Helen Snow was also a thinker, a thinker living ahead of her time. She did not only see the problems in the development of human history, but also produced wonderful ideas to solve them. Following the Gung Ho industrial cooperatives, her idea about China’s economic mode was the most important one of historical significance. In the 1960’s when people in western countries were arguing if China could possibly degrade herself into capitalism, Helen Snow believed that “capitalism is now and always has been impossible in China”. 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: “China is still ‘feeling the way’, I was told. It is still experimenting and still in transformation…It could develop into a mixed economy of socialism, but never into the other historical Western system”. Thirteen years later the “mixed economy of ownership” was established in the official document at the 15th National Congress of CPC. And 30 years later China is advancing successfully on her own way of development just as Helen Snow predicted.
A series of Helen’s ideas, such as bridging different cultures, energism, human ecology, organic life and electric pollution, has been proved correct, and understood and accepted by more and more people.
Helen always lived a simple and organic life herself, advocating that man and nature got along well with each other. She was the pioneer advocate for low-carbon life.
All her ideas were based on her meticulous and accurate observations and shaped by her objective and independent analysis. Her lifelong motto was to seek truth from facts and to combine theory with practice.