"I was not amused," Fenby said about my columns on George Adams and the "NOT the South China Morning Post" Website. "It's one thing to have these things said online on a Web site read by a hundred. But your column goes to thousands. That really hurt. We were hurt by that."
I assure Fenby that there was nothing personal in exposition of what I thought were the paper's shortcomings. Fair comment and criticism, you could say.
Fenby overdid the "injured party" routine as Vines noted. He fired off lengthy letters of protest of my column to the Journal of Commerce in New York, Japan Times, China News in Taipei and Korea Herald.
Let's keep an eye peeled for Fenby's own memoirs; I suspect he'll clear the air with some truths about his stint as Post editor after he retires to Sussex.
The South China Morning Post has been one of the world's most profitable newspapers owned in its life by early English businessmen, a Hong Kong consortium of Chinese and foreigners, Dow-Jones, Rupert Murdoch and now by Robert Kuok, a Malaysian Chinese businessman with pro-Beijing leanings. Accent on Businessman, SCMPand the two other Hong Kong English-language dailies plus the regional Asian Wall Street Journal published in Hong Kong are already feeling some pressures of self-censorship as the 1997 reversion to China approaches.
A1 mid-1996, the People's Republic of China, the world's most populous nation at. l.2 billion, had only one full-fledged English-language newspaper, China Daily, published in Beijing and several other cities with a circulation of over 100,000. It was started, by China's own admission, to give foreign visitors something to read instead of the deadly, ideologically-heavy Beijing Review and China Reconstructs found in racks on each hotel floor during the 1970s and early 1980s. With technical help from Australia and journalism education boosts from the East-West Center at University of Hawaii and Columbia University in New York, the China Daily gives a passable report on the day's news. Many young Westerners work as copy editors on the China Daily, recruited off college campuses or through classified ads in Editor & Publisher. They are attracted by the same sort of expatriate tug that drew Americans, Britons and other to the old Paris Herald in another era.
In the 1930s, the China coast was a virtual boom zone for English-language newspapers particularly in Shanghai and Tianjin. The archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University still have original copies of some of these newspapers wherein readers would report on beheadings, attacks, and in general from rural China as seen by missionaries and businessmen of the era. Shanghai was Asia's most cosmopolitan city and it had an English-language press to match.
