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'''Red Star Over China''', a book by Edgar Snow, is an account of the Communist Party of China written when they were guerrilla army still obscure to Westerners.

Contents

Overview

Assessments and Criticisms

External links

References

Overview

In ''Red Star Over China'', Edgar Snow recounts the months that he spent with China’s Chinese Red Army in the summer and fall of 1936. The book contains a vivid description of the Long March, as well as biographical accounts of a number of persons on both sides of the conflicts, including Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai, brief coverage of Lin Biao, and Mao Zedong's own account of his life.
When Snow wrote, no outsider had much idea of what was going on in the Communist-controlled areas of China or who the main personalities were. The Xi'an Incident shortly after his return. Snow's view was that the imprisonment of Chiang Kai-Shek by his own generals ensured that Nationalist China fought Japan rather than capitulating.
He produced a revised edition which appeared in 1968. He described the book's original context:

The Western powers, in self-interest, were hoping for a miracle in China. They dreamed of a new birth of nationalism that would keep Japan so bogged down that she would never be able to turn upon the Western colonies—her true objective. ''Red Star Over China'' tended to show that the Chinese Communists could indeed provide that ''nationalist'' leadership needed for effective anti-Japanese resistance. How dramatically the United States' policy-making attitudes have altered since then […]

It provided not only for non-Chinese readers, but also for the entire Chinese people—including all but the Communist leaders themselves—the first authentic account of the Chinese Communist Party and the first connected story of their long struggle to carry through the most thoroughgoing social revolution in China's three millenniums of history. Many editions were published in China […] (''Red Star Over China'', Preface to the Revised Edition 1968 ISBN 0802150934.)

A reprinted edition was published in May 2006, entitled ''Red Star Over China - The Rise Of The Red Army''. (ISBN 1-4067-9821-5).

Assessments and Criticisms

Snow had become critical of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, feeling that they could neither reform China nor defend against Japanese aggression. Therefore he looked on Mao and the Communists sympathetically as an alternative. Though he later criticized Mao on many points, he never went back on this basic viewpoint.
The book has often been called the "scoop of the century" and its author seen as a hero.^{[1] [2]} Critics charge that Snow failed to see the potential for totalitarian disaster and that his reports swayed both Western and Chinese opinion in favor of Mao by leaving out the bloody history of the Party and ignoring its unsavory activities, such as dependence on opium revenues. Though it is generally accepted that he reported what he believed to be true, recent research demonstrates that much of the text was approved by Party officials^[3][4]
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday^[5] believe Red Star Over China doesn't give a correct image of what really happened during for the long march. Chang and Halliday claim that Snow mostly relied on Mao as the source for the book.

External links

★ Snow's 4-chapter biography of Mao can be found here [1], here [2] and here [3].

★ Behind ''Red Star over China'' (2006 account from ''China Daily'')

★ There has also been a Chinese screen adaptation [4], which was however rejected by Edgar Snow's widow [5].

★ Georgi Dimitrov and the Chinese Revolution

References

1. A journalistic scoop in 1937, this book has since become a historical classic. Review in Foreign Affairs.
2. Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937), whose interviews with Mao Zedong in 1936 were called the "scoop of the century''. Snow, White & Seven China Revolution Classics''
3. Mao, Zedong, 1937, p.91.
4. Snow, Edgar, ''Random Notes on Red China'', 1936-1945, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p.viii;id.
5. Jung, Chang; Halliday, Jon, 2006. ''. Random House, London. ISBN 0-224-07126-2, p. 234-235

Anne-Marie Brady, 'Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People's Republic' (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).