By An-Wei

    It is a great honor for me and my colleagues to attend this grand celebration honoring Helen Foster Snow in her hometown. As an American citizen going out to the world from Cedar City 78 years ago, Helen Foster Snow eventually became a heroine of the Chinese people and is considered by many as one of the 10 greatest women in the world in the 20th century. In China her name is a household word, and a synonym of Sino-American people’s friendship.

In her lifetime Helen Foster Snow received several honors from China, including the first Literary Prize for International Understanding & Friendship in 1991, and the award of Friendship Ambassador in 1996, which was the highest awards the Chinese Central Government had ever given to any foreigners. After her death in 1997 her funeral in Madison, Connecticut, was attended by four Chinese ambassadors and representatives of her friends from various parts of China as well as over 200 people from 12 states and 4 countries. In Beijing, Helen Snow was officially memorialized in the Great Hall of the People.  In Xi’an, a permanent exhibition on her life was inaugurated, a documentary film was produced and a book was published in memory of this great American woman. The Helen Foster School was dedicated on her birthday a year later, and her statue was set up on the campus. Since 1980s five institutions were set up one after another in China, specializing in the study of Helen Snow’s life and works.

Why was Helen Snow so well respected and honored in a country with 1.3 billion people?

• Helen Foster Snow was a witness to the birth of new China and historian of the modern Chinese revolution.

      Helen Foster went to China in 1931 when she was 23.  Clever, attractive, eager to be a writer, she first worked at secretarial jobs in Shanghai. There she met and married Edgar Snow, still a young and little-known journalist.  Together they began to observe, study and write. In contrast to the mostly colonial-minded foreign community of the time, both shared similar feelings about China’s ordinary people, which conditioned all their subsequent writings and actions.

Encouraged by China's foremost author Lu Xun, Helen and Edgar worked on an anthology of short stories, Living China, published in London in 1936. Included in it was Helen’s essay, “The Modern Chinese Literary Movement”, which was the first analysis of the subject in English and “a lasting contribution to the Chinese people”.

In Beijing they became active backers of the December 1935 student movement that helped spark resistance to the threatened Japanese conquest of China.

In 1936, Edgar made his first-ever foreign journalistic visit to China's northwest, which resulted in his world famous work, Red Star over China. Soon after Edgar’s return from his trip, the other two Front Armies of the Long March met up with Mao Zedong. The red capital was moved from Bao’an to Yan’an. A Communist Party Conference would be held in early May. The Communists and Nationalists were negotiating the formation of the National United Front against the Japanese aggression. Helen realized this was a special occasion. Eager to personally witness the growing Communist movement, Helen tried again to reach the Red armies in Yan’an.

In the spring of 1937, she arrived in Xi’an, which was then under Nationalist control. In the dead of night, she summoned incredible courage and managed to evade six armed guards assigned to prevent her from leaving. It was at the risk of her life that Helen escaped by jumping out from the window of the Xi’an Guest House during the martial law, and managed to get behind the Nationalist lines into Yan’an. She felt that all her years in China had been leading up to this moment – recording the birth of Chinese Revolution from a woman’s point of view – and she was determined to succeed.

Helen spent the next five months among the Red armies, interviewing Mao and many other top leaders and gathering material for what would become several books, including her classic Inside Red China.  She accomplished a feat no one before or after her managed.  She also observed first hand the forming of the Red Army into the 8th Route Army under the United Front. Additionally she wrote down autobiographies of 34 revolutionaries, including army commanders, women leaders and children. Because of this, she knew personally, top leaders in China from then until 1997 when she passed away.

Both Helen’s and Edgar’s books were quickly translated into Chinese and became crucial texts for the Chinese people to learn about China’s arising Communist Movement as well as important historical records for generations to come throughout the world.

Helen’s role in telling the story of Mao Zedong and his comrades to the West was critical. To the Chinese, she was a heroine for being among the very few to chronicle events surrounding their revolution. To historians and scholars in both China and the United States, her firsthand account was a substantial contribution to the record of some of the most important periods in world history.

• Helen Foster Snow initiated the Gung Ho idea and started a nationwide movement that contributed to the final victory in the War of Resistance against Japan.

      In late 1937 Helen and Edgar returned to Shanghai, which they found still burning from Japan’s bombing on the Chinese section of the city. About 80 percent of Shanghai’s factories and workshops had been destroyed by the Japanese. All the treaty ports were in similar condition or under threat of it. Helen became extremely concerned about how the urban Chinese would survive as they became refugees driven into the rural countryside. She told Edgar that something had to be done.

With her ancestor’s pioneer experience in mind, Helen Snow initiated the idea of industrial cooperatives, which would help the displaced workers to join peasant tradesman in small enterprises that they owned and managed themselves. Together with Edgar and Rewi Alley, Helen convinced both the Nationalists and Communists to accept the co-ops for the benefit of all Chinese.

Both Edgar Snow and Rewi Alley described Helen as the first to push the idea of combining wartime work-relief with cooperative organization. Snow wrote: “Industrial cooperation –­ in hundreds of busy self-supporting workshops throughout China, was… the brain child of Nym Wales… But for her faith and enthusiasm, the movement might never have come into being”.

Following the official inauguration of the Chinese industrial cooperative association in 1938, thousands of co-ops were organized throughout the country. All sorts of daily necessities were produced in large quantity by the co-ops, giving necessary support to the army and people in the warfront against Japanese invaders. While the Snows did not personally organize co-ops in the field, as Alley did, they campaigned tirelessly soliciting support for them in the United States, the Philippines and elsewhere. This was done in close association with the International Committee of Indusco, whose chairwoman was Madame Sun Yat-sen. Along with Ida Pruitt, Helen helped set up and run the American Committee in Aid of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives in New York, becoming its vice-chairperson. Mrs. Anna Roosevelt, the U.S. President’s mother, was honorary head. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife, was a sponsor. The committee collected some $5 million U.S. dollars in wartime relief funds for Indusco.

Using her pen name Nym Wales, Helen Snow wrote much about the industrial cooperatives. Her China Builds for Democracy, (New York, 1940), a unique book about the story of Chinese industrial cooperatives, was re-published a few years later in India, with a preface by Prime Minister Nehru, as a textbook for the cooperative movement in his country. During her visit to India in 1972 the Indian government gave Helen Snow a VIP reception, and honored her as “Queen of Co-ops”.

The Indusco system of systematically incubating cooperatives was the first major attempt to foster self-generating economic development among uneducated peasants on a massive scale in the 20th Century. Helen Snow believed that Indusco could serve as a bridge between different political groups and different social systems. It was also a very good way to build up democracy at the grass-roots level in China. 

The motto of the cooperatives, “Gung Ho”, (meaning ‘work together’) was destined to enter the American language. It became the battle-cry of the famed U.S. Marine Raider Battalion of World War II under the command of Evans F. Carlson, who adopted it from the co-operatives which he staunchly supported. Later it came to denote a spirited effort.

Helen’s interest in industrial cooperatives in China was lifelong. In her book, My China Years, published in 1984, she recalled, “My best energy and creative ability went into thinking of ways of getting the industrial cooperatives going… The Gung Ho project had a life of its own. No matter how many times it was given up as impossible and hopeless it rose again” … Naturally she applauded its revival in the 1980s, and gladly joined its re-established International Committee, remaining a member till her death.

Because of her key role in starting the Gung Ho cooperatives, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice in the 1980s.

• Helen Foster Snow was unable to produce a Great Novel of America as she had planned, but she wrote 64 books or manuscripts bridging future generations as well as bridging the East and West.

Helen wanted to be a Great Author since the age of eight. That was why she went to China. But throughout their years in China, the Snows worked as a team on various projects, including the writing of Red Star over China. Helen spent a lot of her time and energy, encouraging Edgar to travel and write, and clearing the desks for him so that his mind could be devoted solely to his work. Her own attempt at a great literary contribution was put off time and time again.

In 1941 the Snows returned to the United States. They were embraced by everyone – from ordinary citizens to the Roosevelts – as pioneers in Sino-American relations. In the same year they bought an old farmhouse in Madison, Connecticut, where they lived quietly and wrote.

During the war years, there was a long separation between the Snows as Edgar was a war correspondent. By 1949, both Edgar and Helen decided that it was time for them to go in separate directions. In the same year the Chinese Communists won decisively over the Nationalists. Americans were horrified, and the United States cut off all contact with new China. At about the same time, McCarthyism infected the United States, and Helen was seen not as a bridge between the United States and China, but a Communist sympathizer. She was in limbo, rejected by her own country and cut off from her beloved China.

Edgar, the more visible of the Snows, eventually was hounded out of the country. With his second wife, he moved to Switzerland where he lived until his death in 1972. Helen remained in the Connecticut farm house, living close to nature. She kept observing, studying and writing about China without any consideration to publish them. She kept writing year after year, and ended up with some 64 books and manuscripts.

Throughout the cold war years, Helen was one of the few westerners who knew China from direct experience, not book learning alone. Her books, with their critical eyewitness accounts, always serve as important resources for scholars who are unable to study the country first hand.

• Helen Foster Snow was a dedicated friend of the Chinese people and an important bridge between China and the United States.

Helen’s reporting departed from the approach of almost all her foreign peers, who were reporting from urban centers about the U.S.-backed, repressive Nationalist regime. At great personal risk, she instead ventured into the countryside to gain understanding of the growing popular support for Communism. She was among the few to foresee the danger of American support for Chiang Kai-shek, and her understanding of the wider Chinese picture was what gave her the insight and drive to be in a position to record for history the Communist revolution.

Her objective reportage was determined by her in-depth understanding of China. Her earlier experience in China included devastating exposure to the famine, desolation and hardship of the Chinese people. She saw with her own eyes a devastating flood on the Yangtze River which killed 600,000 people and sent 120,000 refugees pouring into Shanghai. She ventured inland and witnessed the crushing poverty and disease of Chinese peasants.  A few months later, the Japanese invaded the Chinese section of Shanghai. With war at her doorstep, Helen’s awakening of political and social awareness enlarged. Helen’s sense of commitment to the Chinese people grew. Her purpose in China was not to write alone, she believed, but to act on behalf of a people who had captured her heart.

Working together with Chinese writers and college students, Helen and Edgar translated and published Living China, a collection of short stories by the Left-wing writers that represented the China still filled with life, not the dying China on everyone’s minds. This study of left-wing literature was crucial in Helen’s intellectual and political development. Her increasing contact with revolution-minded students made it clear to her that fascism must be opposed at all costs and another alternative found to unite China and bring it into the 20th century.  Capitalism would appear ideal, but she believed that capitalism’s focus on individualism was too alien to the cooperative-minded Chinese. The growing grassroots popularity of Communism intrigued her, in particular the movement’s commitment to free speech, elections, and the liberation of women from horrifying practices like foot-binding, and she hoped for a political alternative that combined democracy and community.

Beijing was a hotbed of student movement, and Helen and Edgar were quickly drawn into not only reporting on the activity but aiding it.  Helen provided a spark to the movement, offering her home as a meeting place, giving suggestions, using her journalistic connection to publicize the students’ ideas, and even teaching them how to create propaganda for their movement. Helen’s status as a sacrosanct foreigner gave her freedoms, which the students did not have. She was able to report on their activities without repercussions, including articles in the influential China Weekly Review.  The slanted nature of her writing might destroy her chances of becoming a famous journalist, but she valued her status as an activist more and chose to become part of history rather than a passive observer of it.

Helen was unable to return to China for 30 years, but with China in her heart she kept observing, studying and writing about China and her future. When Sino-American relations began to thaw, Helen Snow returned to China in 1972 and again in 1978.  In the 1980s, with economic reform in full swing in the direction of a free market economy, the cooperatives were revived in China. She wrote in her memoir: “In my opinion, capitalism is now and always has been impossible in China… China is still ‘feeling the way’, I was told. It is still experimenting and still in transformation, out of necessity if not choice. It could develop into a mixed economy of socialism, but never into the other historical Western system”.  30 years later China is advancing successfully on her own way of development just as Helen Snow predicted.

Helen saw herself as a bridge-builder between the two countries she loved – her native America and her adopted China. Unfortunately Helen’s name doesn’t ring a bell for many Americans. Her full contribution would emerge only as more of her fellow Americans come to know her story and understand why she deeply hoped for and worked toward friendship between the two nations. With that understanding, two nations that remain largely an enigma to one another – a dangerous enigma – might be able to complete the bridge which Helen Foster Snow began to build more than 70 years ago.  In the past decade we are so pleased to see more and more of her fellow Americans have come to know the value of her contribution to world peace. The grand celebration today in her hometown is a very good example of this encouraging development in the United States. 

      Here I would like to quote Orrin Hatch, the U. S. Senator to conclude my remark: “Mrs. Snow built a bridge of goodwill between the hearts of the Americans to the hearts of the Chinese people. Let her life stand as a reminder that what lies behind the very different political systems of the world are real people whose hearts and minds are not so far apart.”

      May Helen’s torch of friendship continue to be passed on through the generations in a continuing effort to promote and nurture Sino-American relations.