Agnes Smedley was an American journalist, writer and activist who is well known for her publications on the Chinese revolution.
Born in Missouri, she grew up in precarious circumstances, but was able nevertheless to attend Tempe Normal School (now Arizona State University) and San Diego Normal School (now San Diego State University), for a year each. From 1917 to 1920 she lived in New York, working as a secretary and, at the same time, contributing articles to the socialist magazine The Call and Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review. In 1919, she moved to Berlin, where she became friends with Käthe Kollwitz after a collaboration on birth control pamphlets, which they translated and illustrated. There she also met the Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and became involved in the Indian independence movement.
Between 1928 and1941, Smedley lived in China. She stayed in Shanghai for some time, but also travelled around the country as a reporter, as some of her photographs demonstrate. Through a feminist perspective, she wrote – among other issues – about the role of Chinese women during the civil wars. As a correspondent, she wrote reportages for German, British and U.S. newspapers, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Manchester Guardian. She established a friendship and working relationship with Lu Xun (1888–1936) a protagonist in the May Fourth Movement who is widely regarded as the “father of modern literature” in China. In 1927, together with other May Fourth writers, he had to leave Beijing in order to escape Kuomintang persecution and settled in Shanghai in the relative safety of the foreign territories.
Smedley continued to write about and be engaged with Chinese social politics after her return to New York. She also continued her preoccupation with art, as shown in her 1949 contribution to a Tribune Gallery of New York publication. In her essay, Chinese Wood Engravings, Smedley wrote about the art of Chinese wood carvings, its revolutionary potential and the role of Lu Xun. As a prominent leftist figure and the epicentre of the politically and socially engaged Woodcut Movement, Lu Xun was soon followed to Shanghai by the Kuomintang and forced to move back and forth across the city boundaries, switching territories repeatedly. He secretly found shelter at his friend Uchiyama Kanzo's Uchyama Bookstore, located on an extra-settlement road on Szechuan Road, and stayed in Shanghai until his death in 1936.
During her time in China, Smedley maintained an illustrious network that included the German architect Rudolf Hamburger and his wife Ursula Kuczynski, who worked for the espionage ring around Richard Sorge, who in turn worked for the Russian GRU. Smedley published a number of books about her experiences and observations in China and the first of these, Daughter of Earth (1929) was translated into Japanese by Ozaki Hotsumi. Both Ozaki and Sorge were sentenced to death in Tokyo in 1944. Smedley repeatedly visited the Communist and Nationalist forces on their route marches and on the battlefield. In 1941 she left China for the USA,  but left that country in 1949 because of anti-communist persecution and moved to England. She died the same year in a hospital in Oxford.