Edgar
Snow, the son of a printer, was born in Kansas City on 19th July 1905.
After graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism
at Columbia University in New York, Snow
worked for several newspapers.
In
1928 Snow travelled to China and became assistant editor
of the China Weekly Review in
Shanghai. His first book on China, Far Eastern
Front, was published in 1933.
Snow
moved to Beijing in 1933 where he lectured at Yenching University.
He also became foreign correspondent for the Saturday
Evening Post. He also provided articles on China for
the Daily Herald, New
York Sun and the Chicago Tribune.
In
1936 Snow visited northern Shaanxi where he interviewed the leaders
of the revolutionary Red Army. The following year he published Red
Star Over China (1936).
Snow
reported on the Second World War and after visiting
Hong Kong and the Philippines
published Battle for Asia (1941).
He also reported on the ambush and massacre of the Communist-led New
Fourth Army by KMT government troops.
In 1942 Snow became war
correspondent for the Saturday
Evening Post.
This included covering the war in India,
China
and the Soviet
Union. In 1944 Snow was one of only six American correspondents
accredited to cover the Eastern Front.
After the war Snow returned
to the United States. However, Snow and his
friend Agnes Smedley,
was accused of being a communist by Joseph
McCarthy. Snow
eventually decided to leave the country and went to live in Switzerland.
Snow continued to write
on China and important books by him include The
Other Side of the River (1962) and The
Long Revolution (1972). Edgar
Snow died
in Switzerland on 15th February 1972.
(1)
Huang Hua, China Remembers Edgar Snow (1982)
Edgar Snow's life bears amplest testimony to the friendship between
the Chinese and American peoples. In 1928, he came to China, then
a country in the depth of miseries, where he lived and worked for
13 years. After China's liberation, he returned to China on three
occasions, during which he made long and extensive tours and visits.
He had the personal experience
of three periods of great changes in contemporary China: the period
of Agrarian Revolution, the period of the War of Resistance Against
Japan and the period of socialist revolution and construction. Throughout
those forty years, he always sympathized with and supported the just
struggle of the Chinese people, leaving behind a brilliant chapter
in the annals of the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
Edgar Snow came to China
as an honest journalist. With keen insight, unaffected sympathy and
the realistic spirit of seeking truth, and through his independent
observation and contemplation, he' gradually came to know the main
trend and orientation of the development of Chinese history. The miserable
sight of the industrious and honest Chinese people struggling in famine
and on the verge of death gave him a clear picture about the intolerable
dark rule over old China. On the other hand, he saw the future of
China and a source of strength in the heroism of the Chinese Communists
and the patriotic youths carrying on ceaseless and unflinching struggles
for national independence and social emancipation
(2)
Edgar Snow, Scorched Earth (1941)
The Japanese entered Nanking on December 12th, as Chinese troops and
civilians were still trying to withdraw to the north bank of the Yangtze
River, debouching through the one remaining gate. Scenes of utmost
confusion ensued. Hundreds of people were machine-gunned by Japanese
planes or drowned while trying to cross the river; hundreds more were
caught in the bottleneck which developed at Hsiakuan gate, where bodies
piled up four feet high.
Anything female between
the ages of 10 and 70 was raped. Discards were often bayoneted by
drunken soldiers. Frequently mothers had to watch their babies beheaded,
and then submit to raping. One mother told of being raped by a soldier
who, becoming annoyed at the cries of her baby, put a quilt over its
head, and smothered it to death, finishing his performance in peace.
Some officers, who led these forays, turned their quarters into harems
and fell into bed each night with a new captive. Open-air copulation
was not uncommon. Some 50,000 troops in the city were let loose for
over a month in an orgy of rape, murder, looting and general debauchery
which has nowhere been equalled in modern times.
Twelve thousand stores
and houses were stripped of all their stocks and furnishings, and
then set ablaze. Civilians were relieved of all personal belongings,
and individual Japanese soldiers and officers stole motor-cars and
rickshaws and other conveyances in which to haul their loot to Shanghai.
The homes of foreign diplomats were entered and their servants murdered...
"Practically every
building in the city", wrote one of the foreign observers, "has
been robbed repeatedly by soldiers, including the American, British
and German Embassies... Most of the shops, after-free-for-all breaking
and pilfering, were systematically stripped by gangs of soldiers working
with trucks, often under the observed direction of officers."
International "Safety
Zone" became in reality a danger zone for non-combatants and
a boomerang for its well-meaning organizers. Day after day Japanese
entered the zone to seize women for the pacification of the lusty
heroes. Young girls were dragged from American and British missionary
schools, installed in brothels for the troops, and heard from no more.
One day in a letter written by one of the missionaries in the Zone
I read about a strange act of patriotism, concerning a number of singing-girls
who had sought refuge with their virtuous sisters. Knowing of their
presence in the camp, and urged on by some of the matrons, the missionary
asked them if any would volunteer to serve the Japanese, so that non-professional
women might be spared. They despised the enemy as much as the rest;
but after some deliberation nearly all of them stepped forth. Surely
they must have redeemed whatever virtue such women may be held to
have lost, and some of them gave their lives in this way, but as far
as I know they never received posthumous recognition or even the Order
of the Brilliant Jade.
In Shanghai a few Japanese
deeply felt the shame and the humiliation. I remember, for example,
talking one evening to a Japanese friend, a liberal-minded newspaper
man who survived by keeping his views to himself, and whose name I
withhold for his own protection. "Yes, they are all true,"
he unexpectedly admitted when I asked him about some atrocity reports,
"only the facts are actually worse than any story yet published."
There were tears in his eyes and I took his sorrow to be genuine.
(3)
Rewi Alley, a New Zealand reporter working in China, wrote about Edgar
Snow in 1882.
Edgar Snow wrote a great deal to bring things as he saw them with
regard to China, to the peoples of the world. He had a sense of history,
knowing well that not much more than a couple of centuries before,
China had been the world's greatest and most prosperous state, and
that now as she arose again what this could mean to all peoples. He
wanted the good, ordinary hard-working folk everywhere to know of
what simple, ordinary people like themselves in China could accomplish,
ever with the hope that as the Chinese people gained new freedoms,
they would look out and try to take in the best of the world around
them.
(4)
Edgar Snow, letter to Israel Epstein (22nd May, 1962)
In my tour (of the USA after the war) I made 38 lectures, mostly to
colleges and universities, but also to forums, men's clubs, women's
clubs, etc. Very great interest (in China) everywhere. I was picketed
by Birchites (neo-McCarthyites) several times and had a few lectures
cancelled, but this is a minority and not a very strong one. There
is little real support for US-China policy but there is not any organized
support to change it. The voter has no control or voice in policy.
(5)
Just before he died Edgar Snow wrote about his work in China.
The truth is that if I have written anything useful about China it
has been merely because I listened to what I thought I heard the Chinese
people saying about themselves. I wrote it down, as honestly and as
frankly as I could - considering my own
belief that it was all in the family - that I belonged to the same
family as the Chinese - the human family.
(6)
William Corr, Asia Week (November 1997)
Edgar Snow's sympathetic portrayal of Mao Zedong in his 1938 classic
Red Star Over China convinced many Americans that he was one
of those starry-eyed dupes who "lost" China. But, paradoxically,
during the early years of the People's Republic he was out of favor
with the Communists too. In 1952, the China Monthly described
Red Star Over China as a work of Titoist subversion, referring
to the Yugoslav president who had taken his country out of the Soviet
orbit and thus was then a dirty word in the Communist lexicon.
In reality, Snow was nobody's
dupe. A stolid man from Kansas by upbringing, he described what he
saw with little bias, except when writing of European imperialism,
which he detested. Raw, naive and brash, in the American manner, he
proved to be a quick learner and soon gained a thorough understanding
of those eventful times when Japanese militarists were gnawing relentlessly
at Shanghai and northern China.
Two recent books examine
the Edgar Snow legend comprehensively. In Season of High Adventure
(University of California Press) S. Bernard Thomas expertly sketches
Snow's career from his boyhood to his death in Switzerland in 1972.
As he sees it, Snow brought Mao to the attention of the wider world
during the years when Mao was based in the hinterland of Yanan. Later,
Snow was one of the few Western writers allowed to visit China when
the Bamboo Curtain was a tangible reality. Indeed, his invitation
to stand next to the Great Helmsman on the reviewing platform at Tiananmen
on National Day, 1968, was intended as a signal to Washington that
the door was open to better relations. But, as Henry Kissinger ruefully
confessed later, nobody managed to decode the signal.
Robert M. Farnsworth's
From Vagabond to Journalist (University of Missouri Press),
concentrates only on Snow's years in Asia between 1928 and 1941. Drawing
on personal letters, diaries and unpublished manuscripts in the U.S.,
as well as on the many interviews and anecdotes collected while he
was a Fulbright lecturer in China in the mid-1980s, Farnsworth has
produced a detailed work of scholarship.
The writer seems to have
met everyone still living who remembered the Edgar Snow of the Yanan
days, and, fortunately, he was astute enough to grasp that his memory,
like that of other "old friends of China," is frequently
evoked in China for contemporary political purposes. The two books
present a sympathetic portrait of a complex human being as well as
a gifted and influential writer.
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