Spirit of Edgar Snow—Marking the 20th Anniversary of Snow’s Death
Xiao Qian

I owe several happy events in my life to a lucky chance. One of them was when I became a student of Edgar Snow’s in the 1930s. He was then a reporter for two foreign newspapers in Peining, owned respectively by Britons and Americans. From 1933 to 1935, he was concurrently a teacher at the Journalism Department of Yenching University. During the two years when he was with this University, I happened to be a student there, having been previously transferred from the English Department of Catholic University in Peiping. Upon my graduation, he resigned the concurrent job and went to Yan’an where he wrote his masterpiece Red Star Over China.

In the those days, professors at Yenching University were mostly an academic type. Whatever they taught, they would, first of all, give copious references to the classics and spend very much time on definitions. More often than not, they did all the talking while the students did nothing but listen. There was practically no classroom discussion at all. Snow, however, did otherwise. He gave priority to practice and encouraged discussion. And more importantly, he did teaching by way of making friends with his students. We found the reception room in his Haidian residence more appealing than the classroom. He and his wife Helen were very hospital and often entertained us with tea or potluck. They would usually keep open house for us. In the spring of 1935, it was in that reception room that I met Agnes Smedley for the first time. At that time, in order to steer clear of harassment by KNIT agents, she had changed her name to conceal her true identity. So, the evening when I had dinner at Snow’s residence, he introduced her to me as “Mrs. Brown”. As it happened that I was then reading her novel of Daughter of Earth, I kept talking at table about my impressions of it, not knowing that the very lady sitting next to me was its author. It was not until Smedley had left Peiping for Shanghai that Snow told me how apprehensive she had been that evening when I chatted about the novel, suspecting that I already knew her true identity.

While at Yenching University, I had a problem weighing on my mind: I found the study of journalism not to my liking and the advertising course particularly boring. Frankly, I had transferred myself to the journalism department of Yenching for the sole purpose of obtaining qualifications for a reporter. Now, with my heart in literature, I often cut journalism classes so as to sit in on English literature classes. Snow helped me solve this problem. He told me that instead of being contradictory to each other, literature and journalism were mutually complementary and that in order to write stories of real life, a newsman must be cultured in literature, including classical literature. On my commencement day, he and Helen gave me a suitcaseful of world literary classics, ranging from Aristotle to Dickens. Later I learned from Louis Snow’s work that when he was on his deathbed, a copy of Bernard Shaw’s work had been found lying by his pillow. I am greatly indebted to Snow for his teachings that literary taste is a must for a reporter’s news dispatches and feature articles.

In 1936, when Snow found in the Dagong Bao that he KMT had heavily censored my article Interview with Feng Yu-xiang, with Feng’s anti-Japanese views completely cut out, he wanted me immediately to introduce him to Feng for a visit. A few days later, I found in the newspapers that the Japanese government had protested to the KMT government about the unfriendly remarks form Military Commission Vice-Chairman Feng Yuxiang in an interview with the American reporter Snow.

In 1944, Snow and I met again, this time in Paris shortly after its liberation. He was then one of the six reporters specially permitted by the Soviet Union to cover the east front. He told me in a barroom that the days he had spent in China were his most unforgettable experience and also the most important part of his life. He thought that he was most fortunate in having got acquainted with Lu Xun and Madame Song Ching Ling in Shanghai and that it was through their guidance that he had come to understand China.

In the early 1930s, Snow was the first Westerner to predict that the War of Resistance to Japanese Aggression would break out sooner or later and that the final victory would certainly belong to China. In 1948, he wrote three articles at a stretch for The Saturday Review, in which he stated with certainty that the post-war China would follow its own course and never become a Soviet flunkey. His courageous foresight was highly commendable.