Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury

French said that the paper "continued to be a major evening paper in Shanghai through to the 1940s."[4] In 1937, after invading Shanghai, the Japanese authorities attempted to close down Ta Mei Wan Pao but were unable to do so because it was American-owned. The Japanese continued to allow the production of the English and Chinese versions.[5] Ralph Shaw, a former British soldier and an employee of the North China Daily News, a competing newspaper, said that it was "a large-circulation evening newspaper" which had an "outspokenly anti-Japanese" editor and publisher, Gould.[4] In 1938 journalist Robin Hyde wrote to Woman To-day stating that the offices of the Post had been bombed on two occasions; she said that the Japanese had used bombings of newspaper offices as a method of "newspaper terrorism".[7] In July 1940 the Japanese authorities in Shanghai killed Samuel H. Chang and ordered Starr and Gould to leave China. Starr remained for four additional months before leaving China, with plans to return. Gould remained in China, defying the Japanese order.[2] On December 8, 1941, the Japanese authorities moved into the foreign settlements and forced the English and Chinese papers to close. At that time the Ta Mei Wan Pao had a circulation of 40,000.[5]

In December 1942 Starr asked the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to use his newspaper as a form of conducting morale operations against the Japanese and as intelligence gathering. The OSS accepted Starr's offer on January 1, 1943, and, as a way of gathering intelligence, established a new New York City edition of the newspaper. Gould resumed publication from Chongqing on October 31, 1943, and resumed in Shanghai in August 1945 after the Japanese surrender.[8] The OSS had spent $350,000 ($5.8 million in today's currency) on the editions by July 1944, 18 months after the start of the New York edition. New York and Chongqing editions remained as intelligence projects until the end of World War II. By that month the paper had composed 1,500 papers on various intelligence reports and analysis and an edited information catalog of over 5,000 people of various backgrounds.[5] Yu said that a senior intelligence officer of the OSS explained "Newspapermen everywhere are expected to stick their noses into everybody's business" and therefore their targets do not grow suspicious of their curiosity, so a newspaper business would be "automatically almost indestructible cover for the collection of information."[5]

In 1949, Gould voiced support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because he had grown tired of Kuomintang rule and believed that improvement to the situation would result from any change from the KMT status quo. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, author of Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949-1950, said "If conscience prevented de jure recognition of the CCP, he argued that business affairs dictated dealing with the authorities of an ever larger part of China on a de facto basis."[1] After the CCP took power, Gould criticized certain conditions in a manner described by Tucker as "blunt".[1] In June 1949 Gould criticized CCP policies and labor strikes. In response, the printers of the newspaper halted publication and engaged in lock-ins and other disputes. Gould closed the newspaper as a response.[1] Gould said that this incident and other similar incidents "temporarily shattered the relative calm of America's commercial enclaves in China."[1]