Volume 52, Number 17 · November 3, 2005
Portrait of a Monster
By Jonathan D. Spence
Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Knopf, 814 pp., $35.00
It is close to seventy years since Edgar Snow, an ambitious, radical, and eager young American journalist, received word from contacts in the Chinese Communist Party that he would be welcome in the Communists' northwest base area of Bao-an. Traveling there by train, by truck, on foot, and finally on horseback accompanied by a twenty-man escort of Chinese Red Army troops, Edgar Snow reached Bao-an, and was granted several long evening interviews by Mao in his lamp-lit cave. Mao's secretary served as Snow's interpreter, and Snow's 20,000-word English draft of the interview was then translated back into Chinese and transcribed by a young student named Huang Hua, for submission to Mao. Mao made corrections and cuts, and Huang thereupon translated that approved version back into English for Snow.[1] With Snow's extended commentaries and additions to supply historical context, the resulting book, Red Star Over China, was published in the United States and in Britain in 1938; an underground and abbreviated edition had already appeared in Chinese shortly after Snow returned to Beijing, and circulated widely in the Communist base area. Snow later reflected on his book with these words:
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