Urgent Business: Hong Kong, Freedom of Expression and 1997
and survive on subsidies channelled through Xinhua News Agency. Taiwan-backed papers are also small in number, carrying only 2 per cent of readership, and again are heavily subsidized.16
Commercial independents, which dominate the market, reflect the broadly centrist political landscape of Hong Kong. Many of these independent newspapers began to establish their market share during the 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when Hong Kong was forging its own cultural identity. As the city became more affluent, and newspapers reflected local concerns, the reading public grew disinterested with the partisan struggles of the communist and nationalist press which had defined the media since the 1950s." Today, the territory's largest circulation newspaper, the independent Oriental Daily News, sells more than 400,000 copies daily, at least 10 times the average circulation of the largest pro-China papers.
Daily readership (number of readers) 199118
Top 10 newspapers in Hong Kong
Oriental Daily News
1,781,000
Sing Pao
756,000
Tin Tin Daily News
670,000
Ming Pao
427,000
South China Morning Post
288,000
HK Daily News
229,000
Sing Tao Jih Pao
177,000
Express News
96,000
Hong Kong Economic Journal
85,000
Sing Tao Wan Pao
53,000
Of the six English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and the low-circulation Hongkong Standard are both published locally for the domestic market; the Asian Wall Street Journal is published for local and regional distribution, as are the International Herald Tribune, USA Today and the China Daily.
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17
Id.
Id. This "perennial struggle" between CCP and KMT ideologies through the media was largely tolerated by the government which, Joseph Man Chan and Chin-chuan Lee argue, controlled the rules of the game.
18 Readership is not to be confused with circulation. Source: SRH, taken from Paul S N Lee (1992), 396.
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