Chapter 4
"New Influences and Ideas That Have Streamed into Me"

Truly, Snow had arrived in China at a momentous juncture in that nation's tempestuous modern history. The final imperial dynasty, the Qing (Manchu), had been toppled in 1911 and a republic proclaimed in 1912. Although the Cantonese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen had been the leading figure in the anti-Manchu movement, he and his new Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), were soon cast aside. China descended into a decade of dictatorships, warlordism, political fragmentation, and constant warfare among contending (and often foreign-backed) militarists. It was a bitter parody of Sun's "Three People's Principles" for China—nationalism, democracy, and people's welfare.

While in political exile in Japan, the middle-aged Sun married twenty-two-year-old Soong Qingling (Ching Ling) in 1915. She was one of the three famed Soong sisters, daughters of the Shanghai tycoon Charlie Soong. She had been educated at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia, and after returning to China had gone on to Japan to work with Sun in his revolutionary cause. From 1918 through the early 1920s Sun ineffectually attempted to build a secure political and military base in southern China centered on Canton, in preparation for a campaign against the militarists to the north. In 1923, at a low ebb in his political fortunes, and spurned in his earlier efforts to gain support from the West, Sun turned to Soviet Russia for help. He agreed to an alliance with the Russians, to collaboration with the fledgling Chinese Communist party (CCP) organized in Shanghai in 1921, and to a radicalized program of mass mobilization of labor and the peasantry. The Soviets in turn provided Sun's movement with military and political ad-

visers and assistance and helped reorganize the Kuomintang and build a revolutionary army. The reinvigorated and immensely strengthened Nationalist movement, with effective input from dedicated young Chinese Communists, was soon poised in southern China for a northern expedition to unify China.

Sun died of cancer in March 1925, leaving a legacy of unfinished revolution to successors split into left- and fight-wing camps. The new National Revolutionary Army, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, swept through southern and central China in 1926-1927, aided by a massive upsurge of the peasant and labor movements led largely by Communist cadres. (The Hunanese Mao Zedong was a central figure in organizing the peasantry.) But by the spring of 1927 the now anti-Communist Chiang had broken with the left wing of the Kuomintang and turned on his erstwhile Communist allies to massacre thousands of Communists and leftists in Chinese-ruled Shanghai. Spearheaded by gunmen of Shanghai's potent Green Gang, the coup crushed the powerful Communist-led labor movement in control there. Following the coup came a violent purge of Red elements throughout China, the suppression of radical peasant and labor organizations, and a total break with Soviet Russia.

After some futile and costly insurrectionary efforts, at the end of 1927 and in early 1928 the remnant Communist military forces took refuge in the hinterland of southcentral China. There, under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, they would regroup, organize so-called soviet areas and a large Red Army, and wage a peasant-based mobile-guerrilla-style revolutionary armed struggle. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek consolidated his power, based primarily on his military ascendancy and foreign support. He dominated the mercantile-industrial heartland of the lower Yangtze Valley and effected a series of uneasy and unstable accommodations with regional militarists in the rest of China. A national government was formed in October 1928 with its capital in Nanking. Chiang was president and also in command of the army and leader of a purged Kuomintang. His new links and status had been further enhanced by marriage in December 1927 to the younger sister of Madame Sun Yat-sen, the attractive Soong Meiling. The "Soong dynasty" connection was dearly a propitious one for Chiang. (The third Soong sister, Ailing, was the wife of China's wealthiest banker, H. H. Kung; a brother, Harvard-educated T.V. Soong, was a key Kuomintang financial and political figure.) Chiang had also embraced the Soongs' Methodist faith with his new marriage. As reported in the Shanghai Times , the wedding "was a brilliant affair and the outstanding

Chinese marriage ceremony of recent years." Held in the ballroom of Shanghai's plush Majestic Hotel, with some 1,300 invited guests, it followed by only eight months the April coup and massacre in the same city.^[1]

Soong Qingling (Madame Sun) remained fiercely loyal to her husband's memory, and to the policies he espoused in the years immediately preceding his death. She left for Europe (initially for Moscow) after the collapse of the left in China, in the summer of 1927. She returned briefly in 1929 for Sun's belated state funeral and the entombment of his remains in the newly constructed mausoleum on Purple Mountain in Nanking—symbol of the Nationalist government's proclaimed continuity with Sun as its founding father. In 1931 Madame Sun came back to live in her home in the French Concession in Shanghai. There she continued her determined and courageous opposition to Chiang's government, which she regarded as a counterrevolutionary reversal of Sun's goals and principles. In those Shanghai years until the Japanese attack in 1937, she would be a major influence in educating the young Snow on all the above matters from her own political perspective.

The city of Shanghai was then the most visible, and important, center of the foreign economic and political presence in China. Through the extraterritorial and other rights granted the foreign powers and their citizens under the unequal treaty system beginning in 1842, a Western-created city had sprung up adjacent to the original Chinese walled town. In time a greater Shanghai municipality emerged as a hybrid Sino-Western metropolis and the largest city in Asia. A "fascinating old Sodom and Gomorrah," Snow called the Shanghai he knew in the early 1930.^[2]

The city was situated along the banks of the Huangpu (then, Whangpoo) River, which converged with the great Yangtze as it emptied into the sea. Shanghai was divided in three parts: an International Settlement, an adjoining French Concession, and, extending in a semicircle around these two, a much larger Chinese-administered area. The International Settlement was governed by a municipal council controlled by the foreign. business oligarchy. In 1928 the council comprised British, American, and Japanese members, with the British predominating, while the French were in charge of their own concession. Though technically Chinese territory, these two areas were outside Chinese jurisdiction and were guarded by foreign naval, marine, and police forces. When the Japanese attacked Chinese Shanghai in 1932, they used the "neutral" International Settlement as a base for their operations. In his Far Eastern Front (1933), Snow sardonically remarked that the settle-

ment's "'neutrality' was completely smashed not from outside, whence foreigners had long feared Chinese invasion, but from the inside, and by one of the major powers pledged to uphold it." Both at that time, and in the greater battle for Shanghai in 1937, Snow and other foreign correspondents could follow and report on the course of the fighting from this foreign-controlled sanctuary. "From the border of the International Settlement," Snow recalled of the I932 action, "you could watch the fullscale battle, seeing the front lines of both sides." Snow was also able, at some risk, to visit the two sides, sometimes in the course of a single day.^[3]

About half of greater Shanghai's Chinese population of some three million lived in the International Settlement and French Concession, as did some fifty thousand foreign nationals, in addition to large numbers of stateless Russians. This area was the principal center of modern banking, commerce, and industry in China, symbolized by the imposing Bund, and was the port for most of China's foreign trade. Its opulent and gracious foreign residential districts, clubs, and racecourses were worlds apart from the teeming streets and overcrowded tenements and shanties where the balance of the Chinese population lived. In foreign and Chinese-owned factories and workshops alike, the Chinese labor force worked under exploitative conditions of long hours, subsistence wages, and deplorable working conditions. Young women and children from the poverty-stricken countryside made up a substantial part of the workforce. Theodore H. White recalled his first tour of Shanghai industry in 1938 in the company of a young Danish municipal factory inspector. At a textile mill, the inspector "poked with his toe to show a cylinder of bamboo mat in the dump of factory garbage by the canal. In the mat was wrapped the body of a little girl, a factory worker; two or three such mats were put out each night to be collected with the garbage." Shanghai held the bulk of modern industry in China, foreign and Chinese, and over half of its industrial workers. The city was also the center of China's gambling, opium, prostitution, and labor rackets. It was, in White's words, a "city of monsters and missionaries, of light and laughter, of gangsters and gardens," where "the despair at the bottom was as inconceivable to a poor boy from Boston as the delights of depravity at the top were inconceivable to Brahmins of Boston."^[4]

To some, Shanghai loomed as an alien entity divorced from the "real" China of the vast interior. It was also very much a center of key forces that had played and continued to play (albeit often underground) significant roles in the pressures for change and modernization in that nation.

Apart from its preeminence in industry and commerce, Shanghai was the focus of liberal and radical political and cultural currents (generally Western-influenced), and the heart of China's literary and media publications activity. The greater protections afforded by extraterritoriality contributed significantly to all these activities. In this Shanghai setting Snow began his education in "things Chinese, and otherwise."

On arriving, Snow contacted J.B. (John Benjamin) Powell, a Missouri journalism alumnus who was editor and publisher of the widely read and influential English-language China Weekly Review (hereafter Review ). When Powell offered Snow a job on the Review , Ed decided to stay on in Shanghai for the while. He liked Powell with "his warm friendliness, imported corncob pipe, [and] his wonderful knack of storytelling"; also, the salary seemed "princely" (400 Shanghai dollars per month), particularly in Snow's impecunious state. ("I was fiat as your Aunt Alice's hips," he told Mildred.) It was a sum, he exuberantly informed his mother, on which "one can become simply filthy with luxury out here on the fringes of the world." Nevertheless, he assured her, his world travel plans remained in place, and he expected to be back in New York by the following May "at the latest."^[5]

Snow's entrée into his journalistic career was not unlike most other American China journalists of the time. "Most reporters came to East Asia 'by accident—as wire-service people, freelancers, or student travelers prior to 1937," the historian James Thomson notes; many belonged to the "Missouri mafia," and "virtually none" had studied Chinese. Shanghai, an international city with a cosmopolitan and "sinful" reputation, served as a magnet. It was "an interesting place to be stationed," the China journalist A. T. Steele later remembered, where life "was comfortable, news plentiful, and communications good." Shanghai was then "the news capital of China," where the foreign press corps was based.^[6]

The Review had been founded in 1917 by another Missouri alumnus, Thomas F. F. Millard, with Powell, then thirty, sent by Dean Walter Williams from Missouri to assist Millard in the project. Millard and Powell held similar convictions on the Far East, but the two differed widely in style and personality. In contrast to Powell's comfortably down-home qualifies, the older silver-haired Millard cut a worldly, charming, and impeccably tailored figure. Powell's son, Bill, remembered Millard as still elegant and charismatic in his late years, "belting down martinis, and chasing and being chased." By 1923 Powell had bought out Millard and changed the name of Millard's Review of the FarEast to the new rifle. The Review appeared continuously up to its

pre-Pacific War issue of December 6, 1941. For most of this period, Powell served also as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune . Both Millard and Powell had become early champions of Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist cause, a stand highly unpopular with the British-dominated foreign community in Shanghai. Powell maintained his strong support of fine Nationalists both before and after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925 and viewed the emerging Nanking regime under Chiang Kai-shek as the auspicious birth of a "New China."^[7]

Powell's deep interest in Chinese history and culture, and his good relations with local Chinese intellectuals and business leaders further separated him from most of the expatriate community. Advertisements for Chinese businesses appeared in the Review , and English-speaking Chinese students became avid readers and subscribers. The Nationalist regime, for its part, valued Powell's support. In the 1930s, according to Randall Gould, then editor of the American-owned Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury , the Nanking government bought up considerable quantifies of each issue and mailed them out to various people, mostly overseas. Consistently pro-Nationalist and anti-Communist, Powell was also a vigorous opponent of Japan's aggressive policies in China. Though Snow came to differ sharply with Powell on the Nationalist-Communist issue, the two retained friendly personal relations, reinforced by their common support for an independent and strong China, and for firm resistance to Japan. In actuality, the growing menace of aggressive Japanese militarism posed the greatest threat to Chinese nationalist aims and, ultimately, to the Western position in China itself. It was a point Snow quickly came to understand. In the mid-1930s Ed's wife, Peg, reported on the Peking anti-Japanese student movement for the Review , and portions of Ed Snow's 1936 interviews with Mao on the CCP's anti-Japanese united front policies and proposals appeared first in the pages of the Review . Even so passionately dedicated and emotionally charged a supporter of the Chinese Communist cause as the writer-journalist Agnes Smedley maintained an affectionate friendship with Powell despite their frequently explosive and expletive-sprinkled political arguments. Powell courageously continued publishing the Review until the eve of Pearl Harbor and suffered incarceration and torture by the Japanese following their occupation of the International Settlement. Repatriated in October 1942 (weighing only seventy pounds), he had had most of both feet amputated and remained hospitalized for years. He died of a heart attack in 1947, immediately after delivering an impassioned speech on Far Eastern affairs at a University of Missouri alumni luncheon in Washington, D.C.^[8]

Under Powell's expert tutelage Snow began his China journalistic career. Impressed by Powell's integrity and experience and his staunch defense of China's sovereign rights, Snow was quickly in accord with Powell's pro-Nationalist views, seen essentially as simply a "pro-China" position. Ed wrote admiringly of Powell to Mildred for "his fierce and courageous fight for fair-play and equality to the Chinese" against the opposition of the local foreigners. Snow later observed that his feelings at that time reflected also "latent sentiments" he shared with fellow-midwesterners Powell and Millard of identification "with the underdog in any struggle with the still mighty British Empire." He would finally conclude, however, that "the Kuomintang leaders were not so much dissatisfied with the way people in Shanghai were being 'eaten,' as by the fact that it was the foreign devil who was doing the eating."^[9]

But meanwhile Powell put Snow to work helping prepare a special "New China" issue of the Review , to appear in time for the inauguration of the Nanking regime in October 1928. Powell also assigned Snow to the thankless job of drumming up foreign business advertising for that issue. For this task, at least, Snow could call on his New York ad agency experience, and the personal qualifies that had won him accounts and friends there. Typically interested in new settings and people, he learned quickly. For the China portion of the work, he had the help of Chinese assistants and of Powell's large China library of several thousand volumes. It was "one of the best newspaper libraries in the Far East," Powell's son, Bill, later recounted. "The Review office became a gathering place for foreign newsmen and writers, partly because it was a good place 'to look something up.'"^[10]

In pursuing advertising accounts, Snow's "hard-nosed" business sense collided with his more idealistic regard for Powell's championing of the Chinese cause. "I have the humorless task of trying to convince American and English business men to advertise in a medium which upon numerous occasions has incurred their displeasure," he wrote his father a few weeks after beginning work at the Review. Powell's stance "seriously endangered the business future of his magazine, a thing which, unfortunately, so many idealists are apt to neglect in promoting their noble ambitions." Wealthy Chinese merchants' advertising support almost made up for the withdrawal of foreign support, though Snow ruefully noted that credit for the latter accounts went to the Review's Chinese advertising manager. Snow managed to secure a goodly number of important foreign accounts (many of them deemed unlikely prospects) for the special issue.^[11]

Snow still viewed himself as a transient observer of a mostly unappealing scene. He was also just a bit put off by his return to the "prosaic" business world. He remained determined to be on his way once he had amassed a few hundred dollars. Dean Williams, coming through Shanghai, pressed for Ed to apply for a newspaper slot in Singapore, where Williams had as yet not placed one of his Missourians. Snow had the offer of a lucrative editor's job on a new English-language paper upriver in Hankou; but, he confided to his mother in perhaps another facet of "latent" midwestern sentiments, he "had no fancy for being buried in a god-forsaken dump controlled by the slant-eyes." Yet Snow's ingrained sense of humanity was coming through as well. In a fairly early Shanghai diary entry, he remarked on the foreigners' practice of calling their rickshaw men "coolies." And they did have names—"one would not keep even a cow for a year and continue merely to call her 'cow.' It is stupid to do so, and the Chinese concludes the foreigner is stupid when he does the same with him."^[12]

The attractions of China that Snow did discover at this early stage were still largely those of the privileged foreigner with an income in U.S. dollars, who could buy all the amenities (and many luxuries) of life for a pittance. "One can live in such style over here on so little," he informed his mother. "For instance, I can have a rickshaw available day or night for $24 a month—$12 in our money .... Such are the allurements of the Orient." While Snow's China outlook, sympathies, and involvement were destined for very radical change, the fact that he (and his wife) could live comfortably and even in style (especially later in old Peking) on a very modest and uncertain dollar income would play its part in keeping him in China. It allowed him to function much more flexibly as a writer-journalist, mostly avoiding the daily routine and demands of a permanent full-time newspaper connection. As always in his career, he preferred such less confining and more independent—even if less secure—work and writing arrangements.^[13]

By the fall Ed was in a mellow mood. His advertising sales were going extremely well, removing any earlier "business" constraint on his now unalloyed enthusiasm for Powell's role as the nemesis of the "diehard" local British and Japanese, and "the American money-grabbers as well." He was also becoming better acquainted with the impressive list of Missouri-bred newspapermen in China, all of them "goddam good journalists!" He was proud of his part in the enlarged special issue of the Review . His name appeared both as assistant advertising manager and author of a well-researched article on road construction in China. "Thus

your brother enters into the field of Far Eastern journalism. Huzzahs and banzais!" he chortled to Howard.^[14]

Snow continued to work on articles he sent on to Towne, including one stemming from his Shanghai advertising experience that Towne placed with a marketing journal back home. Pursuing his penchant for freshly eyed "people-places" writing, Snow churned out shorter pieces on topics ranging from the silk and porcelain industries to fortune-tellers, and "China's Woolworth," and "Nanking Today," among others. These he sold to the Associated Press through their correspondent in Shanghai (a Missouri man, naturally), who found them "splendid" and "most interestingly handled," and asked for more. Ed was writing "like a house afire" and had developed "a remarkable style," Towne reported to Howard.^[15]

In an initial foray into the China political scene, Snow visited the Nationalist capital at Nanking in mid-October. With the special entrée afforded him by the Powell-Review connection, he met Chiang Kai-shek and other top officials and interviewed Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen's son, who was the new minister of railways. This occasioned some thoughts on Snow's part about Sun Yar-sen, now "ambitiously" referred to as "the George Washington of China." Though probably a great man who had immeasurably benefited China, Sun was also, Snow judged, "a dreamer and an idealist, as well as a dangerous radical" who "strongly tended toward Communism."^[16]

At the beginning of 1929 Snow, substituting for the busy Powell, represented the Review (and also Powell's commitments to the Chicago Tribune and the British Manchester Guardian ) on a Nanking-sponsored select press expedition to the northern China rail junction of Jinan in Shandong (then, Shantung). Japanese military forces had moved in there in May 1928 in an effort to thwart the Nationalist advance on Peking. It was an expression of Tokyo's "strong China policy," a reaction to the potential unification of China, perceived as a threat to Japan's "special position" and further ambitions in Manchuria. Clashes had occurred, and the Japanese had occupied and continued to hold Jinan and to block rail traffic, while negotiations to settle the matter dragged on. An agreement on Japanese withdrawal was reached in April, though it involved also much backtracking by the Chinese on the terms of settlement.^[17]

Snow's Jinan reports spotlighted Japanese obstructionism and spurious versions of the prevailing situation. He focused as well on the human miseries and economic dislocations, and on the groundswell of

anti-Japanese sentiment it evoked among the Chinese. Snow raised the crucial question for Japan's China policy at this critical juncture in East Asian affairs: would Tokyo continue to "hold the mailed fist over the miserables of Shantung" in pursuit of its China interests, or would it renounce this approach "and make an effort to recapture the trade and goodwill which she has lost as a result of her actions here?" Though Japan ultimately retreated somewhat in the Jinan affair, a militarist-dominated Japan in the coming decade would opt for the "mailed fist" in China, with tragic consequences for both the Chinese and the Japanese peoples.^[18]

The Jinan trip turned out to be more exciting than anticipated, at least in print. Based on inaccurate reports that Ed and others in the press party had been detained by the Japanese, Powell cabled the news to the U.S., where it was carried by the Associated Press, the New York Herald-Tribune , and the Chicago Tribune , among others, as well as being widely circulated in China. "It was an extraordinarily lucky adventure for me," Ed wrote Howard, and "as a result of the jaunt I was No. I news in the Far East for several days." For his part, Howard typically remarked to the family, "I can't say I could go much for that sort of thing—I guess Ed has all the 'yen' for adventure in our family."^[19]

Again through Powell's connections, another "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity came Snow's way, once more postponing his China leave-taking. This was to be a trip over the restored eight-thousand-mile national railway system. The venture, organized by the ministry of railways (a leading advertiser in the Review ), was meant to publicize and promote the idea that such travel for tourists was now possible, safe, and comfortable. Snow's descriptive articles would appear in the Review and then as tourist informational brochures of the ministry and perhaps result in a small travel book as well. It seemed an ironic juxtaposition to Snow's just-completed experience with Japanese railway interference in Shan-dong. Actually, the proposed trip was delayed until mid-April by renewed infighting among Kuomintang factions in the south, and by war-lord rumblings in the north.

In recounting these matters to his father, Snow included some of his developing thoughts on China's deep and seemingly intractable problems. (The ten-page missive was a prime example of Snow's letter-writing style to the family in these youthful years: unrestrained accounts of his work and personal activities, contemplations of life in general and China in particular, and unabashedly sentimental yearnings for home and family.) China, he wrote, was in "a pitiable condition," lacked inspired lead-

ership, and needed a "crusader," a "practical idealist," Ed felt. The "stench and decay, the misery and sufferings and national agonies" cried out for a "Great Redeemer" to lead China "into the salvation of a spiritual materialism." This last had echoes of Coolidge-era rhetoric, and indeed Snow contrasted America's material progress with the "dimness of medievalism" in societies such as China and India. The conservative Confucian tradition had stifled initiative and innovation. Snow held up the Promethean model of the dynamic, nature-conquering civilizations of the West against China's centuries-long dreamlike passivity. Science, machines, industrialization—they were China's principal needs, he declared.^[20]

Snow would cast off much in these early formulations. Nevertheless, they contained seeds of his later responsiveness to revolutionary activism, in the form of the Chinese Communist movement, as the dynamic for China's revival. Marxism, of European origin, incorporated Western concepts of historical progression and unbounded material advancement based on ever-higher levels of productive forces and social organization. As Kenneth E. Shewmaker notes, Americans such as Snow were attracted by the Chinese Communists' untraditional ("un-Chinese") qualities of youthful idealism, optimism, and their "modern" rational-scientific approach to transforming China. These traits, as Snow observed in Journey , were in sharp contrast to the "inert fatalism of old China" and appealed strongly to him "as a Westerner." And while in Red Star he dismissed the "saviour" thesis for China, he immediately added that he nevertheless felt in Mao Zedong "a certain force of destiny." Conversely, when Snow met the extremely un-Western Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1931, he found him "a considerable bore" who "does not appeal to me." Much more on these matters later.^[21]

Prior to the start of his China railway journey, Snow was offered an associate editor post on the Review by Powell, as well as the opportunity to replace Millard as the Shanghai correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune . But, as he told his father, he refused to be "harnessed" to, or "sidetracked" by such permanent commitments, "luscious" as they might be. He now hoped, following the railway assignment, to continue toward home via Russia and central Asia. In April he began the railway trip that he looked back on as a vital turning point in his growing awareness of and response to the scaring realities of Chinese life.^[22]

The four-month journey took Snow on "the grand tour" of China, from the scenic spots of the verdant lower Yangtze Valley, into central China, then north to Peking, and beyond the Great Wall to Manchuria

and Korea. It was mostly pleasant and comfortable, and with opportunities for good gift shopping for the family. Ed turned out the required travel pieces, appearing as special supplements in the Review , and later as booklets of the Chinese Tourist Bureau. He was accompanied as guide, interpreter, and coauthor by a forty-year-old recently returned student from Harvard named S. Y. Livingston Hu. Though the latter sported file title of technical expert of the ministry of railways, Hu's position was, as was often the case with the educated elite, a sinecure obtained through good connections. Devoid of railway expertise, Hu was a haughty individual who concentrated on the comforts and pleasures he considered his due as an official. Missouri-educated Snow chose to regard Hu's attributes as primarily the product of his Harvard background.^[23]

From Peking in June, Snow and his companion traveled west on the Peking-Suiyuan line to Zhangjiakou (then, Kalgan). Beyond that city in China's northwest lay a vast area then experiencing devastating drought and famine. At Snow's insistence they continued on into the famine zone, with their special car hooked to a freight-passenger train. Coincidentally Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who was a factory inspector for the Shanghai municipal council, was on that train, squatting on the floor of one of the wagons with the mass of Chinese famine refugees. A powerful, squarely built man, he was a twice wounded veteran of the western front in the great war and had come to Shanghai from New Zealand in 1927. He was now on his way to the famine zone to spend his vacation time helping to build an irrigation canal under the auspices of the International Famine Relief Commission. The project, directed by the legendary American engineer and China road-builder O.J. Todd ("Todd Almighty"), served also to provide work and grain for famine victims. Alley would spend the remainder of his long life in China; at his death in 1987 at age ninety he was an honored figure in the People's Republic. He worked tirelessly among China's laboring masses in the decades of war and civil war. Snow and Alley would later become fast lifetime friends and partners in their wartime efforts to aid China and its people. But it was here that Snow first met Alley fleetingly and as yet from different worlds.

When Snow and Alley first encountered each other on the crowded station platform along the famine route, the contrast in appearance of the two foreigners could hardly have been greater. Alley had developed a badly suppurating red eye, was dressed in crumpled khakis, and was dusty and bedraggled from rain pouring through the broken roof of his car. Snow, riding in his private VIP carriage, was attired in an immacu-

late white linen jacket, shirt, and shorts with long white stockings. To Snow, Alley seemed "a queer duck, but interesting." Hu superciliously refused Snow's request to allow Alley to share their comfortable accommodations. Alley cheerfully returned to his peasant companions and the two apparently had no further direct contact as the train moved on to the end of the line at Salaqi (Saratsi), south of the Gobi Desert in what is now Inner Mongolia.^[24]

Large areas of northwestern China had suffered drought and famine throughout the 1920s, in addition to the normal ravages of such human plagues as bandits, militarists, extortionate tax collectors, landlords, grain merchants, and moneylenders. But the great famine of 1929-1930, witnessed by Alley and Snow in Suiyuan, was the most calamitous of all and took at least two million lives. Salaqi, Alley later wrote, "was altogether a very shocking place," with its population swelled by famine victims who had walked there from faraway villages. As Alley described the scene, "Deserted villages were ransacked of timber, animals stolen or killed, and women sold to dealers who would ship them south, while the men, old women and boys existed on the charity of the soup kitchen until most died and were thrown into the city moat. These were scenes hard to forget."^[25]

This experience of horror, death, and inhumanity would haunt Snow the remainder of his life. It was a further jolt in the "consciousness-raising" process he was undergoing in China. From this ordeal, he subsequently recalled, he "began to doubt that the real revolution [in China] had begun." Yet Snow's reaction was still largely on the compassionate rather than the political level. He expressed it in an article he did on the famine. His graphic description of the scene focused on the Famine Relief Commission's canal-building project that could immediately save perhaps a quarter million lives by providing grain for work and solve the famine problem in the future. Snow placed blame for the tragedy on the drought, warlord battlings, and inadequate transport facilities. Aside from a brief questioning of the Chinese government's willingness to cooperate with international aid efforts (absent from the version published in the pro-Nationalist Review ), Snow's animus was directed more at the foreigners in Shanghai who spoke of "the so-called famine" and who even counseled their friends back home "not to be taken in by all this `starvation propaganda."' (An excerpt from Snow's article was included in a fund-raising appeal in America for China famine relief.)^[26]

In Shenyang (then, Mukden) on his railway trip, Snow interviewed Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" who had succeeded his warlord

father (assassinated by Japanese agents in 1928) as the military-political overlord of Manchuria—China's northeast (Dongbei). This proved to be Snow's only encounter with a man who was to have a special role in the destinies of both Snow and China. The interview, which Snow wrote up as a Herald-Tribune piece, came as a crisis was building in Sino-Soviet relations. The Young Marshal was attempting to oust the Russians from their management role in the jointly owned and operated Chinese Eastern Railway, the czarist-built line that ran across northern Manchuria from the Siberian frontier east to a junction point above the Russian port of Vladivostok on the Pacific. Zhang Xueliang had hitched his star to Chiang Kai-shek's Nanking regime, and the move against the Russians had both a nationalist and an anti-Communist connotation. It was also an indirect challenge to Japan's much more dominant and powerful "special position" in southern Manchuria. The Soviets responded vigorously, sending their troops across the frontier. A negotiated settlement followed the defeat of the Chinese forces, fully restoring the Russian presence on the railway.^[27]

Snow's talk with the Young Marshal touched on all of the above points. Despite the impending confrontation with the Russians, Zhang declared Japan to be the primary enemy and affirmed his patriotic support for a united China (including Manchuria) under a strong central government. Snow was impressed by Zhang's candor and forthright, confident defiance of Japan. Discounting the "rumors" (truthful) of Zhang's opium habit, Snow found the youthful warlord to be an appealing and popular figure, whether in mingling with the students on the large modern campus of Northeastern University in Mukden, or playing golf in his stylish plus-fours. However, in another article from Manchuria, Snow voiced skepticism at the probabilities of Chinese success in breaking Japan's stranglehold on southern Manchuria. The odds in the coming contest were "greatly in favor of the Japanese," and the chances of China "retaining, or rather regaining," control of her Manchurian provinces were "exceedingly remote."^[28]

The 1929 Sino-Russian conflict led to still another extended postponement in Snow's homebound plans, probably the critical one in his gradual abandonment of these intentions. Powell had wired him in Peking to cut short the railway project and return to Shanghai to take over the Review while he rushed up to Manchuria to cover the breaking story for the Chicago Tribune . Powell's absence stretched on to include a trip to the Soviet Union, and Snow remained in charge for some six months. Listed on the Review's masthead as assistant editor, he retained

this connection until the end of March 1930. He also took on Powell's chores as Shanghai correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Manchester Guardian . Being "an editor and correspondent for two major world newspapers leaves little time for writing letters home," he rather grandly informed the family—in the course of writing just such an affectionate nine-page letter! Though impatient for Powell to return so that he (Snow) could be on his way, Ed was increasingly caught up in his budding China journalistic career. Never before had he been so well-informed on all current happenings, he wrote home. He was "enjoying the prestige" of his new jobs. "See my stories in the Chicago Tribune?" Ed wondered what that eminent paper (then ruled by the autocratic Colonel McCormick) would say "if they knew their Shanghai correspondent had never worked on a copy desk in his life and was still a little damp behind the ears?" Snow's task was eased by the friendly advice of Millard and other veterans in the Shanghai press corps. His growing fund of information and insight on China did not as yet extend to the Communists, whom he referred to as "numerous bands of Chinese Communist-bandits, who still exercise control of remote sections of the country." Hard, firsthand intelligence on the Reds was lacking, and Western journalists in Shanghai were dependent on government handouts that dismissed the Reds as "bandits." Snow himself would once and for all dispel the "bandit" myth in his Red Star .^[29]

In Shanghai, Snow participated in another government-sponsored public relations travel stint—this time in the air. He was a passenger in October 1929 on the trial run for the start of amphibian air service from Shanghai to Hankou. Operated by an American aviation firm under contract to the Chinese government, it marked the inauguration of Nationalist China's commercial air service under its official airline, China National Aviation Corporation. Snow wrote up the flight as a promotional piece for the Review in his now well honed travelogue style. The eight-hundred-mile trip, wonder of wonders, took only seven hours each way—"was such a feat possible except by the aid of that mysterious and fantastic creature of Chinese imagination, the omnipotent Dragon?"^[30]

During his tenure editing the Revi ew, Snow made local waves over the practice in many foreign buildings in Shanghai of barring Chinese from using front elevators and entrances reserved for Caucasians. He targeted the British-owned building in which the Review had its offices and excoriated such "ridiculous regulations humiliating to the Chinese." Snow's editorial provoked a "die-hard" reaction from the British-run North China Daily News . But the discriminatory policies were quietly

dropped, though the Review's lease was not renewed. Actually, Snow's views were in complete accord with the Review's policies under Powell and undoubtedly further enhanced its standing among its many Chinese subscribers and advertisers. According to Powell's son, "the incident later became one of [J. B.'s] favorite stories and he would jokingly claim that he got back just as the British were throwing Ed and his typewriter into the street."^[31]

Snow followed up his anti-segregationist mini-crusade with a piece in the New York Sun the next year noting with satisfaction the ending of discriminatory policies in Shanghai's foreign shops and hotels. Faced with growing competition from Chinese-owned enterprises in the more assertive Chinese Nationalist political climate, foreign investors and shopowners could no longer ignore the buying power of the Chinese customer. Catering to this clientele had become a matter of economic survival. "The policy of exclusionism reigns no more," Snow declared, "except in foreign clubs where the white-haired die-hards still gather to lament the passing of days `When these yellow men knew their betters and acted accordingly.'"^[32]

Howard and Ed missed each other dreadfully, with Ed nostalgically recalling their life together in New York, and Howard constantly importuning his brother to come home. At the same time they took pride and interest in each other's accomplishments in New York and Shanghai respectively. "Ed has certainly made the most of his travels," Howard wrote his mother in July 1929, and "is proving himself to be a cracker-jack reporter." That he has been able to do all this at age twenty-four and in less than a year "is almost unbelievable!" But "while proud of what Ed has done," he observed to the family in October, "I do wish he would come home. It would make us all so much happier and a little closer together." A few months later Howard was evincing understandable skepticism at Ed's constantly reiterated pledges to return home. "It doesn't phase me any more to read this in his letters," Howard commented to his mother on one such pledge. "He has written it so often that I begin to suspect him of putting it down for lack of any other news."^[33]

At the same time Howard fully supported. Ed's writing career and, through his advertising-publications connections, was instrumental in getting some of Ed's early pieces into print. Yet as Howard continued to move up to ever better positions and salaries in the business world, Ed felt further left behind and apart from that particular road to success. And while Ed was becoming more and more attuned to Chinese sensitivities and aspirations, Howard retained a stereotypical view of the

"slant-eyes," and a belief that "the climate there is not good for white people." As Ed's horizons broadened, Howard's focused more narrowly on his New York-based business career. Juxtaposed to the brothers' strong and enduring mutual affection was the widening gulf in their material and occupational goals and circumstances. Their dialogue through the succeeding decades was in many ways a fascinating paradigm of America itself, where traditional modes of thinking would be constantly challenged by a vast range of new problems and forces, domestic and foreign.^[34]

As Powell's absence stretched on through the final months of 1929, Snow resigned himself to another winter in Shanghai. (The chilly dampness did not help his chronic problem with sinus-related head colds, aggravated, he often felt, by his "inordinate" desire for cigarettes.) The de-dine in silver prices in the mounting world depression had its effect on Ed's plans. He had kept his money in silver (Mex) dollars; with the sharp drop in the exchange rate for gold (U.S. currency), he was "practically on my uppers," he morosely informed his mother. "What will happen when I have to buy gold before I start travelling I do not

know."^[35]

Yet in a number of ways, Snow was sinking deeper roots in Shanghai. Together with a young American friend, he rented a small well-furnished apartment and took on an "excellent" cook-housekeeper-valet. Lodging, food, and servant cost each of the two Americans a total of thirty dollars gold per month. Still longing for "the sparkling streets of New York," Ed could appreciate the fact that "a treasure" such as his new cook, even if available in New York, would have to be paid ten times more than the ten-dollar-a-month Shanghai wage.^[36]

Snow was also building a cosmopolitan circle of friends in Shanghai. "They include members of every race that is found in any numbers in the Orient," he told his mother, describing them in his usual colorful way:

There is a German newspaper man and a woman author of Deutschland; a Soviet Russian whose Polish wife has a voice like a bell; a Chinese who loves English poetry; an American marine officer [Evans Carlson] whose wife is a lovely southern girl whose specialty is tea with raisin crumpets; a Georgian from the Caucasus, and Georgians are the most entrancing of all women; a young Chinese couple who are my favorites, though they live like mice on a government salary that wouldn't buy your lettuce; a Japanese girl with gold teeth and a brain—a rare combination in Nihon—who is teaching me something of her language in exchange for my criticism of her English and applause for her divine sukiyaki; an Indian poet married to a Japanese, who to-

gether own a garden that is a miniature Arcadia; and an American Jewess who looks like an Irish girl—"all these," as Rupert Brooke would say, "have been my loves." Figuratively speaking, of course.^[37]

In December Snow accepted an offer to be the Shanghai correspondent for the Washington-based Consolidated Press Association (Con Press), a newly organized service representing a number of American newspapers, including the New York Sun and Chicago Daily News . The job called for Snow to send in mainly "mailers" (rather than routine spot cable dispatches) on interesting background stories he came across. Essentially part-time, at a modest monthly salary of eighty dollars, it suited Snow's footloose temperament, seemed a good stop-gap while he thought out his longer-term plans, and allowed time for other writing. As a "roving correspondent," he hoped to do stories for Con Press during a trip into Soviet Central Asia and beyond, which he planned to take in the spring of 1930. But his application for a Soviet visa was denied, presumably for his tics (severed at the end of March 1930) with the anti-Soviet Review . Ed turned instead to an alternate plan through southern China and Southeast Asia, to begin in the fall. Con Press approved the project, with Snow to receive three hundred dollars monthly for feature stories and pictures.^[38]

The heartrending death of his mother in March 1930 further reduced the pressure for an early return home. Ed continued to play with the idea of going back to New York in the fall, but his interest seemed halfhearted. The impact of the depression, and of his long absence, on job opportunities worried him. "Anxiously" he inquired of Howard on the possibilities of "a good advertising or publication job" in New York. A month later, June 1930, still voicing his intention to return, he aired his anxieties at the prospect—the dearth of good jobs in depression America, and his distaste at the thought of the "old 9 to 5 routine" after two years of "personal management freedom."^[39]

There was sadness in Ed's yearning to rekindle the old carefree times with Howard. "We will know many happy days again, many of them," he told Howard, "and recapture an old scent for living." But the past could not and would not live again. Howard's marriage in December 1930, closely followed by Mildred's, dashed any such illusions. Now almost all his close, and to him supremely important, family ties in Kansas City and New York were broken. ("Old faces, old times are forever haunting my waking hours," and "you never need fear that I shall not return," he had written his mother a few months before her death.) Ed

summed this up to Mildred from remote Kunming (Yunnanfu) in January 1931. "Since you and Howard are both fled up in marriage and domesticity, I see no reason for my early return now.... What a gap has been left in things for me, now that Howard has started a new life!!"^[40]

With the pull of his warm youthful family memories and connections now set aside, a maturing and more worldly-wise Snow affirmed the independence that would be the credo of his life. Writing to Howard from Shanghai at the end of 1931, after yearlong travel in southern China, Southeast Asia, and India, Ed felt that he preferred to stay on in China because "I do not wish at present to be confined to a desk job." Though only on a modest reporter's salary, "I have great freedom and no one can make so bold as to order me here or there," he added. "One has to make certain sacrifices in the world to be able to thumb one's nose at it."^[41]

In the longer term, Snow's changing perspectives were probably even more critical in loosening his ties to family and home. He had come to appreciate the people and culture of China, while gaining deeper insight into that nation's problems, politics, and aims. After two years away, by the early months of 1930, his views were beginning to clash with the conventional insularity, racism, and paternalism that most Americans (including his family) directed toward the non-Caucasian and "backward" regions of the earth. Additionally, a gap was now developing between his new thinking and experiences, and the culture of material success he had been part of in Kansas City and New York.

Given his sympathies for China's national cause and distaste for the Shanghai "die-hards," Snow voiced his hostility to the entire system of extraterritoriality, which gave legal sanction to foreign economic interests and privileges in the treaty ports and concession areas of China. In the spring of 1930 he wrote an apparently unpublished piece condemning the presence of American marines in Shanghai. He sent it on to Howard to place for publication, though he doubted its acceptability: a publisher "might be accused of being anti-marine, which is a cardinal sin in America I'm told." Howard himself, in what was often to be a contentious (though not unfriendly) dialogue between the two, found Ed's comments on the marines to be "critical, sarcastic." Ed rejoined that "Americans at home ought to know, or be reminded of, this offensive organization's presence on Chinese soil. To talk of Sino-American `understanding' while they are still here is to talk nonsense." Ed twitted Howard on the "color" issue as well. He hadn't seen "a good-looking American girl for months," he wrote his brother in June 1930. "You see, I draw the color line; I haven't been out with a white girl since last December."^[42]

Snow distanced himself further and more openly from Shanghai's foreign establishment in a mid-1930 article for H. L. Mencken's influential and iconoclastic American Mercury . He targeted the American businessmen and missionaries and gave evidence of his growing estrangement from the American milieu that spawned them. He took a caustic and telling look at the realities of the International Settlement ("a poorly camouflaged British colony"), focusing on the seamy and "wicked" side of Shanghai life. In the best debunking fashion, Snow zeroed in on the Americans' transplanted country club existence, their naughty dalliances and naïveté in their Shanghai world of Russian mistresses, exclusive brothels, and cabarets. In the process, they brought glitter to the settlement's night life—"it is American money and American laughter that enables all the joints to function profitably." Snow typically saved his sharpest barbs for the missionaries—not very successful in saving souls but doing very well in all other respects. Though written mostly in an irreverent and amusing style suited to Mencken's journal, Snow's article had a more serious point to make. It was the theme of the foreigners' isolation from, ignorance of, and lack of interest in the Chinese people around them, whom they saw as "so much background— necessary for trade and industry, but isn't it—ah—unfortunate that they couldn't all be like us?" Their knowledge of the Chinese, Snow commented, came principally from "solemn, pidgin-English conversations with their houseboys."

Snow also sensitively captured the empty sadness of such foreigners. In the green-lawned environs of the country club, he wrote, "the Shanghai American can sit in cloistered tranquility. Far from the sickly Orient, he lolls in cushioned ease, sips amber drinks, dreams lazily under a sky of deep velvet and misty chrome, hears Rudy Vallee come out of the orthophonic, feels the warm breath of the parched earth against his temples, and believes he is back in Evanston—and perhaps wishes to God he were."^[43]

Ed's article did not amuse the Shanghailanders, among whom he soon found himself in the doghouse, at least temporarily. According to Helen Snow, even Millard and Powell were unhappy with the piece. In Journey , Snow wrote that his comments on Christianity in the article had evoked a sharp response from the "town elders;" to the effect that "Christianity had made Shanghai what it was." Personally, Ed added sardonically, "I would never have gone that far." To Iris father, who took a dim view of Mencken, Ed defended the latter as "the Knighted adversary of ballyhoo, of which our American life is the credulous minion." "For

every line of satire he writes, a hundred are written in the pompous bourgeois publications to the effect that God's in his heaven and all's right with America.... We are afraid of the truth."^[44]

The hostility Snow engendered, particularly among the British, in championing Chinese rights probably contributed to the compilation of a dossier on him by the British-run settlement police. Apparently based on "information" supplied by a White Russian informer, it painted a lurid past for Snow as a clandestine and dangerous agent of the Third International. This, before young Snow had the opportunity even to discover the left, in China or elsewhere. But as always, the radicalism really at issue was the more substantive and threatening one of Snow's challenge to smug notions of white superiority and supremacy. He would find himself on further blacklists through the years for defying other powerful interests, imperial or political, including the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and the Soviets. The Shanghai files would crop up in various places and times, including American FBI files in the 1950s.^[45]

Snow was becoming disenchanted with the Nanking regime as the harbinger of an invigorated China, and of its capacity to unify the country under an effective and stable central government. The continuous and inconclusive conflicts between Chiang Kai-shek's forces and his many and varied military and political opponents throughout the country reinforced this view. Commenting to his father in December 1929, Snow marveled at Chiang's ability to "hang on." Largely uneducated, "personally unimpressive, and a man of narrow vision and with few scruples," Chiang remained in power because his enemies could not make common cause against him.^[46]

In a subsequent Herald-Tribune article, Snow criticized the Kuomintang for deifying Sun Yat-sen and building a cult around the man and his doctrines. It was blind idolatry that served the political purpose of the Nanking government. Sun's concept of "political tutelage," for example, was being used to avoid genuine steps toward constitutionalism and democracy. Snow quoted the prestigious Western-educated liberal scholar Hu Shih on this point: "Who are these men that head the government and would lead us through the gates of self-government? ... Do Chiang Kai-shek, Feng Yu-hsiang, and Yen Hsi-shan and other militarists have any conception of what a democratic government is? I think not." Sun, now no longer the "dangerous radical" of Snow's first months in China, emerged as an enlightened though far from infallible leader whose words had been twisted and who would have been the first to reject such worship. Sun had in fact sought to awaken the Chinese from

age-old superstition and intellectual passivity, Snow declared. Defending his criticisms of the National government to his father, Ed compared the Kuomintang's use of the Sun cult to Spain's use of "the incense and idolatry" of Catholicism to enslave the Americas centuries before. "Spain betrayed Christ; the Kuomintang may yet betray Sun Yat-sen."^[47]

Snow's growing aversion to the Kuomintang posed dilemmas for him on the subject of extraterritoriality and the restoration of full Chinese sovereignty. A simplistic "pro-China" position begged many questions. As Snow turned more sharply against the Nationalist regime and grew openly sympathetic to its liberal and leftist opponents, the protections of extraterritoriality became crucial to his own freedom to act and write as he did. "We couldn't have done anything if we'd been under Chinese law," Helen Snow later observed. "A Chinese would have been executed for even messing with such things as we did." (Nor could such Chinese even depend on the protection of the International Settlement. Alleged Communists among them were picked up by the settlement police and routinely turned over to Kuomintang authorities.) Nevertheless the larger issue remained. Extraterritoriality was the legal underpinning for imperialism in China, and a barrier to a fully independent China. It was interesting that Snow's article on Sun Yat-sen itself revealed some of these difficulties and contradictions. He noted that Hu Shih's critiques had appeared in the British North China Daily News , an organ bitterly opposed to the Nationalist government and its aspirations to end extraterritoriality. Publishing Hu Shih's articles obviously served the paper's ulterior political motives, but, as Snow made clear, such articles could not be printed in Kuomintang-ruled China. The extraterritoriality issue vis-à-vis the Western powers would ultimately be subsumed by the much more menacing Japanese threat and would be ended only in the course of the Pacific War. Indeed, extraterritoriality also protected American journalists like Snow (and Powell) from the Japanese—until Pearl Harbor. All in all, life in old China for American partisans of a new China had its anomalies.^[48]

Two years away from New York and almost four from Kansas City, Snow wrestled with his growing disaffection with American norms of success generally, and his brother's in particular. According to the "American credo," he propounded to his father in February 1930, money rather than intellectual or cultural attainment, was "the sole end of lift?' and the measure of success. Those who questioned this were thrust aside as violators of "the American duty of making more money than one really needs." (Snow had the advantage of living quite comfortably in

China on a very modest dollar income.) Applying these thoughts to Howard and himself, Ed underscored their differing perspectives but still harbored hopes of coming back to New York and the brother he adored. Howard's ambition, Ed observed, was to amass a fortune through business as rapidly as possible and only thereafter turn to the finer things of life. But Howard had an "artistic, sensitive heart," an impediment in "the American struggle for success." As a result, Ed felt, the odds were against Howard's "attaining the status he desires as quickly as he desires.^[49]

Continuing in this vein, Ed declared that he too had "suppressed the fires of other loves" in pursuing aims similar to Howard's. But he had rejected status and had "fled New York." When he sailed out of Manhattan harbor, he had sworn "to forget the necessity of emulating" the American "princes of business" he had been taught to worship. "An older pantheism beckoned to me from across sunlit seas, and I wished to investigate it." That Ed had exhibited a daring élan in leaving New York in 1928 is unquestionable; that he had turned his back on the possibilities of a later financially successful New York career (albeit as a writer) is much less clear. Recall that such "mini-princes" of the business and media world as the banker Kelley Graham and the author-editor Charlie Towne had enthusiastically spurred him on his way, on the assumption of the one-year jaunt Ed had planned. (Both in fact were importuning him to return, a year or so later.) Ed was looking back to 1928 with 1930 hindsight. Yet as he discarded old verities and goals, "The new influences and ideas that have streamed into me do not fuse coherenently; ... nothing orderly, definite, dependable evolves."^[50]

The buoyant, romantic youth who dallied on Waikiki and stowed away to Japan had become a more burdened and seasoned adult of twenty-five. His optimistic confidence and faith in the world he had known, and the comfortable assurance of his place in it, had been battered by traumas back home and the impact of a "pitiable" China. He had already proved himself an able journalist and talented writer and was poised for an adventurous journey to colonial Asia and remote Yunnan— China at its most scenic and medieval. Thus far, he had been introduced to an ancient world where human misery and poverty were endemic, and injustice and greed seemed the norm. He had become sensitized to people of color and aware of cultures and histories he had once thought of only vaguely as backdrops for colorful travel accounts. He had aligned himself with the national cause of China and the Chinese, but with shaken faith in the Nationalists as champions of that cause.

An anecdotal parable Snow recorded in his diary seemed apropos to his own quest. An American railroad builder in northern China sits with Chinese to discuss where railways should be built. "Each point he suggests is turned down because it is a 'sphere of influence' of either Russia, Japan, France or Great Britain. Exasperated, he finally emits, 'Then where in hell is China!'" In the years just ahead, new influences and ideas would continue to stream into Snow, further changing and radicalizing his image of China, and of the world.^[51]

In short, he was becoming Edgar Snow.