Re-readings
Principles, grit and communism
For much of his journalistic career, Edgar Snow was shunned by mainstream America. The reason was simple. He had befriended the Chinese communists long before Mao and his men made their way to power in Peking and had indeed afterward continued his association with them. This was the era of the Cold War; and with Joseph McCarthy in mad pursuit of what he called communists and communist sympathisers in the United States, it was only natural that Snow would come under suspicion. The writer could not, of course, be nailed. But the hostility prevailed, all the way up to his death in February 1972. In one of the great ironies of history, the very communists Snow had eulogised over the years in works such as the one under review were now the same communists Richard Nixon was meeting in Peking. In what is fundamentally a re-reading of Red Star, what you will be surprised by is the careful attention to detail that Snow brings into his narrative. It is, in an important way, curious that no one in the 1930s or later observed events in China with the foresight and in the analytical manner that Snow did. Just how ignorant American statesmen remained about China even after the communist take-over in 1949 was exposed when at the 1954 Geneva conference, John Foster Dulles contemptuously turned away from a smiling Chou En-lai approaching him with outstretched hand. The irony came again eighteen years later when Nixon, an inveterate communist baiter, stretched out his hand to Chou in Peking. The opening to China was thus made and in the times thereafter, Nixon and Henry Kissinger would refer to it as a seminal point in the formulation and articulation of American foreign policy. In the late 1930s, when Edgar Snow linked up with Mao, Chu-te, Chou En-lai and Lin Piao in the mountain fastnesses of China, it was a different world. The Chinese communists were engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces and, with them, the various warlords who saw in a triumph of communism the end of their world. The communists and the nationalist Kuomintang split in 1927 and after that break it was for the nationalists to hunt down the Red bandits, as they called the communists, all over the country. The fact that Japanese aggression was rapidly eating away at China's vitals did not seem to matter to Chiang and his authoritarian government. It was the Red bandits that needed culling. It was in search of these bandits that Snow made his initial contacts, discreetly, with the communists. His account of his first meeting with Chou En-lai is revealing. The son of aristocrats and having gone through a spell of education in France, Chou was an intellectual in whom communism found a sort of refinement. He addressed Snow in clear, impeccable English, in that soft tone that was to be his hallmark in his later role as a steadying hand in a China sometimes governed erratically by Mao. A major portion of Red Star comprises accounts of the many one-on-one sessions Snow had with Mao Tse-tung. Perhaps never before or after has Mao come forth with as many details of his life as he has in his conversations with Snow. There is never any question about the scholarly aspects of the Mao character. A self-made man, the future ruler of China speaks to Snow about his readings in global literature and philosophy. He has the history of civilisation on his fingertips and, to an impressed Snow, is eminently qualified to interpret the rise and fall of nations with a sense of profundity one rarely spots in western politicians. In his early youth, Mao read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Darwin's Origin of Species. He devoured works by Mill, Rousseau, Spencer and Montesquieu. Poetry and romances were part of his self-education process and with them he combined tales of ancient Greece and the history and geography of Russia, America, France, England and other countries. You only get to reinforce the feeling in yourself, as you go through this work, that the most discerning of intellectuals are to be found in the communist movement. Mao's wife was executed by the Kuomintang, his family was hounded by Chiang Kai-shek and yet his belief in the need to change the circumstances of life for his people never wavered. And this was a belief common to all his comrades. Lin Piao, only in his twenties, was a formidable chief of the Whampoa military academy that produced the fine guerrillas who would one day seize China from Chiang and remould it under the communist party. Snow provides a dramatic and graphic account of the Long March that would come to be the foundation of communist resilience in China. Pursued relentlessly by the nationalists and often threatened by warlords and sometimes hostile tribes, Mao and his followers surmounted, with huge casualties in terms of men and materiel, to create for themselves the space that would be their eventual springboard to power. In the course of the Long March, which commenced in Kiangsi on 16 October 1934 with a total strength of 90,000 men, the communists covered altogether 6,000 miles. Statistics show that they fought an average of a skirmish a day, while fifteen whole days were given over to pitched battles. Of the 368 days the communists spent on the Long March, 235 were given over to marches by day, with 18 by night. The guerrillas halted for 100 days, but of those days many were spent in skirmishes. In Szechuan, the Reds spent a total of 56 days. In essence, only 44 days were spent in full rest over a long journey of nearly 6,000 miles. The communists crossed 18 mountain ranges, of which five were permanently snow-capped. They crossed 24 rivers, passed through 12 provinces, occupied 62 cities and broke through the armies of at least 10 warlords apart from defeating, eluding or outmanoeuvring Chiang Kai-shek's forces. On 20 October 1935, Mao and the other leaders of the movement sat down with the fewer than 20,000 guerrillas who had survived the Long March to take in the measure of the huge achievement they had made. China's respect for Edgar Snow was never to diminish. He was invited to stand beside Mao and other leading communist figures at the anniversary of the revolution at Tienanmen Square in 1970.
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