Red Star over China

"This arguably is the most important book by an American foreign correspondent in the 20th century. At the time it was written in the mid-1930s nobody knew who the communists were. Many thought they were mere bandits. Snow went to the north-west of China to find them. When his book came out the whole equation changed; thereafter communism was understood to be a viable political movement. This had an impact not only in the West but also in China. Snow gave a draft of the book to the Chinese and a lot of young Chinese tucked the book under their arm and decided to go off to the north-west and join the communists. The book remains a primary source for what was happening at the time. Snow has, for example, the only from-the-horse’s-mouth interview in which Mao talked openly about his life, his background and family. Also, a large number of young Americans read that book and decided to become journalists. The book was a major scoop and such an exciting adventure. Greats like Harrison Salisbury, Seymour Topping and Orville Shell were inspired by this book. It was the All The President’s Men for that generation and made people think, I want to be a journalist. You have to remember that this was a book written under time pressure with no help – that is, there were no files or archives to go to. Snow describes what he sees in north-west China – the communists had been driven out of south-east China by the nationalists. He noted improvements in education and health care, the egalitarianism, all things that didn’t exist in the rest of the country in the 1930s and that made communism seem very attractive."

"It’s worth remembering that at the time Snow’s book was groundbreaking. He was the first foreign journalist to risk this trek to the forbidden Communist state in China’s West in the second half of the 1930s, when it was under heavy blockade by the Nationalist government. Snow invested a lot of time and energy in bringing an untold story out into the world. But as you say, there is also much that is troubling about the book, especially Snow’s unquestioning, even adulatory, response to Mao’s story about the Communist past and present. I’ve chosen the book due to its importance as a global vector for Mao’s ideas. From the year of its publication in 1937, it very quickly became a world bestseller, and the book turned Mao into a political celebrity—an affable, poetic patriot. It translated the man and his revolution to a very wide group of people, from anti-British Indian nationalists, Chinese intellectuals and Malayan guerillas, to anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa, German hippies, and American presidents. It really has had an extraordinary reach and afterlife. Edgar Snow himself, a happy-go-lucky globetrotter from Kansas, was a very unlikely intermediary for international Maoism. So the tale of Red Star Over China and its global travels is emblematic of the wider travels of Maoism itself—the phenomenal, often surprising translatability of Mao and his ideas, within and beyond China. It’s true that Western Europe and the US in the 1960s witnessed something of a Mao craze, and this took place for a number of reasons. One is that it was an era of intense youth discontent, and of student dissatisfaction with their universities and their governments. In this context of youthful rebellion, many student radicals identified Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a youth protest rather than a political purge. These Western admirers adopted some of Mao’s slogans that seemed to fit with their own counter-culture movement, such as “it is right to rebel” and “bomb the headquarters”. “Western Europe and the US in the 1960s witnessed something of a Mao craze” It’s also important to remember there was an international political backdrop to the Western enthusiasm for Mao. The late 1960s was an epoch of widespread disgust at US intervention in Vietnam . Many Western radicals felt solidarity with Mao’s China, which was America’s chief international detractor. Sympathy with Mao’s China also merged with outrage over the mistreatment of ethnic minorities who started to think of themselves as “internal colonies” inside the US, particularly black, Latin and Asian Americans. The militant wing of the African-American liberation group, the Black Panthers, were impressed with Mao’s denunciation of America’s foreign policy, and channeled Mao’s ideas about political violence to challenge the white American ruling establishment. You’re right that is was a lot easier to be ignorant about what was really going on in Mao’s China in the 1960s and 70s than it is now. At the same time, there were sources of accurate information, such as from Hong Kong’s listening posts. But many of Mao’s admirers, French and Italian intellectuals and so on, were not prepared to be sceptical, and were true believers in the PRC’s propaganda dream of an egalitarian utopian state."

"I suppose it would be Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. Yes, and in some ways it seems the most dated of the books I’ve chosen, because it presents a totally rosy portrait of the Communist revolution. But I think for understanding modern China it’s extremely important. And that’s because it does, in rather sympathetic but comprehensive detail, point out both the importance of the land revolution, and the nationalistic revolution, as key elements in Mao Zedong’s revolution. The land revolution was the taking away of land from landlords and redistributing it to peasants. It was the inequality of land distribution that was a very important element in generating support for the Chinese Communist revolution and a very important economic basis for it. And the Communists from the 1920s on, until they won power in 1949, and then afterwards, as a formal state policy, took away land from the landlords and redistributed it to peasants. Of course, after the Communist regime was established, land reform took a very different direction – with collectivisation and the establishment of communes and so forth. The nationalistic revolution was China’s regaining of sovereignty from foreign powers. China, unlike many other countries, was not overtly colonised by the West. Nevertheless from the mid-19th century, the time of the Opium Wars onwards, large portions, especially of Chinese cities, became de facto colonies of Western countries. And there was a large foreign presence there: a missionary presence, a business presence, and a diplomatic presence. Also, in 1937 the Japanese invaded China. And Edgar Snow did his interviews for the book in 1936-7 with Mao and other leaders of the revolution as they were actively fighting the Japanese. So the book also gives a very good flavour for the rise of modern Chinese nationalism and the importance of nationalism in the Chinese Communist revolution. Edgar Snow’s book helps illuminate those two things probably more than any other I can think of. That’s right. For one thing, one of the things that is most challenging to the contemporary Chinese leadership is once again the land issue. After 1949, in the 1950s and early 1960s, land was collectivised. This meant that land in China technically belonged to the collective, which could be either the local village or a sub-village unit known as the production team. But, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, after Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms, one of the things that followed was decollectivisation. And what one sees today is the selling of land by collective units in China. What local officials are doing is, in effect, selling that formerly collective land to developers. It’s particularly true in areas surrounding cities, but actually it’s true in much of China. And much of the protest one sees in China today is protest by farmers who are being dispossessed of their land. And one has the situation today in China where there are well over 100 million migrant workers. They have left the countryside and are working in cities, but they receive – or have up until now received – much of their social support from the countryside, from the fact their families still have land back in the countryside. So, as these families are becoming dispossessed, it’s creating a real crisis of social security. And part of the reason the Chinese government recently has been so actively passing laws on property rights and on the circumstances under which one can or cannot transfer land out of collective hands into other hands, is because this problem is resurfacing. They are once again dealing with the problem of a dispossessed peasantry in the countryside. And so I think the land problem remains, although in changed form, really key to understanding the challenges that face the contemporary Chinese leadership. So too does nationalism, and yet it too of course takes a different form. There is no Japanese military invasion that the Chinese leadership is currently fighting. But it sees itself in some ways as fighting a kind of intellectual or ideological or cultural invasion from other countries. It’s always under pressure to maintain its nationalist credentials. Especially in a situation where this is no longer a very strong Marxist-Leninist ideology in China, nationalism has become a tool that the leadership would like to use. But it’s a tricky one as nationalism can take lots of different forms. Nationalism really is a two-edged sword. If you look at the major influential protest movements in China from the mid-19th century on, they have all had a very important element of nationalism within them. The book I have chosen by Joe Esherick, about the Boxer uprising, is about that: the Boxer rebellion was an early expression of popular nationalism against foreigners. But nationalism was, over time, directed against the Chinese government as well. For example, the May 4 movement of 1919 began as a nationalistic movement, to protest about the fact that China was being disadvantaged by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. But that nationalism was not only directed against the foreign powers; it was also directed against the Chinese state that had capitulated to those foreign demands. And we see this again and again. Very frequently, when you have nationalist protests in China (which seem to happen every few years, for example when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, or early in the Bush administration, when there was the incident with the EP-3 spy plane) it’s just a very tricky issue for the Chinese leadership. On the one hand they don’t want to squash nationalistic protest because it’s important for people to feel proud about Chinese sovereignty. On the other hand, they’re also quite aware that nationalistic protest can quite easily morph into protests that are aimed against the state itself. And those, of course, become very problematic. Again and again you’ll see in an early stage of a nationalistic protest the Chinese state providing a certain amount of support to the protesters. But, after a rather limited period of time, they try to demobilise that very same protest before it begins to take on other kinds of issues and becomes politically volatile."