The Price of Truth in Shanghai

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 8, 10 January 1936, Page 10

The Price of Truth in Shanghai

NEWSPAPER MEN FORFEIT LIVES SYDNEY, Dec. 24. Two editors and two reporters of tnc "Sin Wan Pao,” China’s leading dailynewspapers, Shanghai, are to die on Christmas Day. For writing and speaking the truth concerning their country’s domination by Japan, they aro to face a firing squad at 10 a.ra. to-morrow.

Tho victims are: Koo Ching-loong, associate editor; Loh Zuen-pung, chiefreporter and city editor; Zeo Kweusung, reporter; Zung Tso-lcau, reporter. Though tho order for the execution was signed by General Chiang Kaishek, commander-in-chief of the Chinese National Army, Premier and Minister of Justice in the Nanking Government, it is well known that the pressure came from Japan. My first information of the outrage (writes Mr. V. Y. Chow in the SuiH.ay Sun) was a cablo from a Shanghai friend on November 1. On November 2S a long letter from the president of the Institute of Journalists, Professor Chao Yunghsiang, of Hongkong, give further details:—

"The former president of our institute, Mr. Koo, was arrested on October 22, together with Loh, Zee and Zung. Their trial was a mockery of tho worst kind. They were permitted no lawyers, being in effect court-mar'tiallcd. "Previously some sort of sham trial had taken place in the First District Court of Shanghai, but this court could only find justification of arrest. The four men wero then turned over to the gendarmerie and sent lo Nanking, where they remain, lingering in a .filthy gaol, among actual murderers and suchlike criminals, suffering the torture and misery of their unlawful and in just incarceration.

“Protests have been sent to Nanking, but nothing seems to be able to save them. Japan has her way, and Chiang Ivai-shck has got to obey.” Death of Opinions.

As recent events in the first northeastern provinces have shown, Japanese military chiefs have been relentless ni pursuing their policy to mako of China a Japanese colony-, with the so-called open door firmly closed in the face of the white man.

For Chinese to oppose such a doctrine, or to express contrary- opinions, is to invite death iu China and boycott and persecution elsewhere. The savage sentence of death against journalists who tread on tho toes of the military chiefs and their politicians, is no new thing in China. But this is the first occasion on which two respected editors and two wholly innocent reporters, carrying out their piofession as news-givers and editorial writers, ard to be made scapegoats for the military weakness of their country.

Friend of Lord Lytton. These pressmen, stirred by their sense of national duty-, caused writings to appear in their newspaper which warned the people of China against further Japanese plots in North China. When international sympathy was raised on their behalf, they were additionally charged with being “Communist suspects.” Koo, one of the condemned, is a close friend of Lord Lytton, whom he accompanied on his tour with the Commission of Inquiry in Manchuria in 1932-33. As soon as news of Koo’s arrest reached him, Lord Lytton immediately cabled the Nanking Government, registering his amazement and nausea.

Protests also were cabled by H. G. Weils, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Romain Holland, Bernard Shaw, Naomi Michison, and other writers, for Koo was well known in London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

Author of "Epic.” Loh, who is only 27 and one of China’s most famous war correspondents, wrote many powerful editorials and articles calling for opposition to Japanese aggression, and in the guise of a peasant he penetrated into Manchuria during the Japanese invasion there and secured the material for “The Inglorious Chinese Retreat iro.n Jehol,” which even the "Osaka Maiuichi,” of Japan, has called "a magnili cent book, an epic.” Tho reporters, Zoe and Zung, wore

charged with circulating leaflets of an anti-Japanese nature to University students.

The facts are, briefly, that the Chinese Government will not resist Japanese aggression. Those Chinese students who have been trained abroad resent this cowardice and say so, by speech and writing. And so it has become a crime punishable by death to speak or write against Japanese ‘‘aspirations ” for the control of China.