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Veteran journalist's legacy lasts

(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-02 07:20
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Feng Xiliang, a veteran journalist and founder of China Daily, died on Monday evening in Beijing at the age of 86.

Veteran journalist's legacy lasts
China Daily founder Feng Xiliang participates in a media exhibition in the mid-1980s in Beijing. Feng died on Monday in Beijing at the age of 86. [China Daily]
Feng, also known as C.L. Feng, devoted almost his whole life to journalism, ever since he chose it as his undergraduate major at St. John's University in Shanghai.

His career culminated when he and several other veteran Chinese journalists founded China Daily, the establishment of which was testament to China's determination to reform and open to the outside world.

In a time of reform, Feng, as the paper's managing editor (1981-1984) and then editor-in-chief (1984-1987), was a trailblazer.

Established foreign language news magazines and periodicals in China at that time focused on translating Chinese language articles into foreign languages.

Feng however insisted that China Daily reporters write news and feature stories and commentaries in English, to better serve the paper's target international readership.

He led his staff to adopt common and interpretive language while departing from the conventional stereotypical reporting charged with political jargon and slogans.

He encouraged and helped train a large number of young reporters to tell stories of the Chinese people in English, while covering the wide spectrum of Chinese society and recording the dramatic changes China has experienced since the reform and opening up began in the late 1970s.

Meanwhile, upon his suggestion, China Daily became the first newspaper since 1949 to print news and features from international wire services, as the paper took upon itself the task of informing international residents and travellers in China what was happening around the world.

At the same time, Feng introduced new ideas to encourage Chinese photo journalism. When the convention was still to highlight objects such as new machines or grain harvests as the main news photos to show China's development, Feng asked China Daily photographers to forget this and instead focus on the people.

"He (Feng) told us that China Daily pictures, whether they are of leaders or ordinary people, should be vivid, because this represented the essence of journalistic photography," Wang Wenlan, chief of China Daily photo department, recalled.

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