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Anna Louise Strong was a foreign correspondent and social activist whose midwestern idealism and pioneering spirit led her to extended stays in Russia and China. Although never a member of the Communist Party, she sympathized with the Communist cause and wrote of its struggles with a vibrant naivete, believing that a new era of human progress had arrived.
Anna Louise Strong was born on November 25, 1885, in a two-room parsonage in Friend, Nebraska, where her father, Sydney Strong, was a Congregational minister who was deeply involved in progressive movements. When she was not yet two, family lore relates, a late summer cyclone lifted her from the front yard and deposited her, relatively unscathed, in the cow pasture some distance away–an archetypal Plains experience.
Sydney Strong's ministry took the family to various midwestern locations such as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Oak Park, Illinois. A diligent and precocious student, Anna finished high school at fifteen, graduated from Oberlin College summa cum laude, and became, at age twenty-three, the youngest woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
In Kansas City in 1911, Strong was director of the Child Welfare Exhibit Program, an organization dedicated to improving the wellbeing of urban children. It was there that she embraced socialism and decided to devote her life to progressive social causes. In 1919, as editor of the
Strong was warmly received by the Chinese Communist leaders, who saw her as a valuable propaganda mouthpiece they could use in their dealings with the West. She had interviewed Mao Tse-tung in 1946 at the Communist headquarters in Yenan, where he first used the term "paper tiger" to refer to Western imperialists. Her death in Beijing in March 1970 was an occasion for public mourning and a state funeral. She is buried in the Revolutionary Martyrs' Cemetery in Beijing.