Media

We've come a long way

By Zhu Yinghuang (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 10:13

BYLINE  ZHU YINGHUANG

What was China Daily like 30 years ago? Luckily, you can still find some copies from the old days in the library.

It was an eight-page broadsheet, in black and white. But even from today's aesthetic point of view, it was a beautiful baby. Not only because it was an only child - the first English newspaper in China since the early 1950s, and not just because it was seen by the world as a signal of China's reform and opening-up, but also because it was a journalistic pioneer that has helped change the country's media landscape.

The initial daily circulation was only around 10,000 copies and the staff was small - around 100 - in a peculiar formation that we called "grandparents bringing up grandchildren" because a dozen or so veteran journalists were nurturing recruits in their 20s.

With no office building of our own, we rented a small three-story building in the southeast corner of the People's Daily compound. The dark and musty building had once been a college dormitory and each room could only house five or six people. Walking along the narrow corridors, we could hear the most exquisite melody of the day - the tapping of typewriters.

My wife and I joined two months after its official launch and worked in the opinion department. There were only seven or eight people in the department, most in their 60s and 70s, and we were the youngest.

In the beginning, our main job was to translate articles selected from the Chinese press. Later, the then editor-in-chief, Liu Zunqi, believed China Daily must have its own daily editorials, and we began to write our own commentaries and do more interviews and reporting.

The paper kept absorbing "young blood". I remember one graduate from Xiamen University had to sit behind the door because it became so difficult to squeeze into the room. One day, the managing editor, Feng Xiliang, went to the department and, seeing nobody there, murmured "why is nobody here?" The young guy suddenly stood up from behind the door and said: "Why! Am I not somebody?" Indeed, he was, and Charles Li went on to become CEO of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) Board. He is just one of hundreds of "ex-CDers".

China Daily's influence and reputation are growing year-on-year. It is gratifying to see the acceleration of the global expansion of this paper, both its printed media and websites. Sometimes, I wonder whether our founders could possibly have envisioned what China Daily would become. Today, it is a colorful, professionally-designed 24-page daily distributed throughout the country and beyond and has new, truly localized, North American, European and Asia-Pacific editions. Not to mention that people can read it on their cellphones, iPhones and iPads.

The changes at China Daily can be seen as a miniature of the rapid changes in the Chinese media landscape. Media in China has grown in strength and scale, with its functions more diversified and operations commercialized. These changes are still in process.

As for China Daily, the past 30 years have seen the paper find its feet. "A person gets established at 30", as Confucius once put it. The next 30 years will see it "go global". This is natural because China is entering the centerstage and is expected to play a bigger role, and because a newspaper like China Daily is committed to telling truthfully what is happening in China and what will be the impact on the world.

Zhu Yinghuang is editor-in-chief emeritus of China Daily.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page20)