The Press: All Finish!

On the door of the editor’s office at the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury (circ. 3,000) one day last week, a huge cartoon was tacked. It showed a portly, bespectacled foreigner carrying a suitcase toward a steamship. The pidgin-English caption: “All finish!” The Chinese caption:”Scram, Gould!”

After 18 hectic years of piloting Shanghai’s only U.S.-owned newspaper, Editor Randall Chase Gould, 51, was indeed “All finish!” in the Far East. To Gould, it had been a disillusioning experience.

Though his paper was the spokesman for U.S. business interests in Shanghai, it was also a longtime critic of the “feeble and decadent” Kuomintang regime, and for a time it had regarded the Communists with a tolerant eye.

Like thousands of his fellow citizens, Editor Gould had fallen for the line that China’s Communists were really “agrarian democrats” without binding ties to Moscow. Only last month he voiced a tentative welcome to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Liberation Army as it took over Shanghai. Wrote Gould in his breezy Post: “Shanghai is essentially non-political . . . What it hopes is that a true ‘liberation’ has now come.” It hadn’t. Gould found the city’s new bosses as hostile to a free press as any other Communists would be.

Pistol Packer. Last week Gould got his first real taste of the agrarian democrats’ medicine—Chinese Communist staffers locked him in his office until midnight after he rejected their wage demands. Next day, when he wrote a story about the row, the workers refused to print the Post unless he dropped his “distorted” account and stopped “helping the bandit Chiang resist the People’s Revolution.” That convinced Gould that he could “no longer run an American newspaper in the American tradition,” and he suspended the Post indefinitely.

For 20 years, ever since Insurance-Man C. V. (Neil) Starr bought two struggling sheets and merged them, the Evening Post and Mercury had been a lively landmark of the foreign community (at its peak, the Post sold 15,000 copies of its English edition, 200,000 of its Chinese edition Ta Mei Wan Pao). As early as 1932 Editor Gould warned against Japanese aggression and, when a made-in-Japan puppet Chinese regime took over Shanghai, the Post was bombed and ten Chinese staffers were assassinated; Editor

Gould learned to pack a pistol, and never to sit with his back to the door.

Dancing Taught. When Pearl Harbor came, Gould was in the U.S. The Japanese shanghaied his paper, publishing a Rising Sun house organ under the familiar masthead. To counteract its propaganda effect, Publisher Starr and Editor Gould opened up shop in New York and flew the weekly edition to Free China for distribution. Barely a month after V-J day, Gould was back in his old Shanghai shop feeding the dwindled foreign community the old familiar diet of gossipy chitchat, straight news, Li’l Abner, Joe Palooka and Dorothy Dix. Soon he was squabbling with Nationalist censors. When one killed a story at the last minute, Gould filled the hole with an ad: “Printing done and tango taught at Shanghai Evening Post.”

But not until last week was Gould convinced that the Nationalist censorship dance was a waltz compared to the tarantella of the Communists. At week’s end, Gould was on his way back to the U.S., in the mood to “play with” a quiet weekly somewhere west of China.