Edgar Snow in Red China

BY JOHN K. FAIHBANK

EDGAR SNOWwas the first journalist to get into the small northwest area known as Red China in 1936 and give the story of Mao Tse-tung and his followers to the outside world. Red Star Over China, published in 1937, became a classic, read everywhere for its biography of Mao, its account of guerrilla tactics, its prognosis of the trend of China’s revolution. Twenty-five years later Snow has discovered Red China all over again. In 1960 he spent five months touring the country, the first American reporter who had been there in the old days to do so, and thus he can give us beforeand-after comparisons. The Other Side of the River (Random House, $10.00) makes effective use of his background knowledge of Red China. It is a bit as if Marco Polo were playing Rip van Winkle.

Like any major work on a great and controversial problem, The Other Side of the River gives the inquiring reader homework to do on many problems of attitude and judgment. The book is full of vivid firsthand detail, personal insights, and not a little philosophizing about the condition of mankind. What lies behind it? What were the author’s assumptions and sensitivities, his aims and opportunities? How far did he penetrate the mainland scene? How can American readers evaluate (taking into account their own personal and perhaps barely conscious attitudes concerning Red China) Mr. Snow’s attitude and experience, and the various attitudes of the Chinese whom he saw, from old friends among the leadership to young Party activists and peasants in villages? What realities of China today filter through all these layers of feeling and interpretation?

Leaving aside the embarrassing question whether it is feasible to generalize about 700 million people, as we daily try to do, we can look first at the author, then at his book, and through it, if possible, at China in 1960.

When Ed Snow became a journalist on J. B. Powell’s China Weekly Review in Shanghai in 1928, he was twenty-two years old, fresh from Kansas City, on his way, as he thought, around the world. By the time he got into Red China in 1936, he had had seven years’ experience of the treaty ports, the great northwest famine of 1929—1930, the Japanese undeclared war of 1931-1932 (which he reported in Far Eastern Front), and student movements at Yenching University outside Peiping. Like so many Westerners, he had become an intimately involved and yet immune spectator of Chinese life and its intricate daily struggles, especially the absorbing intensity of personal and political relations in a society where the individual must rely not on impersonal institutions, but on other people. By the time Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, Chou En-lai, and the other Communist leaders had completed their hegira, the Long March, escaping from central China to the northwest, and were ready to tell the story of their struggle, Ed Snow at the age of thirty was prepared to understand its implications and report it in very human terms.

Red Star Over China made him, more than most successful journalists, a sort of institution, an interpreter of the Chinese Communist revolution. Some critics felt that without him it might never have occurred, or at least not gained so much attention. After the united front of 1937-1940 fell apart, he left China, though not before he had helped found the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives movement and seen the Red areas again in their wartime expansion. In 1941 Snow prophesied in The Battle for Asia that “liberals who build up hopes that the Communists of China are ‘different’ and ‘only reformers’ and have abandoned revolutionary methods . . . are doomed to ultimate disillusionment.”

As a Saturday Evening Post correspondent, he saw wartime Russia and India, post-war Europe, Japan, and Korea, yet he remained a China hand in the common meaning of the term — he had left a bit of his heart there. Snow’s career and opinions are so fully on record, surveyed also in his autobiography, Journey to the Beginning (1958), that he is a fairly definite quantity. He is sympathetic to the domestic human aspirations of revolution, unresponsive to its ideological dogma, and has the advantage of thirty years’ perspective on the hard conditions of Chinese life.

GETTING back to Peiping, as the first experienced American journalist in a decade, was not easy. The State Department, Snow says, tried its very best to dissuade Look magazine from sending him. His sharpest strictures are applied to Mr. Dulles’ obstruction of journalists’ going to China. He believes Peiping welcomed him in 1960 partly because as early as 1949 he had prophesied Communist China’s independence of Moscow, and accordingly he had been banned from Russia during Stalin’s lifetime. Apparently the SinoSoviet rift had widened enough to let him in.

Many old friends met him at the Peiping airport. In five months, from July to November 1960, he visited nineteen cities in fourteen provinces, had seventy-odd interviews with all kinds of people — no lack of “opportunity to see China,” despite the usual limitations on a foreign reporter, traveling with guides and usually interviewing through interpreters. He found all-wave radios sold everywhere and available in most hotel rooms. He roamed Peiping alone with a camera and brought out all his films uncensored. “Chinese security is built into the society,” he explains at length; the whole community is trained to check on all its members.

In addition to all the sights, inspections, receptions, and briefings, Snow spent a total of about twelve hours conversing with Premier Chou Enlai, ate with Chairman Mao in his home, and spent some nine hours interviewing him. He also caught up with the life histories of a multitude of people he had known before. All this makes a big book in eighty-six short chapters.

The Other Side of the River gets its title from Pascal: “A strange justice that is bounded by a river! Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side. . . .” This expression of the present-day human dilemma, how to avoid organized killing while maintaining differently organized societies, indicates Snow’s rather nonideological, humanitarian view: Communist China exists, we all have to coexist. Caught between opposed societies, he is in the usual area specialist’s dilemma — how to bridge the Pacific in meaningful terms. His Chinese hosts wanted him to transmit their sense of historical grievance and proud accomplishment. American readers may want him to evaluate Red China in a few wellchosen words, pro or con. Both may be frustrated. Snow is neither an inexperienced traveler susceptible to the sheer enthusiasm of a fellow traveler nor a Kremlinologist chiefly devoted to analyzing power relations as betrayed in Communist jargon. A field reporter, he tries to avoid the oversimplicity of the library researcher, who deals only with documents, not people, or of the columnist, who has to know what he thinks in the first place. His first-person narrative is a mixture of conversations, epitomes of history, reminiscent personal flashbacks, analyses of institutions, and comments on policy. When the Party faithful tell him: This road was only a mule track before Liberation, Snow can reply: That’s strange, I rode a truck over it in 1939.

No other volume on Communist China has covered so broad a range with so much perception. Nevertheless, “travel in China,” says Snow, “provides no magic bag of answers.” To make it more difficult, the returning traveler confronts at home an “amazing number of things people know about China which just aren’t so” — for example, widespread starvation, of which he could find no evidence in 1960. “They were all dying,” he says, “but apparently only at about the same rate people are dying everywhere.”

The main impact of The Other Side of the River lies, I think, in its indication of how dangerously wide the river really is. On the American side there is stereotyped ignorance, due less to lack of data than to lack of comparable experience. For America “to accept the Chinese revolution requires too big an act of imagination from a country that has not suffered, itself, for nearly a hundred years.”

On the Chinese side there is, first of all, the arrogant doctrinaire and puritanical zeal of the revolution, now implanted in so many sincere and devoted patriotic youths. Snow found Chinese soldiers, for instance, obviously shocked at the idea of premarital sexual relations and baffled by the concept of being a conscientious objector. He found that enthusiastic schoolgirls who were eager to quote Chairman Mao were otherwise uninformed and uninstructed about the outside world.

In recording his conversations with Chinese young and old, Snow continually assesses their lives in their terms and in our terms, and tries looking at “imperialist” America and Communist China through their eyes as well as ours. Many of these exchanges take on a wry sense of irony. He soon learns to anticipate the clichés. “I knew what was coming next and silently joined him in chorus . . . ‘nothing against the American people, it’s only American imperialism.’ ”

In general, the industrial and agricultural development, spurred on by the zeal of the revolution, seemed truly enormous, “much greater than I had expected to find.” Similarly, the collapse of the statistical system, which contributed to the economic collapse after the Great Leap Forward of 1958, was due in part to overzealous statistical reporting, with “politics in command.” That the revolutionary ardor overreached itself in 1958 was partly Mao’s responsibility.

As to Mao’s view of the world. Snow feels “his grasp of the Western world is a schematic one based on methods of Marxist analysis of classes as they exist in backward economies like the one he grew up in. He lacks sufficient understanding of the subtle changes brought about in those classes in advanced ‘welfare states’ by two hundred years of the kind of transformation China is only now entering.” These out-of-date assumptions as to Western realities are reinforced by lack of contact. “Mao was never out of China until . . . 1949. He has never seen any non-Communist foreign land, not even India or Japan. . . . Up to 1962, only one person in the Politburo, Lo Fu, had ever seen any part of the New World.”

Snow cannot forget that the American leadership is in an equal position of ignorance. It has never seen the new China, but seems content to rely on intelligence which is necessarily collected and filtered for security purposes. Returning after his marathon talk with Mao, he was invited to the State Department for an interview which lasted only ten minutes. “It shocked me that the American instrument to whom Mao Tse-tung had bothered to talk for nine hours — obviously with the expectation that he might reach an ear in the White House — could be so completely wasted.” Mr. Snow believes that the mutual SinoAmerican ignorance is mutually maintained.

His experience of both sides leaves him a liberal in his views, and liberal with criticism. The book winds up with several broad surveys of cold-war areas that seek to ascertain a method whereby opposing interests might possibly be reconciled. However much one may agree or disagree with this individual view, its contribution lies in the bifocal effort to comprehend both sides in emotional as well as rational terms, an effort which is seldom really made on either side, since all observers have been staying on one side of the river, loyal and ignorant, dutifully responsive to the strategic and abstract considerations of their national interest, quite unable to respond to the human goodwill which is usually felt on the personal level by the distant “enemy.” This all but fatal estrangement of peoples, in a world now so shrunk by technology, can be overcome only by the peoples themselves, by an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” capable of recognizing that as a race “we do stand at the threshold of Childhood’s end.”

Snow’s conclusion bears a typical optimism which a more pessimistic historian may question. The Sino-American estrangement has grown up since the 1920s, when China’s revolution first entered the villages and began to take on national forms quite alien to the prosperous, legal-minded, individualistic American tradition. Ed Snow’s caustic criticisms of various aspects of the United States reflect partly the frustrations of a whole generation of Americans interested in China who have seen many liberal dreams fade and the SinoAmerican divergence steadily widen. Just at the time in the 1940s when Communism seemed to Americans in the United States to become their mortal enemy, it seemed to the Chinese people in China to become their savior. Ever since, the national life of each people has been oriented against the other. The Sino-American antagonism, like the Sino-Soviet, comes from the deep-seated conflict of national interests, values, and attitudes.

How to resolve the Soviet-American conflict rightly preoccupies us. Since the Soviets developed their missiles, we have built up a considerable program of diplomatic contact and cultural exchange. This contact seems helpful to us in avoiding a disastrous Soviet-American conflict. Red China, however, as yet has no missiles. We have already fought once, in Korea, but we still avoid the kind of journalistic, academic, and cultural contact we have with the Soviets.

In the absence of contact during the last thirteen years, ignorance and self-righteousness have increased on both sides of the river. They can lead only toward further conflict.