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Teething problems....and pleasures
By Judy Polumbaum(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-05-31 09:19

Judy Polumbaum is currently a professor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Communications.

It sounded like an idea for a madcap comedy: A core group of veteran Chinese journalists, most with Western or missionary school educations, would lead former teachers and translators, newly minted college graduates and postgraduates, and various and sundry others in producing a daily newspaper in English.

For headquarters, three floors of shabby offices in a borrowed building would have to do. The hardware consisted of antique Underwood typewriters set on scratched wooden desks.

But the software assembled for that original China Daily staff a blend of knowledge, skills, intellect and talent galvanized by enthusiasm for this audacious experiment was superb.

And as one of a handful of foreign copy editors (called "polishers," although the work typically entailed major rewrites of translations or compilations from the Chinese press as well as original reports in English), I was fortunate to be part of that sometimes frustrating, often exhausting but also exhilarating inaugural year.

Monday, July 6, 1981, was my first day in the old China Daily digs, at one edge of the People's Daily compound on the eastern side of Beijing. Among my first stack of items to edit was a commentary by a Chinese author, urging writers to address social evils but also to maintain a sense of humour.

This was indicative of one of the important trends fuelling the paper in its early days: lively discussions on all fronts occurring in Chinese society.

Some of the stories that struck us as novel and newsworthy then may seem trivial today the restoration of household farming in the rural areas giving sudden rise to heaps of watermelons in Beijing in the summer of 1981, for instance; but they must be considered in the energizing context of the times.

My second day, I worked on a translation of excerpts from a long article by a policymaker criticizing himself as well as Mao Zedong for missteps made three decades earlier.

Among other changes, I suggested that all but the first "Comrade" before Mao's name be taken out.

Before I could explain that the term was clunky to the Western ear, Guan Zaihan, the wiry, chain-smoking opinion page editor, cut me off: "Take it out!" he said with a wave and a smile.

Like many elderly Chinese intellectuals, Lao Guan was a survivor of political vicissitudes: A correspondent for a European agency in Shanghai in the 1940s, he'd worked for the Foreign Ministry after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, been labelled a "rightist" in the late 1950s, and later become a schoolteacher.

Lao Guan exemplified the open-mindedness of the journalism veterans at China Daily.

His presence also illustrated the paper's importance in returning experienced individuals to an occupation they seemed born for.

The paper also recruited born journalists who'd never before been in the trade. My officemate Huang Qing from Shanghai was a natural, with a nose for news, fantastic interviewing ability and graceful writing skills.

To this day, I complain about her promotions, well deserved as they've been she's now a deputy-editor-in-chief, and terrific at that, but I still think she should be out on the street.

The diminutive, optimistic Sun Guozhen, with whom I had many freewheeling conversations about the curiosities of human nature, was another of my favourites. After a long teaching career in Northeast China, she'd come to write and edit features. She, too, proved to have keen reporting instincts. I remember her glee upon returning from an interview with a delightful eccentric whose home was crammed with fantastic specimens of his object of expertise, Ming Dynasty furniture.

Another time, she found the hotel where old people invited to Beijing for meetings marking the 70th anniversary of China's 1911 Revolution were staying, and prowled the halls for subjects.

The driving force behind the whole operation was Feng Xiliang, the first managing editor, who had earned a master's in journalism at the University of Missouri and studied graphic design at Columbia University.

Lao Feng often opened the morning news meeting by criticizing that day's paper for running too much non-news stories about meetings, conferences, symposiums, anniversaries, statements without action.

When a story about a panda in Mexico giving birth landed on page one, he dubbed the paper the Panda Daily News.

It's hard to believe, but China Daily was once an upstart. Lao Feng was tickled to learn that some US musicians teaching in Beijing had complained to the Ministry of Culture that they'd been there three days without a mention in China Daily!

And he was pleased when a visiting Canadian dignitary specifically requested the presence of a China Daily reporter at a press conference.

But even when pleased, he was never complacent. "It's a good looking paper," he said one day. "I'd buy it for 10 cents!"

Besides the remarkable achievement of getting China Daily up and flying, Lao Feng put an enduring stamp on China's newspaper culture: Editors at Chinese-language papers who doubted his maverick approach to make-up displaying photographs large, using big headlines gradually turned into admirers and imitators.

Granted, given a small staff that thought big, the work sometimes got to us. On days that I had to chop sprawling, poorly written articles by three-fourths, or when others were out ill and I had to rewrite three or four entire broadsheet pages on my own in a matter of hours, I could get snippy.

"I know you're overworked. I'm sorry," Lao Feng would say.

And he'd promise to hire some part-time relief. I don't recall that happening. According to entries in my journal, the deluge of work sometimes had me in tears. I don't recall that either.

Indeed, what sticks are the memories of the good old days, the wonderful people and the sense of being on an adventure together. Lao Feng, Lao Sun, Lao Guan and many of the other China Daily pioneers are no longer with us, but they'll always loom large in my mind.

(China Daily 05/31/2006 page4)