Anna Louise Strong

Anna Louise Strong (born November 24, 1885, Friend, Nebraska, U.S.—died March 29, 1970, Beijing, China) was an American journalist and author who published numerous articles and books about developments in the nascent Soviet Union and then in communist China, based on her extensive travel in and firsthand knowledge of those countries.

Strong grew up in Friend, Nebraska, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in Oak Park, Illinois. She attended Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) College in 1903–04 and graduated from Oberlin (Ohio) College in 1905. In 1908 she received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Over the next several years she organized “Know Your City” institutes in several Pacific Coast cities and then a series of child welfare exhibits across the country as well as in Dublin, Ireland, and in Panama. During 1914–16 she was engaged in arranging exhibits for the U.S. Children’s Bureau. From 1916 to 1918 she served on the Seattle, Washington, city school board, and from 1918 to 1921 she was feature editor of the Seattle Union Record, a labour newspaper. In 1919 she published a History of the Seattle General Strike.

After a year as a correspondent in Poland and Russia for the American Friends Service Committee, Strong was named Moscow correspondent for the International News Service. From her European observations she wrote The First Time in History (1924) and Children of Revolution (1925). Becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian experiment in communism, she returned to the United States in 1925 as an unpaid agent to arouse interest among businessmen in industrial investment and development in Russia. She also lectured widely. Travels in China and other parts of Asia were reflected in China’s Millions (1928), Red Star in Samarkand (1929), and The Road to Grey Pamir (1931).

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In 1930 Strong returned to Moscow and helped found the Moscow News, the first English-language newspaper there. She was managing editor for a year and then a feature writer. She continued to publish books as well: The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931), an updated China’s Millions: The Revolutionary Struggles from 1927 to 1935 (1935), the autobiographical I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American (1935), This Soviet World (1936), and The Soviet Constitution (1937). In 1936 she returned once again to the United States. She continued to write for leading periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, and Asia. Several visits to Spain resulted in Spain in Arms (1937), and visits to China led to One Fifth of Mankind (1938). In 1940 she published My Native Land. Her subsequent books include The Soviets Expected It (1941); the novel Wild River (1943), set in Russia; Peoples of the U.S.S.R. (1944); I Saw the New Poland (1946), based on her reporting from Poland as she accompanied the occupying Red Army; and three books on the success of the Communist Revolution in China.

In 1949, en route to China, Strong was arrested in Moscow, charged with espionage, and deported; she remained persona non grata in the Soviet Union until cleared in 1955. In 1958 she moved permanently to China, where she traveled extensively and edited the English-language monthly Letter from China for worldwide distribution until shortly before her death. She also published The Rise of the People’s Communes of China (1960) and Cash and Violence in Laos and Viet Nam (1962). She enjoyed the respect and confidence of the Chinese government throughout the political upheavals of the 1960s, and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69 she joined the Red Guard movement. She was a close friend of Mao Zedong, whom she had first interviewed in a cave in Yenan province in 1946.