About Far Eastern Economic Review

Far Eastern Economic Review

The Far Eastern Economic Review was an English-language Asian news and business magazine based in Hong Kong, published from 1946 until its final issue in December 2009. Known widely as FEER, or simply as the Review, its Chinese name was Yuǎndōng Jīngjì Pínglùn (遠東經濟評論). It was originally published weekly, and it covered politics, business, economics, technology and social and cultural issues throughout Asia, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia and Greater China. For much of its life it was regarded as one of Asia's most authoritative magazines, a publication read by an elite audience in government, business and academia. Financial difficulties eventually forced it to convert to a monthly publication in December 2004, and five years later its owner, Dow Jones, closed it permanently. Its history, told in past tense throughout this profile because the magazine no longer exists, is in large part a history of post-war Asia itself, and of the independent regional journalism that grew up to report on it.

The Review mattered because it was locally born. Unlike the Asian editions of American or British titles, it was founded in Asia, edited in Hong Kong and staffed, at its peak, by the largest editorial team of any regional weekly publication. Its defenders argued, at the time of its closure, that losing it reduced the diversity of print media covering Asia. Its critics and its former editors disagreed sharply about why it declined, but they agreed on the scale of what had been built in its first four decades.

Founding by Eric Halpern in 1946

The Far Eastern Economic Review was started in 1946 by Eric Halpern, a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Halpern founded the magazine believing that Asia would become stable after the Second World War and that English would be widely used in the region among merchants, students and bankers. Before the Review, he had settled in Shanghai and worked for Finance and Commerce, a biweekly business magazine that shut down in December 1941 after the Japanese military invaded the city during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As China descended into civil war, Halpern moved to Hong Kong and founded the weekly FEER there, focusing on finance, commerce and industry.

The first issue was published on 16 October 1946. Seed capital for the Review was provided by the Kadoorie family, Jardines and HSBC, three names closely associated with Hong Kong's commercial establishment. The magazine's founding purpose, as restated in accounts of its 1946 mission, was to analyse and interpret financial, commercial and industrial developments, to collect economic news, and to present views and opinions with the intent to improve existing conditions, while aiming at unbiased, dispassionate, factual and balanced reporting. Politics and economics, the mission acknowledged, could not always be separated.

The Wilson years and a widening Asia brief

After Halpern's retirement in 1958, Dick Wilson became chief editor and publisher. Wilson operated an office in a colonial building along the waterfront, where the Mandarin Hotel is now located in Hong Kong. During Wilson's tenure, the magazine extended its coverage beyond its original China and Hong Kong base to other parts of the region, including Japan, Australia, India and the Philippines. That widening brief turned a Hong Kong business weekly into a genuinely regional publication, reporting on economies and governments across Asia rather than only on the colony's trade and finance.

That regional ambition also made the Review a pioneer of independent journalistic establishments throughout Asia. Many articles from its first few decades were exclusive sources of information on the development of China, such as its reports on Chairman Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution and the economic opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping. For readers outside China in those years, the Review was one of the few English-language windows onto events that were otherwise difficult to follow at first hand.

Derek Davies and the glory years, 1964 to 1989

In 1964 Wilson was succeeded as editor by Derek Davies, a Welsh journalist who had served in the British Foreign Office. Between 1964 and 1989 Davies built FEER from a small weekly into one of Asia's most authoritative magazines, with a circulation of nearly 90,000. At its peak, the Review had nearly 100 news staff members in 15 bureaus across Asia, making it the largest editorial team of any regional weekly publication. Davies edited the magazine for 25 years, and his tenure is the period most often described as its glory years.

Under Davies, the Review carved out a name for the excellence of its economic reporting, its refusal to be cowed, and its wide-ranging book reviews. That reputation was built on hard reporting from its own correspondents rather than on rewritten agency copy, and it gave the magazine an influence beyond its circulation figures. Davies and Richard Hughes, the Australian doyen of the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong, became part of what admirers called the Review legend. Davies stepped down as editor in 1989, after he lost a libel case against Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and was succeeded, after serving 25 years as editor, by Philip Bowring.

Ownership: from the South China Morning Post to Dow Jones

In 1972 the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's English-language newspaper, gained majority ownership of the Review. Dow Jones became a minority shareholder in 1973. In 1987 Dow Jones took full control of the Review after it acquired the 51 percent stake owned by the South China Morning Post, in a wider deal involving Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which had acquired a controlling interest in the Post. News Corporation later bought Dow Jones itself in 2007, so the Review spent its final two years as a Murdoch property.

Full Dow Jones ownership changed the magazine's character, according to many of its former journalists. Bowring resigned in 1992 owing to differences with Dow Jones vice-president Karen Elliott House over the magazine's editorial direction. Bowring later claimed that House infused the Review's editorials with the sentiments of The Wall Street Journal, and other former staff complained that Dow Jones introduced editorials, repeatedly revised the format, brought in large numbers of American journalists at the expense of established writers who knew the region, and moved the focus from business and politics towards innovation and lifestyle. Efforts to introduce more lifestyle features sparked protests from Review loyalists, as did the later decision to make the magazine monthly rather than weekly.

Coverage, readership and special reports

The Review targeted markets in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Southeast Asia, and reached an elite group of readers from government, the business world and the academic sector. Its circulation was recorded at 93,055 in 2003, close to the nearly 90,000 figure of the Davies era, which underlines how durable its niche was: a relatively small, senior and influential readership rather than a mass audience. It regularly interviewed government officials and other people who shaped the region, including former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell in October 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July 2004, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian in July 2003 and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in March 2002.

Alongside the weekly magazine, the Review produced a family of tied publications and special reports. China's Elite was a yearly side-publication focusing on China's leading executives and their way of business, praised as a source of statistics, expectations and analysis drawn from interviews with businessmen in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The Review 200 ranked the top 200 leading businesses across Asia annually. Managing in Asia, published every two years from 1989, described Asia's business position, economic outlook and business challenges, while Asia Lifestyles, published in alternating years, surveyed business executives on their lifestyles, habits and aspirations. The magazine also published special reports on significant regional topics, including a report on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its 15 July 2004 issue.

Recognition and the awards the Review presented

The Review's own reporting was recognised by the Society of Publishers in Asia. In 2002 and 2003 it was awarded Excellence in Specialized Reporting by the society, known as SOPA. In 2004 it received an Honourable Mention for Magazine Front Cover Design, and in 2005 it was awarded Excellence in Magazines and an Honorable Mention for Reporting on the Environment. Those awards came in the magazine's final years as a weekly, when its journalism was still winning peer recognition even as its business model weakened.

The Review also presented awards of its own. The Young Inventors Awards, which began in 2000, were organised by the Review in association with Hewlett-Packard to foster scientific invention and innovation among students in Asia-Pacific countries including China, the Philippines, Singapore, India and Australia, with winners receiving social recognition and financial support. The Review also presented the annual Asian Innovation Awards. Both programmes extended the magazine's brand beyond journalism into the region's business and technology community.

Legal battles, bans and pressure from governments

Independence brought repeated legal trouble. The Review's China correspondent Serge Ivanovitch Kost was arrested in China during the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment; he later emigrated to Australia. In the late 1970s Ho Kwon Ping, the Review's Singapore correspondent, was accused of endangering national security, jailed and held in solitary confinement for two months under Singapore's Internal Security Act, made a televised confession and was fined S$3,000. Lee Kuan Yew later charged Davies himself with participating in what he called a diabolical international Communist plot to poison relations between Singapore and Malaysia.

In 1987 Lee restricted sale of the Review in Singapore after it published an article about the detention of Roman Catholic church workers, cutting its Singapore circulation from 9,000 to 500 copies on the grounds that it was interfering in domestic politics. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sued the Review in 1987 over an article claiming his government intended to sell Limbang to Brunei; the case settled out of court in March 1991, with the magazine publishing an apology and paying 50,000 Malaysian ringgit. The 4 April 2002 issue was banned in Bangladesh because its cover story, Bangladesh: Cocoon of Terror, described the country as besieged by Islamic fundamentalism and militant groups. In September 2006 the magazine was banned in Singapore, after an interview with Singapore Democratic Party leader Chee Soon Juan prompted defamation suits from Lee Kuan Yew and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Singapore's High Court ruled in September 2008 that the Review and editor Hugo Restall had defamed them, and the Court of Appeal ruled against the magazine again in October 2009.

Decline: merger, monthly conversion and staff cuts

The decline was gradual and, at first, managerial. In November 2001 Dow Jones merged the editorial operations of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal in an attempt to cut costs; the advertising sales staffs were merged at the same time. In December 2004 the magazine ceased to be a weekly and became a monthly publication, with Hugo Restall as editor. Some 80 employees were lost in that transition, and articles were thereafter largely commissioned from non-staff writers — economists, business figures, government policymakers and social scientists — with only a skeleton editorial staff retained. David Plott, the magazine's editor at the time of the cuts, said they meant the loss of one of the greatest concentrations of knowledge and expertise about the region assembled anywhere.

Former staff disagreed about the cause. Bowring argued the magazine declined because of quickly changing editors and efforts to dumb it down and move away from hard-hitting coverage under Dow Jones. Plott and former editor Michael Vatikiotis said blaming Dow Jones interference was unfair, and attributed the closure instead to business mismanagement that forced workforce reductions and limited advertising revenue. The Economist observed that the Review relied on advertising revenue, and that its business model failed when Western luxury brands no longer wished to appeal to Asian elites in its pages.

Closure in December 2009 and legacy

In September 2009 Dow Jones, by then a subsidiary of News Corporation, announced that the magazine would be shut down permanently because of declining readership and advertising revenue. Reuters described it, in its headline, as closing after 63 years. Dow Jones said the savings from closing the Review would help the company's growth in Asia. Hugo Restall and his small remaining team were, according to contemporary accounts, asked to stay on with the Wall Street Journal's Asian operation. The final issue was published in December 2009. John McBeth, who had joined the magazine in 1979, later gave an account of the closure in a chapter called Death of a Magazine in his book Reporter: Forty Years Covering Asia.

T. J. S. George, co-founder of the rival Asiaweek — which Time Inc. had also closed — summed up the feelings of many former readers when he wrote that Time Inc. had killed Asiaweek and Dow Jones had killed the Review. Whatever view is taken of the closure, the record is clear: a magazine founded in Hong Kong in 1946 with seed capital from local business houses grew, under Derek Davies, into one of Asia's most authoritative publications, survived bans, lawsuits and imprisonment of its correspondents, and was closed by its American owner in 2009 after 63 years. No successor publication took its place as a Hong Kong-based, Asia-owned weekly voice on the region's politics and economics.