By Ho-yin Chao
It is a bit difficult for one to persuade oneself to get hold of Edgar Snow's autobiography and actually read it. This is not because Edgar Snow is not an important man. He thinks he is, and many are inclined to agree with him. The Saturday Evening Post alone has paid him a quarter of a million dollars for his articles and services. He has been connected with many other magazines and newspapers. He has written a shelf of books. He has travelled widely and has interviewed most of the leaders of his generation. His advice was eagerly sought by the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Somehow, even his courtship of, marriage to and divorce from Nym Wales, his affair with the Burmese nurse Batalá, his tryst with the Japanese prostitute Seiko, his "a-political" relationship with the Russian girl Ilena Sergeievna Yasnova in Moscow (he assures us that Miss Yasnova was "hardly" an NKVD agent), not to mention his unadulterated adoration of Sung Ching-ling (now high in the regime of Mao Tse-tung), all seem to be pregnant with international significance.
What makes it so hard to get to read the book is that, before one turns the first page, one knows exactly what the author is going to say, what are his likes and dislikes, who are his heroes and villains, and what are his cures of the ills of our world.
Snow's hero, of course, is Chinese Communist chief, Mao Tse-tung. His sub-heroes are those in China and America who in one way or another supported and sympathised with Mao Tse-tung. His villain is President Chiang Kai-shek, and his sub-villains are those in China and America who in one way or another supported and sympathised with President Chiang Kai-shek. It is as simple as that!
However, it is a bit surprising that Snow, writing in 1959, should ignore the entire train of events in China after Mao Tse-tung captured political power in October, 1949, fully ten years ago. In the book, Snow gives a detailed account of the early years when his hero struggled for political power. The story somehow stops abruptly when his hero gets into power. There is practically nothing in the book about how the "land revolution" on the China mainland was carried out, how the landlords as a social class were wiped out, how the industries were taken over, how the people were herded into "People's Communes," how the men, women and children were driven to make steel with bare hands under the programme known as "The Great Leap Forward." He scarcely touches upon the Soviet looting of Manchuria. He does not tell us about the part the Chinese Communist "volunteers" played in the Korean War. He passes over the charge of "germ warfare" and the "Hate-America Campaign." Of course he makes no mention of recent Chinese Communist conflicts with India.
Most people, I think, who read Snow in 1959 expect to find what he has to say on these matters. At least, I do. But he fails us completely. And there must be a reason for it.
One explanation, it occurs to me, is that Snow is an "Historical Determinist." He tells, us that he was born a Catholic and later left his faith. He calls himself on one occasion a Fabian Socialist. On other occasions, he poses as a patriotic American. But he does not seem to have an American hero. He dislikes the late Senator Robert A. Taft. He detests the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. In any case, he interprets world events in accordance with the Marxist dialectics, to wit:
"Every power policy provokes an antithesis; the ensuing synthesis always reflects opposites and thus differs from both thesis and antithesis" (p.421).
To the events in China, as elsewhere, he applies this ironclad formula. The struggle in China, it follows, is to get the Communists into the seats of political power. Once in, historical forces will come into play and there is nothing in the world to worry about them. They will just take their historical course after a pattern determined by scientific laws. It is folly to pass any judgment on the train of events. No moral issues need be involved. Things are so because, according to the dialectics, they must be so, at least ought to be so. Snow, from the very beginning, was convinced that Communism represented the wave of the future in what the Comintern called the "Colonial and Semi-Colonial Areas." The vista for all the peoples in these areas is clear and definitive. If the cards of Historical Determinism call for your execution tomorrow at dawn because you are a landlord, then have yourself executed. Don't try to avoid it or postpone it. It’s no use. Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao Tse-tung cannot be wrong. So it is not necessary to talk about what happened in China after Mao Tse-tung came into power on the China mainland. Snow, therefore, doesn't. He is not trying to avoid making apologies for his hero, Mao Tse-tung. He sincerely believes that no apologies are called for. That is the way of the Historical Determinist.
Getting Mao Tse-tung into power, however, is an entirely different matter. It is an epic, a saga, which must be told in the minutest details. It is to be told as an example for other peoples to follow. The programme of Communism is to communise one nation after another. Once a nation is conquered, it is entered into the ledger, put on the shelf. It is not to be taken down and examined again from time to time. There is a more immediate job, and that is to conquer another nation, and still another nation, until the entire world comes under Communist rule. Then, the millennium will have finally arrived.
Snow's purpose in telling how China was conquered by Communism is to show how it was done. It is, in other words, a sort of do-it-yourself manual for would-be revolutionaries.
One of the key steps in the process is world-wide propaganda. When Snow came to China, Mao Tse-tung was a renegade in the barren vastness of Northern Shensi, having been driven there by the Chinese Government. Mao's was to all intents and purposes a lost cause, as forlorn as Borodin's in 1927. Snow was then an obscure American reporter in Peiping who was compelled to resort to good luck at the horse-races and part-time lectures at the American missionary Yenching University to make ends meet. But he was not content with teaching his Chinese students the finer points of Western journalism, for which the Christian university paid him to do. He began inciting and organising his students to riot against the authorities. He was instrumental in forming a group of teachers in Yenching and Tsinghua universities to discuss Chinese politics. He was full of ideas as to how the Chinese government should be run and how the over-shadowing Japanese menace was to be met.
The Japanese militarists by that time had taken over Manchuria and Jehol. They were making bellicose moves towards North China. The patriotic fervour of the Chinese people was at a feverish pitch.
The Chinese Government, however, was desperately trying to avoid an immediate war. To its responsible leaders, war under those circumstances was tantamount to national suicide. China, fresh from many years of national revolutionary struggles needed time to prepare herself to contest militaristic Japan on the field of arms. Many foreign friends of the Chinese people, such as the famous Australian, W. H. Donald, held the same view.
Not Edgar Snow. He believed that a war should immediately be launched. Why an American citizen, whose country was not at war with Japan, should display so much patriotism for China, he does not explain. Ironically, in later years, when the Soviet Union assumed an aggressive posture in the world, Edgar Snow has become an outstanding and indefatigable partisan of peace. He no longer urges any victims of Soviet aggression to take up arms to defend themselves.
With his enthusiasm for war in China in those days, his "compote with Mao" is not hard to explain. Almost as soon as the Japanese moved into Manchuria, Mao, as the chief of the defunct "Chinese Soviet Socialist Republic," with headquarters in Juichin (Kiangsi), 2,000 miles from any Japanese soldier, had declared "war" upon Japan, Mao, the internationalist, had also become patriotic.
Why did Mao want war so badly? At the time, Mao was driven into the Shensi wilderness. His armed forces, organised for the purpose of overthrowing the Chinese Government by force, were decimated by the "Long March." War, to Mao was his only salvation. Let us explain this by Mao's own words:
"The Sino-Japanese war affords our Party an excellent opportunity for expansion. Our fixed policy should be 70% expansion, 20% dealing with the Kuomintang, and 10% resisting Japan."
Snow was for war too, immediate and all-out war against Japan at any cost and at any risks. The two men had something in common, and a society for mutual admiration was soon formed.
Snow slipped into the depth of China's interior to interview Mao. He was welcomed with open arms. Mao and Snow talked for hours and days and weeks. To Mao, this was the chance of a lifetime to set up his propaganda belt to the outside world. To Snow, aside from ideological grounds, this was the "scoop," destined to make him in due course "the greatest reporter who ever came out of Asia." The result of this "compote" was, of course, the book Red Star Over China. Edgar Snow was made. So was Mao Tse-tung. The book laid the foundation of the entire Chinese Communist propaganda machine in the West.
Snow, however, is not one to believe Mao's own words about his war effort quoted above. To get such an honest appraisal of Chinese Communist war efforts abroad would be disastrous to Snow's own sacred cause. Propaganda-wise, it would be suicidal. Snow has to mouth the propaganda trash fed to him earlier by Mao Tse-tung in the Shensi caves, that the way to beat the Japanese modern military machine is guerilla warfare conducted by organised and indoctrinated peasants armed with orthodox Marxism and sticks. When Snow interviewed Mao for his Red Star Over China, Mao's men had not even seen a Japanese soldier. In Journey to the Beginning, written after eight years of actual war against the Japanese, Snow considers it his duty to show that such primitive tactics did prevail over them. He has to show that the Chinese Government forces never really fought the Japanese, that instead, they were expending themselves blockading the Communist forces. He has to assert that, in spite of the blockade, the Communist forces nevertheless succeeded almost single-handedly in defeating the Japanese, without the benefit of American lend-lease. He has to say that General MacArthur's spectacular island-to-island campaign in the Pacific had no adverse effect upon the Japanese military forces in China. Mao Tse-tung did it, and did it all alone, under almost insurmountable handicaps. This is how far Snow goes in this book.
The uncharitable thing for Snow is that, aside from a few of his cronies, no other reporters on the scene at the same time share his boundless adoration of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists. His first employer in China, the late J. B. Powell, for instance, came out of the Second World War after brutal torture in confinement as an ardent supporter of President Chiang Kai-shek and a bitter critic of Mao Tse-tung (See My Twentyfive Years in China by J. B. Powell). One of Snow's early associates in China, Edward Hunter, later acquired world wide fame as the first to expose Mao Tse-tung as the arch expert in brainwashing (see Brainwashing in China by Edward Hunter). Furthermore, Edward Hunter has authored a book which may be regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive indictment of the regime of Mao Tse-tung (See The Black Book of Red China by Edward Hunter). And we have the Australian, W. H. Donald ("Donald of China") who had better opportunities than any foreigner to observe Chinese events, frankly exposed Mao's war effort as far back as June 3, 1941 as follows:
"The Communist armies are making some kind of a fight to get definite districts to govern ... In the meantime, they do not fight. As a matter of fact, they never did fight. Rather, they have bluffed at it, have had good publicity when they have captured a Japanese transport section or when they made a raid or two, but they have been conserving their strength so that when war is over they will be in the position to take advantage of the mess that will surely result to try to extend their communism over the county." (The above message is taken from a letter Donald wrote to Herbert Elliston, Donald's old associate in China, who later was to become Editor of the Washington Post. The letter is quoted in Earl Albert Selle, Donald of China, p.352. Italics supplied.)
Sometimes one wonders why a man like Edgar Snow goes into so much labour doing a book of this nature. After all, it also exposes him as being an extremely near-sighted observer of world events. Take the following passage from his letter dated August 14, 1944, to President Roosevelt after an extended trip to Russia:
"1. The (Russian) public wants peace. All are tired. The public is resigned to a Russo-Japanese war and many think it is part of the price Russia must pay for America aid. Russians are grateful for that aid.
"2. The process of war itself, the advance of the Red Army and the flight of Hitler sympathisers, creates in Eastern Europe a kind of political vacuum in which a new type of government will emerge, not democratic in our sense, not Soviet Communism, but pre-Socialist.
"3. The Russians are laying down some fundamental plans looking toward longterm co-operation with America .... " (p. 311)
Really, how wrong can get! And how unkind it was to make a man so burdened with duties as the late President Roosevelt to read such trash. And for Edgar Snow's sake, what is the idea of putting such things into a book written in 1959, even though he has to admit that his judgment was wrong. I am prepared to admit that Snow is an important man, but certainly not so important that his completely erroneous judgment is also of historical interest!
The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution
By C. Y. Yang
Harvard University Press, 1959.
246 pp. US$6.00
Reviewed by D. J. Lee
The part the Chinese family has played in China's social structure is unique. It functions in strict accordance with certain unwritten ethical code which, through sanction of time, has evolved into a system that the Chinese has observed for more than 25 centuries. The political revolution led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen in 1911 and the literary revolution headed by Dr. Hu Shih in the early twenties saw the beginning of the end of the Chinese family system. It was perhaps inevitable. A modern nation with all its complexity of demands and a strictly traditional family pattern cannot exist side by side. China can have the one or the other but not both at the same time.
Mr. C.Y. Yang, professor of sociology of the University of Pittsburgh and also author of his companion study, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition, attempts to present in the book under review a brief history of the Chinese family system and a portrait of what it is like under the Communist regime. There is evidence that he takes into account the changes that have been brought to the laws governing marriage and divorce, which seem to guarantee equality of sex, bringing among other things the socio-economic status of woman up to the level of man's.
Mr. Yang, being brought up in the classic manner of the Chinese family, is in a position to make an analysis of the Chinese family system in traditional society by virtue of his personal experiences and on-the-spot observations which constitute first hand knowledge most valuable to any author. His treatment is good until the author's voyage of study reaches the uncharted sea of knowledge of the Chinese family under the Communist rule. Here he depends solely on the highly questionable source of the Chinese Communist publications which are intended more for propaganda than for any other purpose. The author is naive in that he swallows hook, line and sinker every printed word released by the Communist machinery. His lack of imagination is fully demonstrated by his inability to realize that in a totalitarian state like Red China no family of any normal shape, form or character has a chance to exist when every individual is deprived of personal liberty and freedom. Neither privacy nor the togetherness of a family is possible. Laws governing marriage and divorce, which may be of vital importance to the social structure of a nation in normal condition, have little salutary effect on the type of family system maintained in the grave-yard of the people's communes.
The author's failure to present a true picture of the conditions on the mainland is best indicated in Talcot Parsons' Forlword. How badly misled any innocent reader of Mr. Yang's book can be becomes clear when even Mr. Parsons could arrive at such a conclusion. "It cannot but strike the American reader that, on the background of the old system, the direction of change sponsored by the Communists, but only partially brought about by them, has been precisely to make Chinese family conditions far more like our own than they in the old system. What American now contests the right of young people to marry the persons of their own choice, or of married women to hold property in their own right? Yet these are typical of the things which the Communists have been promoting. Perhaps this makes a little more intelligible why intelligent people in China can favor the Communist movement."
Could it possibly be that Mr. Parsons is not aware of the fact that on the China mainland in pre-Communist days, every young man or woman had the right to marry anyone of his or her own choice, the married women to hold property in their own right? If an intelligent t man like Mr. Parsons could fall for the Communist line that it was they who made it possible for the Chinese family to conform to the practice of the democratic America and that is the cause of the popularity of the Communist movement in China, we do not have to seek far for reasons that have converted many so-called Western intellectuals to be fellow travelers of the Communists.
If poor scholarship, shallow intellect, lack of imagination, gullibility and pseudo-scientific approach characterized the painstaking efforts of the author, his omission in devoting a reasonable length of space to the study of the people's commune system, which made important contributions to the disintegration of the Chinese family system, is all the more deplorable. The author has not seen fit to say more than just one sentence in that connection: The same need for industrial capital contributed to the establishment of the commune system which appears more effective than the cooperatives in extracting income from the peasantry. But even this lone sentence has nothing to do with the people's commune system as it was carried out in 1958. This omission is inexcusable. As the people's commune was forging ahead in full swing in 1958 while the book under review was being written, the author should have the perspicacity and foresight to do some constructive research on this subject so deeply related to the theme of his book, before sending it to the publisher.
We are therefore forced to conclude that the book, with its faults in commission and sins of omission, is unscholarly, unreliable, puerile, misleading.
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*Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1959.