RED STAR OVER CHINA—Edgar Snow— Random House ($3).
In Man's Fate Andre Malraux told the fearful story of a few days in Shanghai that shook the Eastern world—the period in the fall of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek broke with his Communist allies and the Chinese revolution ended in a swirl of arrests, assassinations, executions, torture. Malraux's account was fiction, but to Occidental readers it seemed far more real than the wild and contradictory newspaper reports of what happened to the remnants of the Chinese Communists.
In left-wing versions, the Communists set up a Soviet government in south China, defeated five armies that Chiang Kai-shek sent against them, and ruled 80 million people with unparalleled benevolence. According to Chiang Kaishek, they degenerated into marauding bandits who were completely wiped out in a series of anti-Red campaigns. But in both right & left reports, Soviet China seemed less a geographical and political reality than a wandering country like Swift's floating Laputa. At one time this nomad-land was located in Hunan Province in the interior, then in Kiangsi in southeast China. When Chiang Kai-shek's army took Juichin, its capital, in 1934, Soviet China disappeared, only to pop up a year later in the northwest. A comparable feat would have been for Mexican revolutionists, defeated in Yucatan, to move their capital to British Columbia—except that the Mexicans would have far better roads for their anabasis.
Last year Edgar Snow, 31-year-old, Missouri-born Far Eastern correspondent of the New York Sun and London Daily Herald, got into Soviet China by means of such melodramatic dodges as a letter written in invisible ink, meetings with Soviet spies in Chiang Kai-shek's army, a night trip through the front lines. Last week, in a 474-page volume* that John Gunther (Inside Europe) called "as good a job of reporting as has ever been done," he gave U. S. readers the results of his four months' observation of Soviet China, his nine years' experience in the Far East. The first correspondent to get inside Red China's lines, Edgar Snow was also the first to interview its leaders, the first to get photographs of Chinese Soviet life, the first to see its army in action, the first to get from its leaders a story of its 6,000-mile "Long March" from Kiangsi to Shensi. As a piece of journalistic enterprise Red Star Over China ranks with John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, tells a story scarcely less sensational.
By no means so vividly written as Reed's masterpiece, Red Star Over China is slowed down by essays on Chinese history, discussions of education and propaganda, accounts of critical battles fought in inaccessible country. Delighting in the ramifications of Chinese politics, Edgar Snow seems to step aside to discuss every war lord who fought Chiang Kaishek, made peace with him, got mad, led a campaign against the Reds or accepted an alliance with them to fight Japan.