INTRODUCTION

I still vividly recall the high-school classroom in 1938 when my history teacher—a courtly silver-haired scholarly gentleman who was also the school dean—took the better part of a class hour extolling a new book he had just read called Red Star Over China . This was in the first year of Japan's total war on China, and a time of mounting fascist menace in Europe. To these dark and foreboding prospects, the China journalist Edgar Snow's uplifting firsthand account of the virtually unknown Chinese Reds cast a bright shaft of light and hope. His picture of these courageous young anti-Japanese revolutionaries and of their modern-minded, seemingly upright leaders gave promise of victory in war and a revitalized China to come.

Red Star not only had its own salutary impact on informed and influential American and British opinion but would become a generic model for later journalistic "Edgar Snows" in reporting on Red China over the next decade. (The noted journalist Theodore H. White, who came to China a decade after Snow, was told by an American general in Chungking in 1945 that the only power the Chinese Communist forces had was "what American newspapermen tell Americans about them. Guys like you and Edgar Snow, who talk about the Communist guerrillas and their areas—you guys are what makes their strength.") It would inspire and help activate a generation of educated Chinese youth, with noticeable effect on that nation's future. And Snow and his book would occupy a unique niche in the arcane internal political maneuverings and conflicts of international communism. Indeed, Snow's account was in many ways a harbinger of the national communisms (among which he

acutely placed the Soviet variety) that eventually tore apart the Communist world. When the Chinese Red leaders again turned to Snow in 1960, after a hiatus of over two decades, they evidently hoped he could do for the People's Republic abroad what he had done for its revolutionary precursor. Snow himself then felt strongly that his earlier role placed a special burden on him to help bridge the troubled waters of Sino-American (non)-relations. The Russians, on their part, who from the first viewed Snow and Red Star with hostility, would begin openly to accuse him of using that book to spread the Maoist nationalist "anti-Soviet" heresy in America.

Red Star did its bit in steering my interest in history toward the Far East (as we then called East Asia) and especially China, a process further propelled by service in the Pacific in World War II. As a postwar graduate student, I spent over a year in Beijing (then Beiping) during the 1947-1948 climactic naming point of the Chinese civil war. The ancient capital we called Peking remained very much the one Ed and his first wife, Helen (Peg) Snow, had known in the mid-1930s—perhaps a mite more faded and down-at-the-heels, but still a beautiful and gracious old city. Its mix of the best qualities of China's classical past and of the youthful voices of its present and future was a spellbinding, exciting experience for young Americans beginning our immersion in China's history and culture. We foreigners were witnesses to the denouement of the revolutionary process Snow had so presciently forecast a decade earlier. A new wave of Chinese students yearned and demonstrated for an end to civil conflict, and for a democratized and renewed China, much as Snow's Yanjing (then, Yenching) University students had done in the famed anti-Japanese December Ninth Movement in 1935. Decades later in 1989, another generation of Beijing students would continue to be the spearhead for the still unfulfilled democratic aspirations that have infused China's twentieth-century revolutionary history.

I have been particularly drawn to the story of Snow's thirteen-year sojourn in China, a seminal period for that nation's stormy modern odyssey and for Snow's life and career. He arrived in Shanghai in 1928, the year of Nationalist ascendancy to power under Chiang Kai-shek, following the latter's break with the left, and massive suppression of his former Communist allies. It marked also the onset of organized Communist rural armed struggle against that regime and soon of Japanese military aggression against China that led to full-scale war in 1937 and the resumption of Nationalist-Communist collaboration. Snow left China in early 1941, at a time when this fragile wartime unity was rapidly

eroding, presaging a reignited civil war after Japan's surrender, and Communist mastery by 1949. In the preface to their book on a 1982 conference of veteran China journalists, Stephen R. MacKinnon and Otis Friesen note as one of the major questions addressed at the gathering, "How did American journalists perceive and respond to one of the most momentous events of the century—war and revolution in China during the 1930s and 1940s?" I attempt here to give an account of how one such major and influential journalist-author of that time responded to these events. Included also is a substantial epilogue that begins with a brief overview of Snow's global wartime activities as a world correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and then picks up the Snow story from the postwar years to his death in 1972. It deals with the 1950s—for him, professionally bleak—and the three return visits to China in the final decade of his life.

Snow, a middle-class youth from middle America, had come to China devoid of any political agenda or sinological background. He had had some journalistic training and copywriting experience and harbored larger literary ambitions. He wanted to see the world, with Shanghai a mere stopover, and to try his hand at producing travel accounts of his adventures along the way. He returned home a fully seasoned, politically astute "new" China hand and famed journalist-author. His is a saga of personal, political, and professional development in reaction to the momentous events he witnessed, participated in, and reported. His story tells us much about the China he came to know and alternately (or simultaneously) loved, was appalled by, despaired of, and finally saw re-demptive hope for in the Red star he chronicled to the world.

Snow's initial return to the China of the People's Republic in 1960 seems, in retrospect, to be a futile attempt—by Snow and the Chinese leaders alike —to recreate the unique spirit, setting, and effect of an earlier time when Snow and the revolution were in their buoyant youth. And in 1970, it would finally be the realpolitik calculations Snow disdained that would give him the opportunity to bring another historic Mao message back to America.

Serious, in-depth research on Snow became possible and practical after his death in 1972, with the establishment of the massive and ever-expanding Edgar Snow Collection at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (Snow's hometown). At the same time, the Smedley-Strong-Snow Society in China (now replaced by the China Society for People's Friendship Studies) gathered together much additional primary material on Snow from China-based sources. Many other major library de-

positories of personal, institutional, and presidential papers, Freedom of Information Act materials, and the availability and cooperation of Snow family members, friends, and former colleagues, in this country and abroad, have all contributed to the data base.

John Maxwell Hamilton was the first to utilize such resources in his skillful groundbreaking biography of Snow published in 1988. In my own more concentrated focus on the China period and connection, I have had the benefit of the further strengthening of the Kansas City Snow collection. The Edgar Snow Papers are now fully catalogued and accessible. There are major additions to the holdings of Snow correspondence from his siblings, J. Howard Snow and Mildred Snow Mackey, and her husband, Claude. Mildred in particular lovingly and proudly preserved Snow's letters to the family from the time he left Kansas City until the end of his life. The collection now encompasses materials from many long-term Snow friends and co-workers. In two extended research trips to China, I had direct access to Snow files held by the Smedley-Strong-Snow Society and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing. I also received materials from individuals interviewed in that city, and in Shanghai, Xi'an, and Yan'an. A trip by car to the original Red northwestern "capital" at Bao'an allowed me to retrace Snow's vastly more strenuous, and hazardous, 1936 trek to his rendezvous with Mao in the latter's still carefully maintained primitive cave dwelling. The fantastic configurations of the yellow-orange loess hillsides of northern Shaanxi remain as indelible an image for me as they were for Snow.

Newly available memoirs and personal papers of important participants in Snow's China life and work add more texture and background. Helen Foster Snow has provided personal correspondence and many other items not included in her Nym Wales Collection at Stanford University. Chinese and Russian sources have been especially revealing on the status and publishing history of Red Star in China and Russia, and on its political and polemical place in the Communist word from the book's publication to more recent times. Snow's massive published (and some unpublished) writings are, of course, the indispensable baseline on his work and thought for all Snow researchers.

In addition to his voluminous personal and professional lifelong correspondence, Snow kept a diary from the time he left America in 1928 to his last trip to China in 1970-1971. He accumulated about eighty diary notebooks during those years. He did not make entries systematically; there are gaps of months and apparently even of years. Lois Wheeler

Snow has supplied me with transcripts of over sixty of these handwritten books; most of the others evidently cannot be located. The missing ones are largely from the 1950s and 1960s and are somewhat less central to my present study. However, the diaries of his final six-month stay in China are available and are of inestimable value in documenting Snow's ambivalent reactions to the China of the Cultural Revolution. The diaries offer unique knowledge and insights on Snow's personal and working life, experiences, relationships, and thinking. They thereby yield a richer portrait of the more private man, one not always in harmony with his public persona. Snow best expressed the value and meaning of his diary-keeping. "As one gets older (say, 40?)," he noted in a November 1945 entry, "each day and its record of it, seems important—proof that such a person really lived, etc., slept, felt heat or cold, lonely or befriended, young or old, or hopeful or sad, or glad, or mad."^[*]

But beyond even the evidentiary base, what must finally be the distinguishing feature of a work of this kind is the vantage point, and approach, the writer brings to the task. The emphases, analyses, and judgments in my account of Snow in China are necessarily products of my own background and experience as a historian and modern China specialist. Some of the major themes that thus emerge in this complex study of a complex man may be briefly summarized as follows.

Though China (and the sorry state of the world in the 1930s) radicalized Snow, the process did not displace but was rather an overlay on his innately liberal-humanistic, individualist impulses. The two "sides" never quite meshed, nor were they ever really resolved. It would lead to some soul-searching by him, usually confined to his diary, or occasionally mentioned in personal and confidential correspondence. As a friend of the left, Snow was concerned always to guard what he felt was his independent-minded personal integrity. He did not wish to "join the team," as he laconically put it in a diary entry during his last visit to China. And when Lois, in response to an invitation from their Chinese hosts during that trip, promised to return the following year with their

Some twenty of the diary transcripts, from 1928 through 1933, and 1936, are now on deposit in the Edgar Snow Collection, as are the original diaries of his 1970-1971 China trip. Robert M. Farnsworth, professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has cited the diaries of Snow's 1930-1931 travels through southwestern China, Formosa (Taiwan), Indochina, Burma, and India in the introductions to his useful compilation of the feature articles Snow wrote during that journey (for full details on all my sources I refer readers to the bibliography, acknowledgments, and notes). I deal with these travels in chapter 5, which is directly based on these diaries and articles, and much else.

children, Snow snapped, "Send me a postcard." Snow's independent ("honest") stance had admirably suited the political interests of the inherently maverick Mao-led Chinese Communists whose cause he so sympathetically reported in the late 1930s, and it would suit them again in the final decade of Snow's life as the Mao regime began probing the possibilities of an opening to America. "We do not expect you to agree with everything we say," Mao told Snow in 1970. "You have a right to your own opinion. It is better to keep your independent judgment." As recorded in his diary, Snow thanked the chairman "for his defense of independence of view." This exchange took place as Snow stood beside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum on China's National Day celebration—the famed visual symbol of the imminent dramatic turn in Sino-American relations. The setting gave this conversation a particularly surrealist character. The two men were looking down, as Snow described it, at the masses of chanting youths, with Mao statues and the chairman's words in huge block letters flowing by. It was a vivid expression of the extremes of the Mao cult and the rigidly imposed ideological conformity for which Snow's diary entries at the time expressed great repugnance. It all epitomized the many contradictions and pressures of Snow's singular status (and usage) as Mao's American friend and symbol. On a visit to Beijing University a few days after the well publicized Tianamnen "photo opportunity," Snow irritably recorded his reaction to the greeting he received from a woman official there. "She made my position quite clear when she said, 'We welcome you as an old friend of Mao Tsetung.' What a bitch, as if I would not exist otherwise."

These episodes demonstrated Snow's vulnerabilities in reforging his earlier relationship to Mao. Though "Integrity was the coin of [Snow's] realm," the late John K. Fairbank noted in 1989, "imagine being beguiled by the Great Helmsman in his Great Hall under the full blast of Chinese friendship!" How much more so, I would add, not only on Tiananmen, and in the Great Hall of the People, but in the aura of one-on-one dining and relaxed conversation in the intimate surroundings of the Red leader's private home.

But of considerably greater import and substance for an assessment of Snow's long-term links to Mao and the Chinese revolution were the convictions he came to hold in the 1930s in response to a China in deep distress and crisis. They were convictions he carried with him and further reinforced on his journey to the Red northwest in 1936. He firmly believed. in the necessity for a revolutionary-style "people's war" against the Japanese invader, one that would simultaneously advance the twin goals of

national and social liberation. He saw the Communists taking the lead in this. In fact, he privately worried at the time of the Communists' united front negotiations with the Chiang government in 1937 that the Reds were "throwing in the sponge." Early on he pinpointed the indigenously based character and nationalist perspectives of Mao-led Chinese communism and viewed the Reds as both Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and Chinese patriots. Truly, Snow was something of a "Maoist" before there was a generally recognizable Maoism. His highly influential part in building up Mao's persona and prestige in China and the West were anathema to Moscow and the Stalin-controlled Comintern. Not even Snow's subsequent admiring wartime reporting from Russia could erase the Soviet's antipathy to him. Thus, while Snow's critical-minded, China-oriented leftism was well in tune with Mao's challenges to the Moscow-led world Communist establishment, in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, Snow's stance led to numerous collisions for him with the more orthodox Communist movement directed by the Kremlin. It would result in some curious episodes among his various encounters with its adherents.

Snow had a strong and abiding sense of responsibility as an engaged journalist whose work had a direct impact on the history he recorded. As Lois Snow said of him after his death, "his writing had taken on the nature of political action," and "as a writer, [he] had to be personally responsible for all he wrote." Yet Snow recognized that though he could not avoid "responsibility for power," he was not himself "a man of power." "It bothers me greatly," he privately brooded while in China in 1970, "that I have not solved this contradiction in my lifetime."

Snow was but one in a line of Westerners who sought to "change China" for the better. This could take a personally interventionist (and frustrating) direction; the remarkable story of the wartime Chinese industrial cooperatives (Indusco or Gung Ho) being a case in point. Initiated by Helen and Ed Snow and Rewi Alley, Indusco was a kind of parable on the pitfalls of efforts by Westerners to "reform" China. And as it played in America (with big publicity boosts from Snow), Indusco illustrated the altruistic-paternalistic American "helping hand" urges toward China. Did Snow fit the profile of the American "Sentimental Imperialists" delineated by James C. Thomson and coauthors in their book on the American experience in East Asia? Perhaps—though Snow always thought of himself as a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist, and he was almost as anxious to "reform" America as China.

Indusco was also a prime example of the exceptional partnership of the two Snows in their China work and causes, with Helen (who then

wrote under the pen name Nym Wales) generally taking an "energizing" role. But they were also something of an odd couple in their sharply divergent styles, personalities, and temperaments. It made for an increasingly edgy relationship—an "eternal duel," Snow later rather bitterly (and perhaps unfairly) characterized the marriage. Divorce, and remarriage to the gifted actress Lois Wheeler, came in 1949 after lengthy legal and personal wrangling.

Snow wanted America as well to play an actively "progressive" international role, though he also had a "middle American" and strongly anticolonialist aversion to the nation being dragged into "foreign" wars to defend European empires. He had quickly understood that Western empire and privilege in Asia were doomed by the dual forces of Japanese ex-pansionism and Asian nationalism. But despite his own warnings of the virtual inevitability of war in the Pacific, his personal conflicts over America's gradual involvement in global hostilities were not fully resolved—as was true for most of the American people—until Pearl Harbor. Snow's later disenchantment with cold war policies would put an end to his notions of "good" American interventionism—a still pertinent issue and dilemma as America seeks its appropriate and effective posture in a post-cold war but no less turbulent world. ("Oh, perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples," Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Eisenhower years, would later tell a young CIA recruit.) Beyond this, Snow understood that a proudly nationalist, unified, and developing new China could no longer be subordinated to the great powers, whether Russia or America.

As the United States edged toward war in Europe and the Pacific ha 1941, Snow charted his vision of a new world—decolonialized, demilitarized, mutually cooperative, interdependent, and at peace. He expressed his Western-based faith in the boundless vistas for human progress offered by modern science and technology, and his liberal-radical belief in "rational" planning, and hope that a "higher" democracy, defined in social and economic as well as political terms, would ultimately prevail in America and elsewhere. The world that emerged from the war, however, failed to conform to Snow's scenario. Increasingly sidelined in his journalistic work, he viewed the developing picture with a jaundiced eye. (Snow, a charming and sociable man, was also often subject to pronounced downswings in mood.) As he wrote his old China friend Jim Bertram in 1952, "Events in Asia, Russian policy everywhere," along with American "blunders" and failure to offer "constructive" alterna-

tives, "have depressed me over a long period, and seem to have left me merely old, cynical and disillusioned."

Snow's reconnection to China in his final decade lifted his spirits and put his derailed career at least partially back on track. But for him, to the end, the world remained very much out of joint. Ten years after Snow's death, Lois Snow acknowledged in a commemorative speech, ironically delivered in Beijing, "Despite the yearning for world peace, it seems outside our present grasp; despite the cry for democracy, it is still out of the reach of most of humanity."

Ultimately, the story of this complicated, fascinating, and influential man's "journey to the beginning" (as Snow called his autobiography) transcends the immediate China setting. It is a tale of personal and professional growth and achievement, of inner conflicts, and of bright hopes and somber realities. It is a narrative of one individual's remarkable efforts to improve the world in the face of daunting obstacles, shattered visions, and flawed redeemers. It holds as well a message on the necessity to keep trying.

I have been fortunate in the course of the eight arduous years of this project to meet, interview, and correspond with a great many good people who knew Ed Snow and shared those times, places, and endeavors with him. But above all, it has been an uncommon pleasure to spend this period in the vicarious company of this fine, often ambivalent, sanguine and despairing, very human, and engaging man. I trust the reader will find a similar pleasure.