Seymour Topping on the Chinese Civil War

when I flick through the index of my book Through the Looking Glass, a history of foreign correspondents in China up to 1949, I think Seymour Topping holds the distinction of being the only one with an entry who’s still alive. I believe he is 90 years young this year. Topping’s reporting on the Chinese Civil between 1945 and 1949 for AP was excellent and some of it is included in the recently published collection of his reporting, On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondents Journal From the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam.

Topping, a graduate of the Missouri University School of Journalism that sent so many young writers China’s way (after  Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism had rejected him) had just left the army where he had served as an infantry officer in the Philippines and described himself as “very green” when he arrived in post-war Nationalist China. He first went to northern China for the International News Service for the princely sum of $50 a month and in 1948 joined AP in Nanjing where he was the first correspondent to report the fall of the city to Communist forces in 1949 and described Chiang as a “beaten man”. After the Communist occupation of Nanjing, Topping continued to report from the city for six months.