Bourgeois Beats

For 47 years, China's Ta Rung Pao (The Impartial) cherished its role as an independent newspaper, liked to think of itself as the New York Times of China. But last November, Editor Wang Yun-sheng, correctly gauging the strength of the red tide, left the main office at Shanghai and turned up in Communist-held Peiping to confess his sins. In 20 years with Ta Rung Pao, admitted Wang, he had failed: "Although [I tried] to run the paper as an independent one, in reality it has betrayed the interests of the people . . . There is no neutrality for a journalist between the people and their enemies."

When the Communists captured Shanghai, Wang returned to resume editing Ta Rung Pao. Reporters who unwittingly persisted in the old independent approach to the news were quickly set straight. A fortnight ago, Editor Wang and one of his staffers pleaded guilty on Page One to an "irresponsible attitude" in covering a speech by Communist General Chou Enlai. The irresponsibility: publishing the story without submitting it in advance for revision by "the person involved."

Last week Editor Wang's staff pleaded guilty again in an editorial: Ta Rung Pao had been so dull that the "comparatively backward elements" whom the Communists are seeking to convert "do not like to read the paper." To brighten things up, Editor Wang had printed "scoops" which had turned out to be untrue. Sadly the paper confessed that "as a result of the mischievous idea of news competition held by the bourgeoisie, we are led to make a mess of things . . . [But] under the correct leadership of the Communist Party of China [we shall] throughly cut off our tail of bourgeois ideology."

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