The Chinese-language press: Marching to the beat of history

The Chinese-language press
Marching to the beat of history
By Yvonne T. Chua

THE CHINESE Commercial News (CCN ) is one of four Chinese-language newspapers in the country today. The United Daily News started publication in 1973 during martial law. World News opened in 1981 after martial law was lifted. Sino-Fil, first published in 1952 under the name Huaquiao Chou Khan, was revived in 1983.
The four papers are distributed nationwide, mostly on a subscription basis, and have a combined circulation of 30,000, according to industry insiders. “Official” print runs are, however, three to four times overstated.
Read mostly by teachers, businessmen, and immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, the Chinese newspapers are constantly troubled by the diminishing number of Chinese language literates that began with the “Filipinization” of Chinese schools in 1973.
Back then, the government ordered the schools to throw out the pre-martial law Chinese curriculum, which taught a variety of subjects, from language and history to math, in Chinese for half a day daily and included six years of high school, and to offer Chinese merely as a foreign language subject.
Today’s Chinese newspapers are laid out either in the traditional Chinese way (the text runs from top to bottom and from right to left) or in the Western way (the text runs from left to right).
Like the Chinese newspapers of old, news dispatches from foreign wire services translated from English to Chinese fill the four publications. The papers also reprint Chinese translations of stories from the Manila-based English-language newspapers.
Unlike in the English-language newspapers, international news, especially those on China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, outnumber local news in the Chinese newspapers. This is true for all sections of the Chinese papers, even in the entertainment page where one comes across news about Jackie Chan but not Robin Padilla.
Probably as a result of the martial law experience, some Chinese papers prefer to play safe and do not publish their own editorials or columns. They prefer instead to run editorials from international newspapers or from the local dailies.
Non-commercial ads, including greetings on occasions like birthdays, weddings, and graduations printed in red as well as messages of condolences, are plenty, especially on weekends. The papers, however, rely more on newspaper sales (51 percent) than on advertisements (45 percent) for their revenues.

Differing orientations
While some Chinese papers are perceived as pro-Beijing or pro-Taipei, their political orientation on the whole is not as pronounced as those of the early Chinese newspapers.
The first Chinese newspaper, Hua Pao, was published in 1888 chiefly to address the need of a mercantile community for news on market prices and demand. But the papers that followed it hardly had commerce in mind.
The short-lived I Yu Hsin Pao was founded in 1899 to support reformists in the Qing imperial court led by the scholar K’ang Yu-wei. Kong Li Po, on the other hand, began publishing in 1912 as a party organ of the Kuomintang government led by Sun Yat Sen who had overthrown the Qing dynasty in 1911.
Kong Li Po would openly support the Kuomintang bloc even after it retreated to Taiwan when the communists took over the Chinese mainland after World War II. The post-war Great China Press was equally pro-Kuomintang.
The pro-Kuomintang papers came into conflict with newspapers identified with the communist Chinese forces such as the Chinese Guide Daily and the Chinese Commercial Bulletin. Both began publishing in 1945 but would not last long in a predominantly anti-communist environment.
After biting exchanges with the Great China Press, the China Guide Daily was raided and closed in 1948. Its editor was arrested and later left for Hong Kong. The Chinese Commercial Bulletin, later reorganized and renamed the Daily Advertiser, stopped publication in 1949 following the deportation of its editor.
Chinese newspapers, however, were founded not only in response to political events in China. A number, such as the Chinto-Hsin Wen and the CCN, were born out of the need to lobby for or against certain policies affecting the Chinese in the Philippines such as the Bookkeeping Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act that sought to keep out Chinese laborers from the US.
There were also newspapers that were a response to non-political events. The Fookien Times of Go Puan Seng (father of Philippine Star founder Betty Go Belmonte) was founded in 1926 after the worst floods swept Fujian. It raised funds from the local Chinese to send to China.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce was behind the founding of several newspapers, including the Chinto-Hsin Wen, CCN, Fookien Times, and the China Daily. The last was published to compete with Kong Li Po.

Libel suits
Several early Chinese newspapers were also at the receiving end of libel suits.
The Chinese consul general sued Kong Li Po in 1913 for alleging that the government of Chinese President Yuan Shi Kai was behind the assassination of Premier Sung Chiao. Yuan by then had a falling-out with Sun Yat Sen, an ally of Sung. The case was dismissed.
Kong Li Po was sued for libel that same year by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce which the paper had criticized for its “conservatism.” The Chamber was at the time loyal to the Yuan government. The case was dismissed, too.
In 1923, the Chinese National Tribune was sued for libel after it published a series of articles alleging that the manager of a tobacco store in Tondo arrived from China with a 12-year-old girl who he sold “for immoral purposes” to a Spaniard. The editor, barely 25 and a student of the University of the Philippines, was convicted and sentenced to jail and a huge fine. He escaped serving the penalty upon the intercession of the Chinese consul general.
Fookien Times’s Go Puan Seng was not as lucky, having been fined P300 and jailed for two months after his paper reported in 1929 about a Chinese girl from Guangdong who was abducted by robbers and sold into slavery. The child later escaped from her cruel master in Manila and sought protection at the Chinese consulate which sent her back to Hong Kong to be reunited with her parents.
US Supreme Court Justice George Malcolm would later resolve Go’s case in favor of the latter. Malcolm declared, “The newspaper editor owed it to the public to expose abuses relating to possible slavery in the city of Manila and cruel treatment of a Chinese slave to the end that those responsible might be properly dealt with. It would be shocking to the conscience to consign to prison a newspaper editor thus legitimately pursuing the function of journalism.”
During World War II, the Chinese in the Philippines, both Kuomintang and communist, published underground newspapers in answer to the Japanese-controlled Manila Chinese Shinbun. There were at least nine Chinese guerrilla papers, the largest and most influential of which was the Soul of the Great China that circulated in Central Luzon and Bicol.
The pre-war CCN, Fookien Times and Kong Li Po would resume publication when the war ended. Along with the Great China Press, the papers fiercely competed with one another until they were all closed down by martial law in 1972.

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