Red Star Over China

Only by taking Snow's thoughts out of context, concluded one scholar, was it possible for Harold Isaacs to claim that Red Star Over China was the origin of the myth that the Chinese Communists were "agrarian reformers."[3] Snow's Preface to the revised edition in 1968 describes the book's original context: The Western powers, in self-interest, were hoping for a miracle in China.Red Star Over China tended to show that the Chinese Communists could indeed provide that nationalist leadership needed for effective anti-Japanese resistance.The Publisher's Note of the 1939 edition explains that Snow added a "substantial new section" of six chapters to include the Xi'an Incident, bringing the narrative up to July 1938 as well as "many textual changes."[13] John K. Fairbank praised Snow's reporting for giving the West the first articulate account of the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership, which he called "disastrously prophetic".Writing thirty years after the first publication of Red Star Over China, Fairbank stated that the book had "stood the test of time... both as a historical record and as an indication of a trend.