Censoring the Foreign Press in China in the 1920s

The news from China is not good – Bloomberg has bottled it and says it’s not going to do investigative journalism any more in China (those terminals are just too valuable to win out against real journalism) while a veteran hack, Paul Mooney, has been refused a visa. For more on this read the Economist blog here. Much discussion and hand wringing has (rightly) ensued among the foreign press corps in Beijing. China Rhyming of course prefers to take the historical view and look back to the 1920s and how the Chinese government (KMT then and back in the days when it was the Communists, among others, being censored) tried to limit the investigative attempts of the foreign hack pack….

(the below is from my book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists From Opium Wars to Mao (now available for a very reasonable price on Amazon as a Kindle)

Bans — Fun with the Censors

The government took exception to a wide range of foreign correspondents in the 1920s. The North-China Daily News in Shanghai was often openly hostile to the government. It was a supporter of extraterritoriality and constantly worried about the loss of Great Power privileges and rights if Chiang should decide to continue his Northern Expedition into the treaty ports, which seemed a distinct possibility to many; and the paper was also often perceived to be sympathetic to Tokyo, in line with British Foreign Office thinking at the time. In 1929 the paper was subjected to a postal ban by the government, largely as a result of articles by Rodney Gilbert and George Sokolsky. Following this, in 1930, the paper’s editorial line changed noticeably when the staunchly pro-British O. M. Green was rather controversially replaced as editor by Edwin Haward, the well-regarded India Hand who had worked on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore (Kipling’s old employer). The paper became more pro-government and also more objective in its reporting of issues involving tricky topics such as extraterritoriality. The Old Lady of the Bund’s change of heart was due to Haward’s new editorial decisions as well as a broader change in the sensibilities of the foreign population in China who increasingly decided to live with theNationalist government rather than oppose it. Haward may have been more a man of India than China but he knew his stuff and had also been a long and close friend of  J. O. P. Bland. Though the North-China was hardest hit, both the French-owned Journal de Pekin and Woodhead’s Peking and Tientsin Times suffered various penalties, from being denied the use of the mail system to all copies circulated outside the foreign concessions being seized and burned byNationalist officials.

However, few journalists were as directly targeted by the Nationalists as Hallett Abend (below). He had made multiple enemies in the Chiang clan through various actions, including the perhaps unwise decision to punch Chiang’s son on the nose and accuse the Generalissimo of suffering from unbridled ambition. The government tried to discredit him with Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, and attempted to deport him several times. They were unsuccessful, but the Chinese telegraph offices were ordered not to handle his despatches and he had to resort to the rather roundabout method of sending them to the Times’s Tokyo bureau for forwarding to New York. Despite the government’s intense dislike of Abend, extraterritoriality meant they couldn’t expel him and, as he was the representative of a highly influential paper, he was still invited to the regular tea and sandwiches briefings for foreign reporters held by Chiang and Madame Chiang in Nanjing. However, he could never be sure if the two shots fired at him while in a rickshaw in Beijing, or, several years later in 1934, an attempted stabbing at Shanghai’s North Railway Station, were random attacks or botched assassination attempts.

Other correspondents also found themselves the subject of intense lobbying of their bosses by the Nationalists, if not assassination attempts. For example, Charles Dailey, the Chicago Tribune’s Beijing correspondent was contacted by his bemused editor who had been deluged with sacks of mail denouncing Dailey in what appeared to be an orchestrated campaign similar to that organised against Abend.