Son of 'Red Star over China' trumpeter meets author's descendants
- By Chen Boyuan
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, September 6, 2015
U.S. journalist Edgar Snow's book "Red Star over China," published in 1937, was the first direct coverage of the Communist Party of China, or CPC, by a Westerner. In the book, Snow depicted a Chinese Red Army trumpeter and had the soldier's image appear on the book's cover.
 |
|
Xie Liquan's image is on the cover of an early Chinese edition of "Red Star over China," a book written by Edgar Snow in the 1930's. [Photo by Chen Boyuan / China.org.cn] |
While contemporary readers and military historians tend to speculate that Snow's trumpeter was Xie Liquan, a Red Army boy who rose to become a rear admiral in the PLA navy in 1955, the soldier's son Xie Xiaopeng has clarified that "Xie Liquan was only the trumpeter in the photo, not the soldier in Snow's text."
Xie Xiaopeng reiterated this fact in Beijing on Sept. 4, during a meeting with Snow's descendants, including Sheril Bischoff, the niece of Edgar's wife Helen Foster Snow, and Bischoff's grandson Blake Anthony, on the sideline of China's grand commemorations of the 70th Anniversary of Victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.
The meeting between Xie Xiaopeng and Bischoff amounted to compensation for what should have been arranged for Snow and Xie Liquan – a book's author and its protagonist – before they passed away both in the early 1970s.
"We knew about Edgar Snow and this trumpeter photo, but my family didn’t see it until 1972, when the book's first Chinese edition was published bearing my father's image on its cover," said Xie Xiaopeng, noting that his father and Snow never met again.
"The trumpeter on page 298 [in the Chinese edition] was '15 years' old, wore shorts and tennis shoes and looked very innocent, but the photo is of a man, wearing his full army uniform. He also carried a pistol, meaning that he was an officer. Thus, they can't be the same person," said Xie Xiaopeng.
Xie attributed readers' speculation that the trumpeter in the text matched the one in the photo as "harmless association," but cautioned that Snow's careful, journalistic writing style could not have caused the mistake.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)