Tai Bou Ji
Posted by dm at 1/14/2007 9:00 PM and is filed under hk media,Hong Kong Politics,long hair,china politics 
Every morning I spend about an hour trying to read the Chinese newspapers. Well, okay, not all of them--Hong Kong has something like 15 or 16 Chinese-language dailies. Plus two English language papers. And then there are the five or six weekly tabloid magazines (jau hon). It's funny. Back in the U.S., all the newspaper editors and pundits are moaning and wringing their hands about the Death of Print Journalism. They should grab a seat on the next 777 bound for Asia's Ink-Stained World City, where print lives. Where, in fact, newspapers rule.
Did I say "read the Chinese papers?" I am stretching here. I'm not that accomplished yet. What I do is skim the headlines, look for the juciest articles, then slowly, character by Chinese character, work my way through a couple of them. Learning to read Cantonese newspapers (like the prolific columns of Leih Baat Fong) is heavy lifting. I'm lucky to have a few buddies, current and ex-reporters for the Chinese press, to help teach me local journalism's conventional lingo, and to guide me through the thicket of "real" Chinese (written Chinese language) Cantonese characters, slang, and transcription of vernacular Cantonese speech.
(Speaking of Leih Baat Fong. The other night I had dinner with some of those journalists, and I mentioned to Ah Hing, an editor, that I'd written something about the amazing Mr. Leih. He laughed, then delivered the blow I'd feared. "There is no Mr. Leih. Leih Baat Fong is a pen name for a team of Apple Daily reporters." )
Upsetting news indeed, but nowhere near as upsetting as what I saw in the papers this morning. I'm having a newspaper-fest over Sunday brunch in the Foreign Correspondent's Club, which stocks six or seven Chinese dailies on the member's reading rack. I'd just worked my way through an Apple Daily article about which cha chaan teng in Wan Chai's Spring Garden Street has the tastiest lo seui duck tongues on the menu. (Note to non-Chinese reading Western friends: Good luck finding such useful info in the culinary pages of the South China Morning Post!).
And now, I'm flipping idly through Wen Wei Po, when suddenly I spot a shocking headline:
Leung Kwok Hung On Trial
Sticks Finger Inside Little Girl's Body
My god! How can this be? It's true that Leung was just in court--he and a group of protesters recently won their appeal in High Court against a conviction for blocking the Eastern Harbour Tunnel in 2005 during a demonstration against the toll raise. But how could...
Then I read the small print. The "Leung Kwok Hung" accused of molesting his neighbor's little daughter is a 49 year old electrical technician who, coincidentally, has exactly the same Chinese character name as a certain 50 year old longhaired anti-Beijing Legislative Council member.
I read on (which, I imagine, the paper's editors reckon only a handful of the folks browsing the pages over morning tea and cha siu bao are going to do). This is a tabloid-y story, but a very, very minor one. So minor, in fact, that a quick online search reveals that only one other Hong Kong daily paper has bothered to cover it, again with the name "Leung Kwok Hung" prominently in its headline. And that newspaper happens to be another staunchly pro-Beijing outlet, Sing Tao.
The Hong Kong Chinese press can be smarmy and cutthroat, indeed. That is why to read the papers here, you don't just have to master Chinese, Cantonese characters, local vernacular, and the conventions of journalistic writing. You also have to understand the political subtexts, and learn another set of characters--the personalities behind each of the dozen major newspapers.
You need to know, for instance, that Wen Wei Po is the official organ in Hong Kong of the Chinese Communist Party. As far as this paper's concerned, Longhair is a combination of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Actually, they probably like Kim better; unlike Longhair, the North Korean despot is welcomed as a guest by the party leaders in mainland China. Anyway Wen Wei Po will go out of its way to print nasty stuff about Leung Kwok Hung--and, it seems, his unfortunate doppelgangers.
Sing Tao isn't an official party organ, but they are very pro-Beijing. Likewise the working class sheet Tai Kung Po. On the other side of the political spectrum is the pro-democracy Apple Daily (in Cantonese, Pihng Gwo Yaht Bou), the second most popular HK paper, which serves up a winning mix of Longhair (he's a columnist) and universal suffrage, tragic bus accidents, swimsuited beauties and All Your Favorite Cantopop Stars!
Somewhere in the middle, occupying very roughly the same position as the New York Times is Ming Pao, where the news articles are straightforward, relatively balanced, and written, mainly, in "good" Chinese without vernacular. Then there's the sophisticated Seun Bo, the Hong Kong Economic Journal, probably the most respected Hong Kong paper among the literati. It is an odd hybrid of the Wall Street Journal and the Talk of the Town pages of the New Yorker, with financial news and lots of idiosyncratic columns by Hong Kong's best and brightest. They are all waiting with bated breath to see what is going to happen to Seun Bo now that Richard Li, son of mega-mogul Li Ka Shing, has purchased a 50% stake in the paper.
Finally, there's the number one selling Oriental Daily, (in Cantonese, Dung Fong) one of Hong Kong's oldest newspapers, whose absentee owner lives in Taiwan because he's been facing charges in Hong Kong since the 1970s. (His nickname is baak faan, "White Powder"). That's juicy enough, but there's lots more, so deliciously sordid that someone should make a movie about it.
They could lift half the script from the transcripts of a case now unfolding in the Hong Kong courts. Last night standing outside of Staunton's Bar I bumped into my Aussie pal Dave, a reporter who's been covering the Great Newspaper War Murder Affair. "It's a fucking amazing story," he exclaims to me, waving his pint of beer for emphasis.
Dave recounts the gruesome tale: Seven years ago, Hong Kong's newspapers were locked in vicious circulation wars. At one point, Oriental Daily's distribution company started squeezing its news vendors. Instead of giving them, say, 100 copies of Oriental Daily each day on consignment, the company forced them to buy 150 copies, cash upfront, and eat the loss on the papers they couldn't sell. But the news vendors in Shamsuipo organized and refused to cooperate. The leader of their action was a woman news vendor named Ho Wai Ha.
One morning, police found Ms. Ho lying outside her news stand in a pool of her own blood. She'd been murdered, chopped to death with meat cleavers. Soon afterward, the news vendors of Shamsuipo fell into line.
Ms. Ho's killers left no evidence. The case has been sitting unsolved for seven years. It reopened recently after a guy on death row in Shenzhen spilled the beans to the police, who then tracked down the triad thugs responsible for carrying out the news distribution company's hit order. The Hong Kong cops got them to sing.
Newspapers rule in Hong Kong. Sometimes by brute force. Seven years after the bloody circulation wars Oriental Daily is still the number one selling newspaper in Hong Kong.
But why? I asked my editor friend Ah Hing to explain the huge popularity of a paper with such a murky, notorious past. He chuckled, and answered in two words:
馬經
Ma ging. The horse racing tip sheet. According to Ah Hing, Oriental Daily's is far and away the best. "Go to Happy Valley after the races sometime, and you'll see piles and piles of Oriental Daily all over the floor."
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth: why newspapers in Hong Kong are alive and kicking.
Did I say "read the Chinese papers?" I am stretching here. I'm not that accomplished yet. What I do is skim the headlines, look for the juciest articles, then slowly, character by Chinese character, work my way through a couple of them. Learning to read Cantonese newspapers (like the prolific columns of Leih Baat Fong) is heavy lifting. I'm lucky to have a few buddies, current and ex-reporters for the Chinese press, to help teach me local journalism's conventional lingo, and to guide me through the thicket of "real" Chinese (written Chinese language) Cantonese characters, slang, and transcription of vernacular Cantonese speech.
(Speaking of Leih Baat Fong. The other night I had dinner with some of those journalists, and I mentioned to Ah Hing, an editor, that I'd written something about the amazing Mr. Leih. He laughed, then delivered the blow I'd feared. "There is no Mr. Leih. Leih Baat Fong is a pen name for a team of Apple Daily reporters." )
Upsetting news indeed, but nowhere near as upsetting as what I saw in the papers this morning. I'm having a newspaper-fest over Sunday brunch in the Foreign Correspondent's Club, which stocks six or seven Chinese dailies on the member's reading rack. I'd just worked my way through an Apple Daily article about which cha chaan teng in Wan Chai's Spring Garden Street has the tastiest lo seui duck tongues on the menu. (Note to non-Chinese reading Western friends: Good luck finding such useful info in the culinary pages of the South China Morning Post!).
And now, I'm flipping idly through Wen Wei Po, when suddenly I spot a shocking headline:
Leung Kwok Hung On Trial
Sticks Finger Inside Little Girl's Body
My god! How can this be? It's true that Leung was just in court--he and a group of protesters recently won their appeal in High Court against a conviction for blocking the Eastern Harbour Tunnel in 2005 during a demonstration against the toll raise. But how could...
Then I read the small print. The "Leung Kwok Hung" accused of molesting his neighbor's little daughter is a 49 year old electrical technician who, coincidentally, has exactly the same Chinese character name as a certain 50 year old longhaired anti-Beijing Legislative Council member.
I read on (which, I imagine, the paper's editors reckon only a handful of the folks browsing the pages over morning tea and cha siu bao are going to do). This is a tabloid-y story, but a very, very minor one. So minor, in fact, that a quick online search reveals that only one other Hong Kong daily paper has bothered to cover it, again with the name "Leung Kwok Hung" prominently in its headline. And that newspaper happens to be another staunchly pro-Beijing outlet, Sing Tao.
The Hong Kong Chinese press can be smarmy and cutthroat, indeed. That is why to read the papers here, you don't just have to master Chinese, Cantonese characters, local vernacular, and the conventions of journalistic writing. You also have to understand the political subtexts, and learn another set of characters--the personalities behind each of the dozen major newspapers.
You need to know, for instance, that Wen Wei Po is the official organ in Hong Kong of the Chinese Communist Party. As far as this paper's concerned, Longhair is a combination of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Actually, they probably like Kim better; unlike Longhair, the North Korean despot is welcomed as a guest by the party leaders in mainland China. Anyway Wen Wei Po will go out of its way to print nasty stuff about Leung Kwok Hung--and, it seems, his unfortunate doppelgangers.
Sing Tao isn't an official party organ, but they are very pro-Beijing. Likewise the working class sheet Tai Kung Po. On the other side of the political spectrum is the pro-democracy Apple Daily (in Cantonese, Pihng Gwo Yaht Bou), the second most popular HK paper, which serves up a winning mix of Longhair (he's a columnist) and universal suffrage, tragic bus accidents, swimsuited beauties and All Your Favorite Cantopop Stars!
Somewhere in the middle, occupying very roughly the same position as the New York Times is Ming Pao, where the news articles are straightforward, relatively balanced, and written, mainly, in "good" Chinese without vernacular. Then there's the sophisticated Seun Bo, the Hong Kong Economic Journal, probably the most respected Hong Kong paper among the literati. It is an odd hybrid of the Wall Street Journal and the Talk of the Town pages of the New Yorker, with financial news and lots of idiosyncratic columns by Hong Kong's best and brightest. They are all waiting with bated breath to see what is going to happen to Seun Bo now that Richard Li, son of mega-mogul Li Ka Shing, has purchased a 50% stake in the paper.
Finally, there's the number one selling Oriental Daily, (in Cantonese, Dung Fong) one of Hong Kong's oldest newspapers, whose absentee owner lives in Taiwan because he's been facing charges in Hong Kong since the 1970s. (His nickname is baak faan, "White Powder"). That's juicy enough, but there's lots more, so deliciously sordid that someone should make a movie about it.
They could lift half the script from the transcripts of a case now unfolding in the Hong Kong courts. Last night standing outside of Staunton's Bar I bumped into my Aussie pal Dave, a reporter who's been covering the Great Newspaper War Murder Affair. "It's a fucking amazing story," he exclaims to me, waving his pint of beer for emphasis.
Dave recounts the gruesome tale: Seven years ago, Hong Kong's newspapers were locked in vicious circulation wars. At one point, Oriental Daily's distribution company started squeezing its news vendors. Instead of giving them, say, 100 copies of Oriental Daily each day on consignment, the company forced them to buy 150 copies, cash upfront, and eat the loss on the papers they couldn't sell. But the news vendors in Shamsuipo organized and refused to cooperate. The leader of their action was a woman news vendor named Ho Wai Ha.
One morning, police found Ms. Ho lying outside her news stand in a pool of her own blood. She'd been murdered, chopped to death with meat cleavers. Soon afterward, the news vendors of Shamsuipo fell into line.
Ms. Ho's killers left no evidence. The case has been sitting unsolved for seven years. It reopened recently after a guy on death row in Shenzhen spilled the beans to the police, who then tracked down the triad thugs responsible for carrying out the news distribution company's hit order. The Hong Kong cops got them to sing.
Newspapers rule in Hong Kong. Sometimes by brute force. Seven years after the bloody circulation wars Oriental Daily is still the number one selling newspaper in Hong Kong.
But why? I asked my editor friend Ah Hing to explain the huge popularity of a paper with such a murky, notorious past. He chuckled, and answered in two words:
馬經
Ma ging. The horse racing tip sheet. According to Ah Hing, Oriental Daily's is far and away the best. "Go to Happy Valley after the races sometime, and you'll see piles and piles of Oriental Daily all over the floor."
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth: why newspapers in Hong Kong are alive and kicking.
I enjoy your analysis of the subtext and reasons of "Leung Kwok Hung" being used in the headlines when the two newspaper knew there would be confusion.
As a side note, if working class people don't read "Tai Kung Po", does it still make it a working class newspaper? I personally doubt there are many working class people reading "Tai Kung Po" but I don't have any stats to support my claim. In fact I sometimes wonder who really read papers like "Tai Kung Po"? May be it is just one of those "Print-only" newspaper where they print the party lines but no regular Joe/Jane really reads. (smile)
P.S. I don't know if I am fair. But in my humble opinion, I think Apple Daily has, in recent years, just too many news stories (and sometimes front page stories) on sex crimes. And its choices of words are designed to shock. I would if they learned too much from Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine style of writing headlines.
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Kempton, I've never seen anybody in Hong Kong actually reading Tai Kung Po either.
Or poor Sing Pao, which was in the news lately because they haven't paid their reporters' salaries since last November.
Some of these HK newspapers seem to be barely hanging on. I think a lot of the smaller papers really got hit by the advent of free papers (like AM730).
Or maybe it's just that I don't hang out with the typical Hong Kong reader of a Tai Kung Pao.
Most of the Chinese readers in my circle of friends read Ming Pao, Apple, and/or Seun Bo. Longhair, who as you know is a newspaper pack rat, is usually carrying around copies of all three. Plus a couple of football magazines of course.
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if 馬經 is the main reason why Oriental Daily is the no. one selling newspaper in hk,in summer, there are no horse racing , but the circulation of Oriental Daily still on the top. Can ah hing explain the reason?
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Good question! I'll ask him next time I see him.
In the meantime, I have two guesses about the answer.
First is that people buy newspapers out of habit. When I'm in New York, I buy the New York Times, not the Daily News or the Post. Why? I could come up with a lot of reasons, but the main one is because I've always read the Times.
If you buy OD for the 8 or 9 months of the racing season, you get used to it and will probably keep buying it even during those months when the track shuts down. Or you'll stop buying any newspaper, which leads me to theory 2...
Which is that OD's circulation probably does sag in the summer months when there's no racing. Does anyone know how they calculate circulation figures in Hong Kong? If they average the figures over the course of the year, that would explain away the seasonal fluctuation thing. But if they don't, then maybe Apple Daily is the #1 paper in Hong Kong during July and August (hey, Apple Daily sure sells a lot of copies around July 1!
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If I am not too mistaken, in HK, the circulation data are verified with the help of the HKABC (HK Audit Bureau of Circulations). According to its FAQ,
"Q: How often are audits conducted?
A: Audits are conducted in intervals of 6 months or 12 months, as chosen by the publisher. Audit periods are January through June, July through December, January through December and July through June."
Based on a quick read of the FAQs, looks like the monthly circulation data are available to the PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors. Just a guess.
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So it would be pretty easy for Oriental Daily's publisher to choose a favorable audit time to compensate for any seasonal sales drop linked to ma gwai, horseracing season. In any case, it probably averages out over six or twelve months.
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As i known,OD and the Sun are not in the hkabc audit list. they have their auditor, and they say hkabc's circulation data is not accurate,because hkabc just audit the publishing data, newspapers can be returned to the publishers if they are not sold. but OD and the Sun do not accept returned newspaper, so they claim their data is actually the circulation.
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Well that is certainly interesting! If what you say is true, that means that OD and Sun's claim to be "Hong Kong's Number One" selling newspaper is based on inflated sales claims that are not audited.
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I will say they have their own auditor, not belong to HKABC.I think this is the second question you can ask ah Hing,
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好文章。
文匯報用字其實更不堪入目。"下體"實指"vulva"，譯作"body"，稍欠傳神。
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You're right. I purposely made a "nicer" translation of 下體 because...well, first of all I'm not sure yet who all my readers are, and I didn't want to step on anyone's sensibility. Yet. :)
Also, just as my translation was a little too weak, I think your English translation of 下體 might be a bit too strong. "Vulva" is a very specific and formal medical term, straight from Latin, but ha tai seems more ambiguous. The literal meaning of the characters is "Lower body" or "bottom body". The implication, of course, is that it was the sex organ, but the headline writer seems like he's being coy, and not using the specific Chinese term for it.
I'm not a regular reader of Wen Wei Po. Is it common for them to print articles about sex crimes, using somewhat graphic (or ambiguous) language?
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風化新聞以東方太陽執牛耳，畢竟文匯是黨報。惟涉案者乃反中亂港的梁國雄，又作別論。
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