The Father and Sons Yuyitung

The Father and Sons Yuyitung
By Yvonne T. Chua

IN THE summer of 1942, Yu Yi Tung paid the ultimate price for press freedom.
Yu Yi Tung had closed down his Chinese-language newspaper, the Chinese Commercial News (CCN), on New Year’s Eve as Japanese forces set out to occupy Manila. After he spurned Japan’s demand to resume publishing the CCN as its mouthpiece, he was dragged out of his house one night and thrown into military prison.
Yu Yi Tung was subsequently released on account of his poor health, but not for long. The unyielding publisher was invited back for questioning, court-martialed, and put to death on April 15, 1942. Only the firing squad and a cemetery caretaker witnessed his execution.
It was Yu Yi Tung’s relentless pursuit of press freedom and eventual martyrdom that led his sons Quintin and Rizal down the path of journalism and to give up what could have been lucrative careers. Quintin, named after the illustrious lawmaker Quintin Paredes, was a business ad-ministration graduate; Rizal, named after the national hero Jose Rizal, had a degree in agriculture.
Exactly three years after Yu Yi Tung’s execution, Quintin, then 27, and Rizal, then 22, revived the CCN. But three decades later, they, too, would pay a big price for espousing their father’s undaunted belief in an unfettered press.
“The Brothers Yuyitung,” as the duo would come to be called, were persecuted by not one, but two, paranoid, communist-phobic presidencies.

Subversive, libelous
In March 1962, at the start of the Macapagal administration, the brothers were arrested and jailed by the military for publishing purportedly pro-communist, anti-Filipino, sub-versive, and libelous articles. The deportation proceedings would drag on well into the Marcos administration, culminating in an “apology and retraction” the Yuyitungs issued in May 1968.
But that was not the end of their ordeal.
In March 1970, the Marcos government resurrected the trumped-up accusations, even appending a currency black-marketing charge, and rearrested Quintin and Rizal. In early May that year, while the brothers were out on bail and contesting their deportation case, they were kidnapped outside the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC) and flown to Taiwan where they would be held incommunicado in a military garrison for more than three months until their trial by a military court.
Following a three-and-a-half hour trial, reportedly the speediest in the history of Taiwan, Quintin was sentenced to two years and Rizal to three years to “reformatory school.” Their crime: “Publishing communist propaganda.”
By the time the Yuyitungs were released, the Philippines was already under martial rule and the CCN shut down. Quintin lived in exile in the United States and Rizal in Canada.
When democracy was restored in the Philippines in 1986, the brothers made their way home and plunged back into Philippine journalism. The CCN reopened on June 12 that very year.
Today, the CCN holds the distinction of being the longest existing Chinese newspaper in the Philippines and the third longest existing daily in the country after The Manila Times and the Manila Daily Bulletin. It has, indeed, come a long way since it was founded as a monthly in 1919 and went daily in 1922 with the backing of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to lobby for the economic interests of the minority Chinese.

Beginnings
Yu Yi Tung had come from China originally to teach in the only Chinese school in the Philippines at the time. In his initial years as owner and publisher of the CCN, the paper was openly used by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to fight the Bookkeeping Act. The US Supreme Court eventually declared the law, which required all business records to be kept only in English, Spanish, or a local dialect, unconstitutional.
Yu Yi Tung and his newspaper soon chose to become inde-pendent of its benefactor. His son Rizal would explain years later, “My father believed truth would prevail only when the press is free and independent. Hence, he did not want the paper to be beholden to any partisan group.”
Fair and balanced reporting, however, exacted a toll.
The CCN was tagged as “pro-British” in the 1920s for its report on an incident involving the British-commanded police in Shanghai and the Chinese students. On May 30, 1925, the police opened fire on a students’ demonstration against Japanese mill owners who were accused of maltreating Chinese laborers.
In the 1930s, the paper was ironically branded as “pro-Japanese” for assailing Kuo-mintang leader Chiang Kai- Shek’s reluctance to fight the Japanese. This even as the paper raised funds to support the Chinese resistance forces and advocated the boycott of Japanese goods. In 1945, Yu Yi Tung was executed for being “anti-Japanese.”
In 1962, Quintin and Rizal were arrested by the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and their office searched. The brothers were, according to the Macapagal government, “pro-communist” and “anti-Filipino.” It cited as basis the articles about mainland China that the paper published from 1949 to 1962. In reality, the stories were mere translations of news dispatches from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other foreign wire services.
Back then, the Philippines still maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and the Kuomintang government strongly influenced, if not controlled various aspects of the lives of the Chinese in the Philippines, particularly politics and education. The Philippines was to open ties with mainland China only in 1975.

Promoting integration
The charges against the Yuyitungs were ludicrous at best. Only two months before the arrest, Rizal won an award from the National Press Club (NPC) for his series, “It Is Time For Change,” urging the integration of the Chinese into mainstream Philippine society through reorientation and reeducation. The Yuyitungs were also instrumental in translating Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo into Chinese, as well as publishing books about the Philippines in an effort to promote understanding between the Filipinos and the ethnic Chinese. At the time of their arrest, the CCN was the leading Chinese morning daily with a circulation of 14,000.
Rizal, who was the editor in chief, was released two weeks after his arrest; Quintin, the publisher, would be detained for six months. For the next six years, the brothers reported every week to the immigration office. The case was dismissed only after they reluctantly acceded to the government’s demand to issue a public apology and a retraction.
The statement issued by the siblings was actually nowhere close to an apology and retraction. The Yuyitungs merely stated they never had any intention of “being offensive” to the Filipinos. They also thanked Filipinos for the opportunity to promote friendship between the Chinese and the Filipinos.
Their arrest, detention, and prolonged deportation pro-ceedings notwithstanding, Quintin and Rizal pursued their fearless reporting, publishing accounts of the fraudulent elections that clinched Marcos’s reelection in 1969 and the anti-Marcos student demonstrations and marches that ensued in what is now known as the “First Quarter Storm.”

Enrile’s role
The government was soon back with a vengeance, this time plotting the arrest and detention of the brothers in the run-up to Holy Week of 1970.
On March 21, then Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile revived the charges against the Yuyitungs. The following day, Palm Sunday, Immigration Commissioner Edmundo Reyes flew to Baguio to secure an arrest order from Marcos. On Monday, operatives of the Metrocom, National Bureau of Immigration, Department of National Defense, and the police rearrested Quintin at the MOPC and Rizal at the CCN. Out on bail the following day, the Yuyitungs were to report every day except Sunday to the immigration office where hearings were held from two to seven p.m.
The hearings were Kafkaesque. The evidence consisted of 68 issues of the CCN, of which 47 were, as before, news dispatches about China that had been translated to Chinese and reprinted. The same stories had appeared in all the English newspapers in Manila and elsewhere. A few articles in question were those seeking the integration of the ethnic Chinese.
Of the two star prosecution witnesses, one was an Armed Forces captain who admitted having had nothing to do with the intelligence reports that became the basis of the charges filed against the Yuyitungs. Yet he insisted that the reports were “A-1.”
The other was a Taipei-based professor who was the guest of the Armed Forces and a former editor of the CCN’s rival, the Great China Press. He concluded that the Yuyitungs were communist because their paper used the words “fascism,” “imperialism, “feudalism,” “protracted struggle,” and “serve the people.”
The Yuyitungs’ case had reached the Supreme Court when they were seized Gestapo-style outside the MOPC at nightfall of May 4. Quintin was inside the press club when told that Commissioner Reyes wanted to see him. Upon stepping outside the MOPC, he was pushed into a car. Rizal was at the parking lot when accosted and shoved into a car. They were forcibly taken to Basa Air Base in Batangas and put on board a Philippine Air Force plane that flew them to Taiwan.
It turned out that Marcos had signed their deportation order on Labor Day, a copy of which was shown to the brothers when they were already in the Taipei garrison.

Outraged press
The Yuyitungs’ trial before Taiwan’s military court on Aug. 14, 1970 would move even the most hard-nosed journalists. The brothers professed their commitment to press freedom. Rizal then declared that all responsibility should fall on his shoulders as the newspaper’s editor and pleaded that his brother go unpunished. Quintin, in turn, said he would assume all responsibility as publisher and asked the court to spare his brother. A Philippine columnist would later write of their pleas: “To be a man is more important than to be a good writer.”
The kidnapping and deporta-tion of the Yuyitung brothers unleashed an unprecedented outcry in the local and international press.
The MOPC, then led by Maximo Soliven, and the NPC, headed by Antonio Zumel, promptly issued a declaration of concern that underscored the role of the press.
“The function of the press is to report the news, good or bad, the events as they happen and not as they should. The press cannot indulge in selective news reporting—print only those favorable and suppress the unfavorable. That would defeat the ideal of a free and balanced press,” the MOPC-NPC statement read. “Yet the very charges against the Yuyitung brothers disclose that the army would want only a one-sided press. We cannot stand for that,” it added.
A report on the “Rights of Minority Editors” which the MOPC, NPC, and the Philippine Press Institute (PPI) released the following month raised the basic issues of freedom of the press and violation of human right in the deportation of the Yuyitungs.
“The Philippine press by and large still retains its ancient liberties. Filipino newsmen, however, believe that if the freedom of a minority editor, like the Yuyitungs, is not protected, then it may be only a question of time before other Filipino journalists will find themselves in the same position,” the joint report said.  It added: “A free press… rests on the bedrock principle that the press, if it is to be relevant and effective, must take the risk of tolerating, even encouraging a multitude of views.”
The journalists deplored the deportation of the Tondo-born siblings to Taiwan, from which the brothers had renounced their citizenship. The Times publisher Joaquin Roces, a governor of the PPI, was arranging to have the brothers leave voluntarily for Singapore when they were unexpectedly deported.
The International Press Institute (IPI), to which Filipino journalists had turned for help to get the asthmatic Quintin and hypertensive Rizal released, condemned the “flagrant and high-handed action” against the brothers as “a violation of the declaration of human rights and the principle of press freedom.”

All but Menzi
The Times of London faulted the Philippine government for allowing Taiwan, through its embassy in Manila, to control the Chinese-language press in the Philippines by demanding favorable accounts of Taiwan and hostile references to the Chinese mainland.
The IPI resolution was passed almost unanimously, with one abstention from Bulletin publisher Hans Menzi. Menzi had adopted the Marcos administration’s position that the Yuyitung brothers were out to overthrow the government. Marcos, in response, brushed aside the IPI resolution as interference in the internal affairs of “an independent state like the Philippines” and justified the deportation as being dictated by “national security.”
The case of the Yuyitung brothers would stay on the IPI agenda until their release. As a gesture of gratitude, Rizal christened his seventh and youngest child, who was born the year he was rearrested and deported, “Ipi” after the organization.
The arrest and deportation of the Yuyitung brothers was no simple case, however. It was part of a bigger, more sinister plot that Marcos was cooking up to stay in power.
“It was actually a frontal assault on the Philippine press by President Ferdinand E. Marcos as a prelude to the proclamation of martial law,” Rizal wrote years later. “Marcos decided to test the waters with actions against Quintin and myself, believing that we are the weakest link in the Philippine press. The Philippine press saw through this veiled scheme, though.”
A manifesto signed by 170 journalists, students, and academics the month after the Yuyitungs’ deportation warned that “the charges (against the Yuyitungs) fit well in the pattern of fascistic suppression of civil liberties of the people perpetrated by the regime of President Marcos… The recent develop-ments speak well of the imminent rule of militarism in the country.”
The action against the Yuyitung brothers, Sen. Jovito Salonga warned in a privilege speech delivered at the Senate, was tantamount to “undeclared martial law.”
As Joker Arroyo, one of the counsels then for the Yuyitungs and now a senator, explained: “Marcos could not test the waters for imposing martial law by assaulting Philippine media or Filipino journalists. Marcos theorized that even as he flexed his muscle, the Philippine press would not protest because the victims were after all Chinese journalists and their paper, the CCN, was read only by the Chinese community in the Philippines.”
Following the deportation of Quintin and Rizal, Arroyo and co-counsels Juan T. David and Napoleon Rama took over as editors while lawyer Juan Quijano took over as publisher and continued publishing the CCN. That was until Marcos declared martial law, shut down Congress and news outfits, and imprisoned his detractors, including those who had come to the defense of the Yuyitungs.
About a month before martial law was declared, Quintin was released from reformatory school and moved to San Francisco. Rizal was released one year later and moved to Canada.

Guardian of all freedoms
Quintin was to tell the IPI general assembly in Jerusalem in 1973: “Some persons may have the wrong notion that freedom of the press means only the freedom for the press; that freedom for the press concerns only the journalist. The fact is that when we protect press freedom, we are not protecting the freedom of our profession, but more so the freedom of a free people, because it is the guardian of all other freedoms.”
The brothers waited it out in North America until 1986 when they returned to the Philippines and resumed their journalistic careers. On March 7, 1990, Quintin died of a stroke in San Francisco, California. Last April 19, Rizal died in Toronto, Canada, after a five-year battle with brain cancer. He stopped writing editorials for the CCN two months before his death.
About 11 years ago, on Nov. 30, 1996, the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation honored Quintin as hero. Many years earlier, their father Yu Yi Tung was honored as a martyr by the Chinese Kuomintang govern-ment and the local Chinese community in a mausoleum built for him and other World War II martyrs at the Chinese Cemetery in Manila.
But the Yuyitungs deserve far greater recognition for their struggle for press freedom in the Philippines. In 1970, after attending the trial of Quintin and Rizal in Taiwan, Manila Chronicle columnist Alejandro Roces wrote: “At this early stage, I nominate Quintin and Rizal Yuyitung as my candidates for the Magsaysay Journalism Award. And if those running the Magsaysay Foundation prefer to conserve dollars, or think that the Yuyitungs do not deserve the award, then I suggest that we tie a ribbon around the Magsaysay Building and ship it back to Rockefeller.”
Roces had good reason to feel strongly about the Yuyitungs: “I have been critical of my fellow journalists, but it was one time when I was proud to be a newspaperman. The Yuyitungs proved that the Philippine government and the Chinese government combined could not snuff out press freedom.”

A former reporter for the defunct Philippine Daily Express and former managing editor of Malaya, Yvonne T. Chua worked for the Philippine Center for Inves-tigative Journalism. A Hall of Fame awardee of the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism, she  is now a freelance journalist and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.

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