1926: Shao Piaoping, journalist
1 comment April 26th, 2013 Headsman
On this date in 1928, Chinese journalist and social activist Shao Piaoping was shot at Beijing’s Tianqiao execution — fulfillment of his lifelong motto, “To die as a journalist.”
The intrepid Shao blazed a trail for in his native country, bucking a prejudice that mere journalism was a bit on the declasse side.
He co-founded and edited Hanmin Daily in 1911, just in time to get his support for the Xinhai Revolution into newsprint.
But Shao was no propagandist, and, post-revolution, was repeatedly arrested for his scathing critiques of Yuan Shikai and the various other illiberal strongmen taking roost. He had to duck out to Japan twice during the 1910s; there, he kept cranking copy, now as a foreign correspondent for Shanghai’s top newspapers. As the decade unfolded, he also became a theoretician of journalism without abating his prodigious ongoing output.
“I saw my role as that of helpful critic and believed it wrong to praise petty people simply to avoid trouble,” this pdf biography quotes Shao saying of himself. “I was determined not to dispense with my responsibility.”
By the late 1910s, he was publishing his own capital-city newspaper, Jingbao (literally “The Capital”) and developing his academic thought as a teacher at Peking University. He was perhaps China’s premier journalist, and he still had to slip into exile in Japan in 1919 after openly supporting the May Fourth student movement.
Shao left an impressive mark on his students, perhaps none more so than a penniless young leftist working in the university library, Mao Zedong.
Mao, then still an obscurity to most of the outside world, remembered Shao fondly to journalist Edgar Snow. In contrast to many other Peking University scholars who gave the provincial twentysomething short shrift, Shao “helped me very much. He was a lecturer in the Journalism Society, a liberal, and a man of fervent idealism and fine character.” Word is that Shao even loaned Mao money.
Shao’s acid pen and unabashed sympathy for agitators led to his arrest in 1926 by the warlord Zhang Zuolin — whose wrath Shao incited by denouncing bitterly a horrific March 18 massacre of students.
But the martyr journalist’s heroic career — not to mention his accidental link with the future Great Helmsman — insured his elevation into the pantheon, even though Shao’s underground membership in the Communist party was not known for decades after his death. Mao personally declared him a hero of the revolution, and intervened to see that his widow and children were cared. China has any number of public monuments in Shao’s honor.
Also on this date
- 1945: Sigmund Rascher, feared science
- 1843: Ewen Cameron, black bean leftover
- 1901: "Black Jack" Tom Ketchum, who was left in three pieces
- 1861: Paula Angel ... but why?
- 1478: Pazzi Conspiracy attempted ... and suppressed
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Capital Punishment,China,Death Penalty,Execution,Famous,History,Intellectuals,Power,Shot
Tags: 1920s, 1926, april 26, beijing, journalism, journalists, mao zedong, shao piaoping
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