J. B.'s Boy

One day in 1917, a slight, mild-mannered journalism instructor from Missouri stepped ashore at Shanghai. His fellow passengers piled into rickshas, but he could not bring himself to ride behind a human beast of burden. He walked to his hotel.

In the next 24 years John Benjamin Powell came to know China, its people and their problems as few other foreigners did. His China Weekly Review became a highly respected journal of news and opinion. Long before it became the fashion, the militant little paper took sides against the invading Japanese. When they tried to silence him with bribes and threats, Powell sneered at them and lined his pressroom doors with steel. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japs shut up his shop, and later clapped Editor Powell into filthy, ice-cold Bridgehouse Prison. Before he got out, starvation had cut his weight in half, and gangrene had turned his feet into shapeless lumps.

He lived to bear witness against his tormentors (at the war-crimes trials in

Tokyo), but not to see China again. Last month, in Washington, D. C., death came to tired, 60-year-old "J.B."

In His Steps. Last week, at Powell's old desk, under the gaudy lithographs of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kaishek, son John William Powell, 27, took over the title of editor & publisher of the China Weekly Review. He had been running the paper since the end of the war. Shanghai-born Bill Powell worked with 0WI during the war, tossing leaflets out of Army bombers over occupied Hong Kong and Canton. When he got back to the Review he found most of its fine library stolen, the wiring and switches ripped from the walls.

Inflation sent the advertising rate to $12,000 an inch ($1 U.S.). To make ends meet young Powell started a translation service for U.S. businessmen and correspondents, and a newsletter called Monthly Report. He also began updating Who's Who in China, which, just before the war, had earned his father some new enemies with a section on Who's Who among the Puppets.

Less conservative than J.B. (who under estimated the Communists as mere bandits), Bill Powell tries to steer a middle course between them and the Kuomintang.

By broadening the paper's scope with articles by Chinese and U.S. contributors, he has rebuilt its circulation to 7,500. But few English-reading students and teachers can afford to pay $2,000 (about 16-c-) a copy. Wrote one reader in Chekiang Province, canceling his subscription :

"We teachers get CN $185,000 per month (about $15), so we are hardly able to live. ... I am unwilling to part from the Review, and I hope ... I may soon see it again. When? . . . Only when the terrible inflation stops, and there is an end to this pitiless civil war. Be this true!

Be this true in the near future!"

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