Last Tango in Shanghai
IN THE DYING YEARS OF COSMOPOLITAN SHANGHAI, as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army marched along its boulevards and Communist Party bureaucrats demanded the keys to its once thriving businesses, one lonely English-language paper still haunted the newsstands.
The News was the successor to the , which had once been the most important English-language paper in a country with a thriving multilingual press and in March 1951, the owners—the Morris family—launched the Shanghai News. The staff, at least those who hadn’t already left the city, stayed on, stuck translating and editing copy force-fed to them from Xinhua, the national newswire.
