Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism (1938) By Edgar Snow

This week as the Chinese celebrate the 70-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party consolidation of power, China finds itself as the lead story on two major international news fronts: a trade war with the United States, and a battle of attrition with Hong Kong.  The issues behind both of these news stories are not new, but the bargaining dynamics have changed in these seven decades. To overstate it, China has long ago ceased being a third world country, in fact, it no longer needs to bargain at all.

Everything about state policy is governed by China's history, a direct result of a disreputable and abusive mistreatment by colonial powers (including the United States) and their Chinese puppets. This history, unknown to or forgotten by those who still try to bully China today, shapes Beijing’s world view. And why shouldn’t it?  Concurrent with PRC's short history, the world has witnessed an uneasy stalemate with the former Soviet Union under the reality of mutually assured nuclear destruction.  And now with China, what looms is a mutually assured economic destruction … there will be no winners.

Lost to western policymakers was that the cause of overthrowing imperial dynastic rule in China did not start as a matter of Communists vs. Nationalists. It was a matter of Chinese vs. foreigners & their puppets.  Did the political split have to occur?  One can make a convincing argument that the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was merely another western puppet, backed & bankrolled by the U.S. and other western nations who bet on the Nationalists to protect “their” interests -- and lost that bet. The Chinese peasantry on the other hand, including Mao Tse-tung who was extremely well read in western democratic writings, had no other choice but to seek allies where available to protect the interests of the Chinese people.  At the time, that available ally would have been the Soviet Union.

American & western contact with, and understanding of, what was going on in China beyond the treaty ports was limited.  Next to nothing was known about the Communists who seemed to be winning popular support among the “peasants.” Until that is, Edgar Snow an American journalist was invited into the Chinese interior stronghold of Yenan where Mao Tse-tung and other revolutionaries had sought refuge to regroup after the legendary Long March.  The invitation had a motive, Mao hoped to tell the world the other side of the story.

Snow would spend several months living in Mao’s camp, conversing with him daily and informally.  Snow would write the first western published biography of Mao, his policy beliefs, and how he & the Community Party captured the loyalty of the masses, building them into a peoples’ movement strong enough to expel the machinations of the more modern, more powerful, western world.

Recommendation: Yes, for any reader of history, especially for the detailed history of the Long March; and anyone interested in current events.