ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
5.3.2 Magazines and publishing
Registered periodicals number about 600, their proliferation during the 1980s reflecting an increasingly insatiable and diversified reading public. However, readership fell significantly during 1990 to a low of just 26 per cent of the population, down from 42 per cent one decade earlier. 19 Weekly mass-market glossies, magazines such as the Ming Pao Weekly, command the highest sales. More than 10 of these, topped by the 150,000-plus Ming Pao, cover the latest television, film and celebrity "gossip" and news.
A new crop of carefully targeted and marketed magazines has been emerging to draw readers away from the mass weeklies. Current affairs, business and leisure publications, along with rows of special interest titles on everything from emigration to fashion, cars and film, now line the news-stands - a not insignificant number being franchised Chinese-language editions of foreign publications. Perhaps the most interesting of the magazine ventures are the news-weeklies, Yazhou Zhoukan (a Chinese language edition of Asiaweek) and Next Magazine, both of which have achieved strong circulations.
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A smaller market exists for five or so political monthlies or semi-monthlies, best characterized as China-watching magazines with critical perspectives. The Nineties is perhaps the best known of them and expresses a left-of-centre orientation towards China issues.20 Likewise Cheng Ming comes from the independent left, though is regarded as more steadfastly critical. More centrist than the Nineties and Cheng Ming is the Pai Shing Semi-monthly." Defying any categorization Contemporary is a monthly set up by the former editor of the China-backed Wen Wei Po newspaper, Lee Tse-chung, a long-time CCP member, following his dismissal from that newspaper in 1989.22 Wen Wei Po had openly supported China's nascent democracy movement, strongly deploring the massacre in June 1989.23
On the periodical fringe is a tiny range of subscription or limited circulation publications, mostly bulletins, pamphlets and independent reports published mostly by political and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or pressure groups. Though limited in readership they are nevertheless important from a censorship perspective, especially since many often
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20
Chan Kai-cheung (1991), supra note 3, at 475.
It is worth noting that the terminology "left" (or "leftist") is traditionally associated with pro-China, pro-CCP leanings in Hong Kong, and does not necessarily refer to the broad body of the socialist left as associated in Western Europe, for example.
21
Both the publishers of Cheng Ming and the Pai Shing Semi-monthly had been political prisoners in China before coming to Hong Kong.
22
23
See Chapter 6.
The CCP leadership's official position on Hong Kong can be found in the two locally published magazines, Bauhinia and the Mirror. The former began publication after 4 June in an effort to rebuild the CCP's image in the territory.
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