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Edgar Snow: Some Personal Reminiscences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

John S. Service
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Extract

We can be grateful that Edgar Snow once wrote, in his straightforward uncompromising style, a book about himself. He called it Journey to the Beginning. At a later point in the book he returned (briefly) to talk about his origins, but the “beginning” (Chapter One, line one) was: “When I first reached Shanghai. …”

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Type
Research Article
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The China Quarterly , Volume 50 , April 1972, pp. 209 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1972

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References

1. New York: Random Hous, 1958.Google Scholar

2. Journey to the Beginning, pp.139–13. See also Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow), Notes on the Chinese Student Movement (Stanfor: Hoover Institution, 1959, mimeographed);Google ScholarPubMed andIsrael, John, Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1937 Stanfor: Stanford University Press, 1966). One of Ed Snow's friends among the student leaders became better known at a later period as Ambassador Huang Hua.Google Scholar

3. New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1933.

4. Living China (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936).Google Scholar

5. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937; New York: Random House, 1938; New York: Modern Library, 1944; New York: Grove Press, 1961 (with introduction by Fairbank, John K.), revised edition 1968.Google Scholar

6. On 9 June 1937, Snow wrote to his wife: “I've had to rewrite the last four chapters of my opus to fit in with developments. …It weakens the whole structure of my book very much, but that is nothing.” Nym Wales, My Yenan Notebooks (Madison, Connecticut: mimeographed, 1961), p. 25.Google ScholarSee also the review of Nym Wales's book by Chalmers Johnson in The China Quarterly, No. 22 (04–06 1965), pp. 194–7.Google Scholar

7. Snow, Edgar, The Other Side of the River (New York: Random House, 1962), p.773.Google Scholar

8. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.Google Scholar

9. For instance, People on Our Side (New York: Random House, 1944).Google ScholarPubMed

10. Journey to the Beginning, p. 124.Google ScholarPubMed

11 Ibid. p 18.

12 Ibid. p. 192.

13. An account of some of these activities is in The Battle for Asia (New York: Random House, 1941).Google ScholarPubMed

14. Journey to the Beginning, p. 240.Google ScholarPubMed

15. People on Our Side (New York: Random House, 1944);Google ScholarPubMedThe Pattern of Soviet Power (New York: Random House, 1945);Google ScholarStalin Must Have Peace (New York: Random House, 1947).Google Scholar

16. “I set forth on this singular journey which was to affect my own life profoundly. Intensely excited by the prospect that lay ahead, I was aware, as I took the express for Sianfu, that I was crossing a Rubicon. For once I was absolutely right.” Journey to the Beginning, p. 152.Google ScholarPubMed

17. For a typically senseless instance of Congressional “investigation,” note the attempt of the Tydings Committee minority counsel, Robert Morris, to get me to remember (in 1950) whether I might have been present “at a cocktail party” in Peking in 1937 where Owen Lattimore and Ed Snow may also have both been guests. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1950), p. 1380.Google Scholar In Journey to the Beginning, pp.332–3, Ed decribes the effect on him of being mentioned in the obscure and never-explained “tawny pipit” episode in the Internal Security Subcommittee's investigation of Davies, John P..Google Scholar

18. Snow deals with this in Journey to the Beginning, pp. 225–9Google ScholarPubMed. See also Shewmaker, Kenneth E., “The ‘Agrarian Reformer’ Myth,” The China Quarterly, no. 34 (04–06 1968), pp. 66–81;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the same author's Americans and Chinese Communists, 1927–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

19. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Chinese Economic and Political Studies, 1957.Google Scholar

20. What has happened, one wonders, to such men (among many others) as Rosinger, Lawrence K., author of the recognized, informative books, China's Wartime Politics, 1937–1944, and China's Crisis.Google Scholar

21. The Other Side of the River, p. 736.Google Scholar

22. Snow's picture with Mao certainly received added significance, in Chinese eyes, by appearing on the front page of the People's Daily on 25 December in connexion with the observance of Mao's birthday. See also Peking Review, No. 1 (1 01 1971), p. 5.Google ScholarPubMedLois Snow had been in the original picture but was cropped: Lin Piao remained. The interpreter between Snow and Mao is Chi Ch'ao-chu, half-brother of Chi Ch'ao-ting, another old friend of Ed's.Google Scholar

23. Coincidence collectors will note that Ed's death was on the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year.Google Scholar

24. Peking Review, Nos.7–8 (25 02 1972), p. 4.Google ScholarPubMed

25. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1970).Google Scholar