Chapter 15
Return to China
Snow made his first attempt to revisit China shortly after the Communist victory in 1949. He sent his request to Beijing (addressed to Mao) through his peppery old colleague of Indusco days, Chen Hansheng. The latter, then living in New York, was to return to China in 1950 to live and work under the new regime. As Snow later told it to Alley, he had sent word by "safe hand of Hs [Hansheng]," but "I never heard a beep out of old curmudgeon Hs for years after he returned—to this day [1959] in fact." This silence was hardly surprising in view of Snow's unwelcome writings at a time of the firmly anti-imperialist Sino-Soviet alliance, and of the intense anti-American upsurge in China that accompanied the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.[1]
In 1955 Snow tried again with another letter to Mao. It was seemingly a more auspicious moment. The Geneva conference on Indochina that year, with Premier Zhou Enlai attending and Secretary of State Dulles as an observer, had worked out an interim settlement of the conflict there—despite Dulles's notorious refusal of a proffered Zhou handshake. Then came ambassadorial-level talks between the American and Chinese sides in Geneva (and later in Warsaw). Snow was then advancing his thesis that the specter of the H-bomb was inevitably mutating the cold war into "competitive co-existence." Though the Geneva talks were going slowly, "talk is better by far than killing and the more things are settled by the former the less likelihood there is of the latter," he wrote Alley in September of that year. "Judging rumors hereabouts," he added, "it may soon be possible for American correspondents to visit China again."[2]
In the letter to Mao a couple of weeks earlier, Snow "wondered why I never received from you any reply to my letter several years ago," though he had been "assured at the time" that the chairman had received it. He now thought, he told Mao, that he could do some "useful reporting based on personal investigation and inquiry undertaken with the freedom accorded me when I wrote Red Star Over China." (Snow was obviously reminding Mao of the benefits of that book to the Chinese Reds, while holding out the prospect of a new Red Star .) Should Mao "care" to accredit him to gather material for articles and a book, Ed continued, "I have hope that the State Department might soon waive its ban and validate a passport for me for the purpose." But it would take another five years, and some involuted special arrangements by both Beijing and Washington, to make his trip possible.[3]
Snow did receive an invitation (of sorts) from China in 1957. Early that year, in what would be an odd episode, he was invited by the vice-chairs of the Chinese Writers Union and of the Chinese People's Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to come with his family for a stay of indefinite duration. The letter was sent along to Snow by Alley, who cryptically noted, "Enclosed please find an invitation to come here with your family when you are able." Snow replied that the timing was inconvenient. "Right now all I can say is that as soon as I have completed work here [principally on Journey ] ... I shall proceed to the Far East as soon as possible." He would "be happy" to see them in Beijing, he added, and would write again in a few weeks, as soon as he worked out arrangements in America to cover expenses.[4]
Snow heard nothing further in response to his letter or to one he sent a couple of months later. We can only speculate that the invitation had been a spin-off from the dramatically liberalized climate of the early months of 1957, particularly in cultural-intellectual circles, under the Mao-initiated policy of "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend." It would come to an abrupt end with the repressive anti-Rightist crackdown that followed. Yet during that year the Chinese also began to take a more overly independent, and critical, stance toward Moscow—perhaps the more operative factor in the gesture to Snow.
In December 1957, in reply to various queries from Snow, Alley seemed to encourage Ed by suggesting vaguely that he contact one of Beijing's embassies abroad "and everything will be done to make the trip a comfortable and easy one." The next month (almost a year after receipt of the original letter) Snow wrote his two thus far unresponsive Chinese
"hosts" that he was "now anxious to accept your invitation" and proposed a mid-March arrival for a three-month stay.[5]
Snow then wrote Alley, outlining a plan for his trip which, "I wish you to take up, if possible, with Suzie [Madame Sun] or someone on a level where it can be dealt with positively." Central to his proposal was "a long frank interview with chu-hsi [Chairman Mao] himself," which could "possibly prove as important in breaking new land in international relations as the one I did 22 years ago." But Alley now obviously fended Snow off. "Sorry I'm such a weak reed in the matter of helping you out," he finally told Ed in June. "Everyone is so busy, and I see very few anyway." At long last, Ed was beginning to get the message. The "winds seemed to have veered again," he told Alley in January 1959, "as I've had no response from you or others I've queried" on his hopes for a "look see" at China. This was "too bad," since there was now "a wide audience ready to listen" to a Snow report. (He was being "deluged with invites to talk about Chungkuo [China]," he impressed on Rewi.)[6]
Journey may have played some part in delaying Snow's return to China (as he tended to think), though in the longer term it probably helped to bring him there. The time was simply nor quite ripe for a visit, with the upheavals of the Great Leap in 1958, and Sino-American brinkmanship in the Taiwan Straits that year. And in truth, Snow faced equally serious barriers in America. "As far as China goes," he informed Alley in mid-1958, "the passport obstacle remains and in turn creates a financial stalemate also." Nonetheless, Snow's points on the benefits his trip might bring China were evidently getting through in Beijing. Alley would shortly be the designated front man for China in a genuine invitation to Snow.[7]
For the while, Snow continued to see himself as out of favor on both sides of the Pacific. "Well, so much the worse for them," he confidentially groused to Bertram in the spring of 1959, "on balance I suppose it would not be far wrong to say that (quite apart from where my long-range sympathies dearly lie) my feelings through this whole wasted decade has been a plague on both their houses." He added, though, that his major disappointment by far was with "my own countrymen's inability to rise above the terms of the conflict offered by the other side." Beyond this, he also told Bertram, it was "amazing that I should still find China so much in mind even after purging myself" through Journey .[8]
Strangely enough, news that Snow was now "persona grata" in China would come to Ed through Bertram. It would mark another turning point for him from the "wasted decade" of the 1950s, revive his role as a
significant player in the international arena, reactivate his "long-range sympathies" for revolutionary new China, and give him his always coveted opportunity to help his compatriots "rise above" the rigid Sino-American hostility and conflict of the previous decade.
As Snow's International School assignment began to wind down in Europe in the spring of 1960, and while still in the doldrums on his future China prospects, he received unexpected news from New Zealand. Alley was on a trip there and had asked Bertram to pass along to Ed his (Alley's) "personal" invitation to Snow to come to China as soon as possible as his "private guest" for a three-month stay. Snow cabled back his reply: "Please tell Rewi I am anxious to accept."[9]
Snow could come as a "writer," Bertram told him in further exchanges of letters, and it would of course be up to Ed to secure state department clearance. It was evident that, even using the "private" Alley-Bertram channels, his request received approval, as Snow later wrote, "only after reaching the highest level of authority." As he further noted, the Yugoslav and other Eastern European Communists in Beijing "were keenly interested in my admission to China in 1960. They attached significance to it as a straw in the wind of increasingly unfavorable weather in Sino-Soviet relations." Only the state department seemed unaware of such nuances and "did everything to compel me to go to China illegally, if at all." Still, after much back and forth with the Washington bureaucrats, Snow's passport was grudgingly validated for China. In an arrangement worked out between Bennett Cerf of Random House and Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look , Snow was accredited as a correspondent for that magazine, reluctantly accepted by the state department after determined persistence and pressure by Cowles. Since Look "was one of the organizations authorized to send a correspondent to Communist China," Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Berding wrote Cowles Publications in June 1960, "the Department has no alternative other than to eliminate from his passport the restriction relating to Communist China." (The department was "completely unhappy with the thought that we must validate Snow's passport for travel to Communist China," an internal memo to Berding had stated.) The Random House-Look connection also provided Ed with the necessary financial support for his trip. Thus, Snow summed it all up, "Officially, I entered China as a-writer-not-a-correspondent, while in Washington I entered as a-correspondent-not-a-writer."[10]
Once again Snow found himself on the word stage in his habitual role as a journalist-writer with special responsibilities—this time, in an
attempt to alter the frozen hostility between the United States and Red China, for what he saw as no less than the peace of the world. "To break our isolation from China was now a task in many ways as challenging as my assignment in 1936, and far more important," he wrote of his 1960 trip. "I could not refuse a chance to do a great story of some possible usefulness to history not to mention the survival of our two nations." In this same spirit, "I felt I had a responsibility to both China and America and a certain function to perform perhaps vital at the moment," he subsequently wrote Mao Zedong of the visit. "I believe," Ed also told Mao, "peaceful but competitive co-existence can eventually prevail in relations between the [two] countries."
Heightening Snow's sense of mission, his old Chinese friends exhorted him to bring "the truth" about China to the American people, as he had done for the revolution in Red Star . "I can imagine that every one you have met [in China] does expect much of you," Madame Sun wrote him as he was departing China. She urged him to have "the courage to stand for the truth," despite all the pressures he faced in the West. "Let it be said that Ed Snow helped people find the path." There was also some "cautionary-encouragement" from his old friend Anna Louise Strong. The rather awesome veteran leftist journalist was now working from her China base as an active writer-promoter of the Chinese position to the outside world. "We all hope," she wrote Ed soon after his departure from China, "that your past knowledge of China, plus your recent contacts—in which you were given more access to top people than any other foreigner has had since Liberation, will result in the kind of book that illumines a land and an epoch. You have shown the capacity to do that kind of book but even those who have the capacity do not do it often." Snow was equally intent on asserting his independent status. "I came here entirely at my own expense, as a writer," he wrote Bennett Cerf shortly after arriving in Beijing, "and shall remain as such. I am not a guest of the government," he insisted, drawing a very fine line, "but naturally entered by courtesy of the government."[11]
It would indeed be a delicate balancing act for Snow in his role of "honest broker." "More than anyone I think you appreciate the problems which faced me in writing this book [on his 1960 trip]," he later wrote Strong. His book had been directed at "middle class Americans with little background these many years, often using euphemistic terminology to bypass conditioned reactions, and seeking objectivity invulnerable to academic attack." And there was subtle pressure from Random House as well. "I am sure that you are trying to give an honest and objective ap-
praisal in your book," his editor, Donald Klopfer, wrote Ed, "and whereas I know it will be favorable to the regime because of its accomplishments, I hope you will be able to point out some of their failures too God knows, I am not trying to influence what you write, but this book will be read by an American public, conditioned to look upon the Red Chinese as the enemy; consequently, it shouldn't be all white."[12]
Such "objective appraisal" brought a daunting challenge. The politically charged "American imperialist" and "Red China" images were menacing ones and during the 1960s Would only become more so. Snow's own ambivalences also complicated his journalistic task. He was drawn to Nikita Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence overtures to the West, while his sympathies were with the more militant stance of a China seen as directly in the line of fire of American interventionism in Asia. As in the past he empathized with the Maoist-style social revolutionary-liberationist path for the "have-not" peasant masses of the third world. Though he was gratified to see confirmed his 1948-1949 projections of an independent Communist-ruled China slipping out of the Russian orbit, he was now more inclined to view this opportunity for a Sino-American accommodation as part of a larger and necessary move toward a post-cold war global East-West détente. And while he considered his primary mission to be that of prodding American opinion and policy in these directions, his thinking on his country's political attitude was far from optimistic. The United States, he believed, was now dominated by its massive "military-industrial complex" and driven by anti-Communist, antirevolutionary zeal. Given the pervasive vested interests sustained by the war economy, America's leaders were not yet capable of dramatic initiatives for peace.
"I do know," he wrote toward the close of The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (hereafter Red China Today ), "that some Chinese leaders have long been prepared to respond to a 'let us begin anew' approach by the United States. Too proud to say so directly, they were obviously hopeful that my visit might help rebuild a bridge or two: that is what they told me in various ways—always with the knowing added note that my imperialist government was not interested in bridge-building." On his return from China, Snow had just a few minutes' conversation with Dean Rusk, the secretary of state in the incoming Kennedy administration. After this cursory meeting with the busy secretary-designate, or "brief colloquy," Snow caustically commented in his book, "I was left with the impression that the Chinese had been right." Nonetheless, he foresaw an inevitable break in the Sino-American logjam. "That it will
change," he added, "that it is gradually changing on both sides, is becoming evident."[13]
Snow's "journey of rediscovery" in 1960 was hardly comparable to his 1936 sojourn with the Red revolutionaries in Bao'an—nor for that matter, was this tired and "graying," middle-aged man of fifty-five (as he described himself to Anna Louise Strong) the adventurous young journalist of that earlier time. The 1936 talks in Mao's Bao'an headquarters epitomized the struggle of revolutionary guerrillas against the forces of Chinese state power and Japanese aggression. In the traditional imperial setting of Beijing Snow would now be meeting with Mao (and Zhou) as rulers of an all-embracing, all-powerful "people's democratic dictatorship." His five-month itinerary, from arrival (by Aeroflot from Moscow) in Beijing in late June, took him to Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, Xi'an and Yan'an in the northwest, Shanghai and up the Yangtze to the western interior heartland of Sichuan, and finally to Yunnan in the southwest, from where he left in late November for reunion with his family in Switzerland. His itinerary had been approved by Premier Zhou; there were official tour guides throughout, and interview briefings with local functionaries (cadres) everywhere. There was a private trip and conversation with the premier on his special train. Snow was also welcomed as a "friend" by "dozens" of people he had met in the Red district in 1936. Then "in their youth, ragged, hungry, so-called bandits, now the equivalents of account executives, managers, chairmen of boards, big shots." (Later, in the Cultural Revolution, Snow would label such people in Maoist terms as "Red Mandarins.") The vantage point of a regime in power—one that he viewed sympathetically—would inevitably color Snow's report. It was a perspective considerably reinforced by all his personal long-term friends in China: principally Alley, Hatem (Dr. Ma), Strong, and Epstein among the Westerners; Huang Hua and other officials who had been student friends of his in the old Peking days, Madame Sun, and that leading "big shot" among his former "Red bandit" acquaintances, the "Very High Official" at the top.[14]
Still, here was a unique opportunity for this very special American to see and investigate the new Red China, then no more accessible to his compatriots than the remote northwestern Red base had been in 1936. Notwithstanding the obvious limitations surrounding his formal and informal contacts with a broad spectrum of Chinese in all walks of life, "I think I know more about all these people," Snow maintained, "than I could possibly have understood had I never returned to China."[15]
Snow's "background" conversations with Mao, and his more formal interviews with Zhou were unquestionably the focal points of his stay, and its chief raison d'être. Snow received the summons to his first Mao reunion in over twenty years on a late October afternoon. He found the chairman waiting to greet him at the gate to his home in the Zhongnanhai residential compound for China's leaders directly adjacent to the palaces of the Forbidden City. (Snow compared Mao's house to that of a successful Long Island insurance salesman.) As earlier noted, Mao seemed unaware of the elementary details of Snow's post-China life, evidently including his divorce and remarriage. Mao made clear that Snow's visit, arranged (by himself and Zhou) as Alley's "guest," did not affect the continued stalemate between Washington and Beijing on the exchange of correspondents. As they thus talked before dinner, Mao suddenly thought that Alley, as Snow's "host," and George Harem, as Snow's 1936 companion and friend, should be present. In an expression of imperial prerogatives, he immediately had them summoned.[16]
As Snow described the scene in his notes, Alley appeared in about twenty minutes. Hatem, who had been on a bus returning home after a long day's work, was whisked off by car on arrival home. He came into the room looking "rather startled, but very pleased." Perhaps equally revealing, Mao appeared quite vague about these two highly notable and resident "foreign friends" of the revolution. He had not seen either for many years, thought that Alley was Australian and that Hatem (of Maronite Christian background) was Mohammedan. More surprisingly, the Red leader asked Harem, probably the leading medical figure in the highly effective campaign against venereal disease in Red China, what he had been doing. When informed by Harem that the disease had been 'completely" erased from China (except for cases in Tibet), the chairman was surprised—he had not known that, he observed.
During and after dinner (a simple Hunan-style meal), Mao gave his characteristically unruffled, unhurried forecasts on the Taiwan question, on China's seat in the United Nations (still occupied by Taiwan), and on United States-China relations. A satisfactory (to China) resolution of these matters might take a decade or two, or even longer, but would eventually come to pass. In a typically "Middle Kingdom" view, Mao noted that China in no way felt isolated—it was after all a "United Nations" in itself of myriad nationalities and a huge population. A single Chinese province was in many cases much more populous than most member states of the United Nations.
Mao struck a number of other themes that would show up in Snow's book. He claimed great success for the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1939,
particularly in steal production. Yet he cautioned Snow on the latter's too euphoric impressions of China's advances. China remained a poor and "backward" country and would continue to be for a very long time to come. But to Mao's way of thinking, such poverty had its positive aspects. Austerity "steeled" people's (revolutionary) character—"people should know some hardship, some deprivation, some struggle," he declared. It was a premonition of Mao's subsequent cultural revolutionary attack on materialist values and priorities. To Snow's point on the middle-class character of American society, Mao rejoined in standard ideological terms that it was not the middle class but "the monopoly-capital class" that decided things in America.
To accomplish its monumental and long-term task of modernization, Mao impressed on his American friend, China needed peace and would not "pan wild" in the international arena, whether in or out of the United Nations. The United States, he added, had an equal responsibility to maintain world peace. "Taiwan," he emphasized, "is China's domestic affair. We will insist on this."
Interestingly, to Snow's query whether Leighton Smart, the last U.S. ambassador to Nanking, had offered American recognition and aid to the victorious Reds in 1949, if they renounced their ties to Moscow "in the Yugoslav manner," Mao noncommittally "affirmed that it might be so." When Snow asked for Mao's "personal reaction" to Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's personality cult, the chairman curtly put him off, referring Snow to CCP pronouncements evaluating Stalin. (Snow would question Mao more specifically in later visits on the sensitive subject of the Chinese leader's own personality cult.) According to Snow's notes, Mao avoided any direct comment on the Soviet Union or on Sino-Soviet relatious.
Snow asked the chairman (at a second briefer meeting) about the Hundred Flowers policy of 1957 and the subsequent anti-Rightist response by the regime. Mao replied that "all kinds of people came out in the press with attacks and criticisms of the party," many of them seeking to "overthrow" the government. They had been given "plenty of time" to "expose themselves," he continued. It had revealed the "minority" of "bad people" among the intellectuals, afterwards given "Rightist hats." Mao further emphasized that good people at one stage could become bad at another. Such political labeling, coming down from Mao's perch on high, cast a broad and arbitrarily defined net as it filtered down to the "struggle" levels of local party cadres fulfilling their quotas in exposing "bad" people. In 1970 Mao would rather incongruously complain to Snow about the violence that had accompanied the Cultural Revolution he had himself unleashed.
In a frank peroration on China's Communist ruling elite, Mao told Snow there had been fifty thousand Communists during the revolutionary movement of the 1920s, and only ten thousand after the counterrevolutionary killings of 1927. "Today there are about 800 survivors of all those years. By and large the country is still being run and for some time will depend upon these 800." When saying Iris final farewell to the Chinese leader, Snow mentioned his interest in doing a full biography of Mao and asked for his cooperation. Mao told Snow to settle for his Red Star biography. "Better not write my story any more," he prophetically remarked. "Developments in the future will be a hard thing to write about."
On a lighter bantering note that illustrated the many levels making up the Mao-Snow relationship, Mao handed Ed a toothpick at the end of their dinner. Snow said he thought he would keep it as a memento—"Mao Tse-tung gave me this toothpick." "Have two more," Mao laughed, handing them to Ed for his children.
The full exposition of China's negotiating stance on Sino-American issues was left to Zhou Enlai. Snow's first interview with him took place on the premier's train as they traveled on an August day to the newly completed Miyun dam north of Beijing; a second came a few days before Snow's dinner date with Mao. Taiwan continued to be the key impediment to improving United States-China relations, Zhou emphasized, in a standard statement of the Chinese position. Washington would have to cease "aggression" against China by ending its military intervention in Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits, and also abandon all efforts and policies aimed at creating "two Chinas" in whatever guise. This was an "international question" to be settled between Washington and Beijing. It was separate and distinct from the "internal" Taiwan problem to be dealt with between the sovereign China government in Beijing and the Kuomintang authorities on that island province. These were matters on which agreement should first be reached "in principle," the Chinese premier told Snow; concrete implementation. would be a subject for further discussion. There was "no conflict of basic interests between the people of China and the United States," Zhou declared, "and friendship will eventually prevail." Over a decade later, in the Shanghai communiqué marking the close of Nixon's 1972 breakthrough journey to China, the two countries would essentially concur on the basic principles outlined to Snow in 1960. Full diplomatic relations would take longer, and issues relating to Washington's "unofficial" links to Taiwan (as well as other matters) continue to ruffle and at times seriously disturb Sino-
American relations. But what Warren Cohen calls the "Great Aberration" in America's China policy would finally end.[17]
Zhou acknowledged the existence of Sino-Soviet "differences," though insisting they were natural enough between nations. The two Communist powers remained firmly united and committed to each other's defense. On Snow's query regarding Khrushchev's abrupt withdrawal of Soviet experts from China that year, the premier blandly and disingenuously explained that this was merely normal rotation as tours of duty ended. Zhou was putting an understandable diplomatic spin on the rapidly rising but 'still publicly downplayed tensions between Moscow and Beijing and was perhaps also not yet relinquishing a "Russia card" in any negotiations with Washington. On China's disastrous post-Great Leap Forward economic crisis, Zhou conceded difficulties arising from shortfalls in agricultural output caused, he told Snow, by unprecedented natural calamities. He was otherwise silent on the severe food crisis, let alone on famine conditions, in the country.[18]
In reconnecting with the Chinese revolution and its leaders, and in taking on what he perceived to be a mission of understanding, reconciliation and peace of global dimensions, Snow brushed aside his dyspeptic 1950s "plague on both their houses" attitude. The mission rekindled his fundamental belief in the necessity for, and liberating character of, that revolution in both national and human terms. He had come to the "new China" with a mind-set based in good part on the old China he had known, with its stark images of human misery and degradation, of bad government, and of a weak and divided nation victimized by imperialism in general and Japanese aggression in particular. In contrast, there was now an assertively independent and unified nation, with an effective government proclaiming the interests of the "have-not" majority and embarked on an ambitious, long-term program of economic and social modernization. For Snow, this was the major story he needed to tell—and one his China friends were pressing him to tell. "Going back to China was obviously not the same thing for me that it would be for any other reporter, or even for other former China correspondents," he wrote in the "testamentary" document he sent on to Anna Louise Strong at his return from the China trip. "My position was unique." No Chinese, he further stated, "would for a moment suppose me to be a Communist nor expect me to write as a Communist. Yet they do know," he continued, "that I never joined those who slandered the new regime nor cashed in with exbelievers and professional cold-war propagandists, to help deceive or bewilder the American people about the Chinese rev-
olution and its leaders." It was in this spirit and within these parameters that Snow wrote his massive account of his return to China.[19]
Red China Today , a volume of over eight hundred pages, published in 1962, had the old Snow imprints and more: a colorful personal travelogue style, vividly and warmly depicted personalities from leaders to people in all walks of life, much material on wide-ranging aspects of Chinese life and society, solid discussions of political and economic matters, a positive focus on the regime's social and economic accomplishments and some attention to its more recent setbacks and problems. ("The material was so massive, and the subject so vast," Snow wrote Donald Klopfer of his completed manuscript, that to "make any of it comprehensible to the average reader, far more exposition and background seemed necessary than I had anticipated.") On foreign policy issues, he gave full play to his interviews with Zhou and included a long chapter on Vietnam. A concluding peroration touched all of Snow's visionary themes (his "devotions," he called them)—turning swords into plowshares, with America urged to shift from "war against peasants" to initiative in "a world war against poverty, disease, and ignorance," and for a truly internationalist world in which the "have-not" nations and peoples could find their places in the sun. With Vietnam particularly in mind, he declared that the "eyes of Washington are on the wrong places and on struggles already lost."[20]
For its time, Snow's book was a valuable compendium of information and firsthand impressions by a non-Communist journalist with unique China credentials. It was also a sympathetic, but not uncritical, examination of how China and its people had fared under a decade of Red hale and of how its leaders looked at the world outside. Snow, with his transcendent sense of "responsibility" to help "build a few bridges" (including some of his own), was intent on "balancing" the mostly hostile, and often paranoid and racially tainted, picture of faceless Asian "ants" or hordes (a virulent mix of "Yellow" and "Red" Perils) that Americans had been given. (It was "fear of the unwelcome information I might be obliged to present," Snow subsequently wrote Grenville Clark, "which makes me what is called a 'controversial' writer, at least in the U.S.A.") Though Snow "leaned to one side" (in Mao's famous 1949 phrase), his report was still a valiant, if flawed, attempt to break through the rigid, stereotyped walls of antagonism between the two sides. If his book "raises more paradoxes than it answers, that may be an achievement," he told Klopfer. "It is, at any rate, China." Ironically, Snow's status as an invited (and supervised) "guest" of the regime (though paying
his own way) was considerably more constricting for him as an investigative journalist than the relative freedom he had enjoyed through imperialist-imposed extraterritorial privileges under a hostile (to him) government in the old China. "The fragmented China of the 1930's could be penetrated far more easily than the mobilized totalitarian China of 1960," John K. Fairbank observed of Snow's visit.[21]
Snow's first book on China in two decades garnered (aside from predictable attacks from the fight) generally mixed reviews: highly respectful of his China credentials and connections, and admiring of his repor-torial talents, but critical of many of his judgments. He was best on the people, not the politics of China. In the nature of things it was not going to be another Red Star . Robert C. North, a Stanford specialist on Chinese communism, summed up the kinder side of this consensus: "Edgar Snow has written a powerful and engrossing book. With more discrimination and restraint and self-disciplined analyses he might have written a great one." Unfortunately for Snow, the review for the prestigious New York Times Book Review was considerably less admiring or charitable. It was written by Michael Lindsay, a British academic who had been an ardent champion of the wartime Red guerrillas and as a radio technician had worked for some time among them but who became an inveterate foe of the Beijing regime. "It is disappointing," Lindsay remarked, "that Mr. Snow, with his background and contacts, has added very little to accounts given by other foreign observers." And Snow's "intellectual development," Lindsay wrote (with his own political odyssey clearly in mind), "seems to have stopped in the 1930s when it was plausible to identify the conflict of political left and right with the conflict of good and evil." His review provoked an indignant (and probably ill-advised) Snow letter to the editor that gave Lindsay an opportunity, in a rejoinder to reinforce his original criticisms.[22]
Still seething over the Lindsay review, and frustrated that a months-long New York newspaper strike in the winter of 1962-1963 had put a severe crimp in Random House promotion of the book, Snow was greatly cheered by an accolade from an unexpected source. "Congratulations on your magnificent The Other Side of the River' which, for the first time showed the other side of Red China to me," the popular American television impresario Ed Sullivan wrote him, "and thank you for a brilliantly rendered service to the world."[23]
A major stumbling block for most reviewers was the perception that Snow had depicted the dictatorial Communist system in overly benign populist terms as a "poor man's government." This issue, as we have
seen, had long preoccupied Snow's own thinking, in the interplay of his "radical" and "bourgeois" sides. He had argued in 1947 that for people in "backward" or "feudalistic" societies, it was an important "gain" if they won "a certain amount of economic democracy by exchanging one political dictatorship for another." It was a point he had tried to "explain" to Truman that same year. And Snow had simultaneously argued that "there is not now and never has been, any instance of the minority in power ruling in such a way as to help the g.n. [greatest number] at the expense of its own interests." In coming back to the Chinese revolution in 1960, Snow put his emphasis on the first half of this proposition and downplayed (but did not abandon) his caveats. The People's Republic, he argued, was an exceptional case where the interests of the "have-not" majority had been genuinely advanced and protected. "China," he wrote in a preface to the Japanese edition of Jourey , "presents the example of a nation in which the poor collect from the rich under the auspices of the Communist Party." And pursuing his "exchange of dictatorships" thesis in Red China Today , he averred that in contrast to the Kuomintang's "military dictatorship" controlled by "a small have-got minority," the "Communist dictatorship has organized its bases among the have-not peasants and working people and deeply involved them in the revolutionary economic, social, political and administrative tasks of building a socialist society."[24]
The China scholar Benjamin Schwartz, in commenting on the above points in his review of the book (which Snow privately called "very good, but critical, or critically very good") cogently questioned Snow's "poor man's government" concept. "The fact that the ruling elite [the "800" Mao had cited to Snow] owns the power to command and to make decisions (including all the decisions involving the production and allocation of goods)—the most primordial form of ownership which has ever existed—is apparently of no consequence." Such total control of power might be necessary, to the modernizing process of underdeveloped nations at a certain stage, but even in that case, Schwartz mordantly noted, there was "no need for presenting purgatory as paradise."[25]
Underlying and complicating these fundamental issues was the inauspicious timing of Snow's account. In 1936 he had met the revolution just as it was poised for its dynamic and historic wartime surge leading to ultimate victory. He now caught up with that revolution as it was beginning to falter and had already entered what would be a protracted period of political crisis, conflict, and purges, of massive upheavals, and of dramatic shifts in leadership and direction in a process still playing itself
out. The years from the Hundred Flowers through the calamitous aftermath of the Great Leap, combined with the growing conflict with Moscow, set the stage for a decade and more that would convulse the country and nearly shatter its ruling party structure. Needless to say, Snow could neither foresee such portentous developments nor easily discern the underlying political faults beneath the surface tremors. He thus minimized the importance of Peng Dehuai's dismissal as minister of defense, stressed the CCP's unity and stability under Mao, with the chairman "thus far" free of any "megalomania," or of Stalinist "paranoia" toward his colleagues. Snow cited, as an example of this, the influential role of Liu Shaoqi, the new chairman of the republic and Mao's anointed successor as party leader. Liu, of course, would shortly be the chief target and victim of Mao's Cultural Revolution.[26]
Snow's vision was further obscured by his basic assumptions on the "dictatorship of the have-not majority." He was no longer, as in the China of the 1930s, writing as an opponent of an existing regime who had linked himself with the cultural-intellectual and student currents of dissent and protest. He now tended to picture the critics unleashed by the Hundred Flowers as at worst counterrevolutionaries, and at best liberal Western-educated intellectuals who hankered after a pluralistic political system. The latter, Snow maintained, "had no remedy to offer except a return to the bourgeois ideology of the Kuomintang, which had already proved incapable of solving China's problems." And as for student protesters in the universities in Beijing, Snow remarked that some "demanded the right to choose their own teachers and curricula; they wanted free food for all, and no more work in the countryside." These remarks were sharply challenged in a New Republic review of Snow's book by Rend Goldman, a young China scholar of French-Polish background who studied at Beijing University during these events. As one who "shared in the exultation of my Chinese fellow students," he wrote, and who "witnessed the eagerness with which they tackled national issues, demanding such things as respect for human rights, more learning from the West and the administration of schools by teachers who were not merely party secretaries, I find Mr. Snow's patronizing objectionable." And as for the subsequent suppression of the intellectual-academic critics of the party, George Hatem, near the end of his life, privately told close friends in Beijing (among other things) that Mao's "anti-Rightist campaign took the heart out of China's intellectuals."[27]
Snow's remarks on the incapacity shown by "bourgeois ideology" to solve China's problems spoke to a key issue that continues to bedevil
Sino-American relations. As Andrew Nathan notes in his insightful study of the theory and practice of "democracy" in China over the past century, culminating in the Communist version of "people's democraric dictatorship," there are key elements of modern Chinese political culture as well as of Communist ideology involved. In contrast to Western democratic principles, such thinking views politics "as a realm of harmony rather than antagonism between the citizen and the state, of one-party leadership, of the supremacy of the public interest over citizens' rights, and of the power of the state to make any laws it deems necessary with— out judicial contradiction." The argument made by China's democracy advocates that "a competitive party system and an independent press are necessary to allow people to control the rulers," Nathan adds, has been a rare one for China. Thus far, Nathan concludes, China's "century-long obsession with political order and national strength had made it impos-sible for most other Chinese, even non-Marxists, to share [the democ-racy activists'] visions of change."[28]
Snow had been on both sides of the China argument. In the rime of the Kuomintang, he had urged America to "push" the Generalissimo toward liberal democratic reform. Now, in dealing with his writing; plans in the context of the "better" People's China he had seen, he recorded: "If anyone is looking for material to prove that the American system is the best system for China (including Taiwan!) and ought to be imposed on the Chinese people then I have nothing to say which would be helpful to the cause." It was hardly that simple, neither for Snow over the next decade of his involvement with China, nor for the Chinese and American leaders and peoples since then.[29]
In recent years, particularly with the ending of euphoria (a second "loss of China"?) that had followed the Nixon opening to Beijing, Snow came in for some especially sharp criticism for his reporting on China in the 1960s. Notably singled out for attack has been his denial in Red China Today of any widespread famine during the calamitous post-Great Leap years of 1959-1961. A leading Chinese dissident, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, later in political exile in the United States, pointed to Snow's account of the food crisis as a "telling example," in Fang's hostile view, of the American journalist as "propagandist" for the Mao regime. The American China scholar Jonathan Mirsky is also strongly critical of Snow's writings on Mao-ruled China—on the famine and much else.[30]
"I must assert," Snow wrote of the post-Leap grain crisis in 'Real China Today , "that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine," and that "I do not believe there is famine
in China at this writing; and that the best Western intelligence on Chin is well aware of this." Snow went on, "Isolated instances of starvation due to neglect or failure of the rationing system were possible. Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No."[31]
Snow's assertions were more significant for their ambiguities than a absolutes of truth or falsehood. Though Snow indeed dismissed the starvation reports coming from refugee sources in Hong Kong and widely circulated in the West, there is no evidence that during the 1960 visit he saw (or was shown) any such conditions. And given the highly exaggerated, later revised Chinese reports on grain output beginning h 1958—reflecting the frenzied, unreal, super-leftist "politics in command syndrome affecting party cadres at all levels—perhaps even the top lead ership had not yet fully recognized the true magnitude of the food crisis at local levels at the time of Snow's stay in China. Undoubtedly, great numbers of people starved to death in the most hard-hit provinces and localities, and very many millions more succumbed to the effects of sustained and severe malnutrition during what officials later called the "three bad years" of 1959 to 1961. However, there was evidently no sin gle vast region of devastation and death such as Snow had witnessed in the northwest in 1929. As John Fairbank stated in his 1986 history of the Chinese revolution, "In 1959-60 China was better organized [than in earlier famines] and famine areas full of corpses were not seen. But the malnutrition due to thin rations made millions more susceptible to dis ease. The higher-than-usual mortality became obvious when the statistics were worked out." And in his careful 1984 investigation of the famine and the factors that caused it, Thomas Bernstein notes, "The extent to which famine struck China during those years, it is important to stress, has not been fully established." While "no one doubts" the serious food crisis of that time, Bernstein adds, "famine on the scale of those that struck China during the Qing and Republican periods could have taken place has long been doubted, if only because the PRC has an effective government able to organize the distribution and transportation c relief grain." It was with demographic patterns and other data available only in the early 1980s that the full impact of the calamity has to some ey-tent emerged. Dwight Perkins, a Harvard expert on the Chinese economy, could write of the post-Leap grain crisis almost a decade after Snow's trip, that rationing and railroad construction "averted a major disaster."[32]
The intent here is not to delve into the complex web of natural and political factors that led to the disastrous consequences of those year.,
but to assess the claim of Snow's culpability in propagating a famine version that he either knew or should have known ("what did he know and when did he know it") was palpably false. As already noted, the magnitude and severity of the crisis of 1959-1961 remained uncertain until long after that time. It is noteworthy that the major reviews of Snow's book by China specialists (including the hostile one by Michael Lindsay) either ignored or took no particular issue with Snow's treatment of the matter. Indeed, Benjamin Schwartz in his careful 1963 review wrote, "As against Mr. Alsop's predictions of mass starvation, Mr. Snow's insistence that efficient rationing has distributed whatever malnutrition there may be seems somewhat more justified at least as of the present." The truth was evidently then more elusive than some contemporary critics assert. Like others, Snow had an a priori belief in the will and capacity of the Communist government to take effective organizational measures to avert large-scale starvation, in contrast to the massive human cost of similar crises in the past. "I read your clipping from the [Kansas City] Star about 'famine' in China," Ed wrote Mildred a few months after his return from China. "There isn't any famine there in the sense that I knew it in the past, but the Chinese are having a very tough winter" owing to crop failures brought on by natural catastrophes. "Had such a year struck China in the old days tens of millions of people would now be dying of starvation."[33]
Still, Snow was not that confident of his facts as he worked on Look articles and his book in the early months of 1961. In the face of a continuing barrage of famine stories, he sought to get at the truth from his foreign friends and official contacts in China. It was no doubt naive on his part to think that even if these sources were privy to state-guarded information and statistics on the national food situation, they would share data, particularly adverse data, with a Western journalist, friendly or not. Answers to most of his queries never came or consisted, as Alley's did, of blandly reassuring and generalized replies, devoid of hard facts and figures. A year later, with his book scheduled for publication in the fall, he continued to seek help from China. "I am doing my best to present the facts about the problems of China's agriculture as well as its achievements," he wrote Israel Epstein in May 1962, "but the absence of any concrete information makes it difficult to answer" the Alsops and others on the famine-starvation reports. Among other China matters on which he asked for "explanations," were the refugee exodus to Hong Kong and reports of high-level policy rifts in the CCP. "Do try to get me a few FACTS," he pleaded.[34]
Withal, Snow was not quite playing the "true believer" role. As was often the case, privately he was troubled, uncertain, and irritated at what he considered to be much stonewalling by the Chinese, not only since his departure from China but while he was there as well. In a December 1961 letter to Han Suyin, a writer friend and Red China champion, Snow expressed some of these feelings. He found it difficult to "grapple" with the wildly fluctuating agricultural and industrial output reports emanating from China since 1958—on which he complained, "I was in no way helped to understand by anyone in China." He was "terribly ignorant" when he went to China, he tellingly, if exaggeratedly, informed her. "I assumed I knew something about it. I knew nothing. I still know very little." He had spent most of the past year on research he should have done "before entering the country." Snow frankly acknowledged the barriers he had faced on his China visit. "I made the mistake of supposing that I would find a few people who would speak to me frankly and honestly about matters of the recent past as well as the present." But, he continued, he was "unable to establish any such contacts With reality." Though he acquired a "mass of material," it was "meaningless" without the "necessary background and the kind of facts no one would give me. I have done the best I can to fill in the vast void."[35]
Oh, "for the life of a novelist," he groaned to Han Suyin. Look (which had printed a first article of his based largely on the Zhou interviews) had paid for but rejected others as "biased," he told her. If they "had published what I wrote," he peevishly added, "much of it would have been considered 'hostile' in Peking." It is "a difficult time to emerge with a China book," he wrote Alley as his work neared publication in the fall of 1962, "but then I don't know when it hasn't been difficult to write about it for America since the revolution."[36]
A journal entry Snow made while in China in October 1960 is perhaps the most revealing exposition of the conflicts and dilemmas for him as a committed but politically independent journalist-friend of the revolution writing for a broad "bourgeois" American audience. ("Why don't you nail your flag to the mast, as I do?" Han Suyin goaded him after reading his Look article.)[37] Snow noted:
Mao said it is impossible to remain neutral and he is right—about China. Leaning to one side. I too have been leaning to one side. But not leaning on anybody....To take sides but not to lean on somebody else is more difficult if one lives in an advanced capitalist society than if one lives elsewhere. Think of all the mistakes and tragedies committed by St. [Stalin] or in St's name. Who would wish to have committed himself blindly to that dictator-
ship?...No greater error than to suppose that one's subjective actions are not part of objective reality. If one knowingly acts in accordance with what one knows to be false one is affecting the objective situation adversely not favorably. One does not always know but when one does the first obligation is to truth.[38]
Snow's confidence in Mao, as opposed to Stalin, would be put to increasingly severe tests in the years ahead. But already, the erratic course and flawed character of the revolution in power made the "truth" he sought to discern and report dauntingly complex, ambiguous, and ultimately elusive—as his Red China Today amply illustrated.
By the time his book appeared (in 1962), Snow was much less sanguine about his attempts to open up genuine dialogue and ease the Sino-American deadlock. While still "leaning to one side," he was inclined to blame the Chinese as well as the Americans. Though he thought the American people were "interested and fairly openminded," he told Alley, "so far this has no impact on policy." The "USA has been on the wrong track for years," he added, "but China's policy has done little to help the American people as distinct from ye old American imperialist: government find a bridge to reestablish contact. If one really believes there is a difference between the two it should find realistic expression in policy." It was a typical Snow frustration—both sides were getting in the way of his efforts to promote "a new beginning."[39]
Actually, Snow's massive book (at $10) did quite well, with American sales of over 21,000 copies. Snow was busy in the States in the early months of 1963 with lecture dates and appearances on radio talk shows and the prestigious network TV morning shows. His twelve minutes on the Today program, Random House sales people told him, was worth $50,000 in commercial advertising time. There were debating tussles on some shows with Michael Lindsay and others. On his American tours in 1962 and 1963, he wrote Mao in May 1963, he had spoken to audiences "in more than 50 universities and colleges, discussion forums, businessmen's clubs, teachers conventions and other organizations in more than 30 states." With the favorable reception he had been getting in these appearances, and the wide interest generated by his book as cases in point, Snow sought to impress on the chairman the value of "bourgeois" freedoms in the United States. "I doubt that it is realistic to say that freedom of speech and the press is meaningless in a country where information of this nature can be dispensed to the whole people, by those who possess it."[40]
With his visibility again on the rise in America, and with his unique China connections, Snow was then being approached to intercede with
the Chinese for various prominent Americans seeking to visit the People's Republic. In particular, Grenville Clark, an eminent international lawyer and a "tireless crusader" for world peace through world law, contacted Ed on behalf of Dr. Paul Dudley White, the noted cardiologist and Eisenhower physician, and later on for himself too. Though Snow's attempts then to persuade Mao of the value to China of such contacts proved unavailing, they led to a growing friendship between Snow and Clark up to the latter's death in 1967 at age eighty-five. Snow gave warm encouragement (with important reservations in defense of the right of revolution) to Clark's goals of global federation and world disarmament.[41]
In an approach of a very different character, Snow was hit from an unanticipated, though not surprising, source. Ex-wife Helen brought a legal action against him in New York for back alimony, effectively tying up his Random House book royalties. Fortunately for him, his European earnings were unaffected. Ed's attitude toward Helen had mellowed considerably in the years since the divorce battle, helped by her forbearance on the missed alimony payments. "I suppose I should be grateful that I don't hear from her; she has been uncomplaining recently about the defaults on alimony," he wrote Bertram in 1959. Snow had contacted Peg earlier that year, acknowledging her "patience," and giving a brief "report" on his money situation. "In short, my financial status is zero," he told her. But with his evidently brightened expectations following return from China, Ed sent Peg $500 early in 1961, with apparently implied prospects of more to come. She responded with a detailed recital of her own dire financial straits and her failure thus far to place her writing commercially. "If you can send me money this year," Helen told him, "perhaps I can do a book that will sell at last." Ed was soon forced to backtrack. "I owe you an explanation because I gave you some hope that I could renew some payments to you," he wrote her in 1961 "I was too optimistic. Things have not gone as well as I had hoped." It all hinged on the book he was working on. "If it pays anything I should be able to then." Snow was inadvertently setting himself up for trouble ahead.[42]
Though Ed sent Helen a few hundred dollars more in the spring of 1962, he at the same time reiterated, "I wish you were correct in your belief that I am now in the dough but such is not the case." His only income the past year had come from some lecture engagements that netted him comparatively little after expenses and his agent's fee of 50 percent of the gross. "What a pity it is that you could not find a man to
please you among all the millions here," he wistfully and transparently added. Helen acknowledged the money with a cryptic, "I was very glad to get it," and then went on in friendly enough fashion to non-personal topics of mutual interest. But with the seeming success of Red China Today by the spring of 1963, Helen took action.[43]
Snow morosely told Bertram in June that although his book was in a fifth printing in America, "I have made nothing at all there because your friend Peg has attached and claims all my earnings of those years and the case will presently go to court and provide ironic amusement for many and fees for the lawyers." Though the subsequent legal snits and countersuits were finally settled on terms that ended all further obligations by Ed to Helen, it sadly rekindled and intensified Snow's earlier bitterness toward Peg. (He brooded in his diary on plots for "justified homicide.") "Legally, I am paid off for quits," he unsparingly told Bertram, "but my God what a life sentence she made herself for me, not to say herself." Helen, of course, immersed in her unremunerative writing work, saw all this quite differently.[44]
Snow was back in China from October 1964 to January 1965—a clear sign that his book had been favorably viewed in Beijing. ("Your case is different [from other Americans seeking entry]," Gong Peng, a foreign ministry official and friend from Yanjing student days told him during the visit. She added, "Everyone knows you are a friend of China.") Naturally enough, he found the economy, and particularly the food supply, in much better shape than 1960. As then, his visit was highlighted by dinner and conversation with Mao, and formal interviews with Premier Zhou. (A year earlier, in January. 1964, Snow had traveled to Guinea, Africa for an interview with Zhou, then visiting that continent. The text appeared in full or extract in the European press, and extract in the New York Times .) Snow sought interviews while in China with other top officials of the Beijing regime (including Liu Shaoqi), he told Allan Whiting of the state department, who spoke with Snow in Switzerland after Ed's return. But Premier Zhou "told me I had no need `to bother' these `busy men' since he could answer any questions I had, and if he couldn't, Mao could."[45]
Snow's talk with the chairman (which he was permitted to publish in unquoted form) was, as in previous Mao-Snow encounters, a fascinating example of the Chinese leader's enigmatic but purposeful style and idiosyncratic way of thinking. Snow told Whiting that the chairman "had delivered himself somewhat pontifically, more so than in 1960, reminding me of Churchill's manner in the latter part of World War II (whom I interviewed at that time)." They met on January 9, 1965, this
time in a reception room of the Great Hall of the People that faced Tiananmen Square. Their conversation, in Mao's words, ranged from "south of the mountains to north of the seas."[46]
Mao's remarks, it turned out, contained a number of significant signals for the chairman's American and Soviet antagonists abroad, and his backsliding party protagonists at home. He affirmed that the Vietnam revolutionary forces could win victory on their own. He insisted that China would not go beyond its borders and would fight only if directly attacked. He did not consider such action by the United States to be likely. And China, he added, was busy enough with its internal affairs. Mao saw the Americans and Chinese eventually coming together again—"that day would surely come." He specifically cited, and accepted, official American pronouncements that the war in Vietnam would not be carried into North Vietnam. Frankly, the Red leader wryly remarked, it was "a good thing" that America had its troops in Vietnam. It gave the people there an external imperialist enemy as well as an internal target to unite against—the Maoist concept of nationalist revolutionary struggle. For the Chinese revolution to succeed, he added, "a single Chiang Kai-shek had not been enough. There had to be a Japan to overrun the country for eight and a half years." (The Chinese leaders, Snow later told Whiting, "feel certain we [United States] will lose eventually and that we will make our own situation worse in the meantime without much effort on their part.")[47]
While there would later be heavy American air strikes against North Vietnam, and Chinese economic and military assistance to Hanoi, Mao seemed to be laying out the basis of an implied understanding with the United States on the ground rules for the impending escalated conflict in Vietnam. He signaled his determination to stay clear of direct involvement; he believed that he could safely concentrate on his own domestic revolutionary agenda. He was confident that the Vietnamese revolutionaries could cope, and that in due time America would find it expedient to leave. The chairman evinced "hope" for future improvement in United States-China relations but seemed more pessimistic on prospects with Moscow despite Khrushchev's recent fall from power. The "chief difference" on that score, he whimsically commented, was that the Chinese had been deprived of "a good target for polemical articles." (On this cue, the CCP would continue to attack Soviet policies as "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev.")
Snow rather delicately raised the "personality cult" issue: the Russians had criticized Mao for it, was there "a basis for that?" Mao agreed
there was "some" and, in typically allusive fashion, noted that though Stalin had been "the center" of such a cult, Khrushchev had probably fallen because he had none at all. Mao was dearly viewing the deposed Russian leader as a "negative example" in this respect also and would soon be putting even the Stalin cult in the shade. When Snow met with Mao again in December 1970, at the height of the Great Helmsman's deification, the chairman referred a bit defensively (and mildly critically) to Snow's published references to the Mao cult. "It is you Americans who go in much for the personality cult!" he told Snow, citing the name of America's capital city as an example. Though it was all "a nuisance," there was "always the need to be worshipped." Mao toyed rather fancifully with the notion of "worship": "If no one reads your [Snow's] articles and books after they come out, would you be pleased?" It was the bizarrely exaggerated mode of discourse Mao often indulged in.[48]
Paradoxically, while Snow was disturbed by the extremes of the Mao cult, he had been a significant accessory in the propagation of the Mao image from Red Star to his posthumous and truncated 1972 book on the Cultural Revolution. Snow summed up his assessment of Mao most strikingly in the course of their 1965 meeting. To Mao's fatalistic recital of his many close encounters with death during the revolutionary struggle, Snow responded:
Accidents of fate which spared you have made possible perhaps the most remarkable career in Chinese history. In all China's long annals I cannot recall any man who rose from rural obscurity not only to lead a successful social revolution but to write its history, to conceive the strategy of its military victory, to formulate an ideological doctrine which changed the traditional thought of China, and then to live out the practice of his philosophy in a new kind of civilization with broad implications for the whole world.[49]
Mao, the record showed, did not demur from Snow's estimate.
In further intimations of things to come, Mao told Snow that China's current youth generation had no experience of the old society, nor of revolution. Reading or hearing about it was not the same as living it. Soon his Red Guards would be stirring up a "revolutionary storm" that would become much more than enough even for the old revolutionary warrior, who would finally return them forcibly to their (Maoist) books. The seventy-one-year-old leader told Snow that he (Mao) was soon "going to see God" (another Maoism). The future was uncertain, with rapid change the order of the day. "A thousand years from now all of us," he concluded, "even Marx, Engels, and Lenin, would probably appear
rather ridiculous." It was another illustration of Mao's style. Evidently he was thinking of a much shorter time-span and, with his own mortality in mind, had no intention of suffering a "ridiculous" fate. He would be charting a course aimed at keeping his revolution alive and on track.
When Snow asked if Mao had a "special message" that the American journalist might take back to President Johnson, Mao had none. It would take another six turbulent years before the Chinese leader had such a special message for Snow to transmit to another American president.
Though Snow's write-up of his Mao interview and other pieces on the trip appeared widely in Europe and Japan, he found difficulty placing them in America on terms he deemed satisfactory. For a "pittance," he finally "gave" the Mao story to the Washington Post , which then published it in "distorted" form, Ed grumbled to Mildred and Howard. A relatively intact version of his Mao conversation appeared only in the New Republic . He had concluded, he further complained to his sister, that it was "hopeless to try to deal with the U.S. press on China." (Even so, he had received "the best advance ever paid to me," from Macmillan, for a [never completed] book on the trip.) Adding to the strains, he had had health problems before, during, and after the China journey. In what would become the pattern for him, there had been surgery a few months before leaving, an attack of flu in China, and exhaustion from the pressures of work on his return. In March 1965 he was back in the hospital to clear up an infection.[50]
Compounding all this, Snow's mid-1960s China journey was soon overshadowed by the rush of events. Under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, America plunged into its seemingly endless anti-Communist crusade in Vietnam, while Mao would soon launch his "anti-revisionist" assault on his own party, government, and intellectual establishment. Snow's reaction to the first was one of outrage and foreboding; to the second, uncertainty and some early misreading of the signals from Beijing, but continued trust in Mao-inspired socialist aims. "It is good to see the Chusi [chairman] back in form," he wrote Alley in November 1966, as Mao's Cultural Revolution escalated. A few weeks later he informed Alley of a lecture tour he was embarking on in the States "where some people fancy that I know China. I detest lecturing because I know only something about not knowing, that's all; and audiences are never pleased to be told that truth." And truly, Snow in the beginning seemed to misconstrue the Chinese upheaval. In a July 1966 letter he had seen China as gearing up for expected war with America. In splitting with the
USSR, the "go-it-alone school prevailed and the country is now committed to war." In this somber mood, he declared that "China is already at war with the U.S. in Vietnam." In time China will become "the main base" of the war as it spreads throughout Southeast Asia "and eventually NE Asia," with the Chinese fighting in the manner of the earlier Red guerrillas against Japan. "Perhaps I am too pessimistic," he closed. "I hope events prove me so." Snow amplified on these points in a New Republic piece at the time, in which he judged the Cultural Revolution to be the final crackdown on those who had argued against Mao's policy of confronting the rising American threat by a self-reliant, protracted people's war strategy. He dismissed the "revisionist" charges leveled at such "veteran Communists long indoctrinated by Mao's teachings, and with a lifetime of practice in the politics of the Chinese revolution," as mere "euphemisms." The escalating American involvement in Vietnam triggered a neo-isolationist mood in Ed that harked back nostalgically to his heartland youth. "I think I liked it better when we were not trying to run everybody," he told Howard in June 1965. "I remember the twenties now as a good time when we were satisfied to be ourselves without so much preaching with bombs and so on. How did we get to play god so quickly?"[51]
As the China scene became more chaotic and unpredictable, Snow delayed work on his new book commitments. He did shorter pieces for his European press outlets and the New Republic and spent much time (and money) putting together his China film documentary, One Fourth of Humanity . There were regular lecture engagements in the States, and a Japan lecture tour in 1968. ("In the U.S. my agent asks a minimum of $1000 for a lecture and usually gets it or not much less," he informed his German friend Anna Martens, in 1969.) The Japan journey was particularly successful. He flew there in April 1968 from Honolulu, after a strenuous American visit. His lectures, combined with showings of his China film documentary, attracted large audiences in all the major cities. He "interviewed and was interviewed by" editors, professors, students, and politicians, he told Howard, and was dined by the foreign minister in Tokyo. He worked on a new enlarged edition of Red Star , with added notes, CCP biographical data, and further extracts from his Mao interviews of 1936 and 1939. He prepared a revised and updated new edition of Red China Today .
His efforts to go back to China in the late 1960s were unsuccessful; in fact he too came under ultra-leftist xenophobic attack there as a "foreign agent," and those Chinese who had been associated with him were in
some cases pilloried for the connection. "Indications are that I won't sec you for a long time to come," he bitterly wrote Alley in July 1967. "One pays a price to remain independent in this world and it is so easy to make enemies without really trying." He wrote directly to Mao in mid-1969, complaining that "all my requests through diplomatic and other channels [to visit China] have met no response." (When Snow was finally back in China in 1970, Mao explained the delay to him, "It was a group of ultra-leftists in the Waichiaopu [foreign ministry] who were opposed to you.")[52]
His wish to revisit China, he wrote Han Suyin in 1969, was "simply that I am eager to replenish my scant knowledge, on which this part of the world [the West] draws to a degree not justified but hard for me to ignore, for information and interpretation." And on the consistently troubling problems for him in safeguarding his "independent" credentials in the West without undercutting his "friendly" links to the Chinese, he explained to her: "It is not easy to retain credibility as an independent writer without occasionally being misunderstood—if one is to convey any of the truth—by those one would not choose as enemies." The truth was not that simple to convey "in forums where we function, and ambiguity, sometimes necessary, may confuse friends, and ineptirude turn one into a huai tan [bad egg]."[53]
Snow had mounting misgivings on news of the harsh treatment of old friends in China. He commented to Anna Martens in April 1969 on a letter he received from Soong Qingling: She is "studying hard the works of the Chairman," and "mentions something about foreigners trusted for 20 yrs. who turned out to be renegades. Meaning the E's [Epstein and his wife]? Alors." Meanwhile, the Vietnam morass was causing him much anguish. On the eve of the 1968 presidential election, he wrote Mildred and Claude, condemning both Nixon and Humphrey, but with his harshest judgment directed at Johnson for "his whole immoral and stupid handling of U.S. power to waste lives and billions in senseless destruction."[54]
Snow's chronic "plumbing" problems (as he called his kidney and urinary tract troubles) were a further complicating factor for him as the 1960s decade dosed and perhaps a warning of his terminal illness two years later. He was having "a general letdown, and unaccountably severe fatigue," he wrote Anna Martens in September 1969. Ordered to take a complete rest, he was forced to cancel some lectures in the States scheduled for that fall. It was the beginning of a difficult winter, with two operations and over a month in the hospital. Convalescence was impeded
by a return bout of malarial fever. "Ed's illness was so up and down," Lois told the Howard Snows in July 1970, "he's had such a long drawn-out recuperation—just when he seemed out of the woods, he'd be back in bed!" Though more like himself again, Ed told Mildred in May, "I still tire easily." He would never be really fully fit again. The nearly two-hundred-year-old Swiss farmhouse and barn the Snows purchased in 1968 was also a drain, eating up a great deal of energy and cash on necessary major modernization and refurbishing projects. They worked for months fixing up the house, Lois wrote Howard and Dorothy in January 1969. Ed, she perhaps overenthused, was a "whiz with all tools—not just that typewriter." "It is a beguiling whore," Ed wrote Charles (Chuck) Hogan in October 1969 about the Eysins house, "ever demanding more money and attention." But from their new home, Lois informed the Howard Snows, "we can dip into France in ten minutes, be on top of a mountain in a jiffy, or have lunch on a lake boat going to Montreux or Geneva.[55]
In what seemed almost a replay of his thirteen-year sojourn in China, Snow looked on the Swiss location as temporary, with continued expressions to his sister and brother of his (and Lois's) intention to return to live in the United States—preferably, for Ed, to New England. "we would like to come home—we are still Americans," he told Mildred in May 1970. And in a heartfelt letter to Howard a year earlier (occasioned by the tragic death of Howard's daughter Karen), Ed reached out to his brother in terms also reminiscent of the early China years. There was a reflective sadness over the separate and separated lives of these now aging brothers. "I much need to discuss my own life with you; we have been too long too far apart," Ed wrote. "I am appalled at the short time remaining to us. How life speeds past." Yet Snow could still bounce back: "I can still do a day's work or a day's play—at tennis or swimming or skiing—with enjoyment if not with the old zest." As to thoughts of "retirement" (which he could ill afford, with two children to put through college), Ed told Howard, "I have still things to do; but I would like to be able to work fewer hours and to play more, and to enjoy—peace and quiet." The ensuing final two years would hardly fit that prescription.[56]
As the 1960s ended, Snow was reassessing his ideas on the probable course of events in Asia. The turmoil in China proved to be a much more profoundly shattering and transforming phenomenon than he had envisaged, while his apocalyptic scenario for the United States and China had been a greatly overheated one. In a preface for the new edition of Red China Today , Snow looked at "China in the 1970's." He laid
out and seemingly endorsed the proclaimed policies and goals of Mao's new revolution—first and foremost establishing the "absolute authority" of Mao Thought. A younger generation of cadres had taken over, "albeit led by the Old Man." Mao was solidly in control, Snow insisted, and held a "new" Mandate of Heaven. The glorified Red leader had become "the personification of revolutionary creativity, independence, national self-esteem and world prestige."[57]
Snow took notice of Mao Thought as "a kind of secular religion to which organized opposition was not possible." Still, the "paradox was that Mao Tse-tung's thinking was in spirit deeply populist." As Ed summed it up, "The revolutionary purpose was human emancipation, but Mao's way left no room for heterodoxy if the Vision was to be fulfilled: that the poor (and not any Mandarin elite) should inherit the Chinese earth, marching en masse toward an egalitarian and class-free future." The "paradox" Snow noted was also at the heart of his own thinking and would shortly be sharply revealed as he in turn experienced the impact of the "new secular religion."[58]
On the prospects for Sino-American relations, Snow returned to the theme of reconciliation he had so ardently pursued in the early 1960s. China's (or Snow's?) fear of an American attack was now "reduced," with her major attention focused on what seemed the chief menace, the Soviets. A "renewal of Sino-American discourse now seemed plausible." It all brought back Snow's thesis of 1949. "As some saw it," he wrote in the 1970 preface, "China and Russia were obligingly containing each other, within the ruins of the communist monolithic." Washington could exploit the situation by favoring China as the weaker one, with moves (already being taken) toward relaxation of tension. Sooner or later, Snow noted, there would have to be a serious negotiation on the basis of the principles regarding Taiwan defined for Snow by Zhou Enlai in 1960. But, he added, perhaps letting his personal reactions color his judgments, "that time was not yet"—as evidenced by Nixon's recent "egregious political blunder" in "plunging" into Cambodia. This "amounted to repeating the tragic Vietnam miscalculation itself," he declared. Ironically, of course, the "new beginning" in America's China policy he had hoped for a decade earlier in the Kennedy years would come to pass under a president he disdained and whose motives he distrusted. It was another paradox he would soon face as a Mao-designated American symbol and emissary in this denouement.[59]