John W. Powell

John William Powell (July 3, 1919 – December 15, 2008) was a journalist and small business proprietor who was most well known for being tried for sedition after publishing an article in 1952 that reported on allegations made by Mainland Chinese officials that the United States and Japan were carrying out germ warfare in the Korean War. This news was reported in Shanghai in an English language journal, the "China Monthly Review", published by Powell.

In 1956, the Eisenhower Administration's Department of Justice pressed sedition charges against John W. Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julian Schuman, after grand jury indictments, which had been sought by Federal prosecutors, were handed down against the three North Americans who had published the allegations about bacteriological warfare. However, the prosecutors failed to get any convictions. The defendants, refused to reveal any self-incriminating evidence, as was their Constitutional right, and U.S. Department of Defense officials also refused to provide any incriminating archives or witnesses to the Federal court. [Information on this did turn up decades later as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests.]

All three of the defendants were acquitted of all charges over the next six years, after a Federal judge dismissed the core aspects of the case against them in 1959, due to the obviously insufficient evidence against them.

Powell was born in Shanghai, China, in 1919. One year later, Powell’s parents decided that Shanghai was unsafe for their infant, so they sent him to live with his mother’s family in Hannibal, Missouri. In 1917, Powell’s father, John Benjamin Powell, had been a co-founder of the tiny publication, the China Weekly Review (originally Thomas Franklin Fairfax Millard’s Review of the Far East, 1922 renamed Weekly Review of the Far East, 1923 renamed The China Weekly Review, retaining the Chinese heading Mìlè Pínglúnbào 《密勒評論報》, i.e. “Millard’s Review”), modeled after the influential American political journals The New Republic and The Nation, and which featured original reporting, reports on Chinese subjects, and editorials.

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