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China Monthly Review Magazine



      China Monthly Review, previously called the China Weekly Review until 1950, was an English-language news magazine published in Shanghai. (There is no relationship between this publication and the American magazine Monthly Review published in New York City since 1949.) The China Weekly Review was suppressed by the Japanese invaders during World War II, and the owner/editor, the American liberal journalist J. B. Powell, was tortured by the Japanese and ultimately had to have both of his legs amputated. After the Japanese were defeated in 1945, J. B. Powell’s son, John W. Powell, also an American journalist (though he was born in China), returned to Shanghai to resume publication of the magazine. John W. Powell was soon joined by his wife Sylvia C. Powell and by Julian Schuman, as Associate Editors, in the production of the magazine.

      At first the post-war magazine continued its long pre-war sympathy towards the Chiang Kai-shek regime, but soon became more and more disillusioned by its rampant corruption, complete incompetence, and total disregard for the welfare of ordinary Chinese people. And it became more and more critical of that corrupt regime. By the time Mao’s Communist forces took over Shanghai and then all of mainland China, the magazine had become very supportive of the revolution and all the revolutionary changes that soon followed. It also strongly supported China’s participation in the defense of North Korea from U.S. imperialist attack in the Korean War, and was especially active in exposing considerable evidence of the germ warfare the U.S. secretly engaged in during that war (and which the U.S. still denies to this very day!). It was much more difficult for the U.S. imperialists to dismiss the evidence presented by American journalists than it was to just pooh-pooh the even greater amount of evidence published by the Chinese government in its own publications.

      Although the magazine was published in Shanghai, many of its readers were in the United States. During the Korean War the U.S. government was very alarmed by the exposure of its bacteriological warfare in the pages of the China Monthly Review, and tried to do everything it could to stop the issues of the magazine from reaching its American subscribers. Many issues were intercepted and destroyed by U.S. Customs. Unfortunately this had the effect of severely damaging the distribution of the magazine, and the number of its subscriptions in the U.S., which created growing financial problems. The magazine actually lost a lot of money in its last couple years, but was in effect subsidized by other publishing activities by John W. Powell and his team. Even so, they were finally forced by money problems to end the publication of the magazine with the July 1953 issue.

      This, however, was not the end of the story for John W. Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julian Schuman. All three of them returned to the U.S. after the Korean War was over. And in 1956 the U.S. government indicted them for sedition! (Exposing the truth of U.S. imperialist crimes counts as “sedition” in their view!) The case dragged on for a long time, and John W. Powell and the others were in rather desperate financial condition at this point. They were all black-listed as journalists and had to try to make a living as best they could. (Mr. Powell taught himself carpentry and survived by doing carpentry maintenance work on old Victorian houses in San Francisco.) But outside financial help from the left was found to cover some of the legal costs. (See the pamphlet “China Monthly Review — Editors On Trial” in the Documents section at the bottom of this page.) In 1959 this government attempt ended in a mistrial. All charges against the three were finally dropped in 1961 for lack of evidence. For more about the history of the China Monthly Review and the government legal efforts to send the editors to prison, along with lots of background information, see the quite interesting academic work, the MS degree thesis by Fuyuan Shen, John William Powell and the “China Weekly Review”: An Analysis of His Reporting and His McCarthy Era Ordeal, also available in the Documents section below.

      So far we only have available the issues of this magazine for 1952 and 1953. We have copied them from the “HeliumZone” page on Archive.org. We thank the person who posted these magazines there, who also commented: “This is an unprocessed scan of a mediocre-quality microfilm, but it’s the best I can do for now, because print copies of this are very hard to find and were printed on fragile newsprint paper.” The magazine issues were scanned from bound volumes, and some of the pages are a little crooked but are generally quite legible. We at BannedThought.net have made these issues searchable and have reduced their file sizes (without the loss of any visual quality).

      If you know of any more digital issues of this magazine available somewhere, or if you have any additional hard copy issues of this magazine available yourself, which you could donate or lend to us to scan and post, please contact us at: freespeech@bannedthought.net




Documents Associated with this Magazine:

  • “China Monthly Review — Editors On Trial”, 36 pages.   Searchable PDF format (1,291 KB)  
  • John William Powell and the “China Weekly Review”: An Analysis of His Reporting and His McCarthy Era Ordeal, by Fuyuan Shen, (MS Thesis: University of Montana, Graduate School, 1993), 87 pages. This thesis also has a lot of interesting material about many other American journalists in China during the long revolutionary war era, and on how they were hounded during the McCarthy Era.   Searchable PDF format (3,971 KB)  



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