book," he wrote that Red Star was "neverthe-

less one of the finest books written in the past decade on China's stirring history." And so Snow and his American Communist detractors made their edgy and prickly truce.^[25]

Yet deeper enduring issues remained. Snow had not simply pointed to the Soviet national interest behind the policies pursued through the Comintern. He had counterpoised to this a Chinese communism imbued with its distinctive characteristics and "revolution in one country" preoccupations. In Moscow's eyes Snow, by bad-mouthing Stalin and the U.S.S.R. while glorifying Mao and a national Chinese communism, had raised far-reaching challenges to the Soviet concept of a Communist world order in which Marxist-Leninist "proletarian internationalism," as defined by the Moscow center, was the indispensable cementing ingredient. And most important in this, Snow was clearly venting and transmitting Mao's own counter standpoint. Recall the chairman's pithy query to Snow in 1936, "Who is Moscow's 'Moscow'?" Snow had introduced his famous Mao autobiographical account: "Then Mao Tse-tung began to tell me something about his personal history, and as I wrote it down, night after night, I realized that this was not only his story, but a record also of how Communism grew—a variety of it real and indigenous to China, and no mere orphan adopted from abroad, as some writers naively suppose—and why it won the adherence and support of thousands of young men and women."^[26]

At the time Red Star appeared, Mao was the recognized and acclaimed leader of the CCP and had no apparent differences with the Comintern on wartime policies and goals. In Communist political culture open criticism of a ranking leader was avoided until and unless he was being cast into oblivion—political or otherwise. (To an extent Mao's candid criticism to Snow of earlier Comintern China policies violated these norms.) Snow divulged unsettling evidence of Mao's independently Chinese cast of mind. And in promoting an influential image of a different and attractive breed of Red revolutionaries in China, Snow was also laying the groundwork for a possible American connection. In all the major issues raised in the Red Star controversy, the nationalist-internationalist question loomed large, whether over the Comintern's proclaimed infallibility and its relationship to the Soviet state and party, or over the appropriate united front role and strategic perspectives of the CCP in the anti-Japanese war.

The Chinese Communists were the first, and as yet the only, non-Soviet party with its own army, area, and government, and a decadelong experience of intense armed struggle. The themes sounded in Red Star

presaged the rise of national communisms challenging the imperial Moscow center. Snow in fact portrayed the U.S.S.R. itself as a prime example of national communism. Writing of the Tito "heresy" in 1948, Snow would see it as "a head-on collision, not between nationalism, on the one hand, and internationalism on the other, but between two sets of nationalisms within the 'socialist system of states.'" In the following year, with Communist victory in China, Snow wrote, "in the long run the Chinese Communist Party probably cannot and will not subordinate the national interests of China to the interests of the Kremlin." Not surprisingly, it was in 1960, when Snow's prediction had become the reality, that he was welcomed back to China by its Red leader. And in one of the supreme ironies of history, Russian and other Soviet nationalisms have resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.^[27]

For the while in 1938 the onus remained entirely on Snow, with the transparent claim that he had spoken only for himself, and in direct conflict with the "Marxist-Leninist" position of the CCP leadership, As the polemic in the American party's theoretical journal amply demonstrated, the attack on Red Star served to restate and reaffirm the Stalinist line for China from the 1920s to the current resistance war. It was in effect an early warning signal aimed especially at any Chinese Communist "nationalist" deviations. (Later and more directly in Soviet sources, during open Sino-Soviet conflict Snow would again be targeted as a front man for both American imperialism and Maoist communism.) After the standard praise for his "warm presentation of life under the Chinese Soviets," the American party journal launched into a point by point refutation of Snow's "Trotskyite interpretation of the Chinese revolution." It accused him of drawing "a false and unfriendly picture" of the U.S.S.R., making it "the villain of the piece." "Can one be a friend of the Chinese people and not a friend of the Soviet Union?," it posited. (While Snow rejected out of hand such true-believer definitions of friendship, the question was nonetheless a vexing one for him, as his Red Star revisions illustrated.)

The Communist authors focused on Moscow's protégé, Wang Ming, and extolled his role in "bolshevizing" the CCP in the early 1930s. They pointed to the Comintern-inspired August First (1935) Declaration, drawn up by Wang Ming in Moscow, as setting the guiding principles that led to the KMT-CCP unity arrangements of 1937. (These were of course all matters on which Mao had had his serious reservations and differences.) The writers took Snow to task for his skeptical view that there was no likelihood of "the Kuomintang quietly signing its own

death warrant by genuinely realizing bourgeois democracy." In the purest statement of the "Wang Ming line," later denounced by the Maoists, the article claimed that the Kuomintang was "reviving its earlier [1925-1927] revolutionary tradition." There was, therefore, a "long-range perspective" to KMT-CCP collaboration, "not only in driving the Japanese imperialists out of China, but in building a united, democratic republic." Almost as if in direct rejection of these 1938 attacks on Snow, a Mao message to him in Hong Kong in August of that year urged him to come to Yan'an for "a long talk" on the new stage of the war. Snow, however, was unable to accept the invitation until September of the following year.^[28]

Meanwhile Moscow was producing a translated version of Red Star from which officials could delete anything and everything they found objectionable—something the American left was of course unable to do. It was both a much more subtle and effective way of dealing with the political pluses and minuses of the book. The brief Soviet volume consisted of excerpts from selected chapters, mostly on the Red Army, the Long March, and Peng Dehuai's recital of Red military tactics, rearranged and packaged to suit the editors. It came complete with a new title and an introduction setting forth, with copious quotations from "the great Stalin," the correct line for its readers. It emphasized above all the paramount importance of the united front as "the sole key" to victory over Japan. Mao's autobiography was relegated, in much attenuated form, to a final section on "Sons of the Chinese People," which included also sketches of the major Red Army commanders. The Mao segment devoted less than a page to his entire post-1921 activities, in other words to his entire career as a Communist! It thus neatly avoided virtually all Mao's version of Chinese revolutionary history. Nor did Snow's admiring profile of Mao find a place in the book. Nevertheless Red Star , properly sanitized, was evidently politically too useful and perhaps impolitic to ignore. Even more than in the West, Snow's account had great inspirational as well as informational value for a Soviet audience.^[29]

Rather intriguingly, a much more complete Russian edition of Red Star may have been contemplated in some quarters. The Soviet publication Book News in early 1938 reported on Snow's book (citing its original title), which it said "will be coming out." The fairly detailed description of the contents clearly fitted the original text much more closely than the bowdlerized product actually published. A subsequent issue of Book News simply carried a review of the latter volume. There is no record of any other version published in the U.S.S.R. More than this, nothing fur-

ther of Snow's writings appeared in Russian translation for almost half a century, despite his highly favorable wartime reporting from the Soviet Union for the Post . ^[30]

Snow appeared to be unaware of the treatment his book was receiving in Russia. In an early 1938 diary entry he reported hearing that Red Star "had been translated and was being widely read in Moscow." After his return to America in 1941, Soviet Ambassador Oumansky told him in Washington (just a few days after the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R.), that he "believed" Red Star had been translated in Russia, "I hope with omissions." He added that he "understood" such omissions had Snow's "permission." "I said not that I know of," Snow recorded in his diary. "He (Oumansky) said he thought 'verbal permission.' Seemed quire well informed on this point!!!" We may infer from this cryptic exchange that neither the ambassador nor Snow was "well informed" on the Russian Red Star .

In a somewhat odd twist, in 1942 Snow contributed to the Red Pioneers the royalties (in rubles) he discovered were due him on the book. Adding to the confusion was another strange tale Snow heard about his book in Moscow. The secretary of the Foreign Writers' Union, whose task it was to select foreign books for translation, had read and liked Red Star . Lydia told Ed she had made a "rough translation" of a few chapters and sent it to the Soviet Writers' Union. "Then I went to the hospital," she continued her story. "When I came out the book was already published! I was terribly ashamed, my translation was rough and not meant for publication at all. But the Youth Congress was meeting and wanted some new inspirational book at once. They printed 25,000 copies and sold them in three days." Snow apparently bought this account, which seemed accurate only in the fact that 25,000 copies of the Soviet edition were printed. The Russian translation was actually a professional job and was quite obviously edited and produced under authoritative political supervision. Snow encountered others in Russia who told him they had read his book, including a young partisan fighter on the Smolensk front who just happened to cite his book as the source of her knowledge of guerrilla tactics. Surprisingly, during those years Snow apparently never checked further or saw a copy of the Soviet edition. In contrast to these encomiums, Snow had had great difficulty securing a visa for entry to the Soviet Union as wartime correspondent for the Post . And after the war his chronic "Titoist" or "Maoist" sympathies for national Communist challenges to the Kremlin would bar him from that country permanently.^[31]

During the brief post-1949 span of Chinese solidarity with a Soviet-led socialist camp confronting a hostile America, Snow was clearly out of the loop in both the new People's China and the United States, not to mention the Soviet Union. At the very time Snow was enduring the antagonistic McCarthyist climate in America, he was getting some of the fallout from the supercharged, Korean War-fueled "anti-American imperialism" campaign in China. The prevailing Chinese line on him appeared in a 1952 piece in the China Monthly [formerly Weekly ] Review , which had resumed publication in Shanghai after the war (with a very different political stance) under J. B.'s son, Bill Powell, and which continued to appear under the Communists until 1953. It criticized Snow for discoursing "learnedly on whether Titoist subversion is or is not suitable as a pattern for restoring China to the imperialist sphere," and in terms reminiscent of the 1938 Communist attacks on Red Star , it accused Snow of "writing slanders on the Soviet Union which are only faintly distinguishable from those of the most shameless reactionaries."^[32]

Although unofficial Chinese editions of Red Star appeared in Shanghai and Peking in the looser setting of the initial Red takeover in 1949, by the 1950s outside of a few libraries a copy of the book was almost impossible to find. Though circulated and read by people all over the world, wrote a Chinese scholar about the book in 1980, "the people that had given birth to the book had been having a difficult time reading it openly." Snow disappeared from view as far as the new China was concerned. When Snow finally returned to China in 1960 and met his old friend Chairman Mao, the latter evidently knew little of Snow's personal life in the intervening decades. He thought Ed was still married to Peg and that his nine-year-old daughter, Sian, had been born in her namesake city many years earlier. As for Snow, he was equally uninformed of the nonstatus of his book in China. In the late 1950s he imagined he could pay his expenses in China, should the opportunity to visit arise, with the royalties Red Star and other writings might have earned there.^[33]

Coincident with Snow's 1960 visit to China, a somewhat expurgated and limited Chinese edition of Red Star was prepared for internal (neibu ) party distribution. Snow's trip came at a time of openly escalating Sino-Soviet tensions, and of consequent renewed Chinese Communist interest in pursuing an American opening. "Too proud to say so directly," Snow reported of his 1960 talks with Chinese leaders, "they were obviously hopeful that my visit might help to rebuild a bridge or two." In his massive book on the 1960 journey, Snow pointedly quoted at length from his earlier Titoist-style projections on the long-term Sino-

Soviet relationship. But it would take another decade to translate these and subsequent developments into the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s.^[34]

Notwithstanding all these developments, it was not until 1979, seven years after Snow's death, that a full Chinese edition of Red Star finally became publicly available in People's China. The volatile politics of the Cultural Revolution, and the purges of Red leaders featured in Snow's book, had delayed such publication, bizarrely enough, until after the death of Mao and the end of the Maoist era Snow had been identified with. This edition, which sold well over a million copies, mostly through party committee channels at all levels, was a newly translated one based on Snow's final revised and heavily annotated 1968 edition. Snow's estate apparently received no royalties as China then was not a member of the International Copyright Union.^[35]

Red Star also surfaced again in Soviet sources during the 1970s, in reaction to Snow's supposed role in laying the groundwork for the new U.S.-China relationship. Moscow now openly (and exaggeratedly) targeted Snow's classic account as providing the first and most influential signal of Mao's "nationalist and anti-Soviet" heresies and of his overtures to America. While Snow was being hailed by the Chinese as the prime "bridge builder" (also overstated) of Sino-American amity, the Soviets naturally saw this matter quite differently. Red Star , they asserted, was the originating source and principal propagator of the Maoist line in American historical and political writing and thought. Snow himself had been the conscious intermediary in the ultimately achieved "collusion" of Maoist communism and American imperialism. ("Moscow has paid me the honor of attacking me several times," Snow wrote to a friend in September 1971, just months before his death. They should have "better misinformation on me," he added, "plus lots they must have exchanged with CIA.") By 1981 a Soviet historian, focusing on the final decade of Snow's writings on China, concluded in escalated rhetoric that they showed "beyond any doubt that his earlier declarations of sympathy for the national liberation movement in China were merely a disguise for his real identity of an imperialist, anti-communist politician and writer."^[36]

In 1938 Snow had been castigated by the Communists for maliciously and ignorantly misrepresenting the views of the CCP leadership; now he was accused of having been an all too understanding and sympathetic accomplice in then transmitting the Maoist message at a time when the Chinese leader was not yet in a position directly and openly to proclaim

such opinions as official CCP policy. Red Star's "interpretations of the Chinese problem previewed—sometimes many years ahead—the true, long-range Maoist plans," a Czech Communist anti-Mao polemic de-dared. "Snow's comments," the writer continued, "turned out to be the comments of a perfectly instructed emissary enjoying the status of an 'independent journalist.'"^[37]

In the context of the intense Sino-Soviet enmity of the 1970s, Russian historians went back to the 1936 Mao-Snow connection and assigned a seminal role to Red Star in the emergence of a "pro-Maoist conception" of Chinese communism in Western historiography. Though now viewed through an inflamed anti-Maoist political prism, these commentaries harked back to many of the themes in the Communist critiques of Snow's book in 1938. The American party's attack on and boycott of the book at that time was approvingly noted—substantiating Snow's contention to Browder on the real source of the banning edict. These Soviet analyses, however, now fingered Mao as the chief villain in the Red Star political saga, with Snow in a major supporting role. Though aimed at showing a direct "American imperialist" link between Snow in Bao'an in 1936 and Nixon in Peking in 1972 (conveniently leapfrogging over two decades of intense American hostility to Mao's China), these commentaries were most revealing on just why Red Star had originally rankled the Soviets so deeply.^[38]

As the argument went in these sources, by the mid-1930s American business interests in China had lost confidence in the Kuomintang's ability to bring unity and stability to China, and to defend the country against growing Japanese aggression that threatened the long-term American position in the Far East. This concern kindled their desire to obtain accurate intelligence on the Chinese Communists, particularly in view of the latter's call for a national front against Japan. Snow, representing these elements, made the initial serious effort to gather such firsthand data. Mao, on his part, sought U.S. support not only against the Japanese, but also for his upcoming contest with the Kuomintang. Mao, then emerging as the CCP's leader, and personally resentful of the Comintern and the U.S.S.R., was bent on convincing the American journalist that he (Mao) was "first of all" a Chinese nationalist, independent of and "unfriendly" to the Soviet Union. Snow believed in and transmitted Mao's "Trotskyist lies." The Red leader entrusted Snow, in their confidential talks, to carry the message to American "ruling circles" that they had nothing to fear from Mao-led Chinese communism. Thus, these Soviet writers explained, despite the fact that Red Star was a "pan-

egyric" to the Chinese Reds, the bourgeois press "opened its pages" to Snow and widely acclaimed his book, which had a "noisy" success in the West. Snow had clothed his glowing portrayal of the Communists in Maoist garb, and his account became a "landmark" in forming this image. Mao therefore gained considerable personal "political capital" through Red Star . Snow was the first to popularize and glorify the then still relatively unknown Red leader. Mao's life story, recounted by Snow in the party head's own words, especially served to promote Mao's stature and publicize his version of Chinese revolutionary history. Red Star in Chinese translation had wide currency within the CCP and helped advance Maoist domination of the party. Mao was naturally pleased with Snow's exalted treatment, and while other Communist parties were rightly faulting the book's Trotskyist line, the Chinese leader praised it as "telling the truth about us ." ("Your Red Star Over China is famous," Mao would pointedly remark to Snow in their final talk.)

By presenting Mao as a "democratic" revolutionary leader standing apart from the international Communist movement, these Soviet critiques maintained, Red Star strongly appealed to liberal American readers. (Here we note a Russian version of the "agrarian reformer" thesis.) Other "Edgar Snows" followed in journeys to the Red regions over the next decade and modeled their reports on Red Star . Snow was particularly useful to Mao in expressing views that the Communist leader could not as yet openly articulate. (By the same token of course, Moscow was able indirectly to attack this "Maoist line" in 1938 by aiming at Snow.)^[39]

Did Mao "set up" Snow, as John Fairbank somewhat flippantly suggested? The evidence tends to show Mao and his Boswell to have been in essential agreement on the overall Chinese political scene, and on the strategic and revolutionary perspectives for the upcoming struggle with Japan. Snow's independent-minded commitment to China's national salvation and his deep distrust of the Kuomintang as leader of that cause jibed with Mao's own independently nationalist outlook and equal suspicion of the Moscow-promoted pro-Kuomintang united front line for the CCP. Mao clearly encouraged (or did not discourage) these inclinations in Snow. The Red leader did gain much "political capital" (and Snow much "journalistic capital") from Red Star , as did the Chinese Communist movement as a whole and the larger resistance battle. Curiously, in seeing Snow and his "followers" as having aided and abetted Maoist communism in its drive for power in disregard of its internationalist obligations and loyalties, the Russians produced their own "loss of China" scenario. It was the reverse image of McCarthyist allega-

tions that America's China hands in government and journalism had been responsible for the loss of "our" China to the Russians. In Moscow's eyes, essentially the same nefarious group were culpable in the loss of "their" China to the Americans. Both sides had basically the same complaint against these China experts: with Snow leading the way, they had foisted a pro-Maoist line on American thinking and policy. As a final ironic touch, at the time when Snow's "collusive" American imperialist activities were allegedly finally bearing fruit, he himself in those Vietnam war years was at his bitterest toward the American "ruling circles" he supposedly represented.^[40]

In sum, Red Star holds a unique place as a journalistic tour de force, as an integral factor in the history it recorded and as a remarkably potent political instrument and symbol that brought the Chinese revolution and its revolutionaries to life in the minds of readers around the world. It prophetically charted the dynamic course of that revolution and possibly even more significantly proved to be a harbinger of what would be the disparate power centers and conflicting nationalisms behind the monolithic "proletarian internationalist" facade erected by the architects of the socialist camp. In its implications for China in particular, Snow had already observed in his book that although the CCP was still "an adolescent of sixteen years," it was "the strongest Communist Party in the world, outside of Russia, and the only one, with the same exception, that can boast a mighty army of its own." Finally, Snow effectively communicated his discovery of a new China under the Red star, with its promise of a liberated and transformed nation and people. "The secret of Red Star Over China ," Helen Snow perhaps nostalgically writes, "is that it is a positive, happy book, telling of a wonderful new and happy experience." Red Star remains a legacy of that revolutionary promise: the redeemed, the unredeemed, and the betrayed.^[41]

Let us now return to the embattled China of 1938, where the Snows involved themselves in another historic enterprise that would have a liberating potential of its own.