In Taiwan, two English-language newspapers compete, both with circulations claimed at 50,000 but actually at around 20,000. The China News traces its ancestry to founder Jimmy Wei who was a Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek spokesman during the "Chungking days" before Chiang's Nationalists lost the country to Mao Zedong's Communist. Wei's daughter Simone publishes the paper today. Across town, Jack Huang's China Post is perhaps more aggressive and employs more American copy editors.
A Chinese official who has spent much of his career as Beijing's top watcher of foreign journalistic "China watchers" was the surprise appointee as head of the Foreign Ministry's office in Hong Kong after the July 1 handover.
The naming of Ma Yuzhen, 62, a former Chinese ambassador to London and former Chinese Consul-General in Los Angeles, caught analysts off guard as they had expected that another former Chinese envoy to London, Jiang Enzhu, would get the post. The announcement was made in early June, 1997.
Diplomatic sources welcomed the appointment of Ma, a fluent English-speaker, because of the implication that Beijing has decided to place emphasis on the sensitive question of press freedoms after the handover. Official censorship and more subtle self-censorship have been areas of concern expressed worldwide as the July 1 date nears.
An internal debate in the Chinese leadership has apparently resulted in concern over the high degree of criticism over China's post-handover "image" with "internationalists" winning the day over the "old guard," at least momentarily, in the appointment of Ma.
Jiang, 59, earlier announced for the job, will be re-appointed as a vice-minister of foreign affairs. He is said to be a candidate to eventually replace current foreign minister Qian Qichen, 69. China's top expert on the United States, director of the Foreign Office of the State Council Liu Huaqiu, 59, a protege of premier Li Peng, and Ms. Wu Yi, 59, now Minister of Foreign Trade and Economics, are other candidates for foreign minister. In the Chinese way of choosing leaders, these candidates will be mulled over during the annual leadership meeting at the seaside report of Beidaihe.
When Ma served as head of the Foreign Ministry's foreign press liaison office between 1971 and 1979 he would tell visiting foreign correspondents that his "gray steel filing cabinet" held dossiers and clippings of most articles written on China by American, British and Japanese journalists of the period.
