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Well mostly it was her reporting about what was going on in the communist controlled sections of China and the attrocities in Japanese occupied Korea that distinguished her. The holiday is more a city thing where I live than anything, although she is highly regarded in China. She is the most famous person ever born in Cedar City, Utah. It was her work with agricultural co-ops in China that gave us the phrase Gung-Ho.
An American journalist who reported from China in the 1930s under the name "Nym Wales" on the developing revolution in China and the Korean independence movement. (Her husband) Edgar Snow was the first to go to the "Red Areas" and came back with the material for his Red Star Over China. "Peg," as she was known to her friends, was not to be outdone, and soon followed, returning with the material for her book Inside Red China and the later Red Dust. She also drew upon her interviews with a Korean independence leader she met in Yan'an, which she used to write the book The Song of Ariran. The subject of the book was murdered by Mao shortly thereafter. The couple joined anti-Japanese friends, such as Ida Pruitt, Israel Epstein,and Rewi Alley in organizing Chinese Industrial Cooperatives Gung Ho industrial worker's cooperatives) after 1937.
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Here is some on the Gung-Ho Cooperatives.
In January, 1939 The International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (the Gung Ho International Committee, or, ICCIC)was established in Hong Kong. Ida Pruitt toured the United States to raise substantial financial support. The number of cooperatives reached its peak in 1941 at approximately 3,000 cooperatives with a membership of nearly 30,000. Their factories produced blankets, uniforms and other army supplies. Both the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist movement of Mao Zedong supported the movement and tried to control it.