Those Were the Days

An obituary deep in the pages of the New York Times on Thanksgiving Day disclosed the death of Huang Hua, perhaps one of the most discreet, influential negotiators in China's contemporary history. He was unknown to most Americans. In the 1930s, he helped the American journalist Edgar Snow write a series of newspaper articles about China that eventually was turned into a best-selling book about Mao Zedong and his rebel army entitled Red Star Over China. Snow never acknowledged Huang's assistance in any of his reporting.

In 1944, he served as an interpreter, accompanying the U.S. Dixie Mission into the caves of Yenan where, for the first time, American military officers and diplomats got their first glimpse of, and extended meetings with, Mao Zedong and other Communist Party officials. It was a controversial initiative that angered the ruling Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek and eventually led to the firing of John Stewart Service from the U.S. State Department and cost Colonel David Barrett the likelihood of his promotion to Brigadier General.Their treatment was a forerunner of the Cold War madness that led to the dismantling of America's outstanding corps of China diplomats that was to follow.

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