Part of his ashes, buried inside Peking University, the former Yenching University campus, is appropriate. This was the starting point of his expedition to the Northwest in 1936, and the place where he compiled materials to write "Journey to the West" in 1937.
Edgar Snow, a friend of China, a true, loving, american friend who bears witness to Chinese history.
Edgar Snow was born into a poor family in Kansas City, USA.
In his youth, like many ordinary youths, he worked as a farmer, a railroad worker, and a printing apprentice. After graduating from college, he began his graduate career in journalism, making his debut at The Star in Kansas City and the Sun in New York. Later, he worked as a seaman on a cargo ship to the outer oceans, traveled to Central America, and finally reached Hawaii.
In 1928, at the low ebb of the Chinese Revolution, he moved to Shanghai to serve as assistant editor of the Miller's Review and later as a special correspondent for the New York Sun and the London Daily Herald.
After 1930, he traveled to major Chinese cities and the three eastern provinces, Inner Mongolia, and Taiwan, as well as Japan, Korea, and the Dutch East Indies, to gather news. He traveled long distances through the southwestern provinces of China, trekking through western Yunnan Province to Burma and India, visiting Gandhi and other Indian revolutionary leaders.
At the time of the September 18 Incident in 1931, Snow was in Shanghai, witnessing the Songhu War of 1932 and the Rehe War of 1933.
After that, he worked as a professor in the Department of Journalism at Yenching University in Peking for two years, while studying Chinese and Chinese. During this period, he became acquainted with the famous progressive American journalist Smedley, and also had contacts with Lu Xun, Song Qingling, and some underground Chinese party members.
He compiled an English-language selection of modern Chinese short stories, Living China, and was one of the first to introduce Lu Xun's writings to the West.
The year 1936 was a pivotal year for a major turnaround in China' domestic situation. Snow took countless questions about revolution and war that could not be understood at that time, and set out from Beiping in June, passed through Xi'an, risked his life, and entered the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. He was the first Western journalist to conduct an interview in the Red Zone.
He broke through the tight press blockade imposed on the Chinese revolution by the Kuomintang and the capitalist world.
First, he arrived at the temporary capital security guard of the Soviet district at that time
(i.e., Zhidan County), had a long dialogue with Comrade Mao Zedong and collected first-hand information about the 25,000-mile Long March. Then, after a long journey, he reached Prewang County in southern Ningxia, which was already a forward position intertwined with the canine teeth of the Kuomintang central forces. Finally, braving the artillery fire, he turned back to the security guard, and the security guard successfully arrived in Xi'an. When he returned to Beiping, it was the eve of the outbreak of the Xi'an Incident. In Beiping, he first wrote many sensational newsletters for British and American newspapers, and then compiled them into a book entitled "Red Star Shines on China".
"The red star shines on China", and even the world, as a journalist for a bourgeois newspaper, he already had a premonition, although his reporting at that time was confined to the "northwest corner" of China, a sparsely populated and desolate Red Army base area besieged by powerful Kuomintang troops.
These four months of travel caused a journalist from a capitalist developed country to undergo a great change in his thinking and feelings. He had sincere and enthusiastic feelings for the Communist Party of China, its leaders, revolutionary fighters, peasants, herdsmen, workers, members of the Communist Youth League, and Young Pioneers, and thus gained a profound and correct understanding of China in the midst of the raging waves of revolution and war. This understanding was soon confirmed by the peaceful settlement of the Xi'an Incident and the all-out War of Resistance Against Japan after the Lugou Bridge Incident.
Because of the passion and love for Chinese people that he had aroused during his four-month adventure in the Red Zone of the Northwest, he devoted almost all of his energies for the rest of his life to continuing to explore and report on China.
After the war of resistance against Japan began, he served as a war correspondent for Anglo-American newspapers in China.
In 1939, he went to Yan'an again and had a conversation with Chairman Mao. These conversations were later published in the Miller's Review. In 1941, Snow made a timely report on the anhui incident, but was attacked by the Kuomintang reactionaries and forced to leave China.
He came to China again from 1942 to 1943, and it became increasingly difficult for him to visit China after that. During the period of McCarthyism's control, the FBI treated him as a dangerous person and did not allow the press to publish Snow's articles, and he was forced to move to Switzerland. His passport also prohibits travel to China.
It was not until June 1960, when he received a separate visa from our consulate, that he came to the liberated New China for the first time and held talks with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou. From 1964 to the beginning of 1965, he visited China again, and Chairman Mao received him again. In October 1970, Snow came to China with Mrs. Lois Wheeler Snow and met with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou at Tiananmen Square on National Day.
On December 18 he had a long and final conversation with Chairman Mao.
For example, if Journey to the West and Snow's other writings on China were catalysts for friendship between the Chinese and American peoples, he was the first swallow to primrose in terms of relations between China and the United States.
In February 1972, shortly after Snow returned to Switzerland, the American table tennis team was invited to visit Beijing for the first time, opening a new chapter in Sino-US friendship. Plagued by illness, he could not achieve his wishes.
At 2:20 a.m. on February 15, 1972, Edgar Snow passed away.
On his deathbed, he used the last strength of his life in his hospital bed to face the medical team headed by Dr. Ma Haide sent by China and uttered a sentence:
"I love China."