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!
(Cedar City, Utah, November 11, 2009)