About Open Magazine

Open Magazine

Overview

Open Magazine was a Hong Kong Chinese-language political magazine, published in traditional Chinese under the name Kaifang Zazhi, that reported and commented on the politics of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from 1987 until its print edition ended in December 2014. It was founded by the publisher Ha Gong, with Jin Zhong as its editor-in-chief, and after Ha Gong's early death Jin Zhong ran it for the rest of its life. The magazine advocated press freedom and political democratisation in China, published overseas Chinese democracy-movement figures and scholars, and won repeated Hong Kong human rights press awards. Its publisher, Open Publishing, also became a noted Hong Kong publisher of political and historical books. One of the Hong Kong political monthlies most cited by China-watchers, it suspended print publication in December 2014 and continued as the website Open Net.

Founded in 1987 as Liberation Monthly

Open Magazine was founded on 1 January 1987, but not under that name: it began as Liberation Monthly. Its president was Ha Gong, the pen name of Xu Guo; its editor-in-chief was Jin Zhong, whose real name is Ran Maohua; and its adviser was Xu Xing. The founding arrangement lasted only months. Ha Gong died of illness in June 1987, and the magazine passed into Jin Zhong's hands, where it remained. In January 1990, three years after its launch, the magazine was renamed Open Magazine, the title under which it became known to China-watchers. The name change marked the point at which the publication's identity settled: a monthly of political commentary whose declared commitments, in its own later descriptions, were reporting and commentary centred on the political development of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and advocacy of press freedom and political democratisation for China.

Jin Zhong, the Editor

Jin Zhong's career threaded together Hong Kong's political magazines. Born Ran Maohua, he moved from mainland China to Hong Kong in 1980. In 1981 he was working as an editor at The Seventies magazine; in 1985 he became executive editor of Cheng Ming, Wen Hui's anti-communist monthly; and in 1987 he was the founding editor-in-chief of the future Open Magazine. He later served as editor-in-chief of Open Publishing from 1994 and as editor of the Open Net website from 2000. His editorship was not cost-free. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded that on 4 March 1996 Jin told the organisation that Chinese immigration officials had revoked his permit to enter Shenzhen, the mainland city adjoining Hong Kong: he said he was detained by immigration police for 90 minutes on his way to visit relatives and told he was not welcome. The Committee noted that Open Magazine, published since 1987, was often critical of China's policies. Jin Zhong emigrated to New York in February 2016, after the magazine's print edition had ended.

Takeover, Closure and Relaunch in the 1990s

The magazine's ownership history contained a rupture that few publications survive. In May 1992, Open Magazine was acquired by Joseph Lau, the Hong Kong property developer. In the middle of 1993, Lau decided to cease publishing the magazine. Jin Zhong responded by re-registering the title himself and publishing Open Magazine again under his own control. The episode fixed the magazine's essential structure for its remaining two decades: whatever its ownership paper said, its continuity depended on its editor. Under Jin, the magazine resumed the course it had set since 1990, a monthly of insider reporting and commentary on Chinese Communist Party politics and on political developments across mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, written for readers who followed Chinese politics closely and could not find such material in mainland publications.

Editorial Stance and Contributors

Open Magazine's stated focus was the political development of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it advocated China's press freedom and political democratisation. Its contributors included Chinese democracy-movement figures living overseas and scholars, a contributor base that gave the magazine its character as a platform for debate about China's political future conducted in Chinese from outside the mainland's censorship system. That made it a reference point beyond Hong Kong: the magazine was among the Hong Kong political monthlies most cited by China-watchers, the diplomats, journalists and analysts who mined Hong Kong's Chinese-language press for signals about Communist Party politics. Its reporting was "insider" in ambition, concerned with the personnel, factions and decisions of the ruling party, as well as with dissent, rights and the historical record the party preferred to control.

Human Rights Press Awards

The magazine's journalism was repeatedly honoured in Hong Kong's Human Rights Press Awards, organised by the Foreign Correspondents' Club Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Journalists Association and Amnesty International Hong Kong. A 2017 account of the magazine by its contributor Cai Yongmei, published by the Independent Chinese PEN Center, records that from 2000 onwards Open Magazine won the human rights press awards again and again. The recognition is a useful measure of what the magazine did in its second decade: alongside commentary on elite politics, it published reporting on human rights in China of a standard that Hong Kong's press-freedom community repeatedly judged award-worthy. In a media environment where most Hong Kong outlets practised some self-censorship on Chinese politics, Open Magazine's awards record marked it out as a title that did not.

Open Publishing and Its Books

Alongside the magazine, Jin Zhong's house ran Open Publishing, known in English as Open Books, which published a notable list of political and historical books that mainland publishers could not touch. Its titles included the Chinese edition of "Mao: The Unknown Story"; "Zhao Ziyang: Talks under House Arrest", drawn from the deposed party leader's recorded recollections; "Victims of the Cultural Revolution"; "Fifty Years of Communist China"; "The Death of Lin Zhao", about the executed dissident writer; the Charter 08 manifesto volume; and "China's Godfather Xi Jinping". The book programme extended the magazine's mission into durable form: where the monthly tracked current politics, the books documented the party's history and its critics, and they made Open Publishing one of the Hong Kong houses most associated with politically sensitive Chinese publishing.

Print Suspension in December 2014

Open Magazine's last print issue was dated 1 December 2014. That month the magazine announced that it was suspending print publication and would instead develop Open Net, the website at open.com.hk that Jin Zhong had edited since 2000. The print magazine had run for twenty-eight years, through its founder's death, a tycoon's takeover and closure decision, and its editor's re-registration and relaunch. Its ending was widely read as part of a pattern: the overseas Chinese writer Moli, writing when Cheng Ming and The Trend closed in October 2017, observed that the three Hong Kong magazines she had long written for — Open Magazine, which had ceased operating in December 2014, The Trend and Cheng Ming — had now all ceased to operate. Hong Kong's trio of critical political monthlies was gone within three years.

The Thirty-Year Memorandum

The magazine marked its thirtieth anniversary in book form. In 2017 Open Publishing issued "Open Magazine: A Thirty-Year Memorandum", edited by Jin Zhong, selecting 100 outstanding pieces by 100 writers from the more than 10,000 articles the magazine had published. The historian Yu Ying-shih inscribed the book's title; Su Xiaokang and Fu Guoyong contributed prefaces. The anthology was organised into five parts — figures, history, destiny, currents of thought and culture — and the publisher presented it as a record of a historic thirty years, 1987 to 2017, in which China changed from a closed agrarian society under Maoist dictatorship into the world's factory inside the World Trade Organization, accumulating enormous wealth, while the magazine had witnessed what it called China's aberrations and examined their causes. The book was published in Hong Kong on 1 July 2017 and launched at an event in Kowloon on 7 July, with Jin Zhong and contributors including Cai Yongmei among the speakers.

Legacy

Open Magazine's legacy rests on the combination it achieved between 1987 and 2014: a monthly of record for Chinese politics that mainland readers could not obtain at home, an award-winning outlet for human rights reporting, and a book publisher whose list preserved texts the Chinese state suppressed. Its history also embodies the fragility of that model — dependent on one editor, vulnerable to an owner's whim in 1993, and ended in print as Hong Kong's political publishing market contracted. Its archive, sampled in the 2017 thirty-year anthology, survives as a Chinese-language chronicle of the reform-era party-state written from outside it. Together with Cheng Ming and The Trend, whose editor had given Jin Zhong his start in Hong Kong political magazines, Open Magazine defined the era in which Hong Kong's political monthlies were essential reading for anyone watching China.