Recent Evaluations
Snow's reporting from China in the 1930s was both praised as prescient and blamed for the rise of Mao's communism. His biographers present him as an important link between China and the United States.
However, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, describes Snow as a Mao spokesman and accuses him of supplying myths, that he lost his objectivity to such an extent that he presented a romanticized view of communist China. Similarly, Simon Leys does not think highly of Edgar Snow's depiction of China.
But, a more sympathetic writer concluded that what he did in the 1930s was "to describe the Chinese Communists before anyone else, and thus score a world-class scoop." Of his reporting in 1960, however, he says that Snow "contented himself with assurances from Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong that while there was a food problem, it was being dealt with successfully," which was not true, and "had Snow still been the reporter he had been in the 1930s he would have discovered it." In Mao: A Reinterpretation, a work sympathetic to Mao, Prof. Lee Feigon criticizes Snow's account for its perceived inaccuracies, but at the same time praises Red Star for being " seminal portrait of Mao" and relies on Snow's work as a critical reference throughout the book.
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