Voting Station

Edgar Snow

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Commentator

The Resume

    (July 17, 1905-February 15, 1972)
    Born in Kansas City, Missouri
    Journalist
    Correspondent for the China Weekly Review, New York Sun, Daily Herald, Saturday Evening Post, and Fortune
    Wrote ‘Red Star Over China’ (1937), ‘Battle for Asia’ (1942), ‘People on Our Side’ (1944),’ ‘Stalin Must Have Peace’ (1947), ‘Journey to the Beginning’ (1959), ‘The Other Side of the River’ (1963), and ‘The Long Revolution’ (1972)
    Died of pancreatic cancer
    Cremated, with half his remains buried in New York state, half at Peking University in China

Why he might be annoying:

    At the University of Missouri, he earned a ‘D’ in ‘History and Principles of Journalism.’
    He allowed Chinese Communist officials to review and edit his interviews before publishing them.
    He claimed Mao and the Communists wanted to establish a free and democratic government in China.
    During the Great Leap Forward, he accepted assurances from the Chinese government that, while there was a food problem, it was being dealt with successfully. (In reality, an estimated 20 million people died from starvation.)

Why he might not be annoying:

    One of his editors at the Saturday Evening Post said, ‘Edgar was the one correspondent I would bring home to meet my mother.’
    He was the first Western journalist to interview the leaders of the Chinese Communist movement, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
    Despite occasional lapses, ‘Red Star Over China’ remains an important account of the early history of Communism in China.
    He said, ‘The truth is that if I have written anything useful about China it has been merely because I listened to what I thought I heard the Chinese people saying about themselves. I wrote it down, as honestly and as frankly as I could.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 5 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 15 Votes: 66.67% Annoying