Chinese Communists & “Independent” Newspaper Editor

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 85, 13 January 1950, Page 5

Chinese Communists & “Independent” Newspaper Editor

How beautifully the Chinese deceive; with what urbanity do they enwrap the lie with soft ridicule, as they engage in the art of assimilating the alien. A perfect example of this is reported in the American magazine Time. It indicates how Nationalist China, tongue in check, is absorbing Communism. Confessed His Sins For 47 years, reports Time, the Chinese Newspaper Ta Kung Pao (The Impartial) had cherished its role as an independent paper, but last November Its editor, Wang Yunsheng, correctly gauging the strength of the Red tide, left Shanghai and turned up in Communistheld Peiping—to confess his sins. ' He admitted.that in 20 with Ta Kung Pao he had failed—“ Although I tried to run the paper as an independent one, in reality it has betrayed the interests of the people. For to be independent amounted to betraying the people. There is no neutrality for a journalist between the people and their enemies.” ?

So when the Communists captured Shanghai, Wang returned to the paper Ta Kung Pao; the old independent approach to news was “out.”

But mistakes occurred. Soon Wang and a reporter pleaded guilty 'eft Page 1) to a n “irresponsible attiude” in covering a speech by a Communist general, Chou Enlai. They published a story without Submitting it in advance for revision by “the person involved.”

Paper Was Dull More recently Wang’s staff have again pleaded guilty in an editorial .—a Kung Pao had been so dull that the “comparatively backward elements” whom the Communists are seeking td convert “do not like to read the paper.” To brighten things up Wang had printed “scoops” which turned out to be untrue. Sadly the paper confessed that “as a result of the mischievous idea of news competition we are led to make a mess of things . . . (But) under the correct leadership of the Communist Party of China we shall thoroughly cut off our tail of bourgeois ideology.”