The Press: Chungking Cubs

With two bamboo and plaster dormitories, classrooms in the bombproof Press Hostel, nine typewriters locally valued at $1,200 each, and 32 cub-reporting students, Chungking’s new Graduate School of Journalism of the Central Political Institute got under way last week. The founder and director is polished, ingratiating, 56-year-old Dr. Hollington Tong, pressagent extraordinary to the Chiang Kai-shek regime and biographer of the Gissimo.

The idea that China could well use as many highly trained journalists as were available long ago impressed itself on Vice Minister of Information Tong. “While touring the U.S. with Madame Chiang last winter, Columbia-Man Tong enlisted the aid of Columbia’s Dean of Journalism Carl Ackerman. They got anonymous donors to put up $75,000; further funds were acquired in China.

Dean Ackerman sent textbooks, stationery and Journalism Professor Harold Cross, who heads a faculty of seven U.S. experts and one Chinese. The teaching will be in English and the school run like a U.S. newspaper city room. The students (all college graduates and including six girls) will cover the waterfront, airport, government offices. They will also study U.S. newspaper history, philosophy and techniques, as well as newscasting and photography. In 1945 a Chinese faculty will take over.

Hollington Tong plans to have the cubs publish a newspaper. U.S. newsmen in Chungking last week were wondering how closely such a sheet could resemble a free press. Chungking is as bound by censorship as it is by mud. Its newspapers have been forbidden to discuss such glaring but officially nonexistent topics as inflation.