A Journalist’s Career

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We visited Ma Da at his home one day in the last summer.During the 60-year legendary career, the veteran journalist worked for nine newspapers and served as editor-in-chief for five of them. Under the leadership of Ma Da, the readership of Wenhui News, a national leading news media in the first few decades of New China, boomed to 1.7 millions in the 1980s.

His first step as a journalist started when he was a 17-year-old soldier in the Communist-led New Fourth Army in the resistance war against Japanese invaders.

Ma Da followed his family to Shanghai in 1937 when the war broke out. The only attraction the great metropolis offered the 13-year-old Ma was newspapers. He saved pocket money to buy newspapers and devoured the latest news about the war. In January, 1941, the 16-year-old Ma Da traveled north all the way from Shanghai to a liberated zone in central Jiangsu Province, where he joined the New Fourth Army. The trip was arranged by the communists in Shanghai. In 1942, he started to work as a journalist for Binhai News published in mimeograph. The whole publishing equipment of the newspaper including paper, ink, radio, some reference books and food supply could be carried on a one-wheel carriage and all the newspaper staff frequently traveled with soldiers. He remembered marching six times a day and covered more than 50 kilometers. The work would start as soon as they came to a camp. They would receive news from wireless telegraph, copy and print stories. The mimeographed papers would be distributed to secret houses before secret agents delivered them to villages. The young journalist learned and matured. He worked as editor-in-chief for an army newspaper at the age of 23.

The summit of his journalist career started in 1977 when he led a panel to clean the serious mistakes committed by Wenhui News during the 10-year chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He helped the newspaper turn the dark page and start a new chapter. He became the party chief and editor-in-chief of Wenhui News.

Wenhui News published “Scar”, a short story by Lu Xinhua, a student with Fudan University, on August 11, 1978. After it appeared in Wenhui, the story was broadcast in more than 20 national and provincial radios. Xinhua News Agency and China News Service covered the event. And foreign journalists in Beijing also reported about the sensational story, regarding it as the beginning of a national movement to expose the evils of the Cultural Revolution.

It is hard nowadays to imagine how a short story by a student could have created such a national sensation in 1978. January 1978 was more than a year afterthe downfall of the Gang of Four and a year before the CPC called for the emancipation of the mind. Publishing such a short story could have been politically incorrect and risky. The story first appeared on a wall in the Chinese department at Fudan University. It attracted crowds of students. A journalist learned about the story and sent a copy to Ma Da. The published story caused a big stir in Shanghai, unveiling an epoch-making literary movement in the late 1970s to expose the evils of the Cultural Revolution.

In October, 1978, Wenhui News published the script of a drama by a 31-year-old worker with Shanghai Thermal Treatment Plant. The drama described people involved in the Tiananmen Square Incident in April, 1976. It caused huge positive political repercussions across the country. After the publishing of the drama script in Wenhui, thousands of letters from readers flooded in from four corners of the country to express their heart-warming appreciation and endorsement.

In the 1980s, Ma Da set up Wenhui Monthly, Wenhui Movie Time and Wenhui Books Weekly, making fine use of the newspaper’s resources. In 1985, the newspaper set up a separate publishing house to publish books. It was the first publishing business set up by a national newspaper in the history of China. And in 1990, the Wenhui News raised a bank loan and built an office tower. Never before had a national news media built itself such a building.

Ma Da is 82 years old this year. Although with very weak eyesight in only one eye, he still manages to read newspapers every day.