Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

by Edgar Snow

The first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorized account of Mao’s life, as well as a history of the famous Long March and the men and women who were responsible for the Chinese revolution. Out of that experience came Red Star Over China, a classic work that remains one of the most important books ever written about the birth of the Communist movement in China.

This edition includes extensive notes on military and political developments in China, further interviews with Mao Tse-tung, a chronology covering 125 years of Chinese revolution, and nearly a hundred detailed biographies of the men and women who were instrumental in making China what it is today.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Biography, Journalism

543 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Edgar P. Snow was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He is believed to be the first Western journalist to interview Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, and is best known for Red Star Over China (1937) an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.

Reviews

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with From Opium War To Liberation and Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, 'Red Star Over China' is one of a small handful of indispensable English-language accounts of the Chinese Revolution. The first foreign journalist to make his way into the Red-controlled territories during the Civil War, Edgar Snow had unparalleled access, conducting extended interviews with Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai and many other key figures of the Chinese Revolution. He tells the story of the revolution in detail, with a particular focus on the establishment of the first liberated zones in Hunan and the south-east, the Long March, the establishment of the massive liberated zone in the north-west, the Xi'an Incident, and the establishment of a united front against Japanese aggression.

A great piece of writing, and a great example of investigative journalism. A fascinating story told with warmth and humility. Definitely worth the effort - trying to understand modern China without understanding the Chinese Revolution is like trying to understand modern Europe without understanding the world wars.

[Randol Hooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential text in the study of modern China. Edgar Snow was a precursor to today's embedded journalist and traveled with the Red Army during the Chinese Civil war in the 1930s. He assembles an invaluable narrative from the men and women he encountered such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. It's the closest thing to a first-hand biography of Mao that we have, providing valuable insight into the people and the early history of today's Communist Party of China.

It's an excellent resource as recounts much of the national mythology of the Communist Party in a clear, concise manner. Snow tells the story of the Long March and the crossing of the Luding Bridge, pieces of which are enshrined in the Military Museum of the China People's Revolution in Beijing.

Anyone who seriously wants to make a study of today's China owes it to themselves to read this book.

[Karen Mosley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt compelled to read this book since I moved to China, but struggled through it for the past 6 months. I wanted to be "informed" about Mao Zedong and communism, and now I am. But it wasn't life-changing to read. As has been proven, communism looks good in theory, but doesn't work like it's designed to when practiced.

[Michael Perkins]

I read this book while in college. Author and journalist Edgar Snow spent months shadowing Mao in 1937, including as part of The Long March. Looking back, I see it was a pollyanna book that greatly influenced the views of China in the West, like Walter Duranty did for Stalin's Russia.

[Andrew]

There's no question that Snow's account is fantastic, and he has a journalist's knack for setting the scene, telling the story, and sketching the characters.

The only question is what is and is not valid.

Snow's most exciting bit of journalism, the telling of the tale of the Battle of Luding Bridge, was reported secondhand to him, and almost certainly an exaggeration of actual events. And it becomes suspicious when the Kuomintang are so uniformly evil, and the communist partisans so uniformly virtuous. I've never heard of an army on earth-- let alone a desperate, starving, put-upon band of largely untrained soldiers-- that behaves as well as Snow claims the Red Army did on the Long March.

I have little sympathy for the warlords of prerevolutionary China, and, despite the horrors that would be visited upon Red China in the '60s and '70s, everything I've read suggests to me that during the revolution, Mao was quite legitimately a brave, honest, idealistic freedom fighter. But I'd like to read something a bit less hagiographic.

[Aiden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it slows to a halt in the final section (section 12), Red Star Over China was firing on all cylinders for 380/410 of its pages. Edgar Snow is one of the best history writers i’ve ever read, not because he writes 100% objectively and refuses to give a bias but because it’s the opposite; He makes his bias known and then tells you what he saw and learned. This was one of the best books i’ve ever read, completely reformed my idea of Mao, red China and the Red army. Undeniably worth reading if you want to learn about 1930s china. Loved it

[Breakingviews]

By Katrina Hamlin

The portrait of Mao Zedong watches over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, but it’s still impossible to know the man behind the myth. Nearly four decades after his death, China’s modern leaders invoke his name at their own risk. Consider two of the most popular English-language biographers of the Great Helmsman.

Journalist Edgar Snow wrote “Red Star Over China” in 1937, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was hardly known in the West. His Mao is a hero: both a shrewd thought leader and the “No.1 ‘Red bandit’”, a daring outlaw with epic adventures under his belt. It’s a winsome combination of brawn and brains.

By 2005, when Jung Chang and Jon Halliday published “Mao: The Unknown Story”, the CCP had moved away from Maoist policies, but stuck to the line that he was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad. Their book presents a Mao who is much closer to 100 percent evil. He lacks ideals and his political theory is muddled. His success as a leader depends on a flair for intra-party politics. The authors also take care to diminish his achievements: their account of the Long March sees the young Mao carried in state on a sedan chair, rather than roughing it with the troops.

It’s not hard to explain the difference in perspective. Snow wrote under Mao’s supervision: sections dealing with his early life were submitted to Mao for revisions. He was a leftist dedicated to the war against fascism, and Mao was a worthy leader of the Chinese battle. Jung knew the CCP as the party which had oppressed her family for three generations. Her co-author was an historian, but more significantly also her presumably sympathetic husband.

The works share a basic premise: ignorant readers want to hear the truth. The opening chapter of “Red Star” sets out Snow’s starting point: “there was no greater mystery” than changing China. He offers more than 70 unanswered questions on Mao and China to show how much was still unknown. The title of “The Unknown Story” is a giveaway; the authors’ driving motivation was the conviction that Mao was still not widely understood.

The authors judged correctly: a lack of information and the extremes of his life left ample room for different versions of Mao’s story. Both were considered insightful at publication. After all, even the most determinedly neutral telling would encompass everything from the foundation of a modern superpower to the orchestration of the Great Leap Forward, a development programme which ended with mass starvation.

Today, there are still many Maos - some heroes, some villains and some a mixture of the two. Despite the ambiguity, Mao remains a potent symbol. He is built into the infrastructure of modern China: his portrait hangs over Beijing; his corpse still lies in state; many towns and cities have Mao monuments; and in every part of the country his face adorns yuan notes. This is not going to change any time soon. The CCP probably cannot, and perhaps does not want to, divorce itself from its great leader.

Perhaps the plasticity of the image contributes to its durability. The Chinese Communist government need not abandon Mao, because there is always a plausible version of him who embodies any possible line. When Bo Xilai was a rising star in the CCP, he made use of Mao-era songs and revolutionary slogans.

Bo was disgraced and had disappeared from sight by the time Xi Jinping became president early in 2013. But Xi has called on the memory of Mao with a ‘mass line’ campaign to encourage party members to listen to the masses, and to pay attention to the Chairman’s condemnation of extravagance and corruption.

It’s an attempt to anchor the new generation of leaders in party history. But it’s a risky to take that strategy too far: any positive associations are not easily divorced from the less pleasant memories. Mao’s legacy was - and is - volatile.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting snapshot of the Chinese Revolution by the first European to visit the Red Army in it's base areas during the post Long March, pre United Front period. Captures the fractured nature of China during this period from a different perspective than I've read in other works. Snow seems to become sympathetic to the Red Army less from it's work freeing the poor and more from disdain for the open autocratic tyranny of Chiang Kai Shek. This is reflected in Snow's seeming total lack of such sympathy for the same project in the USSR. But regardless, he does a great job telling the stories he heard from all the Red Army leaders and soldiers he interviewed, really puts you in a very specific sense of time and place.

As a direct journalistic report, the book is necessarily a bit limited in it's historical perspective, even with the updates in the 1968 edition. So while I definitely recommend the book, if you're looking for more of a total history of the Chinese Revolution, I'd also recommend checking out Han Suyin's excellent two part work The Morning Deluge/Wind in the Tower.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thanks, Snow, for legitimizing the tyrant, soon-to-be emperor Mao, who was, without a doubt, one of history's most evil people. He fed you lies and you swallowed them all, then disseminated them to the world, with little to no critical thinking on your part. This garbage book should have been taken off the market long ago.

[celestine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent account of the genesis of the Chinese Communist Party. Sympathetic but not overly biased. I would recommend anyone with a general anticommunist bias to check this book out, considering the CPC is still large and in charge in China. The incredibly human scale and perspective of the narrative is hard to deny. The version I read had Edgar Snow’s notes from the 30 years following. This edition had 100 pages of biographical notes that bring you up-to-date on where the notable (and some less notable) are in the face of the dawning Cultural Revolution.

[Albert Zhou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant exposition of the author's experience documenting the early stage of the Chinese Communist Revolution as a journalist. Contains many insights into the foundations of Chinese politics and the modern Chinese nation state.

[Chet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This needs to be required reading in American high schools and colleges. The first American to meet Mao Zedong, Edgar Snow introduced the great helmsman to the Western world. Especially relevant today as Snow met Mao after the Long March, when the latter had settled in Shaanxi, home province of Mao's colleague Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, current president of China and arguably the most powerful man in the entire world. In RSOC you can get a good earthy feel for Shaanxi province and all the wartime/political maneuvering going on as different factions fought for control over all of China. If you want a story more specifically tailored around Xi Jinping's father, then check out the biopic INTO THE GREAT NORTHWEST, which I personally translated and put up free on YouTube. It makes for a great companion piece to Red Star Over China. In fact one of the episodes explicitly references Edgar Snow's work.

[zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably a 4 star book but I’ve given it 5 because I’m so glad this book exists, and I think Snow was the perfect person to write it.

[Sickoklaas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das Buch war super anstrengend zu lesen ist aber jetzt schon eines meiner Lieblingsbücher über Kommunismus und politische Theorie. Die Einblicke in die frühen politischen Jahre des Mao Tse-Tung‘s und der Chinesischen Kommunistischen Partei sind extrem interessant und damals sehr revolutionär. Ehrlicherweise wären sie es heute auch noch aber die Art wie über die Guerilla Taktik geschrieben wurde hat mich fasziniert. Mao Tse-Tung scheint mir wahnsinnig charismatisch gewesen zu sein. Was man dem Buch leider anmerkt das es um die 90 Jahre alt ist. No joke wie kann man die ersten 15 Prozent des Buchs beschreiben wie Edgar Snow zu Mao hin kommt? Das würde man heute in einem Kapitel machen und nicht in 10 aber na gut. Alles in allem finde ich es ist Pflichtlektüre im Punkto Kommunismus und chinesische Geschichte. 4.5/5 wegen dieser dummen introduction bis snow bei Mao ist.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had hoped to get more insight about Mao, but it doesn't deliver. Snow does do a good job of setting the scene, illustrating well the fog that makes interpreting the present a challenge, let alone predicting the future.

[Nathan Levin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent journalistic account of "Red China" in 1936-37. Mao makes many interesting claims in his dedicated section of the text, as well as the interviews near the end of this particular issue. I'm not a big fan of Snow's writing however, nor the things he focused on. He is clearly sympathetic to the Reds, though he makes it clear this is merely his interpretation of what he saw.

[Jackson Burrowes · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first available looks into the Chinese Red Army and their long battle against forces within and outside China, pretty incredible interviews and descriptions from Snow.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book documents an incredible scoop at a pivotal and historic moment - for China and for the world. When Snow visits the North-West Soviets in 1936 he is given a remarkable and exclusive intimacy with the Chinese Communist Party and many of its most famous members and leaders, with whom he discusses personal backgrounds, Communist politics, military strategy and great achievements - in particular the already near-mythical Long March.

Snow has a bias but he acknowledges it. He writes clearly and cogently about everything he sees and through fantastic good luck he meets some of the most important figures in modern Chinese history at one of the most pivotal moments of the 20th century.

To improve this book it could be revised to change Latin script/phonetic Chinese, although there is already a guide - and there could be a better map included, the one in this version really isn't that helpful!

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Endlich Edgar Snows Buch über die chinesischen Sowjetgebiete bis 1936 und deren führenden Persönlichkeiten der KPCh wie Mao, Zhou etc. fertig gelesen. Unbedingte Leseempfehlung. Es ist völlig zu recht DER Klassiker für diesen Zeitabschnitt. Es bietet hautnahe Einblicke in das Leben der einfachen Bauern in den Sowjets. Es zeigt die politische, ökonomische und militärische Organisation in den Gebieten en Detail. Dazu lebensechte Interviews mit Mao etc. Es berichtet auch über die lebensverhältnisse der „Roten“ vor den Sowjets und damit über ihre Unterdrückung und ihr Elend. Dazu gehören immer wieder die Massenmorde an den Kommunisten und der Zivilbevölkerung durch die KMT-Barbaren.

[Zhenlan Hu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book at a rather young age. I was not disappointed at all. As a Chinese myself, I know it was a difficult time completing such a book, considering the author, Mr. Snow, is an American citizen.

I truly appreciate the friendship exerted on Mr. Snow's part and admired him for taking the chance describing the wartime circumstances in China, Chairman Zedong Mao, and the Chinese Communist Party at the time. We thank you.

[Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

moving, tragic, beautiful, academic, personal.

an incredible work of journalism that became an incredible work of history.

LOVE

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary:
Edgar Snow snuck across battle lines in late 1936, and became the first foreign reporter who lived with, and interviewed the Chinese communist rand and file, leaders, and Mao himself over a four-month period. Red Star over China is his account of interviews, observations, and a few personal hair-raising experiences. A unique snapshot in time showing his impressions of the communists and what they wanted him to take away from his experience. Despite some prose weaknesses, many of which are difficult to avoid in a work that attempts to cleave closely to original interview responses, the book retains its value and is essential for anyone interested in better understanding modern Chinese history or the early years of Chinese Communism.

Strengths and weaknesses
As the first foreign report’s account of the communists after the Long March, Snow’s interviews and observations provided not only valuable information on the development, status, thinking, and propaganda of the communists to contemporary audiences, it also provides those of us with the benefit of historical context and other sources the opportunity to see where his reports on the communists ended up not being fully correct. While the passage of time does give valuable clarity in some regards, the present can also cloud the past, and his reports on the communist movement long before it dominated the country provide refreshing and unexpected insights to most of us who have a more jaded view based on evils it perpetrated in later ears. Communism, like many other movements that ended up falling into excess and evil, started from idealistic and largely positive motivations. Snow’s account provides the modern reader a useful reminder of this.
Some reviewers have criticized Snow’s account for being overly positive, even to the point of hagiographic and naive. His presentation of the communists, especially in contrast to the nationalists, is certainly in their favor. And it may be that he did not see their evils during his four months among them because his interviews were scripted and his trips were curated. It would be unwise to take everything in the book as gospel truth, and he himself freely admits in several places where his information is sketchy or he is reporting second-hand accounts. The 1968 edition of the book provides numerous notes and indications where subsequent events or material proved the original inaccurate, and this should not be the sole source of information for someone interested in Chinese communism pre-WWII.
One further weakness of Snow’s work for the general reader is that he relies too heavily on names and numbers. The endless names of people and places (especially in a romanization no longer used) is tedious, difficult to remember, and not helpful in getting a broader understanding of the period for someone not already familiar with the key players. Snow’s long transcriptions almost verbatim of several of his interviews with Mao that form the central few chapters also suffer as they devolve into a long recounting in semi-heroic style (which he acknowledges) of the Red Army. Snow’s readability and usefulness to the modern reader would benefit from a more liberally edited approach. However, the approach taken in the book does more accurately present the original wording, and so is valuable as roughly equivalent to a primary source.

Personal Takeaways:
- The communists were mostly young, under thirty, and most of their military was even younger, with a large number of them under 20 and as young as 14-16.
- The communists lost about 75% of their forces during the long march, which lasted over a year and covered 10,00 km (equivalent to walking across the United States and back)
- The communists, at least as portrayed by Snow based on his interviews and observations, were notable for a variety of reasons: the ground troops were enthusiastic, even passionate, about their cause; their armies paid for food, didn’t steal, and didn’t rape; they managed to operate on a shoestring budget; their leaders eschewed personal wealth and ostentatious displays of privilege.
- In conflict with the Moscow-trained communist leaders, Mao felt that the communist revolution in China had to start with the rural peasants, rather than the urban workers. Because the urban workers were primarily in cities where foreign countries held concessions and military power, the urban revolution would be much harder to achieve; and by contrast, as the poor were heavily taxed, often fell into debt, and were frequently abused by passing armies, they had a greater reason to revolt. And as a rural country, any national movement would have to include the large mass of rural peasants anyway.
- The communist cause was further one that would be attractive to any rural peasant. According to Snow, the communists took any land that was not farmed by the owner and redistributed it to common use; reduced taxes on farmers from 50-60% to 10%; and trained rural peasants to read (as well as in Communist propaganda).
- In addition, Communists banned prostitution, opium, and foot-binding, while establishing local-level democratic elections, universal suffrage, free universal education, and the right for women to freely decide whom to marry.
- (personal reflection, not explicitly stated in the book.) The nationalists were somewhat limited in their abilities to implement social reform because of their political choices and reality. Much of China, including several entire provinces, were ruled by independent warlords who had no real or lasting allegiance to the Nationalist government. The Nationalist leadership depended on the continued support of these warlords and of the wealthy land-owning classes to maintain their government, so any social reforms would have met with the opposition of the main support structures of the government and almost certainly in break-aways and power grabs. Later, as the communists staked out a radical land reform position, any Nationalist social reforms would be even more difficult as they would legitimize the Communist positions and cause even greater alarm among the wealthy political classes. Thus Is would be only after eliminating the Communists and consolidating their political position that the Nationalist government could enact social reforms (even if it had wanted to, which was unclear but dubious).
- The Communists, at least at the time of Snow’s interviews, were consistently supporting a united front against Japan, rather than continued civil war. They offered multiple times to work under the direction of the national government to achieve that goal, and even made credible actions to that end. This was in contrast to the Nationalists, who felt that eliminating the communist threat was more existential than the Japanese threat, which would be pushed back eventually. Also, the communist claim was perhaps a bit disingenuous, as they clearly intended to continue their proletariat revolution as soon as the Japanese threat was eliminated and continued to conduct effective propaganda campaigns throughout. So it is not surprising that the Nationalists continued to oppose the communists, even if it meant that the communists would thereby win the political campaign (suggesting unity against a foreign invader is inevitably going to be more appealing than conducting a civil war while a foreign invader takes more land).

[Haydon Ramirez · Rating 4 out of 5]

We have so much to learn from the “Red Bandits” of China. How they transformed a small group of radicals into a mass movement of millions of peasants, students, workers, and soldiers that would alter the course of not only China’s history, but the history of the world. They ousted the landlords and tax collectors, fed and clothed (and eventually armed) the poor, educated the illiterate, and established rights for women and national minorities. Edgar Snow’s account of the Chinese Civil War, and eventual United Front against fascist Japan, is not only an interesting historical read, it’s a critical moment in history that we need to study today.

[Changho Sohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book delivers that feel of Mao's Soviet with all the experience that Snow went through. It delivers a very personal narrative of traveling to Yan'an Soviet, undergoing all the excitements and near-calls of actions, where tensions were high and lives left to pure luck. Think Wild West with population of millions, you sort of have gotten the feel of it. Snow's interactions with Mao corroborates with other Chinese documents as well. Riding through the donkeys while under the danger of an ambush by the Nationalists bring that movie-like tension. His description of attending the staged drama advocating the ideology also verify their immense attention paid to reaching out the peasants. Kind of reading NYT series of the 30s. Timeless.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book serves as a great illustration of the origins of the PRC. It’s an extremely enjoyable read and features a surprisingly wonderful Marxist analysis of China’s wartime situation toward the end.

[TimEs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting. Gives a lot of info on KMT I didn't know

[Barack Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

306-Red star over China-Edgar Snow-History-1937

Barack
2021/01/23

" Red Star over China " was first published in the United States in 1937. It describes the Chinese Communist. It is one of the most influential books about the Western world in the process of understanding China, and it is also one of the most representative books in the Western world that sympathizes with the power of Red China in the 1930s.

Edgar Snow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, US in 1905 and died in 1972. He studied at the University of Missouri and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is a journalist and is well-known for books and articles about Chinese communism and the Chinese communist revolution. He was the first Western journalist to give a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Chinese Communist after the Long March and the first Western journalist to interview many Chinese Communist leaders including Mao Zedong. Representative works: " Red Star Over China " etc.

Table of Content
PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF RED CHINA
PART TWO: THE ROAD TO THE RED CAPITAL
PART THREE: IN “DEFENDED PEACE”
PART FOUR: GENESIS OF A COMMUNIST
PART FIVE: THE LONG MARCH
PART SIX: RED STAR IN THE NORTHWEST
PART SEVEN: EN ROUTE TO THE FRONT
PART EIGHT: WITH THE RED ARMY
PART NINE: WITH THE RED ARMY (Continued)
PART TEN: WAR AND PEACE

" During my seven years in China, hundreds of questions had been asked about the Chinese Red Army, the Soviets, and the Communist movement. Eager partisans could supply you with a stock of ready answers, but these remained highly unsatisfactory. How did they know? They had never been to Red China. ”

The investigation of the Chinese Communist and its early leaders has made Snow a symbol that foreigners cannot go around studying the early history of the Chinese Communist in New China. Looking at it today, some of the posterity may have a deeper understanding than him, but we usually only remember the first one. What's more, at that time a comprehensive point of view, to study the Chinese Communist is a very dangerous thing, Snow able to overcome the difficulties, lived in China for so long, that to find true courage is indeed admirable.

“ The Communists claimed to be fighting for agrarian revolution, and against imperialism, and for soviet democracy and national emancipation. Nanking said that the Reds were only a new type of vandals and marauders led by “intellectual bandits.” Who was right? Or was either one? ”

The conflict of interest makes the two parties inevitably attack each other. We, as descendants, looks very easy to distinguish right from wrong, but who live in the era of the flood of the guys who, in fact, it is difficult to distinguish the merits and demerits of the various claims. Spend more time, investigate more, draw conclusions cautiously, and don't jump to judgments.

" Even the simplest points were disputed. Some people denied that there was such a thing as a Red Army. There were only thousands of hungry brigands. Some denied even the existence of soviets. They were an invention of Communist propaganda. Yet Red sympathizers extolled both as the only salvation for all the ills of China. In the midst of this propaganda and counterpropaganda, credible evidence was lacking for dispassionate observers seeking the truth. Here are some of the unanswered questions that interested everyone concerned with politics and the quickening history of the Orient. "

For the same thing, some people support it, and some people oppose it. The supporters are conclusive, and the opponents can also give many reasons. In the end, the loudest speaking is the result. If the Chinese Communist no clutter, after a century up to today, and along the way made so many astonishing miracles, who in turn will remember those pioneers do?

" Since then it had been a crime punishable by death to be a Communist or a Communist sympathizer, and thousands had paid that penalty. Yet thousands more continued to run the risk. Thousands of peasants, workers, students, and soldiers joined the Red Army in an armed struggle against the military dictatorship of the Nanking regime. Why? What inexorable force drove them on to support suicidal political opinions? What were the fundamental quarrels between the Kuomintang and the Kungch'antang ?* ”

He took a huge risk and went deep into the jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist. The situation is unknown, life and death are unknown. Almost no one does not cherish their lives. Many people do such things for a reason. The reason that prompted them to do this is also the core of the vitality of the Red Army and the Chinese Communists.

" What were the hopes and aims and dreams that had made of them the incredibly stubborn warriors—incredible compared with the history of compromise that is China—who had endured hundreds of battles, blockade, salt shortage, famine, disease, epidemic, and finally the Long March of 6,000 miles, in which they crossed twelve provinces of China, broke through thousands of Kuomintang troops, and triumphantly emerged at last into a new base in the Northwest? ”

An organization, or a State, in the early days, experiences the more difficult test, which fortunately kept it down low probability. But once it can survive these hardships, the higher it will reach in the future. If you can survive the extremely bad plight. Then in good times, you can use your wisdom and courage to achieve faster and better achievements. So we say, the weak experience of suffering was destroyed, and the strong experience of suffering, although to a beating, but its spirit is more powerful.

" Threats of Japanese conquest had provoked great demonstrations of the people, especially among the enraged youth. A few months earlier I had stood under the bullet-pitted Tartar Wall and seen ten thousand students gather, defiant of the gendarmes' clubbings, to shout in a mighty chorus: “Resist Japan! Reject the demands of Japanese imperialism for the separation of North China from the South!” ”

Judging from the comparison of all aspects of hard power at the time, Japan was almost invincible. The young people still yearn for the prosperity and revitalization of the country and nation. From the perspective of a mature adult, they may find their ideas only ridiculous. But if everyone is wise to protect themselves, our country and nation would have long been annihilated in the long river of history.

“ We all knew that the only way to leam anything about Red China was to go there. We excused ourselves by saying, “Mei yu fa-Tzu” —“ It can't be done.” A few had tried and failed. It was believed impossible. People thought that nobody could enter Red territory and come out alive. ”

For those who don’t understand Red China, they naturally have fear and fear, just as we have reservations about unknown regions and events today. All propaganda must be consciously defaced or beautified. We must see, experience, and think with our own eyes.

“ 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.” “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." ”

What history is like can never be completely restored. If the last Red Army fails, then they are in the history of the image, probably will always be based on bandits in the form of appearance, only the winner to be eligible to write the history and interpretation of history. The only winner of the offspring have a chance to live down.

[Jared Quigg · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'Unbearable,' the average American or English worker would say. But I remembered Shanghai factories where little boy and girl slave workers sat or stood at their tasks twelve or thirteen hours a day, and then dropped, in exhausted sleep, to the dirty cotton quilt, their bed, directly beneath their machines. I remembered little girls in silk filatures, and the pale young women in cotton factories sold into jobs as virtual slaves for four or five years, unable to leave the heavily guarded, high-walled premises day or night without special permission. And I remembered that during 1935 more than 29,000 bodies were picked up from the streets and rivers and canals of Shanghai--bodies of the destitute poor, of the starved or drowned babies or children they could not feed.
"For these workers in Wu Ch'i Chen, however primitive it might be, here seemed to be a life at least of good health, exercise, clean mountain air, freedom, dignity, and hope, in which there was room for growth. They knew that nobody was making money out of them, I think they felt they were working for themselves and for China, and they said they were revolutionaries! They took very seriously their two hours of daily reading and writing, their political lectures, and their dramatic groups, and they keenly contested for the miserable prizes offered in competitions between groups and individuals in sport, literacy, public health, wall newspapers, and "factory efficiency." All these things were real to them, things they had never known before, could never possibly know in any other factory of China, and they seemed grateful for the doors of life opened up for them."
--Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China

"So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms?" The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified."
--Michael Parenti

It is one thing to read Marx, look around you, and see that he was right about this miserable system. Many have done it, have noticed the widening inequality, the blatant corruption, the diminishing freedom of the workers. But it is quite a different thing to see all that and make the choice to fight. Some will simply resign themselves to the idea that this is just how the world is, mean and unfair. Others will look to reform the system, to make the workers more "comfortable," to seek a "kinder" capitalism.

Edgar Snow arrived in China when a mass movement of peasants and workers sought a third option: fighting back. Revolting. When his book hit the shelves, he was criticized relentlessly for painting too kind a picture of the Communist revolutionaries, for "failing" to portray them as criminal hooligans bent on destroying civilization. For his work on this book and others, he was eventually blacklisted and forced out of the United States, "the land of the Free."

For all his supposed "sympathy," Snow's reporting is remarkably even-handed. If his portrayal of the Communists is kind, he answers that with kind words for some of the Nationalists as well. For every passage highlighting the gains the Communists have made, he follows it with descriptions of their challenges, of the times when he doubts their sincerity, etc. He frequently is critical of the USSR's policies toward China, accusing Stalin of a number of strategic mistakes. To put it simply, Snow always sounds like he is an outsider looking in, and his later support for the Communists begins and ends with the reporting he did while on the ground there. He saw firsthand the miserable conditions of the workers and peasants, and he interviewed so many people who benefitted from living in the Communist-controlled areas of China during the Civil War. These were people who could read for the first time, who could live without fear of the landlord, who had purpose in their lives for the very first time.

The book remains valuable for communists and history lovers today for a number of reasons, chiefly Snow's interviews with Mao and his description of the Long March. Mao's brutal upbringing, along with the conditions of pre-Communist China explain both his conversion to Marxism and his later ruthlessness. After surviving the Long March, the Nationalists' attempted extermination campaigns, World War II--wouldn't you do anything it takes to make the world better? It must finally be acknowledged--despite the objections of liberals--that Mao's legacy IS complicated. The failure of the Great Leap Forward and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution exist alongside a legacy of women's liberation, mass literacy campaigns, rapid expansion of healthcare, skyrocketing life expectancy, going from a backward country to a world power, etc. etc. Mao lead the Communists both when they freed the country from the Japanese, and when they oversaw an unbelievable number of famine deaths. In my mind, one does not cancel the other out. The facts are simply the facts: in the pursuit of a better world, the Chinese Communists scored impressive wins, and suffered catastrophic failures. The point of studying history is to learn from past success, and past failure.

Which leads me to the Parenti quote. Liberals demand perfection from socialists. If the people take revenge over their past oppressors, then the revolution wasn't worth it in their minds. If the New York Post isn't allowed to exist under socialism, then the liberals don't want it. China today is too restrictive of civil liberties. I readily admit that at the same time as I say the United States grants far too many civil liberties to white Christians. Simple-minded liberals too often believe that to praise China's successes means to endorse everything they do. My divergence with them is that I do not demand the revolution to be perfect. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Since the death of Mao, China has in many ways retreated from socialism, and the result is that it is far more unequal there today than during the first decades of Communist rule. Does that mean I call for an end to Communist Party rule? Of course not. I simply urge the Communist Party to learn from its own history, and remember both its successes and failures. A better world is possible, and it won't be reached from the capitalist road. America has proved that and continues to prove that every day as our quality of life declines. The civil liberties for the fascists is why we're here.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating window into the world of the Chinese Communists as they existed in 1935-1936, Snow's interviews and accounts with not just the leaders of the Communist Party of China, but the common soldiers, peasants, and workers that lived in the territories that they controlled are a critical facet to understanding not just the way in which the CPC was able to survive the brutal conditions it faced, but how it would come to win the Chinese Civil War. The differences between the Nationalist ("White") governance and that of the communists is starkly highlighted in gripping detail, from the regressive taxation schemes to the laissez-faire cruelty that defined the lives of many of the poor and downtrodden. Many of those interviewed by Snow who had lost parents, siblings, wives, and in some cases entire clans that included their extended family to the Nationalist efforts to stamp them out, and yet persevered anyways -- marching out of the Jiangxi Soviet as the Nationalist armies began a campaign of annihilation, and completing the thousands of miles of marching necessary to survive being dogged by their enemies.

While some of the more auspicious guesses by the Communist leaders interviewed by Snow would not be born out in the future, this does not detract from the overall quality of the account. There are a few stumbling blocks here and there; the way in which the text is written makes frequent skips or retreading of the same ground a common characteristic. It would have been nice for a chronologically arranged history of the Communists, followed by the interviews necessary, to help better guide the text. And while I appreciate my copy being true to form and preserving the Wade-Giles pronunciation format that Snow was both familiar with and used, I would have appreciated it if it had been updated with more modern Romanization standards.

Overall a fine primary account that should be on your reading list if you have an interest in Chinese history in the early 20th century.

[Phong Olympia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a good premise to understand how Communist Revolution can succeed in China, as well as a good prediction for China society (1949-1976). The book describes how the Chinese Communist Party could establish a strong base in northern Shaanxi province amidst Japanese invasion of Manchuria and Kuomintang (KMT) Encirclement Campaigns. It also partly provides biographies of top leaders in the CCP: Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai.
By reading this book, it is not difficult to figure out why the CCP would be the one standing victoriously over the Tiananmen Square in 1949 to establish the People's Republic. The Red area (indicating areas controlled by the CCP, including northern Shaanxi and a part of Gansu) was described as a 'truly' society than any other areas in China. There were no exploitation, just men and women working for their own lives. Lands were redistributed to peasants and children can go to school for free. Meanwhile, corruption and war had seriously crippled Kuomintang government. Mao Zedong insisted on a United Front policy, which gained him popular support from Chinese people.
In China's Great Hall of the People nowadays, it can be noted that a Red Star is shining above in the center of the ceiling. It can be interpreted as a reconfirmation of Edgar Snow's prediction, that the Red Star is finally shining all over China.