Dream Street, Shanghai

From 1917 until the day after Pearl Harbor, John Benjamin Powell edited and published a courageous, respected Shanghai newsmagazine called the China Weekly Review. Clapped into prison by the Japanese, J.B. suffered starvation and gangrene that hastened his death (TIME, March 10, 1947). Behind him, Powell left a son to carry on. Last week, in a Communist Shanghai that was virtually deserted by Americans, 31-year-old John William Powell was still publishing the Review. Old J.B., who called no man master, would have been surprised and shocked at its subservient tone. Son Bill had become an outright apologist for Communism.

Born in Shanghai and educated (like his father) at the Missouri School of Journalism, young Powell worked for the Office of War Information in China during World War II. In 1945, as editorial regent for his ailing father, Bill soon recaptured the Review's old readers among the U.S., British and English-speaking Chinese communities, who were glad to see the weekly revived. But young Powell moved sharply left from his father's position as an independent critic of both the Nationalists and the Communists. After Red troops finally took Shanghai in 1949, the Review hailed the city's "liberation," lavishly praised "the new democracy," and began demanding Formosa's "liberation" from Chiang Kai-shek's "henchmen." The Review's version of life in the U.S. became a red-and-pink patchwork quilt, sewn together from such dependably left-wing sources as the speeches of Howard Fast and George Seldes' news letter In Fact. Wrote the Review: "The United States, in the eyes of the Chinese people, has become the symbol of world reaction."

Even the Review's traditional English lessons for Chinese readers have become party-line jabberwocky. One recent issue analyzed the sentence: "Pa may be a thoughtful union man in the shop, but when he picks up a magazine, he likes to study the ads for new cars." The Review explained that "Pa" was slang for "father." Then it added: "This sentence portrays the average American as shortsighted politically ... He does not want to be informed, he wants merely to escape into a dream world in his leisure hours." With Editor Powell's homeland now fighting his friends in Korea, old J.B.'s admirers waited to see if son Bill would escape from his own dream world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.