Anna Louise Strong (second from left, front row) with Zhu De (third from right, back row) and Peng Dehuai (second from right, front row) at the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army in Hongtong, Shanxi, in February 1938. [Photo reproduced by Jing Wei/China News Service]

Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970) was an American progressive writer and journalist. She came to China six times and spent one-third of her life in China. She loved China, passionately eulogized the revolutionary struggle and socialist construction achievements of the people led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), and made important contributions to enhancing the friendship between the Chinese and American people.

A recorder of the Chinese revolution

Strong was born in Friend, Nebraska, in November 1885. Under the influence of her parents, she studied hard from an early age and received her PhD, magna cum laude, from the University of Chicago at the age of 22. She was active in social activity, focusing on industrial workers and the labor movement, working on the struggle to abolish child labor, opposing U.S. participation in World War I, and writing a number of sharpedged editorials while serving as editor of the Seattle Union Record, the U.S. newspaper of the Seattle General Strike Union. In 1921, inspired by the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Strong left the United States for Moscow, where she wrote numerous works extolling "the new world of man and the man of the new world," and later lived in the Soviet Union for nearly 30 years.