Helen Foster Snow

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Helen Foster Snow was an American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s under the name Nym Wales on the developing Chinese Civil War, the Korean independence movement and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Snow's family moved often throughout her youth and she ended up living in Salt Lake City with her grandmother in her teenage years, until she decided to move to China in 1931. There, Snow became a correspondent for several publications and began a relationship with American journalist Edgar Snow. While, like her husband, she was never a member of the Chinese or American Communist Party, she was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in China, whom she compared favorably to the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek.

In the late 1930s, Snow's writing career brought her to Yan'an, where she held historic interviews with Chinese Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong. At this time, Snow also conceptualized the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives and the Gung-Ho movement, which provided Chinese citizens with jobs and economic stability in times of war. In 1940, Snow returned to the United States, where she continued to support the Cooperatives and write books based on her experiences in China. In the late 1940s, critics grouped her with the China Hands as one of those responsible for the "loss of China" who went beyond sympathy to active support of Mao's revolution.

Awards and honors

In 1981, Helen Foster Snow was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in China and nominated again in 1982. In her memoir My China Years, Helen writes, "The nomination was not for any particular achievement, but for the potential that my ideas and world view hold for peace and progress in the world". In 1993, Helen was the first recipient of the China Writers Association's literary award. In June 1996, Helen was honored by the Chinese government as Friendship Ambassador, one of China's highest honors offered to foreign citizens. She was the first American and only the fifth person ever to receive the award.

Works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Foster_Snow#Works