Shanghai needs an English daily
By Edward Neilan
World's newest business boom town could also become an international information, arts, cultural, intellectual center.
SHANGHAI (JP): One institution which Shanghai needs in 1998 to help fulfill its promise as contender for becoming Asia's renaissance city is a daily English-language newspaper.
There were four such newspapers here back in the 1930s -- North China Daily News, Shanghai Times, Evening Post, Mercury, and China Times.
Today there is only the twice-weekly Shanghai Star tabloid, a rather bland, mostly business handout-filled little brother of Beijing's English-language official China Daily. The Star is waiting to explode or in its place, a joint-venture newspaper, which is unlikely.
Within weeks, the Associated Press will open a Shanghai bureau, following the New York Times, Reuters and a half-dozen Japanese newspapers in recognition of the newsworthiness of this largest city (15 million) of the world's most populous (1.2 billion) and fastest-growing (low double digit) nation.
Millions of dollars of potential advertising is waiting to be placed in such a newspaper by the multinational firms which Shanghai has attracted. American, Japanese and Hong Kong expatriate captains of business here told me as much, noting English is increasingly the lingua franca of business as it has been in Hong Kong.
There is talk that Hong Kong's South China Morning Post which sells 8,000 papers in China in addition to more than 130,000 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, would like to start a North China Morning Post in Shanghai.
At the moment the upscale international market here is left to the Morning Post, Hong Kong Standard, Straits Times of Singapore, International Herald Tribune, Asian Wall Street Journal and Financial Times all of which arrive in the afternoon by air.
The prospect of a fat, saucy Shanghai Star delivered under every expatriate's office, villa, apartment or hotel room door each morning sends shivers of anticipation along the spines of marketers here of everything from automobiles to hair spray to financial instruments and furrows to the brows of Party propaganda department operatives who would have to deal with inevitable liberalization in the news, arts and culture columns.
This is the "problem" that prevents publication of an outspoken newspaper in any language in this or any other Chinese city.
Meanwhile, conversations with Chinese academics and think tank researchers say that Shanghai would benefit from an English-language daily newspaper that eventually could record international debates and presentations and widen almost non- existent press freedom.
The Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party says it is the "editor" for all the nation's newspapers.
Local editors must restrict themselves to publishing articles about economic progress, glowing accounts of President Jiang Zemin's latest visit abroad and progress reports on the Three Gorges development project.
Change could come about in the same bold way the China Daily was born in 1981. When I first visited China in 1973, English- language reading fare was restricted to copies of Peking (now Beijing) Review weekly and China Reconstructs monthly magazines placed in racks on each hotel floor.
Over the years, there were so many complaints about the boring reading fare that China Daily was conceived first to give foreign tourists--whom China wanted to attract and keep happy--something to read.
Today the China Daily is a respectable English-language newspaper, with some gaping short-comings as assessed by a critical foreign journalist, but nevertheless constantly improving.
Shanghai needs its own daily English-language newspaper to fully promote what former mayor and premier-to-be (April) Zhu Rongji sees as Shanghai's role as a leading world city in the future. That means culture, arts, and information as well as construction.
The writer is a Tokyo-based journalist who was a Visiting Scholar, Fudan University in Shanghai, during November.