Helen Foster Snow:  An Introduction to Her Life and Legacy
“The Accomplishments of Helen Foster Snow in China”

By Kelly Ann Long

Helen Snow’s potential for important accomplishment in China began long before she arrived on Chinese soil. It began in a courageous spirit of adventure, in an inherent self-confidence, and in a capable intellect well-disposed to learn new things. These personal attributes were joined by her belief in American exceptionality, confidence in its founding traditions, and a sense of optimism about possibility for friendly relations with other nations in the world.  Her outlook also reflected the pioneering spirit of her ancestors and myriad Americans who had set out for territories unknown to better their lives.                                   

After taking a civil service exam and learning that China was the spot with a probable position open, hopeful that her experiences would provide the substance on which she would form her reputation as a journalist or novelist, Helen Foster left behind the comforts of a familiar world in Utah, heading for realms unknown, at the young age of 23, in the summer of 1931. That bold step loses significance unless we remind ourselves of the context of the time in which Helen made that leap. The world had been immersed in a deep and growing world-wide economic depression and forecasts were not bright. She did not climb into a comfortable seat on an airplane for a many hour flight across an ocean, but rather, boarded a ship that carried her into the blue horizon for weeks as it made its way across that vast Pacific. She traveled without benefit of escort, companion, or husband to a destination that often appeared in the American popular press as a land steeped in poverty, lacking in good governance, rife in destitution and conflict.

Arriving at her destination in late August, Helen Foster stepped off the ship and onto the Bund, the thriving waterfront of Shanghai.  In an open rickshaw, Helen set out for the Astor Hotel in the direction of the U.S. Consulate. She entered the city during a time when westerners enjoyed extraterritorial privileges, and she moved within a section of the city immersed in Western influence. During her first weeks in China, Helen Foster enjoyed a lifestyle opulent in comparison to her former existence and the lives of those she knew back home. She took delight in the luxuries this life afforded, yet she also challenged herself by getting jobs within the foreign sector. Later, she moved to the more affordable China United Apartments on 104 Bubbling Well Road and worked for a group of industrial bankers as a personal secretary.

One of her early adventures was to travel out of the relative comforts of the foreign community to investigate what was going on in the wider world around her. Part of what she discovered outside that protected enclave of western settlement was evidence of the worst flood of the Yangtze River in recent Chinese history. In the late summer 1931, refugees poured into a city hard pressed to meet their needs. Some of Helen’s descriptive letters home found publication in local papers. She described “The greatest flood in the history of the world, famine, terrific disease epidemics and bandits tearing up the interior and the government officials cutting each other’s throats at Nanjing.” Even at that early stage, her writing reflected compassion for the people of China, a developing understanding of the political dynamics in China by the 1930s, and clear evidence that she would be no mere watcher from the sidelines, but rather, a person who would commit herself to causes.  

Printed in the Salt Lake City Tribune and The Salt Lake City Telegram, these early journalistic forays described panic-stricken refugees and blazing infernos, the latter resulting from a Japanese attack on Chinese sections of Shanghai in January 1932, which foreshadowed the course of events that would throw China into a full-scale war against foreign aggression by 1937.  Although Helen assured readers that the danger befell common Chinese, not foreigners in the protected areas, she could not have known her safety was certain, and yet she made the choice to stay even in the face of danger. Thereafter, she traveled toward the frontline of the battling, only to be turned back by a bomb exploding on the path. Yet her growing interest in the Chinese political scene had been whetted, and it would lead to her introduction to Song Qingling, widow of Sun Yatsen, and to Lu Xun, the “father” of the Chinese modern literary movement. These early acquaintanceships would later help connect her to emerging Chinese artists and writers who reflected the impulse for change in Chinese society. These early associations with influential individuals would provide lasting connections during Helen’s time in China and after.       Helen found another kind of success in meeting and winning the affections of Edgar Snow, a Missouri newsman who had already established a reputation as an up-and-coming journalist. After a short courtship, they tied their destinies together as they decided to marry and continue their adventures in China. With guidance and support of her new mate, Helen made other courageous steps. Following a honeymoon voyage, Edgar and Helen Snow moved to the capital and traditional cultural center of China, the city known as Peking, or Peiping, Northern Peace, as a statement of continuing hope in those days of rising conflict.                                  

A city of scholars and students, Peking was home to Sinologists and individuals attached to the U.S. legation or military, most of whom lived in Westernized neighborhoods near the Forbidden City.  Helen and Ed settled there too during the first months in the city.  Helen enjoyed an active life among foreign social elites as she came into contact with influential westerners such as Colonel Evans Carlson, who made famous the phrase "gung ho" for the American Marine Corps in World War II, and his wife, Etelle; Herrlee Creel, researcher of the oracle bones; Karl Wittfogel and his wife Olga Lang, who wrote about Chinese family and society; Ida Treat, an American archaeologist; and Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist.

      Finding the lifestyle a strain on their income, however, in January 1934, the Snows moved out of the inner city to the Haidian district, near key universities. Helen took another bold step by enrolling in courses at Yanjing University and moved further in her study of the Chinese language. She came into regular contact with Chinese students and came to understand the situation in China from their perspective. It was there that she performed some of her most noteworthy accomplishments by forming true and lasting friendships with the young Chinese with whom she met. These Chinese intelligentsia and college students, called “radicals” or Left-leaning intellectuals by some, moved along the cutting edge of important political and social events. The Snows’ sentiments moved in league with these students. Their house became a hub of interaction between Chinese students and foreigners in the days leading up to the December Ninth Movement.

      The student movement that developed in 1935 was an expression of a growing spirit of the time and a declaration that the time for change had come. Helen and Edgar Snow joined ranks with Peking students who organized to protest against imperialist aggression and the Nationalist governments’ acquiescence toward the Japanese. As members of an American expatriate group in Peking, the Snows and others feared Japanese encroachment in Peking and supported the student movement unfolding on campuses as a patriotic expression of national consciousness.  Emboldened by the conviction that their friends acted on the side of justice, the Snows supported a movement that directly assailed the policies of the Nationalist government that labeled protests as reactionary and illegal. Helen Snow wrote essays protesting against Chiang Kai-Shek’s policies and in support of her student friends. She came to the attention of leaders in the movement through her efforts to heighten awareness of the fascist threat in China.         

Some of her lasting and influential literary accomplishments in China emerged in response to the student movement. One of the most poignant was her poem titled “Old Peking.” A poetic articulation of her sense of Peking’s loss of tradition and character at the hands of Japanese, it evoked a call for action against oppression, and it was embraced by the students. The poem critiqued the political situation, reflected Helen Snow’s awakening political consciousness, and demonstrated her growing potential as a writer. Additionally, her news articles focused on the student movement served as an important conduit of information for Chinese and foreign audiences. She wrote under her pseudonym Nym Wales and a Chinese pseudonym, Hsueh Hai-lun. Framing herself as a political activist, Helen wrote to draw the reader into agreement and to move others to action.                                                                 

That Helen Snow was available and willing to commit herself to such a call in a country not her own, among people she admired but with whom she would always remain an outsider at some level, is a marked achievement during this period in her life. She made close and lasting friendships with young women and men in the movement. Helen’s lasting devotion to the student cause indicated that loyalty to individuals played a strong role in her personal and professional decisions. It was this commitment that marked Helen as exceptional. Without these foundations and this connection borne of willingness to extend herself on behalf of others, to embrace their causes, and to act for their welfare as for her own, Helen Snow would never have made what is undoubtedly her best known accomplishment in China, her daring adventure to the communist-held territory of Yenan in 1937.

In considering her epic journey to Xian and then to the Communist areas in 1937, it is once again essential to recall the historical context of the time in which she acted, and to understand the challenges she confronted in accomplishing that feat. To simply leave Peking and ride by overnight train to Xian required daring and subterfuge. On arrival in Xian, Helen Snow encountered a city under martial law as Marshall Zhang Xueliang’s troops left the city and troops loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists took control.  News of Edgar Snow’s earlier expedition into Communist regions had preceded Helen’s arrival in the Northwest, and the Nationalists responded with increased efforts to keep journalists from bringing news of the Chinese Communists to the outside world. While in Xian, Helen was kept under close surveillance and was urged to go back to Peking.

She persisted in her goal, and became the second western woman and among the first eight westerners to enter this communist enclave. At that time the fate of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was still uncertain; news about them was kept from the outside world by a blockade imposed by their rival Nationalist Chinese; and the character of their governance of China was yet to be revealed. Although Helen is recalled in history as one among a group of daring journalists who broke through the border to learn about those who laid claim to Northwest China, it is important to remember that she made her entry to Yenan as a woman working solo.                    

To do that, she had first to “escape” from Xian and make her way to Yenan in secrecy. Snow arranged her bedclothes into a human-looking mound, put on dark glasses, a pair of slacks to make her look like a boy, a camel's-hair coat, and carried a bag with her needed items. She planned to jump out of a window in her boarding house at exactly 12:45 a.m. and was to be greeted by a fellow conspirator waiting outside the wall. She would be taken to a house to wait until the city gates opened at four o'clock or so. Yet her accomplice did not arrive, and yet she made those first bold moves into the unknown. Arriving at the gate outside the guest compound, she was questioned by police and told them she was a foreigner wanting to return home.

Snow secured a rickshaw that took her at a trot through city streets. Eventually joined by her accomplice, Helen went to a house where they met with a driver who drove them out of the city.  Helen Snow sat in the backseat wrapped in a blanket, hoping to appear as a sickly missionary's son. Traveling on a little-used road, Helen, her accomplice “Fitch,” and the driver arrived on April 30th at Sanyuan, the three mile point between Xian and the communist stronghold, where Helen Snow caught her “first glimpse of the Red Star."   Fitch returned to Xian and Helen traversed the remaining distance to Yenan as a lone western woman.                       

She undertook that strenuous journey to arrive at the communist stronghold in order to meet and interview Chinese cadres, women, children and key leaders including General Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and Mao Zedong. That journey took her into a remote and dangerous region in China’s interior, where she traversed roughed terrain, confronted disease, poor hygiene, inadequate food supply, and cultural challenges including insufficient language skills to comprehend the varieties of Chinese dialects spoken among the people gathered in the area.  Her extended stay in the communist encampment in Yenan would test her physically and emotionally, and would forever change her view of the world.                              

Events that unfolded after Helen’s arrival would alter the course of China’s history. Throughout the spring and summer of 1937, Nationalist and Communist representatives continued deliberations about forming a United Front against Japanese aggression. Undeclared war would break out between the Japanese and Chinese following the July 7 “Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” creating the impetus to complete the United Front agreement. By August, before Helen left, the transfer of Chinese Communist army units to the Nationalist Forces began. Large portions of China would be beset by war by the time Helen completed her interviews and made her timely getaway from Yenan to reenter Peking.                                              

During her four months in the Northwest, she gathered stories and photographs of important Chinese leaders, and chronicled their arduous Long March to arrive in the northwest. Among her noteworthy accomplishments in China are the interviews and photographs that Helen contributed to the narrative first unfolded in Edgar’s Snow’s famous Red Star Over China. Helen’s Inside Red China filled important gaps in knowledge about individuals whose lives had been indelibly shaped by civil strife. Her book revealed the human face of revolution, and recounted stories of real people involved in the battles that tore China asunder.  She wrote about topics such as marriage, divorce, and womanhood; developed a sense of kinship with the women in Yenan; and interviewed prominent leaders, gathering stories of an "elite" clique within the communist inner circle.                                                                          

In weakened physical condition, she undertook a demanding journey of several weeks after she left Yenan, confronting challenges presented by nature and war. She arrived in the Japanese occupied Peking as coastal areas of China came under assault. After checking into a German hospital for treatment for dysentery and fatigue, she later worked alone in November 1937 to pack up the Peking household in preparation for a move to Shanghai where Edgar had gone before her.            

Unlike the bustling atmosphere of the city when she arrived nearly six years earlier, the somber tones of a city under siege enveloped Shanghai that autumn. Helen settled into her new home in the Medhurst Apartments, which Gong Pusheng, a friend from the student movement days, recalled as barren of furniture except for a chair, a typewriter, and one bed. In harrowing times, often alone in those days while Ed traveled in the interior to report about the war, Helen labored to conclude Inside Red China. While the text conveyed important stories and background, her photographs also proved quite compelling. These provided close-up views of common soldiers, children, women, and better-known leaders of whom American readers had seen few photographs. These photos helped to dispel notions about the demonic nature of the Chinese Communists. Within that collection are more than three hundred photographs of Yenan taken in 1937, prior to its bombing during WWII.   Subsequent to the publication of these images in the 1930s, they have been included in museum exhibits in New York and Xian, in magazines, in China: A Photo-history 1937-1987 edited by W.J.F Jenner, in a bilingual photo-history titled Bridging, and in an exhibit for the international Snow Symposium held on the Brigham Young University (BYU) campus in 2001.                                                      

Another of her important accomplishments in China began before war forced her evacuation from Shanghai and China itself in 1940. By 1938 Helen Snow had begun to think about “industrial producer cooperatives that would encourage change in the social structure by changing the mode of production.” She hoped to initiate an effort to rebuild China’s wartime industries and provide food, shelter, and work for war refugees. Helen argued for the idea even though at first she encountered only skepticism. Eventually, the idea was embraced by important Chinese leaders as well as Rewi Alley and Edgar Snow. The Committee for the Promotion of Industrial Cooperatives in China met in Shanghai on April 3, 1938. Helen Snow began to campaign for this movement. Named Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (C.I.C.), but better known by the nickname "Indusco," from the cable address of Rewi Alley, the Chinese characters “Gung Ho” (work together) set inside an inverted triangle, represented the idea of all groups working together in a spirit of cooperation. As the endeavor swelled to take on international dimensions, Helen worked with influential westerners and Chinese.  The Snows became “unofficial diplomats” using their reputations as writers to campaign for membership, publicize projects, and gain financial support for Indusco.  This project would continue to engage Helen’s action and interest throughout her time in the Philippines and long after she returned to the U.S.                

Helen wrote articles and a book, China Builds for Democracy (1940 and 1941), in support of the enterprise. She explained the impetus for industrial cooperatives – an army of free labor, a demand for commodities, a blockade of the interior, untouched natural resources, and the need to rebuild after wartime destruction. Working from the Philippines with Mrs. E.E. Crouter, she secured over $250,000 in Chinese dollars to finance Indusco work in the communist areas. She sought support of the Chinese Women's Relief Association to oversee the equitable distribution of funds and carried on extensive correspondence with many individuals involved with Indusco.

Her physical departure from Asia did not bring an end to her efforts to work for the betterment of people in China, and for the cause of strengthened American-Chinese friendship. Back on her home soil during tenuous times, when US officials viewed Communism as a monolithic threat, Helen maintained her loyalty and belief in those individuals she had met during the challenging years of their struggles in Peking and Yenan. In the United States, Helen continued to write about her experiences and about the Chinese whom she had come to know and admire. Among her China-focused books are Women in Modern China (1967), The Chinese Communists: Sketches and Autobiographies of the Old Guard (1972); and eventually, her autobiography, My China Years (1984).                                                   

Among Helen’s many literary and humanitarian achievements, the most significant was in forging cross-cultural friendships that endured. Through her efforts, she fostered among Americans a friendly regard for China and the Chinese, showing others that China was a nation of good people. Within China, she also planted the idea that Americans were friendly people who truly hoped to help. The significance of her accomplishment in creating bonds of friendship has been given evidence over many years. Chinese associations have long recognized the contributions of Helen Snow to Chinese-American friendship, though Sewing Associations, photo exhibitions, literary society awards, museum exhibits, schools, and attendance at symposia in the U.S. So too, Americans have journeyed to China to participate in such celebrations of cross-cultural regard and respect. Evidence of her lasting accomplishment reaches right down through time to connect with us today in the form of people coming from China to participate in this symposium, bringing with them a statue dedicated to the memory and spirit of Helen Foster Snow. This celebration of the birthday of Cedar City, the place of her birth, is an important recognition of the myriad accomplishments of a woman who devoted her time to building friendship. It offers strong testimony to the importance of nurturing an on-going spirit of mutuality and support, so evident in the work and life of Helen Foster Snow.