Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context By Jiawe ...

Chapter 2

Red Star over China

My painting Red Star over China has its origins in a book of that title by the American journalist Edgar Snow.¹ The Chinese edition, titled Travel Notes from a Trip to the West, was published by Commercial Press, Shanghai, 1938, after the Japanese Imperial Army had besieged the city, but I have adopted the English title for my painting. Snow’s book is historically as important as Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed² that reports on the Russian Revolution: both books are eyewitness accounts by American journalists of the two mighty revolutions of the twentieth century. Unlike Reed, who died soon after his book was published, Snow was never a communist and remained a democrat all his life, and moreover, thirty years later witnessed another so-called “revolutionary” period of Chinese history, known as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). For many decades both publications were banned in the Soviet Union and China because Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were intent on covering up the brutality of their revolutions. Today as the tide of communism recedes, Snow faces another dilemma. The excesses of Mao’s totalitarian dictatorship have led to certain critics naming Snow as the first person to glorify Mao’s rule and charge that his book Red Star over China had been coopted for political propaganda by the CPC.