People · newspaper editor and publisher, journalist
John Benjamin Powell
鲍威尔Bàowēi'ěr · 1886–1947
American journalist who edited and then owned the Shanghai weekly Millard's Review, renamed the China Weekly Review, from 1917 to the Pacific War.
John Benjamin Powell (鲍威尔, Bàowēi’ěr) was the American editor and owner of one of Shanghai’s best-known English-language weeklies.
A Missouri-trained journalist who had taught at the university’s journalism school, Powell arrived in Shanghai in 1917 to help launch Millard’s Review. He served as honorary secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai in 1919 and went to Washington in 1920 to lobby for the China Trade Act. In 1922 he bought out the paper’s shareholders and renamed it the China Weekly Review, though Chinese readers continued to call it by the old name.
The gazetteer says he met many leading figures of the day, including Sun Yat-sen, Feng Yuxiang, Zhang Zuolin and Du Yuesheng, and describes his reporting as fair and sympathetic to Chinese resistance against Japan. After Japan entered the Pacific War he was interned, and in 1943 he was sent home to the United States in an exchange of prisoners. The gazetteer gives 1947 as his death year.
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Du Yuesheng杜月笙Acquaintance, according to the gazetteer