The year 1925 was a turning point for China.

1925年是中国的一个转折点。

The economy was booming, with factories opening along the Yangtze River. Chinese artists like Liu Jipiao played a key role at the 1925 Paris Exposition in starting the Art Deco movement, with Shanghai later rivaling New York City and Miami Beach in exemplifying the new fashion.

当时经济蓬勃发展，长江两岸纷纷建起工厂。刘既漂等中国艺术家在1925年的巴黎博览会扮演了关键角色，开启了装饰艺术运动，上海后来在展现这种新时尚方面足以与纽约和迈阿密海滩媲美。

But in politics, the year brought tragedy. Sun Yat-sen, the man widely credited with overthrowing several millenniums of imperial rule in 1911, died on March 12, 1925. Eleven weeks later, Shanghai was rocked by a huge labor protest that was suppressed with deadly force by the city’s British-led police, sparking protests around the world.

但在政治上，这一年带来了悲剧。1925年3月12日，被广泛认为在1911年推翻了几千年帝制的孙中山去世。11个星期后，上海爆发大规模的工人运动，结果遭到该市由英国领导的警察部队的致命武力镇压，引发了世界各地的抗议浪潮。

Those two events prompted The New York Times to establish in Shanghai the newspaper’s first bureau in China. The Times has covered China up close ever since, and marked the bureau’s centennial this autumn.

这两个事件促使《纽约时报》在上海建立了第一个驻华分社。自那以后，时报一直近距离报道中国，并在今年秋季迎来了上海分社的百年纪念。

During World War I, The Times greatly expanded its network of bureaus in Europe, but was slower to do so in Asia. Starting in the latter half of the 19th century, the newspaper’s Asia coverage relied mostly on dispatches from traders, missionaries, sailors, soldiers and other travelers. In the early 1900s, The Times began publishing articles from news agencies like The Associated Press, which supplied the initial report published by The Times of Sun’s death.

第一次世界大战期间，时报极大地扩展了在欧洲的分社网络，但在亚洲的行动则相对迟缓。从19世纪下半叶开始，时报亚洲报道主要依赖商人、传教士、水手、士兵和其他旅行者发回的通讯。20世纪初，时报开始刊登来自美联社等通讯社的稿件，当时发表的关于孙中山去世的最初报道正是由美联社提供的。

By coincidence, Nicholas Roosevelt, a prominent commentator and correspondent on foreign affairs for The New York Times in the mid-1920s, was on a trip to China and other East Asian nations when Sun died.

巧合的是，在孙中山去世时，20世纪20年代中期《纽约时报》著名的评论员和外交事务记者尼古拉斯·罗斯福正在中国等东亚国家旅行。

Mr. Roosevelt was uniquely positioned to assess the importance of Sun’s death.

在评价孙中山去世这件事的重要性上，罗斯福具有得天独厚的优势。

1923年的孙中山。

He was the son of President Teddy Roosevelt’s first cousin, and was trained by the president since boyhood for a diplomatic career. He assisted President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles conference following World War I and spent most of the next several decades alternating between roles at The Times and as a senior diplomat. (During World War II, a more distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, named him as America’s deputy director of war information.)

他是泰迪·罗斯福总统的远亲，从小就接受总统外交事务培训。一战后，他在凡尔赛会议上协助伍德罗·威尔逊总统，随后几十年的大部分时间里，他时而在时报任职，时而出任高级外交官。（二战期间，他的另一位远亲富兰克林·D·罗斯福总统任命他为美国战争信息办公室副主任。）

In the 1920s, Sun was widely perceived in the United States as the person who could hold China’s fractious provinces together. His death provoked overwrought predictions that China would dissolve into a civil war that might draw in foreign powers.

20世纪20年代，孙中山在美国被广泛认为是能够凝聚中国四分五裂政局的关键人物。他的去世引发了过度预测，认为中国将瓦解并陷入内战，甚至可能会有外国势力卷入。

Nicholas Roosevelt sent a cable to Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The Times, and urged the newspaper to establish a bureau in China. The Times was still mulling the recommendation when violence erupted in Shanghai at the end of May.

尼古拉斯·罗斯福给时报出版人阿道夫·奥克斯发了一封电报，敦促报纸在中国设立分社。当5月底上海爆发暴力事件时，时报仍在考虑这一建议。

The Times quickly hired Thomas F. Millard, a well-known American journalist working in Shanghai, as the newspaper’s first correspondent in China.

时报迅速聘请了在上海工作的知名美国记者托马斯·F·米勒德作为报社在中国的第一位记者。

Mr. Millard left The Times in early 1927. Another correspondent, Frederick Moore, was sent to Peking, now called Beijing. But after a few months he and his wife sailed home, declaring the schools inadequate for their children. Before he left, he hired Hallett Abend, who covered China for The Times until 1941.

米勒德于1927年初离开时报。另一位记者弗雷德里克·摩尔被派往北京。但在几个月后，他和妻子就坐船回国了，称那里的学校不适合他们的孩子。在他离开之前，他雇佣了哈雷特·阿班，后者一直为时报报道中国直到1941年。

For his first two years, Mr. Abend was based in Peking, where he rented a 12,000-square-foot house for $12 a month, or $223 in today’s dollars after allowing for inflation. (Such bargains are no longer available.) He moved to Shanghai in 1929 after Nationalist leaders tried to deport him for writing articles accurately warning that they had not brought regional warlords under control. He then lived in Shanghai as chief China correspondent for 12 years.

在最初的两年里，阿班常驻北京，他以每月12美元的价格租了一栋1.2万平方英尺（约合1100平方米）的房子，算上通货膨胀约合今天的223美元（约合1600元人民币，如今已经不可能捡到这样的便宜了）。他在1929年转驻上海，因为国民党领导人试图驱逐他，此前他撰写文章准确地警告说他们尚未有效控制地方军阀。随后他作为首席驻华记者在上海生活了12年。

1947年，《纽约时报》上海分社的一个房间。

In articles about Japan’s rapid military advances in China from 1931 onward, Mr. Abend warned that war in the Pacific was increasingly likely between Japan and the United States.

在关于1931年后日本在中国军事推进的文章中，阿班警告说，日本和美国在太平洋爆发战争的可能性越来越大。

During the 1930s, he assembled in Shanghai a team of journalists to cover China for The Times. One of them, Tillman Durdin, was among the first eyewitnesses in 1937 to tell the world of mass killings by Japanese forces of civilians in Nanjing. He then covered World War II from Chongqing, China’s wartime capital.

20世纪30年代，他在上海组建了一个记者团队为时报报道中国。其中有位蒂尔曼·德丁，是1937年首批向世界讲述日军在南京大规模屠杀平民的目击者之一。随后他在中国战时首都重庆对二战进行报道。

Based after the war in Shanghai and Nanjing, China’s postwar capital, Mr. Durdin and a team covered the civil war between Communists and Nationalists. The Shanghai bureau even had a well-equipped darkroom for developing photos.

战后常驻上海和战后首都南京的德丁和一个团队报道了共产党和国民党之间的内战。上海分社甚至配备了一个设备齐全的暗房用于冲洗照片。

After Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, The Times covered China mainly from Hong Kong. As China reopened to trade and investment in 1979, The Times reopened its bureau in Beijing that June, and then reopened in Shanghai in January 1995. Both bureaus continued operating through the Covid-19 pandemic, although with a staff much depleted by U.S.-China tensions, and both remain open today.

1949年毛泽东掌权后，时报主要从香港报道中国。随着1979年中国重新向贸易和投资开放，时报于当年6月重开北京分社，随后于1995年1月重开上海分社。这两个分社一直到新冠疫情期间都还在继续运作，至今没有关闭，尽管受美中紧张关系影响人员大大减少。

The Times marked the centennial of its Shanghai bureau this autumn on the city’s famous Bund, with a reception in the Roosevelt Room, which has portraits at either end of Nicholas Roosevelt’s two presidential cousins.

今年秋季，时报在上海著名的外滩纪念了上海分社成立一百周年，并在罗斯福厅举行了招待会，包间内两端挂有尼古拉斯·罗斯福的两位总统亲戚的肖像。