Mirror Image Of "The Other":A Study On The Cognitive Evolution Of The Communist Party Of China By American Journalists In China,1921-1949

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.With a history of 100 years,the world’ s largest ruling party is still in its prime,showing strong vitality and becoming a hot issue in academic research at home and abroad in recent years.However,there are few studies from the perspective of American journalists in China,and most of the existing achievements are limited to a certain event or some fragments of the early history of the Communist Party of China,lacking research from a macro perspective and the historical process.American journalists in China were a complex and diversified group,whose origins can be traced back to the mid-19th century when American missionaries ran newspapers in China.In the 1930s and 1940s,with the expansion of American power in China,its personnel,institutions and scale reached their peak.Such a special group,when observing and reporting the changes in China’s politics,economy,culture and other fields,naturally turned their attention to the Communist Party of China during this period.Looking back at the historical development of the CPC in its early 28 years(1921-1949),it is not difficult to find that their attitudes,their voices and their actions had more or less left their marks at various historical points.Undoubtedly,the reports of American journalists in China provide us with a unique and beneficial perspective to study the early history of the Communist Party of China from another angle.The major historical events during the Period of the New Democratic Revolution,including the May 4th Movement,the May 30th Movement,the April 12th coup,the Xi’ an Incident,the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression,and the Kuomintang-CPC negotiation,all had intricate connections with the United States and was also a period of intense activities for American journalists in China.This paper tries to give a preliminary answer to how American journalists in China viewed the CPC,how their cognition of the CPC had changed,and what caused the cognitive evolution during this period.American journalists in China were mainly composed of professional journalists sent by American domestic media,independent freelance journalists,journalists from American media in China,and American missionaries,diplomats and soldiers who played the role of journalists.Through sorting out and summarizing,there were about 50 American journalists in China who contacted and reported on the Communist Party of China during this period,and there were dynamic changes among them.The trend of this group in China was changing,with August 1945 as the cut-off point.It showed an increasing trend in the early stage and then gradually decreased.When the People’s Republic of China was founded,there was not a single American journalist reporting on the spot.Before the May 30th Movement,the Communist Party of China did not attract the attention of American journalists in China,and the reports on the media were mostly vague.It was not until the May 30th Movement that the shadow of a "radical party" was vaguely found,but the Communist Party was still referred to as the"radical faction" of the Kuomintang.After the April 12 coup,American journalists in China did not know about the existence of the Communist Party of China.During the agrarian revolution,when the Communist Party of China went underground or into remote rural areas,few American journalists had access to it.Relevant reports mostly borrowed Kuomintang propaganda documents to call the Communist Party of China "red bandits".With the repeated failure of the Kuomintang in "suppressing bandits",American journalists in China such as Hallett Abend began to doubt the theory of "red bandits".In 1936,Edgar Snow revealed the inside story of "Red China",and the picture of Mao Tse-tung appeared on the American media for the first time.Since then,Nym Wales,Agnes Smedley,Haldore Hanson and other American journalists in China successively reported the news of the Communist Party of China to the outside world."New China","Land of Five Withouts" and other titles appeared in the media,and this group’ s cognition of the Communist Party of China had changed significantly.After the victory of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression,the civil war between the Kuomintang and the CPC began.American journalists in China had been divided due to the adjustment of the US government’ s China policy,and there were two different perceptions of the Communist Party of China-the "ally" of the Soviet Union and the party rooted in the people.Some journalists ignored the facts of the Chinese revolution,blindly discredited and distorted the CPC,waved flags and shouted for the Chiang Kai-shek government,and even acted as "intelligence agents"and "liaison officers";Another part of the reporters reported the truth of China’ s civil war and the earth-shaking changes in the liberated areas to the outside world from the perspective of their own experience,explaining the inevitability of the CPC’s final victory.In the first 28 years of development of the Communist Party of China,a large number of outstanding leaders had emerged.From 1921 to 1949,in the works of American journalists,the leaders of the Communist Party of China experienced a change process from "red bandits" to "superior human beings".Undoubtedly,Snow’ s trip to northern Shanxi was a turning point in this group’ s cognition.The descriptions of many American journalists in China from different perspectives presented an objective and three-dimensional image of a generation of leaders of CPC.Combing through the evolution of American journalists’ cognition of the CPC during this period,we can see that it had gone through a process from vague to increasingly clear to deliberately distorted.The reasons were influenced by many factors,such as journalists’ different backgrounds,beliefs and media interest groups.But in the final analysis,the deep-rooted anti-communist ideology of mainstream American society was the root cause of the problem.In short,this study puts the early historical process of the Communist Party of China under the background of the world,and reflects on the early history of the Communist Party of China from the mirror image of "the other" of American journalists in China,which is of great significance for comprehensively reflecting and understanding the Chinese Communist Revolution and enriching the study of the party history during the New Democratic Revolution.