ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the career of Ma Xingye (1909–1991), another product of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. Ma’s trajectory from an America-educated intellectual to a GMD press censor and the editor of the Party’s organ newspaper raises an intriguing question regarding why liberals in Republican China ended up supporting an authoritarian GMD regime. While the existing scholarship insists that Chinese intellectuals indigenize liberalism for the sake of national unification, I find that an aspiration for transcending local, factional, and partisan interests to serve the whole nation figured as a key component part of American progressivist liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Therefore, it was readily transplantable for nation-minded Chinese intellectuals. Moreover, I attempt to refute an assertion that Chinese liberals of the day, once co-opted, were in complicity with authoritarianism. In the late 1940s, Ma endeavored to depoliticize the GMD’s mouthpiece by transforming it into a financially self-sufficient daily newspaper. More importantly, he continued to espouse the ideal of producing the newspaper as a vehicle for democracy.
