Edgar Parks Snow (July 19, 1905 – February 15, 1972) was an American journalist known for his books and articles on communism in China and the Chinese Communist Revolution.

[1] He briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri,[2] and joined the Zeta Phi chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

[2] He quickly found work with the China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell, a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism.

[4] He became friends with prominent writers and intellectuals, including Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen and an advocate of reform.

He arrived in India in 1931 with an introduction letter to Nehru from Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist living in China.

[4] He began to make an international name for himself when he became correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and widely traveled throughout China, often on assignment for the Chinese Railway Ministry.

[2] He toured famine districts in Northwest China, visited what would later become the Burma Road, and reported on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

[4] In June 1936, Snow left home with a letter of introduction from Soong Ching-ling (who was a politically important supporter of the Communists) and arrived at Xi'an.

He was greeted by crowds of cadets and troops who shouted slogans of welcome, and Snow later recalled "the effect pronounced upon me was highly emotional."

Snow reported that Mao was a sincere communist, a patriot committed to resisting the Japanese invasion and world-wide fascism, and a political reformer, not the purely military or radical revolutionary that he had been during the 1920s.

Snow's work in Indusco mainly involved his chairmanship of the Membership and Propaganda Committee, which managed public and financial support.

I remember, for example, talking one evening to a Japanese friend, a liberal-minded newspaper man who survived by keeping his views to himself, and whose name I withhold for his own protection.

Snow met them again a year later in Chongqing and he was reminded that: Japan was full of decent people like them who, if they had not had their craniums stuffed full of Sun goddess myths and other imperialist filth, and been forbidden access to 'dangerous thoughts,' and been armed by American and British hypocrites, could easily live in a civilized co-operative world if any of us could provide one.

At times, Snow's defenses of various undemocratic Allied governments were denounced as blatant war propaganda, not neutral journalistic observation, but Snow defended his reporting, stating: In this international cataclysm brought on by fascists it is no more possible for any people to remain neutral than it is for a man surrounded by bubonic plague to remain 'neutral' toward the rat population.

Writing for The Nation, Snow stated that the Chinese Communists "happen to have renounced, years ago now, any intention of establishing communism [in China] in the near future.

His 1963 book, The Other Side of the River, details his experience, including his reasons for denying that China's 1959–1961 Great Leap Forward was a famine.

In 1963, his new book was reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald which referred to his association with Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who by then was "the Chinese Government's chief propagandist in English.

[28] When Snow came down with pancreatic cancer and returned home after a surgery, Zhou Enlai dispatched a team of Chinese doctors to Switzerland, including George Hatem.

Wheeler Snow issued statements of protest to the international press and threatened to remove her husband's remains from Chinese soil.

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.

[32] Jonathan Mirsky, a critical voice, stated that what Snow did in the 1930s was "to describe the Chinese Communists before anyone else, and thus score a world-class scoop."

He 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.