Teaching Our Journal: Yong Volz & Lei Guo

Making China Their “Beat”: A Collective Biography of U.S. Correspondents in China, 1900-1949
By Yong Volz & Lei Guo, University of Missouri

The range of issues implicated in the history of U.S. foreign correspondents is extensive, rich, and complex. That history can spark discussions among students regarding the role, status, and place of foreign correspondents in U.S. history, their making of the cultural and historical imagery of foreign countries, the ideological conflicts between journalism and nationalism, and the development and unraveling of U.S. international relations.

U.S. foreign correspondents are commonly perceived as the most elite group in the field of journalism. Through their reporting on foreign affairs, they have played a vital role in orienting public opinion and influencing foreign policies. They are seen as “necessary mythmakers,” “mediators,” and “translators” between nations and cultures. From a sociological perspective, their own social positioning such as gender, class, education and nationality contributes to the particular ways they cover the world. It is important, therefore, to examine the social composition of foreign correspondents in order to better understand how the meaning of the world has been constructed and represented at different points in history.

This article focuses particularly on the first generations of U.S. correspondents covering China in the first half of the twentieth century. This period marked the emergence and rapid expansion of American journalistic presence in China, contemporaneous with the most radical transformation and tumultuous period in the Chinese history. Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capital and adopting the collective biography approach, this article analyzes the demographic characteristics and career paths of 161 U.S. correspondents to understand the rise and configuration of the U.S. press corps in China, and more broadly, to illustrate the opportunity structure 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.

Questions for Class Discussion:

  1. S. foreign correspondents have historically been considered as “a rare breed,” “a special class-apart” from other reporters, “the model of every aspiring young journalist,” and “the nobility of American journalism.” Why is this the case? In what sense are U.S. foreign correspondents among the most elite in the field of journalism? How are they different from local journalists in terms of social status, work environment, and political and cultural place in American society?
  2. The authors point out that most of the existing studies on foreign correspondents take a biographical narrative approach to highlight the life histories of selective individuals while few studies have focused on the collective and composite portraits of foreign correspondents. Why is it important to study the social composition of foreign correspondents as a collective?
  3. Compare the conventional biography approach and the collective biography approach. What are the advantages as well as disadvantages of each approach in historical description, interpretation and explanation? What kinds of historical research questions call for the use of the collective biography approach?
  4. Why would being “a missionary kid” constitute an advantage in becoming a China correspondent in the early twentieth century? What does it say about the preferred qualifications and competencies of early foreign correspondents?
  5. How to explain the fact that many early China correspondents had a Missouri connection, from Thomas F. F. Millard to John B. Powell to Edgar Snow? In particular, what was the role of the Missouri School of Journalism in the early formation of the U.S. press corps in China?
  6. How might the collective portrait of the China correspondents be similar or different from those of the U.S. press corps in other countries, for example, in France, Russia, Egypt or South Africa? And why?

Exercise 1: Comparing the profiles and career paths of two China Correspondents 

This article analyzed the biographical information of 161 U.S. correspondents who were active in China from 1900 to 1949. Among those are two prominent figures, Thomas F. F. Millard, viewed as “the patriarch of China Hand journalists” who wrote prolifically with seven books and numerous articles about China, and Edgar Snow, a household name in China whose reporting gave the West “the first articulate account of the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership.” The life stories of these two can provide students a window into the historical formation of China correspondence and its relation to the development of U.S.-China relations in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this exercise, students will first read the New York Times’ obituaries of Millard and Snow:

https://www.nytimes.com/1942/09/09/archives/t-f-millard-de-expert-olq-hin-war-correspondent-adviser-to-the.html and https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/16/archives/edgar-snow-dies-wrote-about-china-edgar-snow-author-on-china-is.html. Lists of additional information regarding their careers and life experiences can also be found starting with http://edgarsnowproject.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Franklin_Fairfax_Millard.

Discuss the following questions: What did Millard and Snow have in common in biographical terms? How were they different in family, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds? What were their personal and/or professional connections? How would you describe their career routes into China reporting? How do their backgrounds and career paths reveal the convergent or divergent formation of the U.S. press corps in China? How might their different backgrounds and social positioning contribute to the particular ways they covered China?

Exercise 2: Collective biography and quantification in historical analysis 

Sociologist and historian Charles Tilly defines collective biography as a “formal method” that uses quantitative means to identify common properties, and systematic variations across many personal experiences. Methodologically, it is a labor-intensive process that involves assembling, compounding. and cataloging comparable individual cases, followed by “regrouping of those files into a collective portrait” through statistical analysis. Such a method, as Tilly argues, permits historians to “retain all the idiosyncrasy of personal experience while identifying uniformities and variations across many personal experiences.”

Use this article as a research example that showcases the use of collective biography for historical analysis (see the “Method and Data” section). In this exercise, students will form in groups of three to design their own collective biography research. Follow the steps below:

  • Decide on a historical topic (e.g., the collective biography of Pulitzer Prize winners from 1917 to 1949, or the first generation of journalism students who attended the Missouri School of Journalism from 1908 to 1917, or the female leaders in major journalism associations, African American newspaper publishers, etc.);
  • Identify the sources (a. explain how to compile the list of individuals under your study, and b. list at least five possible general sources for biographical and career information of those individuals);
  • Describe the research procedure and measure (e.g., how to retrieve the data, what is the most relevant information to record, how to catalog and categorize the data, and how to compute descriptive statics);
  • Reflect on the merit of this research design as well as possible holes in the research design and challenges you expect.

Exercise 3: U.S. foreign correspondents today 

This study examines the overall social composition of U.S. correspondents in China from 1900 to 1949, which witnessed the formative years of the field of China reporting until its suspension when the Chinese Communist Party took over and expelled almost all foreigners, including American correspondents, from China. American correspondents returned to China in the late 1970s when China reopened its door to the world. Expectedly, today’s U.S. correspondents in China might fit a different profile and certainly work in a very different political and social environment. In this exercise, look through the following websites/documents to get a glimpse of who constitutes today’s China correspondents, what are their qualifications and skills, what news organizations they work for, and what working conditions and challenges they might encounter. Compare and contrast today’s China correspondents with those who ventured into China reporting in the first half of the twentieth century.

Additional Resources

Cavanaugh, Jerome, Who’s Who in China, 1918-1950 (Hong Kong: Cheng Wen Publishing Co., 1982; reprinted from Millard’s Review and China Weekly Review).

ChinaFile (an online magazine published by the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society), http://www.chinafile.com/

Edgar Snow Memorial Foundation, https://edgarsnowfoundation.org/

Fairbank, John, The United States and China (Harvard University Press, 1983).

Goodman, Bryna, “Networks of News: Power, Language and Transnational Dimensions of the Chinese Press, 1850–1949,” The China Review, 4 (Spring 2004): 1-10.

Langfitt, Frank, “The Challenges of Being a Foreign Reporter in China,” retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/733404699/opinion-the-challenges-of-being-a-foreign-reporter-in-china

Mirsky, Jonathan, “Getting the Story in China: American Reporters Since 1972,” The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series, 1999, retrieved from https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/2000_11_mirsky.pdf

Powell, John B., My Twenty-Five Years in China (New York: Macmillan Co., 1945).

U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, “United States Relations with China: Boxer Uprising to Cold War (1900-1949),” retrieved from https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/90689.htm

Tong, Hollington, Dateline: China, The Beginning of China’s Press Relations with the World (New York: Rockport Press, 1950).