University student Huang Hua and American journalist Edgar Snow met in 1936, when communists and nationalists were vying for power across China. Both were communist sympathisers whose paths would cross for the next four decades as China first turned communist, then sought diplomatic recognition from the US.
Huang, born Wang Rumei on January 25, 1913, went on to become one of China's greatest diplomats, with a career that included a stint as ambassador to the United Nations and culminating between 1976 and 1982, when he was foreign minister and vice-premier. Later, Huang was one of the few leaders opposed to billeting soldiers in Hong Kong, for which he was publicly scolded by patriarch Deng Xiaoping .
Huang owed his entry into the circles of power to Snow, who took the fluent- English-speaking student to the communist guerilla headquarters in Yanan as his interpreter. Snow's book resulting from this trip, Red Star Over China, had a huge impact on how the world viewed the Chinese communist movement. In recent years Snow has been criticised for failing to address the violence and purges that marked the birth of the communist movement in the Jiangxi soviet. Huang's own memoirs chronicle the days in which this book was born.
