Weird People of History: Maoism's Western Propagandist, Edgar Snow

Edgar Snow. Source

Most history books I read feature, at best, one Weird Person of History: one person so charismatic, so active, so goddamn strange, that he seems almost like the main character of reality. Most people live small, ordinary lives. Only the rare few make me contemplate a career change to director so that someone can make a movie about this guy.

Maoism: A Global History has two Weird People of History per chapter.

I normally try to write about all the Weird People of History I come across, but if I do that to Maoism: A Global History I will wind up plagiarizing the entire book and Julia Lovell will be mad at me.

So. Let me pick just one, and tell you about Edgar Snow.

Edgar Snow was born in 1905. His early life closely resembled a particularly unsubtle take on Superman: born in the American Midwest; handsome; cheerful and kind; an Eagle Scout; president of his fraternity. Before settling down to a real job, he decided to travel around the world, funding his trip through travel journalism. Unfortunately, his behavior wasn’t very Supermanlike: to save money on his trip to Japan, he illicitly stowed away on a ship without paying. The article he wrote about his charmingly roguish shenanigans earned him money, but the cabin boy who hid him was fired and became a beggar.

Eventually, Snow's trip took him to Shanghai, where he abandoned his vacation permanently. You see, he had learned about the wonders of purchasing power parity. He could afford to have a rickshaw driver on call 24/7 for only $12 a month ($224 in today's money). His cook was paid a tenth of what such a cook would be paid in New York City. He could live like a king on a freelance writer's salary.

Edgar Snow really liked his life of privilege and luxury. But he also felt guilty, seeing the poverty, misery, and hunger that surrounded him. Like many a campus Maoist to follow, he wanted to Do Something.

His guide to doing something? Song Qingling.

This post gives you two Weird People of History for the price of one. Song Qingling and her two sisters were the first Chinese women to study in the United States. Song Qingling was a shy idealist, prone to writing essays in the school newspaper about the need for reform in China.

The Song family was heavily involved in the republican revolution. Her wealthy father funded Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary groups. Her sister Meiling would marry Chiang Kai-shek. And Qingling became Sun Yat-sen's personal secretary and promptly fell in love with him. When her horrified parents refused to let her marry a revolutionary twenty-six years older than her, she got a maidservant to put a ladder near her room, escaped down it, and eloped with him.

It ended well for her. For the next decade, until Sun Yat-Sen's death in 1925, she was his loyal assistant and supporter. She overcame her shyness to help him, and soon became a beautiful and charming society hostess. She got pregnant only once, but miscarried when she was escaping from an assassination attempt on him. After he died, she worked with Chiang Kai-shek.

But in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists.

Disturbed by the brutality, Song Qingling remade herself into the Communist party's most skilled fellow traveller. She knew how to appeal to men like Edgar Snow. On the one hand, she loved luxury in general and European luxury in specific: dance parties, European opera, paintings, fresh flowers. On the other hand, she spoke eloquently about the suffering of the peasants in China. She acted skeptical about all politicians, saying ‘I have never trusted any Chinese politicians except Dr Sun Yat-sen…I distrust Mao Zedong less than the others.' And Qingling was entirely immune to persecution from Chiang Kai-shek, because her sister Meiling adored her and Chiang Kai-shek knew what he needed to do to keep domestic peace.

In reality, she was a loyal supporter of Mao. By 1937, she had donated $50,000 to Mao Zedong ($1.15 million in today's money). Her apparent independence was a deliberate plot: if an objective outside observer said something positive about Mao, then it must have been tree. She could introduce powerful people to people who would convince them of Maoism without it seeming artificial. They just happened to run into a particular person at a party! They were convinced by the evidence! Surely no charismatic hostess was manipulating matters from behind the scenes.

And one of the most useful men she cultivated was Edgar Snow.

In 1932, Edgar Snow married, and in 1933 he moved to Beijing to teach journalism. He continued to live a life of luxury. He had three servants, whom he paid collectively $40 a month ($1000 in today's money). His wife Helen worked as a sort of early twentieth century influencer: she got ball gowns and jewelry for free if she wore them at ballrooms to inspire other people to buy them. Though Helen herself was a leftist, the two best waltzers in Beijing were a Fascist and a Nazi, and she never let her political principles get in the way of dancing. The rest of their schedule filled with dinner parties, polo, horse races, and hanging out with radical artists and students.

But was this all? Perhaps Edgar Snow should do something for the cause of justice and equality other than donating the prize money from his Mongol racing pony to leftist causes. But what could it be?

In 1936, Edgar Snow decided to visit the Communist state in Northwest China. Song Qingling made introductions, and Snow soon had permission to visit. His letter of introduction to Mao was written in invisible ink.

After a series of adventures being smuggled by underground Chinese Communist Party agents, Snow spent four months in the Communist state. He was the first journalist allowed this level of access.

From Snow's perspective, all the Chinese Communist Party members were wonderful people: funny, handsome, intelligent, altruistic, hardworking. Snow guessed that more than half of Red Army members were virgins. They wanted nothing more than freedom and equality. To Snow, the Chinese Communist Party was entirely free of authoritarianism: none of its members venerated Mao and they all felt entirely free to question him. They never killed captured enemies, because their enemies were also part of the Chinese people; they tried to teach them the glories of Communism.

Throughout his time in the north-west, Snow failed to meet a single uncongenial individual: everywhere he was greeted by ‘cheerful smiles’ and ‘kindly eyes’. The Communist state represented the most perfectly harmonious community: its inhabitants danced, acted and sang – sometimes hilarious ditties, such as one about a revolutionary chilli pepper – and ‘what discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed’. The only criticism he heard voiced was from a Communist engineer who complained that the workers in local industries ‘spend entirely too much time singing!’ ‘I often had a queer feeling’, Snow mused, ‘among the Reds that I was in the midst of a host of schoolboys, engaged in a life of violence because some strange design of history had made this seem infinitely more important to them than football games, textbooks, love or the main concerns of youth in other countries..."

Mao himself, according to Snow, had a great sense of humor, loved books and knowledge, and could be driven to tears by the suffering of the Chinese people. He was a patriot, tireless in work, a political and military genius, and a devoted father. He despised luxury, eating simple food and wearing raggedy clothes. Most of all, he understood the peasantry deeply and synthesized their demands into a coherent political program. Mao was so sincere and truthful that Snow felt no compunction about taking all of Mao's words on faith.

Indeed, Julia Lovell speculates, "Snow seems to have been at least a little in love with Mao." I didn't realize you're allowed to put your RPF ship in your serious history book.

In part, Snow's good impression of Communist China was because they carefully courted him. While Snow was allowed apparently free run of Communist China, he was the only white person there, and it seems likely that everyone was briefed on how they should treat him. Snow was also reliant on his translator, Huang Hua, a Communist and noticeably friendly and cheerful man. Lovell speculates that a lot of the Communist footsoldiers' good humor and kindness might have been put in by Huang.

The Chinese Communist Party also kept an eye on their image in a more practical way. When Snow arrived, he was greeted with a military band and the entire cabinet. They got him as many luxuries as they could manage: clean towels, fresh bread, and even once coffee. He spent less than $100 ($2,300) in the four months because people kept giving him free stuff.

And finally Snow's reporting was heavily censored. Snow's interview transcripts were translated into Chinese, approved by Mao, and then translated back into English. While Snow was writing the book itself, the Chinese Communist Party sent him numerous revision notes to align the book with Comintern policy and to keep it up-to-date with the ever-shifting politics of who was in good standing and who was an evil revisionist.

In 1937, Red Star Over China came out. It was an instant bestseller. As late as the 1970s, both anti-Communist and pro-Communist Western China hands heralded it as a classic. Red Star Over China was read widely by guerillas around the world: Soviet partisans during World War II; Indian Maoists in the 1960s and 1970s; Nepali Maoists in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; even Nelson Mandela.

Red Star Over China was translated into Chinese in Shanghai during the 1937 Japanese invasion, the team of translators even working in the midst of battle. This was good priority-setting, because Red Star Over China was a sensation in China:

Student political groups were mesmerised by Red Star and its author; it circulated secretly across universities and high schools in Shanghai, where 50,000 copies were printed; pirate versions spread over China and sinophone Asia. Readers were so avid that some copies were ripped into individual chapters, to enable Snow’s words to travel more rapidly.

It remains popular in China even today, where it has evolved into a sort of self-help manual. (One fan in 1989 wrote an essay about how it helped him overcome colon cancer.)

Red Star Over China was particularly credible because it wasn't Communist propaganda. Edgar Snow was an American, an outside observer. He could be trusted to report accurately. And what he reported was utopia: a Communist paradise of diligence, cooperation, equality, patriotism, and freedom.

Edgar Snow parlayed Red Star Over China into a career as a China expert. He personally advised FDR on China policy. However, McCarthyism made it impossible for him to stay in the United States, and he spent the last few decades of his life in Switzerland.

Snow made several more carefully choreographed visits to China after the founding of the People's Republic of China. One of his books "refuted" rumors of the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward. Since few foreign journalists were allowed in China, Snow's writing was disproportionately important. He had on-the-ground insight that the West was otherwise almost entirely lacking.

Snow died in 1972 of pancreatic cancer. After a lifetime of service to Chinese Communism, Song Qingling was permitted membership in the Chinese Communist Party on her deathbed in 1981.