Edgar Snow > Quotes

“Where did the Communists get their support? From the "great majority’"—the poor peasants, ready to die for them. Why? Peasants were not interested in revolution, Marxism, or theories. They wanted peace, rice, parcels of land, relief from their agonies, freedom from crushing debts, usury and taxes, and a chance for their children to learn to read and write.”
― Edgar Snow

“A look at Chinese history showed that some of China’s ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits.”
― Edgar Snow, Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

“For one thing, possibly this war has more profoundly shaken the Chinese clan-family system than any previous catastrophe. Of course, the system is not unique to China but characteristic of many feudal and semi-feudal societies surviving in Asia. It is still vigorous in India and is probably stronger in Japan, with peculiar differences, than in China. Total war imposed on the individual Chinese heavy and complicated problems which the limited resources of familism were no longer able to meet alone. The mass need for security in the face of unprecedented catastrophe results in new forms of social combination and interdependence, and a greater readiness to submit to broad group authority.

Millions of people have been separated from their relatives and even their parents, some by army conscription, some in the confusion of escape from death, but thousands by voluntary desertion of family for country. If a Chinese Gallup could circulate a questionnaire among China's youth today, to ask, "What is your first duty?" the finding might be considered revolutionary. Quite a percentage would answer, "To China" instead of "To my family."

Confucius said wu wei meant simply that the highest duty of man is to serve one's parents while they are alive, to bury them with propriety when dead, and to worship them with propriety when buried. "All you need to take with you to govern China," Akira Kazami advised the Japanese Cabinet of which he is chief secretary, "is the Confucian Analects." But in many ways the 2,500 years of Confucian domination of the Chinese intellect is being overthrown. Filial piety is no longer the glorified thing it was once.”
― Edgar Snow, The Battle For Asia

“And yet, except for Japan's impatient and greedy seizures of Chinese territory, China and Japan might have found a common meeting ground. Ideologically, the two regimes seemed not far apart. The Kuomintang was much impressed by both Fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany. Chiang chose german officers to train his army, and Italians (before General Claire Chennault's day) to train his air force. Germans helped organize his political gendarmerie, the Lan I She, or "Blue Shirts," modeled after the Gestapo. Cadets in the Kuomintang military academies were taught the fuehrer principle of unquestioning loyalty to "Leader" Chiang, and that teaching soon reached public schools through the organization of Kuomintang youth corps.

The Kuomintang "tutelage period" was always a one-party dictatorship; no legal basis existed for an opposition. Although this dictatorship was inefficient and incomplete, opposition was possible only under shelter provided by militarists not yet wholly "assimilated," or in terms of open armed insurrection such as that led by the rival Communist party. There was no Bill of Rights, thousands were held in jail without trial, and executions went on daily, but as few records were published it was never possible to know just how many people were being killed.”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning

“Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai.

Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road;
the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.”
― Edgar Snow, Red China Today: The Other Side of the River

“The truth seemed to be that a revolutionary army anywhere was always in danger of becoming too puritanical, rather than the contrary.”
― Edgar Snow, Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

“Russians accuse Mao of seeking “world holocaust.”
― Edgar Snow, Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

“The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution.

Shanghai!”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning

“Had the United States taken the lead in such a world war against poverty, disease and ignorance it would itself have found some means of transition from the “military-industrial complex” escapism into which it has fallen. But aren’t we already doing enough with the four to five billion dollars annually expended in foreign aid? Directly and indirectly, by far the greater part of such sums go into military hardware that is of no value to the poor and is often used as a means of repressing and reducing any chance of peaceful change. In machine­ poor lands much of the rest goes into the pockets of military sycophants, profiteering merchants, landlords, politicians and the quick among the have-gots. It goes into cars and gasoline and freezers for the few. Too much of it tends to intensify class hatreds, the chasm between rich and poor, and dislike of the Yankees who bring gumdrops but not the means of work.”
― Edgar Snow, Red China Today: The Other Side of the River

“in China, where a career of banditry in early youth often indicated a man of strong character and purpose.”
― Edgar Snow, Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

“In July, Lin Piao, China’s Minister of Defense, publishes a declaration, “Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!” which calls upon the underdeveloped nations, likened to the “rural areas of the world,” to join forces against American and Western imperialism, the “cities of the world.”
― Edgar Snow, Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

“In the morning I inspected my traveling companions and found a youth and a handsome old man with a wisp of gray beard sitting opposite me, sipping bitter tea. Presently the youth spoke to me, in formalities at first, and then inevitably of politics. I discovered that his wife’s uncle was a railway official and that he was traveling with a pass. He was on his way back to Szechuan, his native province, which he had left seven years before. But he was not sure that he would be able to visit his home town after all. Bandits were reported to be operating near there.

“You mean Reds?”

“Oh, no, not Reds, although there are Reds in Szechuan, too. No, I mean bandits.”

“But aren’t the Reds also bandits?” I asked out of curiosity.

“The newspapers always call them Red bandits or Communist bandits.”

“Ah, but you must know that the editors must call them bandits because they are ordered to do so by Nanking,” he explained. “If they called them Communists or revolutionaries that would prove they were Communists themselves.”

“But in Szechuan don’t people fear the Reds as much as the bandits?”

“Well, that depends. The rich men fear them, and the landlords, and the officials and tax collectors, yes. But the peasants do not fear them. Sometimes they welcome them.” Then he glanced apprehensively at the old man, who sat listening intently, and yet seeming not to listen. “You see,” he continued, “the peasants are too ignorant to understand that the Reds only want to use them. They think the Reds really mean what they say.”

“But they don’t mean it?”

“My father wrote to me that they did abolish usury and opium in the Sungpan [Szechuan], and that they redistributed the land there. So you see they are not exactly bandits. They have principles, all right. But they are wicked men. They kill too many people.”

Then surprisingly the graybeard lifted his gentle face and with perfect composure made an astonishing remark. “Sha pu kou!” he said. “They don’t kill enough!” We both looked at him flabbergasted.

Unfortunately the train was nearing Chengchow, where I had to transfer to the Lunghai line, and I was obliged to break off the discussion. But I have ever since wondered with what deadly evidence this Confucian-looking old gentleman would have supported his startling contention. I wondered about it all the next day of travel, as we climbed slowly through the weird levels of loess hills in Honan and Shensi, and until my train—this one still new and very comfortable—rolled up to the new and handsome railway station at Sianfu.”
― Edgar Snow

“What's wrong with China?" Dr. Frene demanded of me almost immediately, after Nym introduced us. "Why were the Chinese able to invent everything and develop nothing? Why did Chinese civilization undergo a menopause? What happened to China's creative power?"

"Maybe China atrophied because of lack of competition," I suggested weakly.

"Nonsense!" he screamed mildly. "China is a case of stability achieved at the expense of stifling the individual. The society lives but the creative personality dies. Taoistic passivism and fatalism on the one hand, bastard-Confucianism on the other: ancestor-worship, adoration of the male offspring, worship of the phallus! Regimentation of the mind by the classics on the one hand, dissipation of sense power and early and constant cohabitation on the other hand. The mind becomes a perfect mechanical instrument but remains a blank because the senses are dead which should serve and simulate it!”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning

“In those dreamy years of lingering isolationism we Americans thought of both Asia and Europe as a museum of inanimate ruins. The history I was then witnessing could not be brought home "to sit on." The living humanity in the old world was far more important than its relics and its problems would affect the lives and fortunes of our own sons for man years to come.”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning