Red Star over China

By Edgar Snow,

Book cover of Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

Book description

The first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorised account of Mao's life, as well as a history of the famous Long March and the men and women who were responsible for the Chinese revolution. Out of…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Red Star over China as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In the mid-1930s a young journalist slipped past Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces into the northwest of China to find out if the Communists were Red Bandits or a legitimate political movement. Edgar Snow found they were the latter.

His eyewitness account – which read like an adventure story reverberated around the globe and catapulted him to the top of his profession. As a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, he roved the world during World War II.

His career came crashing down with McCarthyism, but for two decades Snow remained one of the few American links with the People’s…

From John's list on by foreign correspondents.

This was a bestseller when it was first published in 1937, when the War of Resistance against Japan (essentially WWII in the Pacific) was on the cusp of going all out. It was a must read for anyone back then who wanted to know what was going on in the Far East and it is still a must read for anyone today who wants to understand China.

From Shouhua's list on the Pacific Theater in WW2.

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