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THE CHINA CRITIC
March 13, 1930
March 13, 1930
THE CHINA CRITIC
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sheet, and broken up in the middle by advertisements of medicines that will respectively make the hair grow." "keep the womb warın" (sic!) and "make the old young in spirit again."
Before I read the news itself, my eyes lighted upon a very curious and, from the sociological standpoint, high- ly interesting advertisement immediately preceding it. Or rather there was a couple of parallel advertisements, which were headed (A) "Tang To's Home Has Been Robbed," and (B) "Tang To Is Sixty Years Old This Year"—all in very fine calligraphy, I must say.
The text of the advertisement ityelf was printed in the artistic "Sung-Dynasty type." too. The self-proclama tion to the world about a robbery was already extra- ordinary, and one could not think of any motive unless it were to let the world know that something important had happened to the said advertiser. However, that was his own affair. I thought, and the craze for front-page publicity was by no means confined to the orientals. But Ad. "B" was a peach. I was wondering what Mr. Tang's being "sixty years old this year" had to do with the general public. But I soon found the reason. In view of its great sociological significance, allow me to reproduce the first part in full:
"On the 11th of March, (being the equivalent of the 12th day of the second moon the day when the hundred flowers come back to life of the year Keng-u), (1), Tang To, have just reached the age of sixty. (I) propose to use the pretext of a birthday celebration to raise a fund for some honorable purpose.
All ye my friends, relatives and members of the same clan who wish to present Tang To with birthday gifts, PLEASE GIVE ME CASH!(big type is original). Be so kind as not to send poems, scrolls or silver shields, SPECIAL attention is called to the fact that I DO NOT WANT TO RECEIVE hall hangings, ceremonial checks, puddings, dumplings, candles, and noodle (italics are ours but the caps are Mr. Tang To's original),
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This was not the Wit and Humor Column: the advertisement was paid for, and even banks for receiv- ing the CASH have been designated.
news to solve, no nerve-stretching and heart-rending counting of columns and lines and space, no wasting time pondering over which item is going into the front page and which to go behind. Here was an austerely simple conception of newspaper technique that might stagger the Western journalists and have shamed Joseph
Pulitzer himself. As it is, however, since ours is a "nationalistic" age, the editor of Domestic News natur- ally comes first and has the whole "front page" (or more correctly, the whole one-third of a front page) to himself. This makes all internal squabbles between the editors of the different departments a thing of the past.
editor at all, inasmuch as there is no necessity for co- Moreover, it disposes of the necessity of having a chief
ordination, and thus saves a heavy item on the salary of
business, and not bother about his fellow-editors' job, the editorial staff. For if everybody will mind his own
everything will go on smoothly, almost automatically. He has his allotted space, and he is there to fill it, and if he is a fast worker, he fills it quicker than all the rest, and may go home for an early supper even. Truly ours is the Land of the Free!
But this astonishing simplicity of method of editorial procedure could not be carried out without a second important discovery in newspaper technique. What if the Domestic Editor has a little too much "copy" for his allotted space? Suppose he has two or three lines left which cannot by any method of line-squeezing and space-saving be printed on his "front page," what shall he do? A graduate of the Missouri School of Journal- ism would think at once of using the column reference method, But the Missouri graduate forgets that this is an unwarranted waste of the editor's time and energy. No, the thing is much simpler than that. Let it go right on to the first column of the next sheet and to the Hell with repeated cross headings! As editors are also hu- man beings, the next department man generally has no objection to this encroachment of his territory, for it latter's responsibility for the day. must be acknowledged that this takes away part of the
Generally, after acquiring some technique in turn-
“ŒŒÎ¶XT*: BREAT-A(W*T=A+= 百花生日)唐駝六十初度,擬借做壽為名,集得現款移作一件 正常事業.凡我朋友親戚家欲為唐駝載者,求惠賜現 *. *UDEBAKLA, HHSUBU**ing over the sheets (Sheet No. One is followed by Sheet 敢值
No. Two, which, however, in actual practice is not so simple as it seems, as all readers of the "big paper" will testify), the reader will soon have no difficulty in chas- ing the unfinished two or three lines. As it happened this day, I found several such pages beginning with the middle of a sentence, unhailed by any sort of head- ing. Thus, for instance, on page 7, I found immediately after the editorial, a column beginning abruptly with the words "how they treated vou may be waived for the present" (4±0, H¶). Who is this "you", I meditated? My common sense told me, however, that as page 7 follows page 6, which again follows page 5, and as all these preceding pages contained nothing but advertisements about quick cures for gonorrhea and syphilis, logically it could only have been the continua- tion of an unfinished paragraph on page 4 of the preced- ing sheet, or Sheet No. One. A few minutes' work soon proved that my guess was correct, and the world had
otit.
That is what Chinese birthday celebrations have become. But to go on with our voyage of exploration. I found that the editors had, as Mr. Chen said, a very great and simple way of classifying the news. Nothing could be more simply conceived and more simply carried I am informed that the editors themselves are classified, one belonging to the Domestic Department, another to the International Cable Department, another to Local News Department, etc. and I saw the classifi cation and make-up of the News automatically followed the classification of the editors themselves, Here was the acme of simplicity and efficiency—no question of make- up, no soul-harassing problem concerning priority of
not yet gone to pieces, inspite of all that Einstein crowd may say about the fourth dimension and other such rot.
But we have already inadvertently come to the Second Sheet. And here again was a wilderness of advertisements: Hazeline Snow, Baby's Own Tablets, Key to the Stomach, Longevity Tablets, which are good for "your wife, if she is weak" (A the ad. says), Cod-liver Oil Emulsion, and lawyers', publishers', mer- chants, and college presidents' advertisements (the college presidents' names generally appearing in big type), all staring at you from the middle of the page. But all, on the whole, still quite respectable, with the exception of the ubiquitous Yao Tso-tun Gonorrhea Tablets (AGA) and a few aphrodisaics.
Lying somewhere in dangerous proximity to Yao Tso-tun's ad was the editorial. The editorial, in con- sonance with Chinese humility, was a very unpreten tious affair, appearing in very small print, including its caption. I had been prepared for some school com- position on "Thrift" or "Obedience to Heaven," or "The Importance of Patriotism," or "The Greatness of the Chinese Nation," for I must confess that I have read this daily before. It was therefore a pleasant change to find that today's editorial dealt with an economic problem, namely, that of Unemployment. As some readers seldom have the opportunity of getting ac- quainted with the Chinese editorial line of economic reasoning, I shall reproduce the most pertinent remarks. The reader need not be alarmed, however, even if I reproduce it in full, for it consists only of fourteen lines. However, even this is unnecessary, because the line of reasoning is perfectly straight and simple, and the style lucid.
"The problem of unemployment has already become almost the most important problem in the world. (Any problem under discussion is always "the most import- ant" in the world). Not to mention the poor countries, even the strong countries like America, England, Japan, and Germany, which are all highly developed industri- ally and strong in capital, have no way of dealing with the unemployment problem. So much the less is to be expected of the other countries.
"According to the method of the American Govern- ment in dealing with the unemployment problem, the way is to provide funds for carrying on constructions as a means for absorbing the unemployed workers. This is because they deeply realize that the great numi- ber of the unemployed is largely due to the excess of goods over demands. The buying power of the world market is daily becoming weaker, so if they should put the workers into the factories, this will increase the excess of the goods over demand still more For instance, the recent fall of silver is also an instance of the fall of price due to the excess of the com- modity..
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The editorial at least has the virtue of brevity. It does not try to talk too much about a thing concerning which there is apparently so little to be said.
Now we come to the news proper. The editor of Domestic News is still holding his ground. I notice the editor has a very good sense of geographical sequence, not even allowing the topic of the news to interfere with his geographical arrangement. Thus, little one-line or two-line telegrams from Nanking fol low in close succession, each having to do only with itself, and each being graced with a special head. After a regular succession of telegrams from Nanking, come those from Peiping, and then those from Tientsin, By the time we are in the midst of telegrams from Tientsin, we have already come to the bottom of page seven, and hence our commonsense tells us that the next telegram from Tientsin is to be found on the top of page eight, and on top of page eight it is indeed. We thus make a mental tour with the Domestic editor through Han- kow, Tsinan, Tsingtao, Foochow, and Amoy. The great headlines, together with their happy-go-lucky distribu- number of undistinguished and inconsequential small
tion, gives the reader a sense of the extreme variety and richness of the news, although one feels that all the items are equally important or equally unimportant. I was already in fear and trepidation for the things of truth and beauty I had been hunting for. And now we come across the ubiquitous Yao Tso Tun and his anti- gonorrhea tablets again right in the midst of the reading column. This page eight is literally broken up with patches of advertisements, as
a
besieged city wall might be riddled with bullet marks. And as the advertisers generally vie with each other in having their insertions printed with as big characters as possible, the editor has no ghost of a chance against them unless he were to make the head- lines louder and bigger than the characters in the advertisements. As this manifestly cannot be done, what the newspaper reader sees is not domestic or inter- national news, but Ovomaltine, Hazeline Snow, and the big characters of Yao Tso-tun, shouting to the reader "Those Who Believe In Me Come Quick! Quick!” (****). Mr. Yao evidently has a message to the nation which seems almost prophetic. One might think it possible for the editor to come to the advertisers for an agreement so that the ads will appear in one half of the page and the news in the other. So far as a layman can see, no sacrifice of space is thus entailed. But into the mysterious workings of the editorial mind we will not prove. He who interferes makes trouble. There have been too many new-fangled ideas already nowadays.
As I said, after the Domestic Section comes the International Cables Section. There isn't much space left on page eight now, and he who looks for continuity of reading is heading for trouble. For all readers of the said "big" paper must remember that page eight is the last page of Sheet No. Two, and Sheets Nos. One and two are folded together, while Sheet No. Three is the first sheet of second set. To the Second Set, there- fore, we go. The conditions here are all similar to what I described for page eight, namely, adverisements with big characters spread all over the page, while the news proper with monotonous and invariable heads are in-