About City Magazine

City Magazine

Overview

City Magazine (Chinese: 號外, Hao Wai) is a Hong Kong culture magazine founded in 1976 by John Chan — Chan Koon-chung — and a group of college graduates. It is known as the “name card of Hong Kong culture,” a description used by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which exhibited its inaugural issue and noted that by analysing and critiquing the more than 500 issues published to date, it is possible to track the development of Hong Kong's culture itself. Its first issue appeared in September 1976 in tabloid form, under the cover name The Tabloid, before the publication switched to magazine format in February 1977 and took the English name City Magazine.

Scholars treat the magazine as an outlier among Hong Kong's popular print media. A chapter devoted to it in Yiu-Wai Chu's study Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980s describes a magazine that showcased fashion trends, celebrities and talk of the town, but also philosophy and literature, and that defined the fashionable and cosmopolitan taste of the city throughout the 1980s and beyond. The University of Hong Kong's honorary fellowship citation for its founder calls it the most avant-garde cultural publication of its kind in the 1970s and 1980s and the most influential publication of its kind in that period, introducing Western avant-garde trends and movements to Hong Kong. Few magazines anywhere are credited, by both a national museum and academic scholarship, with serving as a city's cultural name card; that double recognition is the core of City Magazine's reputation.

Hong Kong in 1976: A City Without a City Magazine

The magazine appeared at a particular moment in Hong Kong's development. In the 1970s, as the Cambridge-published study puts it, Hong Kong gradually developed into a cosmopolitan city as a result of rapid economic growth. The Heritage Museum's account makes the same point in social terms: when City Magazine was first published, Hong Kong was undergoing rapid socioeconomic and cultural development. The media and entertainment industries grew rapidly in that decade, multimedia stardom expanded, rising stars spawned trends that fans emulated from fashion to hairstyles, and demand for cultural-industry products created new opportunities for magazine journalism.

Yet, strikingly, Hong Kong did not yet have a city magazine. There were established popular titles such as Ming Pao Weekly and youth journals such as The Chinese Student Weekly and The 70's Biweekly, but no magazine devoted to the city itself as a subject — its style, its consumption, its arts and its way of life. Academic writing on city and regional magazines notes that such titles construct a local identity for readers and advertisers. Seeing that niche, a group of young pioneers founded one. The founding of City Magazine was therefore an act of recognition as much as of publishing: its founders believed Hong Kong had become the kind of city that deserved — and could sustain — a magazine of its own, of the kind associated with great cities elsewhere.

Founding by John Chan and Fellow Graduates

The founders named in the scholarly account are Koon-Chung Chan (also known as John Chan), Peter Dunn, Henry Wu and Joseph Yau, who launched the magazine originally entitled The Tabloid (Haowai) in September 1976. The Hong Kong Heritage Museum describes the founding in complementary terms: City Magazine was founded by John Chan and a group of college graduates from the elite education system of the 1960s, and it boasted of being an “intellectual magazine.” Chan was the central figure. Hong Kong Baptist University's fellowship biography records that he grew up in Hong Kong, studied sociology and political science at the University of Hong Kong, briefly worked for The Star as a reporter on his return to Hong Kong, and founded City Magazine in 1976; he was its chief editor and later its publisher for twenty-three years.

The idea's intellectual genealogy is unusually well documented. According to Chan, the idea for The Tabloid could be traced back to The Chinese Student Weekly, The 70's Biweekly and The Youth Weekly — the Hong Kong youth publications of the preceding years. To those local influences was added an American one. Chan went to Boston University in 1974 to pursue graduate studies in journalism; Hong Kong Baptist University records that there he was enlightened by radical scholars and experienced his first taste of counterculture, and that he founded the magazine inspired by the underground weeklies for young people in Boston. The Cambridge study adds that The Village Voice and similar publications left a deep impression on him during those Boston studies in 1974. City Magazine was thus conceived at the meeting point of Hong Kong's own youth-press tradition and the American alternative-weekly model.

From The Tabloid to City Magazine

The first issue, in September 1976, appeared in the form of a newspaper — a tabloid — with a cover design reading “THE TABLOID.” The format did not last. In February 1977, only months later, the publication was changed to a magazine, and it was decided that its English name would be City Magazine. The Heritage Museum, displaying that inaugural issue in its “Hong Kong Pop 60+” exhibition, stresses what the change signalled: adopting the name City Magazine showed the founders' original intention and determination.

The sequence is revealing. The founders began with the form they knew from the alternative press — a tabloid newspaper in the lineage of the youth weeklies and the Village Voice — and then deliberately restated the project as a magazine, named not after a format but after its subject: the city. The Chinese name, Hao Wai, was retained through the change, giving the title a dual identity it has kept ever since — 號外 in Chinese, City Magazine in English. A publication that began as an experiment in tabloid form became, within half a year, a monthly-style magazine with a declared civic subject, and it went on to publish more than 500 issues.

An Intellectual Magazine for the New Middle Class

From its founding, the magazine defined its readers and its attitude with unusual precision. The Heritage Museum records that its readers were college students and middle-class people, and that it presented itself as an intellectual magazine: the editorial team emphasised lifestyle and cultural literacy, hoped to be independent in thinking and in life, and set out to establish an attitude to life different from that of the general public. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the account continues, its middle-class lifestyles and image influenced generations of Hong Kong people.

Other institutional accounts use similar language. Hong Kong Baptist University says the cultural magazine quickly gained popularity and became the must-read magazine for the bourgeoisie and intellectuals of the time. The University of Hong Kong says it would set the standard in “cool.” These descriptions converge on the same editorial proposition: sophistication as an aspiration. City Magazine did not merely report on a middle-class lifestyle that already existed; by modelling cultural literacy — knowing about film, design, food, ideas — it taught a rising class how to recognise itself. That pedagogical quality, as much as any single article, explains why scholars and museums treat a lifestyle magazine as a document of the city's social history.

Contents: From Fashion and Food to Philosophy and Literature

The magazine's subject range was broad by design. The Heritage Museum lists its contents as fashion, food and drink, music, film, technology, design and architecture. The Cambridge study's list overlaps and extends it: fashion trends, celebrities, talk of the town, and even philosophy and literature. Put together, the range runs from restaurant coverage and hairstyles to essays on ideas — a combination that marked the magazine out, in the scholar's word, as an outlier among Hong Kong's popular print media, most of which stayed within entertainment or within serious journalism rather than spanning both.

The magazine was also a place where its own circle wrote creatively. Co-founders Chan and Peter Dunn, among others, wrote pop fiction that exhibited a new metropolitan sensibility associated with the emerging class of yuppies. That detail captures the magazine's method: the same pages that introduced readers to metropolitan consumption also carried fiction written in a metropolitan voice, so that Hong Kong's new urban life was simultaneously reported, sold and imagined. The Heritage Museum concludes that the magazine introduced a new cultural attitude and lifestyle, with its own design, and that the words and images published in it have become classics after years of preservation.

Defining Cosmopolitan Taste in the 1980s

The magazine's influence peaked in the decade that Hong Kong cultural studies calls the golden era of the city's pop culture. The Cambridge chapter's central claim is that City Magazine defined the fashionable and cosmopolitan taste of the city throughout the 1980s and beyond, and it uses the magazine to explore Hong Kong's “cosmopolitan hybridity,” a term borrowed from Allen Chun, in the context of 1980s popular culture. Its covers are treated as evidence in that argument — the chapter's keywords include magazine covers, yuppie, urban literature, middle class and paradigm shift.

The University of Hong Kong's citation supplies the complementary judgement: founded in 1976, the magazine became the most influential publication of its kind in the 1970s and 1980s, introducing Western avant-garde trends and movements to Hong Kong. “Hybridity” and “avant-garde introduction” describe the same process from two sides. The magazine imported — Western trends, movements and tastes — and simultaneously localised, presenting them to Cantonese college graduates and middle-class readers as the equipment of a Hong Kong identity. In a decade when Hong Kong's future was being negotiated — the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1984 — a magazine that showed readers how to be modern, stylish and Hong Kong at once was doing cultural work well beyond entertainment.

John Chan's Twenty-Three Years

The magazine's continuity rested on one long tenure. Chan Koon-chung was chief editor and later publisher of City Magazine for twenty-three years — a span confirmed independently by Hong Kong Baptist University, the University of Hong Kong and his publisher Penguin Random House, whose author biography describes him as chief editor and then publisher of the monthly magazine City for twenty-three years. Twenty-three years from 1976 carries the magazine through its tabloid beginnings, its 1980s ascendancy and into the post-handover period, under a single founding intelligence.

Chan's own formation explains the magazine's range. Born in Shanghai and raised and educated in Hong Kong, he graduated from the University of Hong Kong — in sociology and political science, according to Hong Kong Baptist University; the university's own fellowship page records a BSocSc degree in 1974 and journalism study at Boston University from 1974 to 1975. He had been a reporter before he was a publisher. A sociologist by training, a journalist by trade and a counterculture witness by his Boston years, he edited a magazine that treated a restaurant opening and a philosophical essay as equally legitimate subjects — because, in his formation, both were data about how the city lived.

Beyond the Magazine: Film, Fiction and a Cultural Generation

The magazine's circle did not stay within its pages, and Chan's parallel career illustrates the milieu the magazine both drew on and created. A movie fan, he ventured into the film industry as a screenwriter in the 1980s, when Hong Kong cinema was in its golden era; his first screenplay, Hong Kong 1941, was directed by Leung Po-chih and nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Screenplay. He went on to work as a film producer as well. Film was already one of the magazine's listed subjects, and its founding generation's movement between magazine editing, fiction and cinema was characteristic of the period's Hong Kong cultural production, in which the same people wrote, filmed and published.

Chan's books extended the magazine's project in another medium. His Hong Kong Trilogy — The Dreaming of Sunscreen (1984), Nothing Happened (1999) and Can Do Cafeteria (2003) — chronicles the social and political changes of Hong Kong in the pre- and post-1997 eras, the very transformation his magazine had chronicled issue by issue. His later dystopian novel The Fat Years received critical acclaim worldwide and was translated into thirteen languages, and in 2013 he was named Author of the Year at the Hong Kong Book Fair. The magazine's founder becoming one of the city's defining novelists is not a diversion from the magazine's story; it is evidence of the cultural standing of the circle that the magazine assembled from 1976 onwards.

The “Name Card of Hong Kong Culture”

The magazine's historical standing is now formally recognised. The Hong Kong Heritage Museum selected the inaugural issue of The Tabloid as an exhibit in “Hong Kong Pop 60+,” its exhibition on six decades of Hong Kong popular culture, and its audio-tour script states the judgement plainly: a great city's popular culture is akin to a name card representing that city's culture, and City Magazine, founded in 1976, is known as the name card of Hong Kong culture. The museum's reasoning is archival: by analysing and critiquing the more than 500 issues of City Magazine published to date, one can objectively explore the magazine's era and track the development of Hong Kong's culture.

Academic recognition matches the museum's. An entire chapter of a Cambridge-published scholarly book on 1980s Hong Kong pop culture is devoted to the magazine under the title “Every Great City Deserves a City Magazine,” and its author treats the magazine as the lens through which the decade's cosmopolitan lifestyle can be understood. Universities have added their own honours to the founder the magazine made: Hong Kong Baptist University conferred an Honorary University Fellowship on Chan in 2020, with a biography leading on the founding of City Magazine, and the University of Hong Kong's fellowship citation likewise centres on the magazine. Few consumer magazines achieve this status — preserved as a museum artefact, analysed as a scholarly primary source and cited in university honours.

Legacy and Continuing Significance

City Magazine's legacy can be stated in the terms its record supports. It was Hong Kong's first city magazine, founded in September 1976 in a market that had youth journals and entertainment weeklies but nothing devoted to the city as a way of life. It survived its own reinvention — tabloid to magazine within five months — and published more than 500 issues. It defined a readership — college students, the middle class, the bourgeoisie and intellectuals — and, especially through the 1980s and 1990s, influenced the lifestyles and image of generations of Hong Kong people, in the Heritage Museum's assessment.

It also left a method. By mixing fashion, food, music, film, technology, design and architecture with philosophy, literature and pop fiction, it argued in practice that a city's culture is one subject, not several. That argument — made first by a group of young graduates influenced by Hong Kong youth weeklies, The Village Voice and Boston's underground press — is why the magazine is studied today under headings such as cosmopolitan hybridity and why its inaugural issue sits in a museum. City Magazine began as a bet that Hong Kong deserved a city magazine. The record of the following decades — 500-plus issues, a generation's taste formed, and the title “name card of Hong Kong culture” — is the evidence that the bet was right.