The Chinese University Of Hong Kong Press - How the “Red Star” Rose《紅星是怎樣升起的》英文版 | Ishikawa Yoshihiro 石川禎浩

The fact that Snow did not sneak into “red China” to gather information constituting the basis of his Red Start over China all alone is in many instances misunderstood even by scholars.​
Mao Zedong’s biography has been the subject of an international mountain of commentary in China and elsewhere. Biographies praising Mao and those slandering him are all based on the American journalist Edgar Snow’s (1905–1972) account in Red Star over China for the route Mao traveled from early childhood through his youth.

How the “Red Star” Rose introduces the image of Mao and the biographical information made known to the world through the publication of Red Star, and with its publication the circumstances which they fundamentally undermined. Ishikawa Yoshihiro uses Mao Zedong as raw material to examine from whence and how ordinary historical information and images which we habitually use unconsciously come into being. He desires to help readers to reconsider the historicity of the generation of not only Mao’s image but of that of “historical materials.”

Author

Ishikawa Yoshihiro 石川禎浩 is Professor at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. He specializes in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the history of modern Chinese thought and politics, and the history of Sino-Japanese exchanges. His representative work, The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party (2001), has also been translated into English (2012) and Chinese (2006; expanded edition, 2021) respectively. In November 2021, he was awarded the 25th Ryotaro Shiba Prize for his outstanding research on the Party’s centenary history.

Translator
Joshua A. Fogel, historian and translator, is Canada Research Chair Professor in modern Chinese history at York University. Trained initially in Chinese history, he developed an abiding interest in Japanese history and, after many years of language study, found a way to integrate the two: the study of cultural and political Sino-Japanese relations. He is the founding editor of the Sino-Japanese Studies journal. His most recent book is A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzo, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War (2019).

Endorsement

With a title that evokes Gao Hua’s seminal study of Mao Zedong’s rise in the Chinese Communist Party, Ishikawa Yoshihiro asks two critical questions—What did the world know of Mao before the publication of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China? How did Red Star change that understanding? With the meticulous research, careful documentation, and fair-minded judgment that characterizes all of Ishikawa’s work, he shows how little even Moscow and the Communist International knew about Mao before 1936. This study is full of unexpected insights into the origins of early visual images of Mao, the background to Snow’s historic trip to northern Shaanxi, and the evolution of the classic study that he left. In a world where balanced judgment of the rise of Mao is increasingly difficult to find, Ishikawa’s scholarship stands out as a rare model of judicious balance.