DEATH BREATHES CLOSE BEHIND many a newsman today... but nowhere closer and hotter than along "newspaper row" in Shanghai.

Before every entrance of the old and respected Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury--American-owned and just across the street from the International Settlement--stand armored cars, pill-boxes, barbed wire barricades, and guards with drawn guns.

*For the terrorists who serve either the Japanese or their Chinese puppet, Wang Ching-wei, have bombed the Post plant five times, slaughtered guards, wounded pressmen, and last month murdered Samuel H. Chang, director of the Post and its Chinese edition, the Ta Mei Wan Pao.

Cornelius V. Starr, owner, and Randall Gould, editor, have been ordered out of the country by the puppet regime. Neither paid any attention. Gould is still at his post; Starr stayed four months, came home when he got ready, plans to return soon.

And they are not alone: four other Americans and one Briton similarly threatened have dug in their toes, strapped on guns, and called the Jap bluff.

*Why are the invaders of China trying to drive U.S. newsmen out of the country?

Because these resolute Americans, controlling vital news outlets from the unique and unmanageable city-state of Shanghai, stand square in the road of Japanese conquest. For Japan must control the mind and morale of its subject peoples, must direct world-thinking the Japanese way, if it is ever to realize the dream of a "Greater East Asia"--domination of China, India, the Indo-Chinese peninsula, and all the East Indies including the Philippines.

*Now that Japan and her allies in Europe have formally threatened war on the U.S., if any resistance is made to such aggressive plans, it is time for the American news-reader to study as never before the dispatches of his courageous correspondents in the Far East.

Our typical attitude toward China since the Jap invasion has been the usual friendly American sympathy for the underdog. But now our interest in China goes much further than this. Now the top dog is snarling at us, and every intelligent news reader knows what a tight spot we shall be in if the underdog relaxes his grip.

*Most Americans are glad to find that our interests coincide with those of the Chinese people. We have grown to like them, their peaceful and philosophic way of looking at life, their tenacity and courage in misfortune, the beautiful things they make, and the humorous things they say.

Perhaps we don't realize that the Chinese, in their turn, have grown to like us. They are grateful for the medical knowledge that has routed some of their worst diseases, for the industrial technics that have helped them put up such a good fight. Many of them are grateful for the Christian religion. They remember how we backed up their dream of building a new, strong China. And they are glad to get the things we have to sell. Contrary to popular opinion, they like the Standard Oil Co. which brings them the blessings of kerosene... and they find a thousand uses for the cans it comes in.

*Brilliant Chinese leaders by the score owe their education to American universities. A chief official of the Chinese information ministry, Hollington K. Tong, is a graduate of the journalism schools of the Universities of Missouri and Columbia. Our schools of journalism have had more effect, proportionately, on Chinese newspapers than on our own.

The old notion that "You can't understand the Oriental mind" is being dispelled by able writers and journalists of both races. Lin Yutang and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek show us China from the inside--John Gunther and Carl Crow from the outside. J.B. Powell continues to give us his important journal of opinion, the China Weekly Review, though he is on Wang's blacklist and has to have a bodyguard.

And just as important as the books and magazines are the day-by-day cables... from men like A.T. Steele of the Chicago Daily News, the N.Y. Times' Hallet Abend, and Tillman Durdin, and TIME's own T.H. White, who came via Harvard and the Chinese information ministry, and is now on the hot spot in Indo-China.

*Sometimes readers ask why TIME devotes so much space to the Orient. It is because TIME has always believed that the day would come when an understanding of that area with its billion people, half the population of the earth, might be of the utmost importance to America.

How the good will of these people can be channelled and become a force in world strategy is a profound challenge. But on such intangibles world history has turned and tyrannies have fallen.

*This is why TIME, and its sister publications, FORTUNE and LIFE, have gathered and used such a storehouse of information on China, Japan, and the Philippines... and why TIME's week-by-week analyses of the Far Eastern situation seem to more thoughtful news-readers essential equipment for the decisions we face across the Pacific.

In these days of crisis, the free press is more than ever a vital force in making our democracy a living, working success. Therefore, TIME is seeking, in this series of advertisements, to give all college students a clearer picture of what the press in general, and TIME in particular, is doing to keep the people of this nation safe, strong, free, and united.