It took nearly seven decades, but The Associated Press has at last honored Y.C. Jao, a 1940s AP correspondent in China murdered simply for doing his job.

The AP just put Jao on its Wall of Honor for newsmen and women who’ve died reporting in its employ — a long overdue tribute to a man whose story the service admits was “almost lost to AP’s history” until his family wrote to the AP president last year.

Jao was working for the AP’s Nanking bureau in 1949, when the Communist revolutionary forces took over the city and banned American foreign correspondents outright.

Jao could have gone to work for a party publication and written, as the Communists pushed him to do. Instead, he kept leading his AP bureau and sending in reports on what was happening on the front lines of the revolution because he believed the world deserved independent journalism.

That’s plainly why Mao’s secret police seized him in a campaign against “counterrevolutionaries.” His family and friends never heard from him again; years later, they learned the Communists had executed him in secret on April 29, 1951.

In the face of Communist brutality, Jao bravely stood up for free and honest reporting. His example only further shames the American companies that kowtow to Chinese censorship for a quick buck today.