Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley and Robert Payne are important representatives of western writers who came to China before and after World War II. They went deep into red China, regarded Yan'an as a “sacred landscape”, and constructed the image of red China from the aspects of natural landscape, social landscape and cultural landscape. The three writers' red China narrative styles can be defined respectively as historical narrative, memory narrative and poetic narrative. Snow is good at describing history, and his narrative has historical objectivity and depth. Smedley is good at lyricism, and her narrative is full of subjective enthusiasm and personal memory. Payne's advantage lies in the creation of image, which combines the inner feelings with the objective correlative to create a historical situation rich in poetic space. The red China writing of the three is closely related to the historical context, personal cultural stance and experiences in China. As the classics of narratives of red China, their works provide a window for the Western world to understand China, enhance the cross-cultural communication between China and the West, and promote the understanding and identification between the East and the West.