About Hua Shang Daily

Hua Shang Daily

A Hong Kong daily of the united front

Hua Shang Daily (simplified Chinese: 华商报; traditional Chinese: 華商報), also translated as China Commercial Daily, was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Hong Kong between 1941 and 1949. It appeared in two distinct lives separated by war: a first run launched on 8 April 1941, during China's war of resistance against Japan, and a second, longer run from its revival on 4 January 1946 until its farewell issue on 15 October 1949. In both lives it was a patriotic, pro-Communist newspaper of the united front — in its second life openly a democratic publication that supported the democratic movement and opposed the rule of Chiang Kai-shek. Its headquarters were in Hong Kong throughout, and its story ended not in the colony but in Guangzhou, where more than sixty of its staff went to help found Nanfang Daily, which later reference works listed Hua Shang Daily as a predecessor of.

The paper's name caused lasting confusion, and the record is explicit about it. Hua Shang Daily had nothing to do with Chinese Business View, the newspaper of Shaanxi Province that shares the same Chinese name, 华商报, and is also sometimes translated as Hua Shang Daily. The Hong Kong paper was the earlier of the two and belonged to a completely different world: the wartime and civil-war press of the 1940s, written and edited by some of the most prominent journalists and cultural figures of the Chinese Communist movement and its democratic allies.

Founding in Hong Kong in April 1941

Hua Shang Daily was founded in Hong Kong on 8 April 1941 and was conceived from the start as a united-front newspaper — a publication intended to rally a broad patriotic readership behind resistance to Japan rather than to speak only for one party. The surviving accounts differ slightly in how they name its leadership, a reflection of how collectively such papers were run. The English-language record describes it as a patriotic newspaper for the united front led by Liao Chengzhi and Fan Changjiang. The Chinese-language account, drawing on a memorial volume about the paper's later reviver Rao Zhangfeng, names Zou Taofen, Fan Changjiang and Hu Zhongte as the leaders under whom it was founded in Hong Kong. Fan Changjiang is the figure common to both accounts, and Liao Chengzhi, the Communist Party's representative in Hong Kong, stood behind the enterprise in which both versions place him.

The choice of Hong Kong was deliberate. In early 1941 the mainland press was under severe pressure: after the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941, Nationalist authorities cracked down on leftist journalists and progressive publishing, and many cultural figures left Chongqing and other Nationalist-held cities for the relative safety of the British colony. Hong Kong, still at peace while China fought, offered printing plants, a large Chinese readership, banking and shipping links to Southeast Asia and the overseas Chinese press, and a colonial legal order under which a patriotic Chinese daily could still appear. It was into this refuge that the founders brought Hua Shang Daily in the spring of 1941 — only months before the Pacific War destroyed the refuge itself.

Zou Taofen and the paper's first months

The publisher Zou Taofen gave the young paper much of its character. Zou, born Zou Enrun in 1895 in Fujian, was already one of China's best-known journalists and publishers: he had taken over Life Weekly in 1926 and built its circulation from a few thousand to a record figure for a Chinese magazine, and in 1932 he had founded the Life Bookstore, which became an important publisher of progressive books. From April 1939 the Nationalist authorities forced Life Bookstore branches to close and arrested managers, and on 25 February 1941 Zou resigned his seat on the Nationalist government's political council and left Chongqing secretly for Hong Kong.

At Hua Shang Daily, founded weeks after his arrival, Zou was not a figurehead. Accounts of his Hong Kong months record that he was busy with editing and wrote, in the persona of an ordinary journalist, a serialised column — rendered as Since the War of Resistance — recording his personal experience of the political council he had just left. A publishing venture grew out of the paper as well: a recollection preserved by Singapore's Shanghai Book Company records that in 1941 the company remitted 10,000 Hong Kong dollars to co-found a Hua Shang Daily publishing department in Hong Kong, which published Zou's Since the War of Resistance before the Japanese occupation forced it to stop and its remaining funds were diverted to evacuating progressive cultural figures from the fallen colony. In May 1941 Zou also revived his magazine Mass Life in Hong Kong, making the daily part of a small cluster of patriotic publications gathered in the colony in that last year of peace.

Fan Changjiang and the wartime generation

Fan Changjiang, the co-founder named in both the English and Chinese accounts, embodied the generation of war reporters who staffed the paper. Born Fan Xitian in Neijiang, Sichuan, in 1909 and educated at Peking University, Fan had become famous as a Ta Kung Pao correspondent: sent to China's northwest in 1935, he travelled for some ten months through five provinces and wrote the dispatches collected as China's Northwest Corner, which described the Chinese Communist Party, the Red Army and the Long March for a national readership, and in 1937 he interviewed Mao Zedong. In 1939 he joined the Communist Party — one account dates his admission to May of that year in Chongqing, introduced by Zhou Enlai — and from then on his journalism was done under party leadership: he helped found news agencies and newspapers, among them Hua Shang Daily in Hong Kong, where biographical accounts place him as a co-founder and deputy general manager.

Scholarship on this generation, notably Parks M. Coble's China's War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance Against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2015) — a work cited as a source for the paper's own history — describes how reporters connected with the National Salvation Movement, Fan among them, believed their mission was to inspire the public through patriotic reporting, and how by 1941, as political cohesion in China melted away and Chiang Kai-shek's government cracked down on leftist intellectuals, many of those journalists fled toward Communist-held areas or, as in Fan's case, to Hong Kong. Hua Shang Daily was one of the institutions that flight produced.

Suspension: the Pacific War and the fall of Hong Kong

The paper's first life lasted eight months. The Chinese-language record gives the precise end: because the Pacific War broke out and Hong Kong fell, Hua Shang Daily stopped publication on 12 December 1941. Japan attacked Hong Kong on the morning of 8 December 1941, local time, on the same morning as the attack on Pearl Harbor, opening one of the first battles of the Pacific War. The colony's British, Indian and Canadian defenders held out for seventeen days; Kowloon and the New Territories were abandoned within a week, and on the afternoon of 25 December 1941 — a day remembered in Hong Kong as Black Christmas — Governor Sir Mark Young and the military commander surrendered in person at the Peninsula Hotel. The Japanese occupation that followed lasted three years and eight months, until Japan's surrender in 1945.

For the paper's circle, the fall of the colony was a personal emergency as well as a professional end. Hundreds of patriotic and cultural figures were stranded in occupied Hong Kong, and the Communist organisation, acting on instructions from Zhou Enlai, mounted a celebrated rescue: Liao Chengzhi, the Eighth Route Army's Hong Kong office head, helped organise the operation, in which, by one account, more than 500 people were helped to escape, among them Soong Ching-ling, Mao Dun, Xia Yan, Liang Shuming, Cai Chusheng, Hu Feng and Zou Taofen himself. Zou was carried through the Dongjiang guerrilla area to safety; his health failed, he went secretly to Shanghai for treatment, and he died there on 24 July 1944, being posthumously recognised as a member of the Communist Party. He did not live to see the paper he had helped found return to the streets of Hong Kong.

Revival on 4 January 1946

After Japan's surrender, the paper was rebuilt by a new team. The Chinese-language account records that the revival was achieved through the efforts of Rao Zhangfeng and Lian Guan of the Guangdong party organisation, and that Hua Shang Daily resumed publication on 4 January 1946. Its masthead in the second life mixed business, party and democratic-movement figures in the united-front manner. Its chairman was Deng Wentian, a Chinese deputy manager of the Hua Bi Bank in Hong Kong. Its editor-in-chief was Liu Simu. Its general manager was Sa Kongliao, a leader of the China Democratic League. Its chief writer was Xia Yan, and its editorial committee included Lian Guan, Rao Zhangfeng, Xia Yan and Qiao Guanhua, among others.

Two of those names underline the calibre of the revived paper's staff. Xia Yan (1900–1995) was one of China's leading left-wing playwrights and film writers, a founder figure of the League of Left-Wing Writers, whose plays Sai Jinhua (1936) and Under Shanghai Eaves (1937) had become standard works; biographical records place him in Hong Kong from September 1946, associated with Hua Shang Daily until May 1949, and after the war he rose to become vice-minister of culture. Qiao Guanhua (1913–1983), who had taken a doctorate in Germany and worked mainly in journalism writing international reviews for Hong Kong newspapers, later became one of the People's Republic's best-known diplomats and its foreign minister in 1974. In 1946, both men lent their pens to a Hong Kong daily whose real business was the political contest for China's future.

A democratic paper in the civil war years

The revived Hua Shang Daily was, in the English record's summary, a democratic publication: it supported the democratic movement and opposed the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese record states the alignment more bluntly — the paper was pro-Communist and opposed Chiang. It thus spoke, from the legal shelter of British Hong Kong, for the side that was fighting the renewed Chinese Civil War on the mainland and that could not publish freely in Nationalist-held cities. Its formula remained that of the united front: a Democratic League figure as general manager, a banker as chairman, Communist journalists and party figures on its editorial committee, and a famous democratic publisher's legacy in its past.

That the paper was watched from outside is shown by a surviving American record. On 18 August 1949 the United States consul general at Hong Kong telegraphed Washington about a manifesto issued by a Hong Kong group attacking Chiang Kai-shek as a betrayer of Sun Yat-sen's revolution and advocating cooperation with the Communists; the telegram noted that the manifesto had received extensive write-up in the CCP-controlled Huah Siang Pao — the paper's name in the telegram's romanisation — alongside favourable editorial comment in Ta Kung Pao. By the summer of 1949, with the Communist victory on the mainland approaching, Hua Shang Daily was chronicling the defection of Nationalist figures to the winning side, and foreign observers treated it as an established voice of that side in the colony.

Farewell: 15 October 1949

The paper's end was as deliberate as its founding. On 15 October 1949, Hua Shang Daily published an article on its front page titled Goodbye, my dearest readers! and then stopped publication. The date fell in the month in which the long civil war reached its conclusion and the People's Republic of China was established: the mission for which the Hong Kong paper had existed — a patriotic and then democratic voice outside the territory its movement controlled — was complete, and its people were needed at home. The company was moved to Guangzhou, and, in the Chinese record's figure, more than sixty of the newspaper's staff travelled to Guangzhou to prepare a new paper.

That new paper was Nanfang Daily, established in Guangzhou and first published on 23 October 1949, eight days after Hua Shang Daily's farewell. Nanfang Daily became the official newspaper of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published by what grew into the Nanfang Media Group, and its own reference entries list Hua Shang Daily as its predecessor. The Hong Kong daily therefore did not simply vanish in October 1949: its staff, company and political function were transplanted across the border and continued under a new name in the provincial capital it had supported from exile.

Legacy and identification

Hua Shang Daily is remembered today chiefly through its people and its successor. It linked three moments of modern Chinese journalism: the patriotic reporting of the 1930s war correspondents, represented by Fan Changjiang; the progressive publishing movement built by Zou Taofen, whose last newspaper it was; and the party press of the new People's Republic, into which its staff passed directly in 1949 through Nanfang Daily. Its 1946 revival team — a banker-chairman, a Democratic League general manager, and an editorial committee carrying future cultural and diplomatic leaders such as Xia Yan and Qiao Guanhua — remains a compact illustration of how the united front worked in practice in post-war Hong Kong.

For researchers, identification is the essential caution. The Hong Kong Hua Shang Daily (1941–1949) must not be merged with the later Shaanxi newspaper of the identical Chinese name, Chinese Business View, which reference works state explicitly had nothing to do with it, nor with Hua Shang Daily as a rendering of other commercial papers. Within its own short life it also had two distinct phases — the wartime united-front paper of April to December 1941, suspended on 12 December as Hong Kong fell, and the democratic paper of January 1946 to October 1949 — and any citation of it should be placed in the correct phase. What survives of it in the reference record is brief but consistent: a patriotic Hong Kong daily, founded 8 April 1941, silenced by one war, revived on 4 January 1946, and closed by its own farewell — Goodbye, my dearest readers! — on 15 October 1949.