About Chung Sai Yat Po

Chung Sai Yat Po

Chung Sai Yat Po was a Chinese-language daily newspaper that was published in San Francisco, California, from 1900 to 1951. It was founded by the Presbyterian minister and publisher Ng Poon Chew and it became one of the longest-running and most widely read Chinese-language dailies in the United States. For more than five decades the paper served the residents of San Francisco's Chinatown, reported news from China and from the United States, and argued for the rights of Chinese immigrants at a time when federal law sharply restricted Chinese immigration and naturalization.

The paper was financially independent and it did not align itself with a political party. Its editors presented it as a bridge between Chinatown and the wider American society around it. Readers relied on it for practical information about laws and regulations, for news of families and events in China, and for editorial guidance on how a largely immigrant community was to live, work, and claim its place in American life.

Origins in Los Angeles

The newspaper began outside San Francisco. Ng Poon Chew was born in Guangdong province in China in 1866 and he arrived in California in 1881. He worked as a domestic servant, studied English, adopted Christianity, and trained for the ministry. In 1892 he became the first Chinese Presbyterian minister on the West Coast, according to biographical accounts of his life, and he was assigned to mission work in Los Angeles.

After a fire destroyed his Los Angeles mission in 1898, a fire that was widely attributed to arson, Ng turned his energies toward publishing. He apprenticed himself to a Japanese-language periodical in Los Angeles to learn how to operate a press, and in 1899 he launched a Chinese-language weekly in Los Angeles called Hua Mei Sun Po, also rendered as the Chinese American newspaper. The weekly ran for about a year and it drew enough support to persuade Ng that a larger effort was possible in San Francisco, which he regarded as the capital of Chinese America.

Founding in San Francisco in 1900

Ng moved the operation to San Francisco in 1900 and relaunched it under the name Chung Sai Yat Po, a title that was also rendered in English as the China West Daily. What had been a weekly became a daily, and later accounts described it as the first Chinese-language daily newspaper published outside China, and the first Chinese-language daily in the United States. Ng served as editor and managing editor, and he translated English-language material into Chinese for his readers.

The early editorial team also included Teng I-yun and John Fryer, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Ng presented the daily as a paper of integrity at a moment when sensational yellow journalism was common in the American press and when racist caricatures of Chinese residents filled many English-language pages. His Christian faith and his familiarity with American civic life shaped the paper's nonpartisan stance and its editorial voice.

A Voice During the Plague Years

The paper appeared in the same year that bubonic plague reached San Francisco's Chinatown, in an outbreak that lasted from 1900 to 1904. Chinatown was quarantined, residents were subjected to disputed vaccination and inspection campaigns, and Chinese San Franciscans felt that they had been singled out for blame and for harsh treatment. Chung Sai Yat Po became a vital source of information and advocacy during that crisis.

The paper explained official orders to readers in Chinese, reported on the quarantine and on court challenges to it, and published pointed political cartoons about the officials involved. Historians and the PBS American Experience account of the outbreak both treated the paper as a central resource through which the community understood the emergency and organized its response. That early service established the daily's reputation as a defender of the community rather than a mere bulletin of translated wire news.

News From China and News for Immigrants

A defining feature of the paper was its China news section. Correspondents in China supplied reports that were selected for the interests of immigrants in California, covering wars, natural disasters, political change, and educational and economic developments that English-language newspapers rarely carried in comparable detail. For readers whose families, property, and obligations still spanned the Pacific, that coverage was essential rather than supplementary.

At the same time the paper covered American news that bore directly on Chinese life. It reported federal, state, and city laws and regulations, including changes to immigration law and restrictions affecting trade and entry, and it drew on Associated Press and United Press reports for broader national and international news. Advice columns, poetry, and guest-written pieces filled out its pages alongside editorials and straight news reports.

Assimilation, Rights, and Reform

Editorially, Chung Sai Yat Po encouraged its readers to participate in American civic life. Its front-page editorials marked the history and meaning of United States national holidays, and during the First World War it urged readers to support the war effort through measures such as purchasing Liberty Bonds and accepting military conscription, arguing that visible participation on the home front demonstrated belonging and strengthened claims to fair treatment.

The paper also advocated equal rights for Chinese Americans in direct terms. Ng carried that advocacy beyond the newspaper itself. In 1905 he joined with the Irish American journalist Patrick J. Healy to publish a book-length statement against exclusion, and he published other books and pamphlets opposing discrimination. He traveled and spoke nationally in fluent English against anti-Chinese legislation, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, and contemporary admirers gave him an affectionate nickname that compared his wit to that of Mark Twain.

Coverage of Women and Social Change

The paper gave sustained attention to the position of Chinese women, in both China and the United States. Scholars who surveyed its early decades counted roughly 550 articles and 66 editorials on women's subjects between 1900 and 1911, including dozens of pieces written by Chinese women themselves. It used debates in China about women's status to open discussion of women's lives in Chinese America.

Its writers condemned foot binding and published medical articles, satire, and poetry about the harm the practice caused. The paper also opposed polygamy, the sale and enslavement of women, and arranged marriage, and it reported on new schools for girls in China, including elementary, trade, medical, and teacher-training schools. Its position on women's education was conservative in framing, since it often argued that schooling made women better wives and mothers and strengthened the nation, but its reporting on female students, graduates, and reform victories still encouraged similar expectations among readers in the United States and fed into wider conversations about women's suffrage.

The 1906 Earthquake and the Fight for Chinatown

The San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, and the fires that followed destroyed Chinatown and destroyed the paper's plant along with those of many other San Francisco newspapers. Like its competitors, Chung Sai Yat Po relocated temporarily to Oakland. It issued its first post-earthquake number on April 26, 1906, in hand-copied form, and it continued to operate from Oakland until 1907.

From exile the paper reported on displaced Chinese families who had lost their homes, on relief camps that were repeatedly moved under pressure from white property owners, and on relief efforts by the Red Cross, the American government, and a delegation sent from China. It also reported the debate over whether Chinatown would be rebuilt on its original site or forced to outlying locations such as Hunters Point or Potrero. Ng used his editorials to remind readers of their constitutional rights, to advise them on rent negotiations and insurance claims, and to urge merchants to return and rebuild. Chinatown was in the end rebuilt on its original site, and the paper claimed a share of credit for guiding the community through that fight.

China's Revolution and Shifting Allegiances

The paper followed Chinese politics closely and its allegiances shifted as events unfolded. Ng had earlier helped the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, a fellow Christian, after Sun was detained in San Francisco in 1904 for attempting to enter the United States on a forged passport. Ng connected him with supporters who hired a lawyer and raised bail money for his release.

After the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911, the paper moved from a reformist position toward support for the republican revolution, presenting the new republic as a vehicle for democracy and for the spread of Christianity, free trade with the United States, and modern education. Its stance shifted again in 1912 and 1913, when it treated Yuan Shikai's government as legitimate and Sun's renewed challenge as rebellious, but it withdrew that support when Yuan attempted to restore the monarchy and declare himself emperor. Thereafter it maintained a pro-republican position through the years of the Beiyang and Kuomintang governments.

Rivalry in Chinatown's Press

Chung Sai Yat Po did not hold its field unchallenged. By 1902 it was already described as the largest of San Francisco's four Chinese-language newspapers, with more than 3,000 readers in a Chinatown of about 10,000 Chinese residents, but a durable rival emerged in Sai Gai Yat Po, the Chinese World Daily, which was published from 1909 to 1969. The two papers competed for readers, credibility, and standing in Chinatown.

The rivalry was ideological as well as commercial. Chung Sai Yat Po promoted Christian values and defended religious freedom and the place of Christianity in China, while its rival reinforced Confucian values and supported revolutionary forces in China from a different standpoint. Each paper criticized the other's religious and political positions, and their exchanges gave Chinatown readers a genuine debate in Chinese about what modern Chinese life in America ought to be.

Final Years and Legacy

Ng Poon Chew died in 1931, one day short of his sixty-fifth birthday, but the newspaper he founded outlived him by two decades. Until 1915 its offices and printing shop stood at 809 Sacramento Street in Chinatown, an address that later housed other Chinese-language publications. Publication continued until 1951, a run of just over half a century that made it one of the longest-lived Chinese-language dailies in American history.

After it closed, scholars treated Chung Sai Yat Po as the representative title of the early Chinese American press. A survey project based at the University of California selected it for digitization precisely because of its long run and because nearly all of its issues survived, and early years of the paper were digitized for research use. Historians credited it with helping readers break through social and cultural isolation, with narrowing the distance between Chinatown and mainstream American society, and with giving a community that faced exclusion a daily record of itself, in its own language, on its own terms.