On the door of the editor's office at the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury (circ. 3,000) one day last week, a huge cartoon was tacked. It showed a portly, bespectacled foreigner carrying a suitcase toward a steamship. The pidgin-English caption: "All finish!" The Chinese caption:"Scram, Gould!"
After 18 hectic years of piloting Shanghai's only U.S.-owned newspaper, Editor Randall Chase Gould, 51, was indeed "All finish!" in the Far East. To Gould, it had been a disillusioning experience.
Though his paper was the spokesman for U.S. business interests in Shanghai, it was also a longtime critic of the "feeble and decadent" Kuomintang regime,...