At the end of March, at the age of 84, the extraordinary American journalist Anna Louise Strong died in Peking. A prolific from 1930 to 1949, interviewed the leaders of the Chinese revolution, was expelled from Russia, reinstated, and spent her last years in China as a Red Guard.
Anna Louise Strong was a MiddleWest, bourgeois American. She was at first a religious writer and among her early books are titles like Bible Hero Classics in Words of the Scripture (1908. A pacifist during the first world war she was radicalised by reporting on a general strike in Seattle in Febuary 1919, and by 1912 she was working to relieve the famine in the Soviet Union.
Her non-conformist religious background was the basis of a transition from bourgeois ideology to support for communism- -but she never rid herself of simplistic enthusiasm. In her early period as a revolutionary she was unable to distance herself from the cult of Stalin. She successfully conveyed the enthusiasm of • revolution without being able to adopt a critical marxist position.
Anna Louise Strong first went to China in 1925 where she met Comintern agent Micheal Borodin. Borodin introduced her to one Chinese official by saying: "Miss Strong has been unlucky in her revolutions. She came too late for the one in Russia and now she is very much too soon for the one in China". She was, however, a lot luckier than Borodin himself, who in 1927 had to flee China when Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Communists; he was later shot by Stalin in 1939.
Returning to Moscow Anna Louise Strong worked on the Moscow News, and the one time that she met Stalin got him to order changes in the way it was run. She was a loyal apologist for Stalinism and even denied that he had ordered the extermination of the Kulaks, Russia's rich and revolutionary peasants: "Stalin had merely analysed and authorised what farm hands were already instinctively doing"
1946 saw her great work of journalism. Visiting the red areas of China she made a series of systematic interviews with Mao and other Chinese leaders. This at a time when Stalin was telling American visitors in. Moscow that the Chinese were only Anna Louise Strong with Mao (1966)
Anna Louise Strong built her interviews into a book, Dawn out of China which describes Mao's creative application of Marsingle day. But if circumstances force us tol critical history of the Chinese C.P., in particular arguing against the Moscow trained "dogmatists" in the Chinese Party.
Plans were made for the books publication throughout the communist world. But it constituted an open deviation from Stalin's line. In Febuary 1949 Anna Louise Strong was arrested and deported from the Soviet Union for being a "US agent". Her book was stopped in th Although she was later rehabilitated in 1955 and her arrest blamed on the 'Beria clique, the charges were in fact a move by Stalin against Mao. But she herself went blandly on and in 1957 published a book in praise of Stalin (The Stalin Era).
From 1959 to her death she lived in Peking. She sent a regular Letter from China to the US left and became an honorary member of the Red Guards. She was also the first non-Chinese journalist to get into Tibet, after the March 1959 rising was crushed. On her return, when she wrote about it, she included rubbish about the reconciliation of Buddhism with Marxism. Her culture, her abilities and her blindness expressed a particular form of middle class solidarity with the socialist revolution. MAO: He can.