About The Trend

The Trend

Overview

The Trend was a Hong Kong political monthly magazine, published in Chinese under the name Dongxiang, that commented on Chinese politics and society for nearly four decades. It was launched in 1978 as the sister magazine of Cheng Ming, the anti-communist monthly founded a year earlier, and it belonged to the same small Hong Kong publishing house created by the publisher Wen Hui. The two magazines shared an editorial stance, a founder-editor and a fate: both were banned from mainland China after Wen's published criticism of Deng Xiaoping, both survived for forty years on limited resources, and both ceased publication together with a final joint issue on 1 October 2017, following Wen Hui's death at the age of 96. The Trend is the less documented of the pair, but its history is inseparable from the Hong Kong political magazine world that Wen's house represented.

Launched in 1978 as Cheng Ming's Sister Magazine

The Trend began publishing in 1978, a year after Cheng Ming was launched on 1 November 1977. Wen Hui founded it as the second title of his publishing house, and the pairing was deliberate in its timing: reference histories of Cheng Ming record that the two sister magazines were published on different days of the month, Cheng Ming on the first and The Trend on the fifteenth. That staggered schedule gave a two-man-scale political publishing operation a presence on Hong Kong newsstands roughly every fortnight, with each monthly able to respond to a political month that the other had opened or closed. The Trend was thus not an imitation of Cheng Ming but its designed complement, extending the same editorial project across the whole month rather than a single publication day.

Wen Hui and the Publishing House

Both magazines rested on one man. Wen Hui was born in Guangzhou in 1921 and moved to Hong Kong in the 1940s. He joined the Chinese Communist Party's underground news agencies in Hong Kong and was transferred to the Wen Wei Po newspaper, before being turned away from the party after the Cultural Revolution — the biographical turn that turned a former insider of the party's Hong Kong press apparatus into one of its most persistent critics. The magazine houses founded in Hong Kong in the late 1970s by older newspapermen with party links, as the veteran journalist Gao Yu later recalled, began with the tacit consent of the United Front Work Department, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, in the hope of freeing thought from Maoist influence. Wen's house, publishing Cheng Ming and then The Trend, became the longest-lived of those ventures. Wen left Hong Kong for the United States in 1997, yet his magazines continued in Hong Kong for another twenty years.

Content and Editorial Stance

The Trend shared the editorial stance of its sister title: commentary on Chinese politics and society from a position critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Reference accounts of the Wen Hui magazines describe them jointly: the two titles published many commentaries criticising what they regarded as the errors of the People's Republic government's domestic and foreign policies, and they carried reporting and scholarly analysis concerning the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas affairs, some of which was publicly questioned by the Chinese government. The house's farewell letter in 2017 described what the two magazines together had tried to do for forty years: to provide a freedom of speech platform to call for democracy, human rights and freedom, and to criticise dictatorship and corruption. The Trend's own pages also preserved the house's history; it was in The Trend's September 2010 issue that the writer Yang Liyu published the account, later cited by historians of Cheng Ming, of how the Chinese government had frustrated Wen's 1981 Cheng Ming Daily newspaper venture.

The Break with Beijing

Like Cheng Ming, The Trend could enter mainland China in its early years, and like Cheng Ming it lost that access. After the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, Wen Hui's criticism of Deng Xiaoping — above all his essay against the Four Cardinal Principles that Deng put forward on 30 March 1979, the principles upholding the socialist path, the dictatorship of the proletariat, party leadership and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought — led the mainland authorities to block the magazines. Gao Yu's account stresses that while other Hong Kong publishers of that circle made public self-criticisms under pressure, Wen alone vowed to struggle against the Four Cardinal Principles to the end, and his magazines were labelled "counter-revolutionary" in consequence. An article by Wen in 1982 criticising Deng again drew the party's condemnation of the titles. For The Trend, as for Cheng Ming, the result was a fixed position outside the mainland's distribution system, publishing about China from Hong Kong.

Life as a Hong Kong Political Monthly

The Trend's working life was that of the Hong Kong political monthlies as a class: Chinese-language magazines, produced with very limited resources, that could say in Hong Kong what no mainland publication could print. The farewell letter's own phrase — humble contributions made "with our very limited resources and capability" — describes the economics of such titles. Their readership was never only Hong Kong's: Cheng Ming's recorded sales history, 80,000 copies a month in its 1980s peak and a later revival when mainland tourists could visit Hong Kong individually, shows the cross-border appetite for this kind of commentary, even though separate sales figures for The Trend were not published in the sources that record the pair's closure. What can be said of The Trend specifically is that it endured: founded in 1978, it was still publishing substantive political and historical essays in 2010, and it continued until 2017.

Among Hong Kong's Political Magazines

The Trend belonged to a recognisable spectrum of Hong Kong political monthlies. At one pole stood pro-Beijing titles such as Mirror Monthly, founded in 1977 by Xu Simin; at the other stood Wen Hui's two magazines and, from 1987, Jin Zhong's Open Magazine, whose editor had himself served as Cheng Ming's executive editor in the mid-1980s before founding his own title. These magazines were the print infrastructure of China-watching in Chinese: monthlies that dissidents, scholars and overseas Chinese writers used to debate mainland politics beyond the mainland's censorship. Their interconnection is visible in the reaction to the closures: the overseas Chinese writer Moli wrote in October 2017 that the three Hong Kong magazines she had long contributed to — Open Magazine, The Trend and Cheng Ming — had all ceased to operate, Open Magazine having ended in December 2014 and the Wen Hui pair now following it.

The Shrinking Market

By the 2010s the environment for such magazines had deteriorated on several fronts at once. Hong Kong's market for political print shrank as readers moved online and as the mainland readership that once bought Hong Kong political magazines in person dwindled; Cheng Ming's sales, the documented proxy for the house, fell from their 1980s peak to about 1,000 copies an issue by 2017. Commentators quoted at the closure also pointed to the 2015 disappearance of Hong Kong booksellers known for politically sensitive books as a blow that struck the city's publishing sector hard. The two Wen Hui titles had been losing money, according to reports in Oriental Daily and Apple Daily at the time of the closure. The Trend had no separate institutional owner or successor waiting: it lived and died with its founder's house.

Closure with Cheng Ming in October 2017

The Trend ceased publication on 1 October 2017, when it and Cheng Ming released a final joint issue in which staff members from both magazines bid farewell to readers. The timing, just before the Chinese Communist Party's 19th National Congress, was noted by commentators, but the reported cause was personal: Wen Hui had died in New York at the age of 96 a short time before, and, citing unnamed sources, Oriental Daily reported that his family did not want to carry on publishing the titles, which had been losing money. The magazines' farewell letter did not state the reason clearly. It thanked readers for forty years of support, said the two magazines had witnessed history together, and counted them fortunate to have borne "the dream and mission of a generation". With that joint issue, The Trend disappeared from the shelves after thirty-nine years.

Legacy

The Trend's legacy is bound up with the experiment it belonged to: the attempt, from Hong Kong, to sustain independent Chinese-language political commentary about a one-party state for four decades. Freedom House's China Media Bulletin recorded the 2017 closures in a section headed "anticommunist magazines close", and Hong Kong Free Press's original report, republished by Global Voices, presented the end of Cheng Ming and The Trend as, for many commentators, a sign of the end of Hong Kong's free press era. For The Trend itself, the documentary trace is thinner than its sister's — it left no separate sales series or English-language profile — but its thirty-nine years of monthly commentary, its mid-month place beside Cheng Ming, and its role as an archive of the house's own history make it a necessary part of any account of Hong Kong's political magazines.