Heavy Hand Eclipses the ‘Red Star’

Once, a long time ago, the Chinese Communist Party was made famous as the “Red Star Over China.” Now it’s become little more than a black cloud.

On Tuesday, Lois Wheeler Snow, the widow of American writer Edgar Snow, issued the stunning, poignant declaration that she may no longer be able to leave her husband’s ashes on the campus of Beijing University, where they were placed after his death in 1972.

On a visit to China with her son, she tried last weekend to visit and deliver $1,000 in support money to Ding Zilin, a woman whose own son was killed during the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 and who has been pressing ever since for an accounting of that bloody episode. China’s security apparatus blocked the meeting from taking place and detained a Chinese woman who tried to serve as an intermediary.

In China, “basic human rights are being trampled underfoot,” Snow concluded in an e-mail Tuesday. “The violation of these rights by the government while Edgar Snow’s ashes lie buried on the campus of Beijing University makes a mockery of all that he stood for.”

It was Edgar Snow, a journalist from Missouri, who introduced the Chinese Communist Party to the world. In 1936, he broke through blockades to interview Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai and other party leaders in remote Shaanxi province, where they had retreated after the Long March. Snow portrayed them as a seemingly attractive, idealistic group in closer touch with ordinary Chinese people than the ruling Nationalist Party.

The book that resulted, “Red Star Over China,” was one of the best-read, most influential works of nonfiction in the 20th century. Indeed, it remains a primary source on the early history of the party that now rules China.

Snow remained on good terms with the Communist Party leadership after it came to power in 1949. When Mao wanted to demonstrate to the Nixon administration his willingness for a rapprochement with America, he appeared in public with Snow at his side.

Snow’s memorial, placed along a lake at the university, honors him as “an American friend of the Chinese people.” The Chinese characters on it were written by Chou.

Lois Wheeler Snow, now 79, met her husband in 1946 and was an active participant in his China travels and writing for the rest of his life. For years, China’s Communist Party leaders treated her, too, as a lao pengyou, an old friend.

But her sympathy ended after the upheavals of 1989. Last weekend, on her first trip to China since then, she sought out Ding, the organizer of efforts to find out what happened and how many Chinese were killed when the regime called in the army to end the huge demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Why should Ding be so threatening to the Chinese leadership? The 1989 crackdown still remains one of the most sensitive subjects in Chinese political life. But the reasons extend beyond that.

China’s Communist Party, which in Snow’s early years believed in revolution, now believes above all in preserving its power. Its government has become a security state. People in China can say what they want, as long as they don’t in any way challenge the regime; if they do, their efforts are crushed.

At the moment, the regime looks increasingly nervous about losing control. In February, the army had to be called in to northeast China to stop a riot by about 20,000 laid-off mine workers. Last week, riot police broke up a violent demonstration in southern China.

There may be many more such episodes if China proceeds with its economic reform program and, in the process, lays off more people. So the regime needs to send a message that it will squelch any protest. And nothing could symbolize protest better than the demonstrations of 1989 and Ding herself.

China’s treatment of Ding serves as a classic illustration of why the Clinton administration is proposing a formal condemnation of China later this month at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. But so far, the European Union has refused to support the United States in this endeavor. The Europeans try hard to divert their eyes from China’s continuing repression of dissent.

Lois Wheeler Snow can’t. She publicly pleaded Tuesday with Chinese leaders not to “put me in a position where I will have to reconsider the appropriateness” of leaving her husband’s ashes in China.

Above all, her ill-fated visit raises anew the questions the Chinese Communist Party would rather not confront.

Edgar Snow’s flattering portrait of the Communist Party in “Red Star” became part of its self-image. Now it seems fair to wonder whether the party subsequently betrayed the ideals Snow thought he had found in the 1930s or whether Snow was mistaken about that idealism.

When Snow strode into the Communist Party’s rustic headquarters in 1936, bugles played and crowds shouted “Welcome to the American journalist.”

Last weekend, a bit of Chinese history came to a close. The Communist Party’s welcome mat for Edgar Snow and his family was unceremoniously withdrawn.