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Edgar Snow’s interviews with Mao in 1936 have the status of a classic in both China and the West. These were the first public comments by Mao about himself and his life. Snow, a progressive American journalist, had lived and worked in China since 1929. In June 1936, he set out to visit the “Reds” who had recently made their famous Long March from southeast China to the northwest. Snow published his observations in a book, Red Star over China, that became an instant bestseller in the West and was quickly translated into Chinese. Although the book includes his impressions of the Communist administration in general, it is his interviews with Mao that have always attracted the most attention.

The United States alliance with the Nationalist regime on Taiwan is a form of armed intervention in the in ternal affairs of China. Today it is clear that the aims of that policy cannot be realized in the visible future. The costs of maintaining Chiang Kai-shek far exceed the American invest ment in nonmilitary help to other Asian lands; preoccupation with armed answers to the challenge of poverty obscures American understanding of the real needs of all underdeveloped countries. State Department justifications for continued non- recognition of China are threadbare; defining functional alter natives is not easy. Outstanding Sino-American issues are negotiable, given the will on both sides. The future of Taiwan most likely would be settled, once serious "recognition talks" began, by compromise between Peking and the Taiwan succes sors to Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Recognition by the United States and the United Nations would greatly enhance the in ternational prestige of the People's Republic of China. It would mean serious modifications in the cold war and accept ance of the implications of a prolonged period of competitive co-existence. Recognition, therefore, is not something to be lightly undertaken without a clear alternative program and dy namic concepts and means of winning the "battle" of competi tive co-existence. Continuation of our present policy will, however, lose that battle to the Communist bloc by default.

On February 24, 1942, I was in Washington trying to wangle a priority to fly over to Cairo on a clipper ship as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post—though I hadn't yet finally decided whether to go overseas in that role or stay home to work for Air Force intelligence. It depended partly on whether I was able to get a visa to enter Russia, for I believed then that important work could be done there for Post readers. While I was talking to Wayne Coy, one of the President's administrative assistants, word came to his desk that Mr. Roosevelt would see me that afternoon. He then let me detain him for nearly an hour, talking about the Far East, from which I had recently returned after a dozen years, mostly spent in China.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Winston Churchill, who has a way of making his epigrams stick, has said that "We arm to parley," and that "Jaw-jaw is better than war-war." The question is, how long do we arm before we parley? We have been at it now for eleven years at a cost of close to $1,000 billion for all concerned. Yet the balance of power—and terror—is in much graver doubt than when it began. How long can we arm to parley before war-war removes the jaw-jaw alternative—and man along with it?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

\HATEVER it may have been in the South, Chinese Communism as I found it in the Northwest might more accurately be called rural equalitarianism than anything Marx would have found agreeable as a model child of his own. This was manifestly true economically, and although in the social, political and cultural life of the organized soviets there was a crude Marxist guidance, limitations of material conditions were everywhere obvious. There is no machine industry of any importance in the Northwest. The country is far less influenced by industrialism than the eastern parts of China; it is farming and grazing country primarily, the culture of which has been for centuries in stagnation, though many of the economic abuses prevalent no doubt reflect the changing economy in the semi-industrialized cities. Yet the Red Army itself was an outstanding product of the impact of "industrialization" on China, and the shock of the ideas it brought into the fossilized culture of the Northwest was in a true sense revolutionary. Practical considerations, however, denied the Reds the possibility of organizing much more than the political framework for the beginnings of socialist economy, of which naturally they could think only in terms of a future which might give them power in the great cities, where they could take over the industrial bases from foreign imperialism and thus lay the foundations for a true socialist society. Meanwhile, in the rural areas, their activity centered chiefly on the solution of the immediate problems of the peasants -land and taxes. This may sound like the reactionary program of the old Narodniks of Russia, but the great difference lies in that Chinese Communists regarded land distribution as only a phase in the building of a mass base, enabling them to develop the struggle toward the conquest of power and final realization of profound socialist changes-in which collectivization would be inevitable. In Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic' the First All-China

THE STRANGE ALLIANCE: The Story of our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia. By John R. Deane. 1947. (New York: Viking. Toronto: Macmillan. viii, 344pp. $4.50) WHY THEY BEHAVE LIKE RUSSIANS. By John Fischer. 1947. (New York: Harper. Toronto: Musson. viii, 262pp. $3.50) "JUST TELL THE TRUTH": The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain. By John L. Strohm. 1947. (New York: Scribners. Toronto: Saunders. xii, 250pp. $4.25) RUSSIA IN PERSPECTIVE. By George Soloveytchik. 1947. (New York: Norton. Toronto: George J. McLeod. 244pp. $3.50) RUSSIA: A SHORT HISTORY. By Helen Gay Pratt and Harriet L. Moore. 1947. Issued under the Auspices of the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations. (New York: John Day. Toronto: Longmans, Green, vi, 282pp. $4.75) THE PEOPLES OF THE SOVIET UNION. By Corliss Lamont. 1946. (New York: Harcourt Brace. Toronto: George J. McLeod. x, 229pp. $3.50)

In view of the widespread ignorance and confusion which exist in this country regarding the situation in China, especially in relation to agriculture and food, we are glad to be able to present to readers of MR an authoritative analysis by Edgar Snow, well known author of Red Star Over China from which many of us first got the exciting story of Mao Tse-tung and the rise of Chinese Communism. Mr. Snow returned to China recently and has now completed a monumental work of more than 800 pages which is scheduled for publication later this month by Random House. The following article is a chapter from The Other Side of the River: Red China Today by Edgar Snow © Copyright, 1961, 1962 by Edgar Snow, and is reprinted here by permission of the author and publisher. (References will be found at the end of the article.) —The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Solomon Adler's book ( The Chinese Economy , Monthly Review Press, $5) is a modem economist's study of modern China's economy, uninhibited by the necessity to perpetuate ancient errors in our thinking about Asia or prejudices against socialism as a possible way of life there. It will doubtless be condemned for being too sympathetic in its treatment to offer useful "fuelle for the flames" of ideological warfare, but it will take more than passion to refute so tightly constructed and factually well-documented a work. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.