CEDAR CITY — Most people would be surprised to know that the most revered American woman in China is from Southern Utah.
She has buildings and organizations named after her, and even a statute created in her honor standing near Main Street in Cedar City.
She is widely recognized in China today as among the most influential Americans to have advanced understanding of China and good will between the two countries.
Helen Foster’s modest beginnings in Cedar City offered no hint of her storied future. Her mother’s family were pioneers who settled southern Idaho. Her father’s family were among the original settlers of the Cotton Mission.
John Moody Foster, grew up in St. George. After attending the Branch Normal School in Cedar City, he pursued degrees at Stanford University and the University of Chicago before practicing law back home.
His daughter, Helen, was a bright ambitious young woman, the oldest of three children. Following high school, she attended the University of Utah where she was active in student government and journalism.
While working in Salt Lake City in her early 20s, she longed for adventure and with the help of her father landed a job in China. She set sail for Shanghai in the summer of 1931 with aspirations of becoming a foreign correspondent.
Helen did not have to wait long for excitement. Within days of reaching Shanghai she witnessed the devastating impact of the worst flood disaster in Chinese history. The Yangtze River flooding destroyed millions of homes and farms, leaving in its wake over three-million people dead from drowning, famine and disease.
Helen sent reports on the flooding and its aftermath to the “Seattle Star,” a modest beginning to her journalistic career. It would be three other events that most profoundly shaped her future. The first was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which led to the Japanese occupation of China. Then the Chinese Civil War between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. The third was Helen’s introduction to the renowned American author Edgar Snow.
A Missourian, Snow was a correspondent for the ‘Saturday Evening Post,’ who cemented his reputation as an author of incisive articles and best-selling books on the rise of communism in China.
In the summer of 1931, while recovering from malaria and considering returning to America, he met Helen. She admired his work and encouraged him to stay in China. Sparks flew, they fell in love and they were married within a year.
Edgar helped Helen secure her credentials as war correspondent and they were both soon sending reports back to the states on the Japanese occupation, including the battle for Shanghai which was happening in the streets in front of them.
It would be another decade before Japan bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, so Americans were not yet at war with Japan. Despite growing tensions between the U.S. and Japan, Helen and Edgar traveled about China in relative safety, establishing their reputations as experts in Chinese culture and providing some of the best accounts of that turbulent decade, which were widely read both in America and China.
The Snows moved to Beijing in 1933, where they taught at a Chinese university and where Helen wrote a book on the Sino-Japanese war called ‘Far Eastern Front.’ The couple arranged for the translation into English of a collection of left-leaning articles titled ‘Living China.’ The Snows also published an anti-fascist magazine called ‘Democracy,’ which was soon shut down by the Japanese and back issues seized.
Through their work in Beijing, Helen and Edgar became close friends with many of their Chinese students, several of whom were part of the communist underground and later became leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.
The Snows opened their home to student activists as a safe place to develop plans for their social and political movement. In 1935, Helen helped students organize anti-Japanese demonstrations throughout China, which became known as the “December 9th Movement.” This also helped establish her early reputation.
Throughout the war, Chinese Communists were more active in fighting the Japanese than the Nationalists and the Snows wanted to meet with their leaders. Throughout their work in Beijing, the Snows had gained the trust and respect of student leaders who invited the couple to travel to the communist-controlled areas of China to meet with Mao Zedong and other revolution leaders.
Edgar went first, returning with material for his best-selling book ‘Red Star Over China.’ Helen joined him in 1937 to visit the Chinese Communist Party’s headquarters at Yanan, China. This was a time when the U.S. was more concerned about defeating Japan than about the outcome of the Chinese Civil War. Later, during the McCarthy Era, both Edgar and Helen were blacklisted for their sympathetic portraits of the revolutionaries.
While in Yanan, Helen interviewed Mao Zedong and several other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. She ultimately published five books on her experiences, including ‘Inside Red China.’ During this time she also wrote her most successful book, ‘The Song of Ariran,’ an account of Korean resistance to Japanese occupation. Much of her writing, including these two books, were published under her pen name, Nym Wales.
Another source of Helen Foster Snow’s legacy in China was the central role she and Edgar played in the creation of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, also known as the Gung Ho Movement.
Nowadays, Gung Ho has a meaning of zealous commitment to a cause, like the U.S. Marine Corps slogan. But in Mandarin, and to the cooperative movement in China, it meant “to work together.” Helen discussed the foundational ideas behind the Gung Ho Movement with Mao Zedong during her time in Yanan.
In practice, the Gung Ho Movement created small, self-supporting cooperatives, similar to those Helen’s grandparents had participated in during the United Order and other historical co-op experiences by settlers of Utah and Idaho.
Their purpose was to create work for unemployed workers and refugees by producing goods needed for the war effort. These were created mainly in the rural areas of China and were intended to help replace industry lost to Japanese bombing.
More than 3,000 cooperatives were created during the war with Japan, they later evolved into agricultural and industrial communes throughout China under Mao Zedong leadership.
Helen Foster Snow was widely known and respected in China during her lifetime — her legacy has only grown over the years. When she died in 1997, memorial services were held near her Connecticut home and in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a rarity for foreigners.
Parts of a hospital and school in Xian, China are named in her honor, as is a wing in the Communist Eighth Army Museum in Xian. A number of Chinese academics have chosen to honor her through the creation of The Helen Foster Snow Society in Beijing. She was also recognized with the first China Writers Association’s literary award.
Years ago I learned of Helen Foster Snow’s reputation in China when I traveled extensively in China. When asked where I am from in America, I always reply “From the same village as Helen Foster Snow,” which never fails to elicit surprise and expressions of praise for her.
During her lifetime, Helen wrote dozens of books and manuscripts covering her experiences in and observations of China. She also became deeply engaged in her own family history. Her extensive publications, manuscripts, photographs and personal papers are in the library archives of Stanford University and Brigham Young University.
Snow is also honored in her home state through the creation of the Helen Foster Snow Foundation, which seeks to promote good will with China through people-to-people exchanges. And last year her father’s alma mater, Southern Utah University, created the Helen Foster Snow Cultural Center to create opportunities to study Mandarin, promote citizen diplomacy and provide cultural exchanges.
Perhaps the most visible symbol of Helen’s legacy is a 7-foot statue of her, cast in China, that stands on Cedar City’s Main Street adjacent to the city park. Reflecting on her life in later years, Helen wrote that “history, like nature, has its own economy, its own balancing of forces in the final accounting. Nothing can be lost, except to awareness.”
She also observed of both China and her home country that, “… one can judge a civilization by the way it treats its women.” And while she loved the Chinese people and its culture, she became skeptical of the early egalitarian hopes of revolutionary leaders, writing, “Revolution devours its own parents as well as its own children.”
Helen Foster Snow is likely one of the most noteworthy people to emerge from the deep cultural roots of Southern Utah during the past century.
To learn more about Cedar City’s most famous female in American history, consider reading Kelly Ann Long’s book, “Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China;” a documentary film by Dodge Billingsly, “Helen Foster Snow: Witness to Revolution;” or a news article, ‘Up Close with Helen,’ in the January 12, 2020 edition of China Daily.
Photo Gallery
An Wei, Sheril Bischoff, Jim Cosidine and Sharon Crain with the statue of Helen Foster Snow on Cedar City’s Main Street on the occasion of SUU’s 2017 Helen Foster Snow Day. Photo courtesy Southern Utah University, St. George News Edgar Snow’s book “Red Star Over China,” and Helen Foster Snow’s book, using her pen name Nym Wales, “Inside Red China.” Both books were widely distributed in both the U.S. and China. Photo courtesy China Daily, St. George News Helen Foster Snow with her husband, the noted author Edgar Snow, on their honeymoon in Tokyo in 1932 | Photo courtesy China Daily, St. George News Helen Foster Snow at her home in Connecticut in 1949 | Photo courtesy Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, St. George News Helen Foster Snow with Red Academy officers in Yanan, China circa 1937 | Photo courtesy Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, St. George News The 7-foot statue of a stylish Helen Foster Snow on Cedar City’s Main Street | Photo by Jacob Barlow, St. George News Helen Foster Snow being welcomed by residents of Xian during her return visit to China in 1978 | Photo courtesy China Daily, St. George News Helen Foster Snow with Chinese officer Zhu De, in Yanan, China | Photo courtesy China Daily, St. George News Helen Foster Snow and her husband Edgar, as they and other foreigners meet with Mao Zedong at the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Yanan, China, circa 1937 | Photo courtesy China.org, St. George News
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