AP honors journalist executed in 1951 by Chinese officials

Associated Press ^ | 12/11/19 | JOHN DANISZEWSKI

[OddLane]

Y.C. Jao was a respected Chinese correspondent working for The Associated Press in April 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Red Army stormed into Nanjing, defeating the Nationalist forces of leader Chiang Kai-shek and paving the way for the Communist takeover of China.

A family man in his late 40s, tall and erudite with liberal views, Jao was an intellectual deeply committed to news, and to modernizing journalism in China. He had studied at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism in the 1920s, before returning after 10 years to teach journalism and to start an English-language paper...

[Zhang Fei]

Brave man, but naive in the extreme. The prudent thing to do was exit the country with his entire family. As an AP correspondent, he might have had an entre into the US. In the worst case, he could have left for Taiwan.

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[Jao’s story was almost lost to AP’s history. It came to light when a nephew, Jilong Rao, wrote to AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt in 2018, calling attention to Jao’s death. He enclosed a copy of an official document — a Chinese court’s rejection of the family’s 1983 request that Jao be rehabilitated posthumously on grounds that there was no evidence he ever engaged in espionage.

The court had ruled that the verdict would stand. It said it had been proven that Jao would write regularly to the AP in Hong Kong even after its American correspondents were expelled from the country. The court claimed that these letters contained “rumor, calumny and counter-revolutionary speech” and amounted to collecting intelligence “on behalf of imperialism.”]

[granada]

A liberal worked for AP.
Fake journalist.

[angmo]

Yet journalists by and large consistently support communism and totalitarian regimes. Until they get killed by them.

[elbook]

A lesson for any ‘Moderate’ leftist journalists here in the USA.

They can wind up being among the first that communists(ruthless leftists) ‘Put Up Against the Wall’ when they finally seize power.

[dfwgator]

And yet our media thinks Trump is even worse on journalists.