About Beijing Scene

Beijing Scene

Beijing Scene was an independent English-language publication founded in Beijing by the former United Press International journalist Scott Savitt. Sources described it in overlapping terms — as a magazine, as a newspaper, and, in Savitt's own biography, as China's first independent weekly newspaper — and that variation reflected its character: a locally produced English publication, made outside government control, for the foreign community of the Chinese capital in the 1990s. China Economic Review, in its history of the sector, called Savitt's move perhaps the boldest yet made into that market, and said Beijing Scene offered independent English content at a level that had not yet been seen in the mainland market. The publication was closed around 2000, when Savitt was arrested, jailed for about a month and deported from China.

The surviving record of Beijing Scene is much thinner than the record of the magazines that followed it. No audited circulation, complete run of issues or detailed staff history is preserved in the sources consulted for this profile, and this article does not invent them. What is well attested is the founder, the moment, the publication's pioneering status, the contrast contemporaries drew between it and the gentler titles around it, and the abrupt end — and those attested facts are enough to explain why a short-lived Beijing weekly is still named in histories of Chinese media more than two decades after it closed.

The founder: Scott Savitt in Beijing

Scott Savitt's own biographical account began in 1983, when he was one of the first American exchange students in Beijing. He stayed on in Beijing working as a reporter for Asiaweek magazine, and was then promoted to foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and then for United Press International. At 25 years old, his biography says, he was the youngest accredited foreign correspondent in China, with an intimate knowledge of Beijing's backstreets. His articles were published in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications, and he was interviewed on NPR, the BBC, ABC's Nightline and CBS News.

The defining experience of that correspondent career, in his own telling, was Tiananmen. As the seven-week occupation of Tiananmen Square ended in bloodshed on 4 June 1989, Savitt witnessed events at first hand, moving through the city on a flame-red 500cc Honda motorcycle. Publishers Weekly, reviewing his later memoir, likewise described a reporter who put himself in the middle of the unfolding events rather than watching from a distance, and whose knowledge of China was built over what it called 17 years of knowing the country as intimately as an American could. It was after Tiananmen, in his biography's sequence, that Savitt founded Beijing Scene.

Two founding years: 1993 and 1994

As with several titles in this sector, the sources did not agree on a single founding year, and both attested years must be reported. China Economic Review's history of China's English city magazines, and the clean reference record on which this directory entry rests, dated Savitt's move to 1993: "The next, perhaps boldest move into this market was made by former UPI journalist Scott Savitt in 1993. His magazine was Beijing Scene." Savitt's own website and his Wikipedia biography, by contrast, stated plainly that in 1994 he founded Beijing Scene — his site calling it, in that sentence, China's first independent weekly newspaper.

This profile therefore dates the founding to 1993–1994, with both years attested, rather than presenting either as certain. The difference of a year does not change the publication's place in the sequence: in either dating, Beijing Scene came after the Welcome-derived magazines Shanghai Talk and Beijing Journal of 1991, and before City Weekend, formed in Beijing in the later 1990s, and before Mark Kitto's Ish magazine of 1998, which became the That's series. It was an early, formative title — and, in the judgement of the sector's own history, the boldest of the early ones.

The Beijing market it entered

In the early 1980s, shortly after China's initiation of its open-door policy, there were no independently operated English publications of any description in China, according to China Economic Review's history. In the mid-1980s, Minnie Yeung, a classical pianist whose family represented China Daily in Hong Kong and Macau, founded Ismay Publications in Hong Kong and stepped softly into the mainland market with a series of Welcome publications, which the Chinese authorities welcomed as an opportunity to promote the country to the outside world. In 1991 those Welcome publications were transformed into magazines, Shanghai Talk and Beijing Journal, to cater to the rapidly growing expatriate communities in the two cities.

Beijing Scene entered that small world — a handful of titles serving diplomats, journalists, teachers, students and businesspeople in the capital — and changed its tone. Where the existing publications were tied, in origin, to a Hong Kong representation of China's official daily or to a welcome-the-visitor purpose, Savitt's publication was the project of a working foreign correspondent who had just covered the most sensitive event in modern Chinese history for American news organisations. That difference in origin helps explain the difference in character that contemporaries remembered.

"Much more in your face"

The most direct contemporary characterisation of Beijing Scene in the sources is a remembered contrast. China Economic Review quoted a long-term Beijing resident recalling the market Savitt entered: "The magazines out at that time were all very innocent. Scott's publication was much more in your face." The same history said Beijing Scene offered independent English content to a level that had not yet been seen in the market, and the directory record for this entry summarised it as pioneering the expatriate city-magazine genre.

Care is needed here. The sources attested the publication's independence, boldness and novelty; they did not preserve a detailed contents list, a set of famous articles or a catalogue of campaigns that a profile could responsibly recite. Beijing Scene should therefore be understood, on the evidence, as a pioneering independent English weekly for Beijing whose significance lay in proving that such a publication could be produced in the capital at all — and in the directness contemporaries associated with it — rather than through invented examples of its coverage. Its founder's background as a Tiananmen correspondent, translator and later human-rights translator formed part of the same public identity.

First independent English newspaper in China

Beijing Scene's central claim in the historical record was priority. Savitt's biography called it the first independent English-language newspaper in China, and, in its more specific phrasing, China's first independent weekly newspaper. A Duke-related account of Savitt described it in similar terms as the first private publication in the People's Republic of China. China Economic Review's broader history supplied the context for that claim: the independent English city magazines of this period were, it said, the first publications since 1949 to be produced without government control.

Those formulations were not identical — newspaper, weekly newspaper, private publication — but they pointed to the same distinction. Beijing Scene was not an official English publication of the Chinese state, of the kind that had represented China to foreign readers since the 1950s, and it was not a foreign newspaper imported for hotel lobbies. It was produced in Beijing, in English, independently. In a media system built on licensed, sponsored publishing, that independence was both its identity and, ultimately, the reason its history was short.

Operating in the grey zone

China Economic Review's history explained, for the sector as a whole, the conditions under which titles like Beijing Scene existed. Media was a sensitive issue in China; many of these publications were, in the history's words, technically illegal, and aspiring publishers operated under a veil of administrative tolerance, forming tenuous alliances with various state organs. "Everybody's got a grey argument," one media analyst quoted in that history explained, using the Chinese word shuofa, an explanation: a publisher needed an account of itself that the system could accept.

The same history gave the economics of the grey zone. The biggest cost was printing, the base cost of getting one of these publications off the ground was roughly estimated at about US$2,000, and the business model rested on free distribution and on advertisers buying an assumption about distribution numbers — publications placed in bars and restaurants, whose real readership nobody could demonstrate precisely. Beijing Scene belonged to the earliest, most exposed end of that world: before Ringier backed City Weekend, before Time Out licensed Chinese editions, and before the sector acquired the larger foreign groups and formal partnerships of the 2000s. Savitt's own biography framed the risk in personal terms: after founding the publication, he knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities moved in.

Closure in 2000

The end came in 2000, and the sources agreed on its outline while differing in detail. Savitt's own site said that in 2000 he was arrested, flung into solitary confinement and, after a month in jail, deported. A Duke-related account gave a fuller version: in the summer of 2000, Beijing Scene — described there as the first private publication in the PRC — was shut down by China's Ministry of State Security, and Savitt was jailed for 30 days, 21 of which he spent on hunger strike, before being repatriated to the United States. Publishers Weekly's review of his memoir likewise described solitary confinement and a hunger strike following his arrest.

Beijing Scene therefore closed, in past tense, around 2000, with the arrest and deportation of its founder — not through a commercial failure, a sale or a gradual decline of the kind that ended later titles. It had lasted roughly six or seven years, depending on whether its founding is dated to 1993 or 1994. Its closure demonstrated, earlier than any comparable case in the sector, the limit that the sector's histories described in general terms: an independent publication existed on tolerance, and tolerance could be withdrawn.

After Beijing Scene: China Now and Contexts

Savitt's publishing career did not end with his deportation, though it continued outside mainland China. In 2003 he published China Now magazine — a title a Duke-related account described as a revival of his China publication under a new name. He was also the founding editor of the award-winning Contexts magazine, worked as the in-house Chinese-English translator for numerous human rights organisations, and was a visiting scholar at Duke University, his own university. Reference summaries recorded that he later lived with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Those later roles matter for understanding Beijing Scene's afterlife. The publication itself left no continuing brand, website or successor title in Beijing. Its continuation was biographical and literary: in the career of a founder who went on to other magazines and translation work, and in the memory of the Beijing foreign community, for whom the title remained a reference point for what independent English publishing in the capital had briefly been.

Crashing the Party and the written record

The fullest first-person account of Beijing Scene's world was Savitt's memoir, Crashing the Party: An American Reporter in China, published in 2016 by Soft Skull Press. The book related his experiences from arriving in China as a Duke student in the early 1980s, through breaking into journalism, reporting for Asiaweek, the Los Angeles Times and United Press International, and witnessing the Tiananmen Square crackdown, to the creation of China's first independent English-language newspaper and its consequences. Reviewers described it as a page-turning debut and as a picaresque, poignant account that took readers beyond the seat of Party rule and closer to the life of the country.

For a publication whose own archive is not readily accessible, such surrounding accounts — the memoir, the China Economic Review sector history, university and publisher biographies of its founder — are the record from which its history must be reconstructed. That is also why its founding year and even its format are given differently in different sources: Beijing Scene lived in the grey zone its chroniclers described, produced few of the formal traces — audited figures, corporate announcements, licensing records — that make later magazines easy to document, and disappeared when its founder was removed from the country.

Legacy of a pioneer

Beijing Scene's legacy was disproportionate to its lifespan. It pioneered the expatriate city-publication genre in Beijing, demonstrated that independent English content could be produced in the mainland capital, and set the tone — bolder and more direct than the innocent titles before it — that the sector's later, larger magazines inherited in commercialised form. City Weekend, the That's series and the licensed Time Out titles all operated in a market whose possibility Beijing Scene had helped to prove, even as they replaced its personal, founder-driven independence with corporate backing and formal Chinese partnerships.

It is remembered, finally, as a case study in the bargain of that era's independent publishing in China. A former correspondent could start an English weekly in Beijing for little money, serve a real community and be remembered decades later as a pioneer — and the same publication could be shut down, and its founder jailed and deported, in a single summer. Both halves of that story are attested in the sources, and both are necessary to understand what Beijing Scene was.