Making China Their “Beat”: A Collective Biography of U.S. Correspondents in China, 1900–1949

Abstract

What was the social composition of the U.S. correspondents in China during the first half of twentieth century? Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capital and adopting the collective biography approach, this study analyzed the demographic characteristics and career paths of 161 correspondents to illustrate the opportunity structure and its historical variations in the largely unstructured field of foreign correspondence during its formative years. Being a missionary kid, having a journalism education, especially from the Missouri School of Journalism, or being raised in the northeast region with an Ivy League education, were among the kinds of valued social and cultural capital that conferred an advantage in becoming a China correspondent.

Notes

1 Victoria Brittain, “The NS Profile: The Foreign Correspondent,” New Statesman, (May 13, 2002) https://www.newstatesman.com/node/155544; Emily Erickson and John M. Hamilton, “Foreign Reporting Enhanced by Parachute Journalism,” Newspaper Research Journal 27, no. 1 (2006): 35; John Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 219; Larry Heinzerling, “Foreign Correspondents: A Rare Breed,” in Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, edited by David Halberstam (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 257.

2 See Leo Bogart, “The Overseas Newsman: A 1967 Profile Study,” Journalism Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1968): 293–306; Stephen Hess, International News and Foreign Correspondents (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996); Theodore Kruglak, The Foreign Correspondents: A Study of the Men and Women Reporting for the American Information Media in Western Europe (Geneva: Librarie E. Droz, 1955); William Maxwell, “U.S. Correspondents Abroad: A Study of Backgrounds,” Journalism Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1956): 346–48; John Wilhelm, “The Re-appearing Foreign Correspondent: A World Survey,” Journalism Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1963): 14768; Lars Willnat and David Weaver, “Through Their Eyes: The Work of Foreign Correspondents in the United States,” Journalism 4, no. 4 (2003): 403–22; Denis Wu and John Hamilton, “U.S. Foreign Correspondents,” Gazette 66, no. 6 (2004): 517–32.

3 Lars Willnat and Jason Martin, “Foreign Correspondents – An Endangered Species?” in The Global Journalists in the 21st Century, edited by David Weaver and Lars Willnat (New York: Taylor & Francis), 495–501.

4 For example, Raluca Cozma, “From Murrow to Mediocrity? Radio Foreign News from World War II to the Iraq,” Journalism Studies 11, no. 5 (2010): 667–82; Giovanna Dell’Orto, Giving Meanings to the World: The First U.S. Foreign Correspondents, 1838–1859 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2002) and AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); John Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Stephen Hess, International News and Foreign Correspondents (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996); John Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).

5 For example, Jinx Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Julia Edwards, Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Paul French, Through the Looking Glass: Foreign Journalists in China, From the Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

6 A similar critique is raised by Peter Gross and Gerd Kopper (eds.), Understanding Foreign Correspondence: A Euro-American Perspective of Concepts, Methodologies, and Theories (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). The authors call for more theoretical endeavors to explain the roles and practices of foreign correspondents from sociological and anthropological perspectives.

7 Paul French, Through the Looking Glass.

8 John B. Powell, “Missouri Authors and Journalists in the Orient,” Missouri Historical Review XLI, no. 1 (1946): 45–55; Peter Rand, China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 22; Helen Snow, My China Years (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1984), 21.

9 Giovanna Dell’Orto, Giving Meanings to the World, 3.

10 Joyce Milton, The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

11 Morell Heald, Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900–1940 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1988); Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (Boston: Little Brown, 1969); Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992); Jonathan Silverman, For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White (New York: Viking Press, 1983); James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: America's Eyewitness to World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997).

12 Peter Rand, China Hands, 22; Leo Bogart, “The Overseas Newsman,” 295; Georgie Geyer, Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 370; Victoria Brittain, “The NS Profile: The Foreign Correspondent.”

13 Theodore White, “Far Eastern News in the Press,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 12 (1946): 181.

14 Mordechai Rozanski, “The Role of American Journalists in Chinese-American Relations, 1900–1925” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974).

15 Stephen MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting: An Oral history of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

16 Grey Dimond, Ed Snow Before Paoan: The Shanghai Years (Kansas City: Edgar Snow Memorial Fund, 1975); John Hamilton, Edgar Snow: A Biography (Baton: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Robert Farnsworth, From Vagabond to Journalist: Edgar Snow in Asia 1928–1941 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996); Bernard Thomas, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

17 John Hamilton, “The Missouri News Monopoly and American Altruism in China: Thomas F. F. Millard, J. B. Powell, and Edgar Snow,” The Pacific Historical Review 55, no. 1 (1986): 27–48; Paul French, Carl Crow, A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures of an American in Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007); Joyce Hoffman, Theodore White and the Journalism of Illusion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Neil O’Brien, An American Editor in Early Revolutionary China: John William Powell and the China Weekly/Monthly (New York: Routledge, 2003); Peter Rand, China Hands.

18 James Thomson, “Introduction,” in China Reporting, edited by Stephen MacKinnon and Oris Friesen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2.

19 Peter Rand, China Hands, 185.

20 See Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley, 413; Mordechai Rozanski, The Role of American Journalists in Chinese-American Relations; Robert Farnsworth, From Vagabond to Journalist; Paul French, Carl Crow, A Tough Old China Hand, 3; Peter Rand, China Hands, 21.

21 Paul French, Through the Looking Glass; Stephen MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting; Peter Rand, China Hands; James Thomson, “Introduction.”

22 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field,” in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, edited by Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 29–47.

23 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119.

24 Elizabeth Almquist and Shirley Angrist, “Career Salience and Atypicality of Occupational Choice among College Women,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 32, no. 2 (1970): 242–49.

25 Ulf Hannerz, “Foreign Correspondents and the Varieties of Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 299–311.

26 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.

27 Jeylan Mortimer, “Social Class, Work and the Family: Some Implications of the Father's Occupation for Familial Relationships and Sons’ Career Decisions,” Journal of Marriage and Family 38, no. 2 (1976): 241–56.

28 Oliver Boyd-Barrett, “The Politics of Socialization: Recruitment and Training for Journalism,” in The Sociology of Journalism and the Press, edited by Harry Christian (Keele, England: Sociological Review Monograph, 1980), 307–40.

29 See Peter Rand, China Hands; and John Hamilton, “The Missouri News Monopoly and American Altruism in China.”

30 See Paul French, Carl Crow, A Tough Old China Hand.

31 Thomas M. H. Chao, The Foreign Press in China (Shanghai: China Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931).

32 Vernon Nash, “Chinese Journalism in 1931,” Journalism Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1931): 446–52; also, Vernon Nash, “Historical Statement Concerning the Department of Journalism of Yenching University, Peiping, China,” Sara Williams Papers, folder 1079, The State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, MO.

33 Mordechai Rozanski, The Role of American Journalists in Chinese-American Relations.

34 Paul French, Through the Looking Glass; Peter Rand, China Hands.

35 John Service, “Edgar Snow: Some Personal Reminiscences,” The China Quarterly, no. 50 (1972): 209–19.

36 Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-Tung (London: Penguin Books), 10; John Hamilton, Edgar Snow: A Biography.

37 Liang Ma, “A Survey of the Foreign Press in Shanghai,” in An Archival Collection on the History of the Republic of China, volume 5, edited by China’s No. 2 Archive Institute (Jiangsu: Guji, 1935), 131–49.

38 Joyce Hoffman, Theodore White and the Journalism of Illusion.

39 Henry Luce, founder and editor-in-chief of Time magazine, was also born in China to missionary parents. He is considered as a central figure of the “China Lobby,” steering public sentiment and America’s China policy in favor of the Chinese Nationalist government.

40 Paul French, Through the Looking Glass.

41 Charles Tilly, “Retrieving European Lives,” in Reliving the Past, edited by Ebyo Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 11–52.

42 Ibid., 24.

43 Peter Rand, China Hands, xv–xxvii.

44 Stephen Hess, International News and Foreign Correspondents.

45 “In Memoriam: Nathaniel Peffer,” Political Science Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1964). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2145934

46 Robert Farnsworth, From Vagabond to Journalist.

47 Robert Desmond, Windows on the World: World News Reporting 1900–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980).

48 Yong Volz and Francis Lee, “Who Wins the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting? Cumulative Advantage and Social Stratification in Journalism,” Journalism 14, no. 5 (2013): 587–605.

49 Peter Rentfrow et al., “Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105, no. 6 (2013): 996–1012.

50 John Hamilton, “The Missouri News Monopoly and American Altruism in China,” 29.

51 Stephen Hess, International News and Foreign Correspondents.

52 Sarah Mason, Missionary Conscience and the Comprehension of Imperialism: A Study of the Children of American Missionaries to China, 1900–1949 (Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Illinois, 1979).

53 Biography Index, Volume 5, September, 1958–August, 1961 (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1962); “Laurence Leslie Lyon, Ph.B. 1928,” Bulletin of Yale University: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University 32, no. 3 (1935): 135–36.

54 “Obituary,” New York Times, October 3, 1964, page 2. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/03/archives/us-photographer-dies-in-800foot-f-all-in-india-burke-of-life.html

55 John Hamilton, “The Missouri News Monopoly and American Altruism in China.”

56 See Steve Weinberg, A Journalism of Humanity: A Candid History of the World’s First Journalism School (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 120.

57 See Neil O’Brien, An American Editor in Early Revolutionary China; and Steve Weinberg, A Journalism of Humanity, 120.

58 In 1945, she was sent by Reader’s Digest to cover China and stayed there for five months. The trip resulted in the publication of another influential book, Last Change in China (1945). See D. A. Farnie, “Freda Utley: Crusader for Truth and Freedom,” in Britain and Japan, Biographical Portraits, edited by Hugh Cortazzi (London: Japan Society, 2002); also Freda Utley, Odyssey of A Liberal: Memoirs (Washington: Washington National Press, 1970).

59 See Mordechai Rozanski, The Role of American Journalists in Chinese-American Relations.

60 See Akira Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism: U.S. Foreign Policy to 1914 (London: Routledge, 2002), 224; Ralph Minger, William Howard Taft and United States Policy: The Apprenticeship Years, 1900–1908 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 168.

61 Stephen MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting.

62 Edwin Hoyt Jr.’s father, a long-time reporter and publisher, was appointed as the director of the domestic branch of the Office of War Information and hired the young Hoyt to work with OWI from 1943 to 1945 before Hoyt Jr. went to China as a foreign correspondent for the Denver Post.

63 Freda Utley, Odyssey of A Liberal: Memoirs, 6–7.

64 Neil O'Brien, An American Editor in Early Revolutionary China.

65 Tsan-Kuo Chang, The Press and China Policy: The Illusion of Sino-American Relations, 1950–1984 (Norwood: Ablex, 1993); Giovanna Dell’Orto, Giving Meanings to the World; Giovanna Dell’Orto, AP Foreign Correspondents in Action.

66 Peter Gross and Gerd Kopper, Understanding Foreign Correspondence, 3.

67 John Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye.

68 Ibid.

69 For example, Hallett Abend’s My Life in China (1943), Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World (1949), T. A. Bisson’s American Policy in the Far East (1940), Crow’s 400 Million Customers (1937) and China Takes Her Place (1944), Thomas Millard’s Our Eastern Question (1916), Agnes Smedley’s Battle Hymn of China (1943) and China Fights Back (1938), Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (1937), Anna Louise Strong’s China’s Millions (1928), and Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder Out of China (1946).

70 John Goldthorpe, “Occupational Sociology, Yes; Class Analysis, No: Comment on Grusky and Weeden’s ‘Research Agenda’,” Acta Sociologica 45, no. 3 (2002): 211–17.

71 Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1977).

72 Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

73 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yong Volz

Yong Volz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, 107 Neff Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA, [email protected].

Lei Guo

Lei Guo is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, [email protected].