Other News

Farewell, Tiziano Terzani

September 2004 - We mourn the passing of Tiziano Terzani, veteran reporter, respected author and dear friend and colleague to many in Beijing. He died July 28, at age 65, in his hometown of Florence, Italy, after years of battling cancer. Tiziano, who worked as a lawyer before making the switch to journalism, covered Asia for three decades as a correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel from his bases in Vietnam, Beijing, Tokyo, Bangkok and New Delhi. He started out as a fellow traveler with a passionate interest in Communist China, but became increasingly critical once based in Beijing, as he sought truth from facts in the turbulent post-Cultural Revolution years. As a result, he was expelled in 1984 for "counter-revolutionary activities."

Tiziano’s many books include “Behind the Forbidden Door,” about his years in China, “Goodnight Mr. Lenin,” about the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, and “A Fortune-Teller Told Me,” which is partly about the role superstition plays in Asia – but more than that, a beautifully woven soliloquy on the complexities and contradictions of this region. Even in the advanced stages of his illness, Tiziano traveled in Afghanistan during the US offensive in 2001, and wrote a book called “Letters from the War.” His final book, “Another Turn of the Carousel,” published thus far only in Italian, is about his struggle to come to terms with his illness, his mortality, and what his life – or any life – can mean. Perhaps one answer comes in the fact that Florence will be naming a street after him, and that a memorial in his honor drew so many people to the Palazzo Vecchio, that they spilled out of the designated room and filled the great hall.

Reality-style rudeness

November 2004 - A group of Belgian journos blew who through China last month in a cross-country television production marathon managed to put some serious new mileage on the "ugly foreigner" stereotype. Local fixers working for Belgium's Kanakna Productions say that in the course of filming a reality-style TV show documenting a group of hitchhikers racing from Beijing to Bombay, the Belgian journos managed to offend, insult and create serious cultural antipathy across ten provinces before they finally exited China from Yunnan Province. Fixers knew they'd pulled the wrong job early on when Belgian producers "ordered" them to tell local police to clear traffic so that the cars carrying the hitchhikers could proceed without the inconvenience of normal road conditions. Things got worse when those same producers tried to berate their local staff into going through tollgates without paying.

The Belgian journos also apparently had a penchant for public urination within sight of toilet facilities, and for tossing copious amounts of litter, beer bottles and other flotsam in public places along the route. Sympathies to the folks on the No. 2334 train from Xi'an to Guiyang, who had to endure the entire Belgian TV crew of over 100 people bluffing and blustering their way onboard without tickets and then demanding seats and service from the conductors. Sadly, they got their way.

FEER R.I.P.

November 2004 - The news came as a shock, not just to the Far Eastern Economic Review’s readers, but to most of its reporters, editors and other staff as well. They were told, just as they were putting the Nov. 4 issue to bed, that this would be the last issue of FEER as we know it. FEER had been losing money for six years, Dow Jones said – so 80 jobs were cut.

FEER staffers and contributors, past and present, expressed sadness, frustration and anger at the demise of the 58-year-old magazine’s …the last English-language newsweekly on Asia. Some accused Dow Jones of having ‘driven FEER into the ground.’ Former FEER editor Philip Bowring had this to say in an October 30 op-ed in the South China Morning Post:

“Not with a bang but with a whimper. So died the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review, a product born in Hong Kong 58 years ago and which in its heyday between 1965 and 1990 was a major force in Asian journalism, nurturing many a fine writer, getting up the nostrils of governments and businessmen everywhere - and making money. “Doubtless, autocrats will be having a good laugh, having first neutered the magazine, which was once a thorn in their side, to the point where few bothered to take it seriously. In its heyday it took on Lee Kuan Yew in his own courts, losing but achieving a huge moral victory…
“The death of the Review came by a thousand cuts inflicted primarily by Karen House, the emissary from New York who took over responsibility for the Review two years after Dow Jones, previously a minority shareholder, acquired 100 per cent of the magazine in 1988….
“The thousand cuts were a succession of failed makeovers and revolving editors after House arrived on the scene. Between 1946 and 1992, the magazine had just four editors: the founder, Eric Halpern, Dick Wilson (still alive in London), Davies and myself. In the 12 subsequent years under House management it had six, of whom the last, David Plott, had been in the chair just a few months.
“The magazine lost its way because people in New York thought they understood what the readers wanted more than those who were on the ground in Asia who had nurtured the magazine from humble beginnings to the most successful regional magazine in the world, which made a $16 million profit in the year that Dow Jones acquired it.”

Bowring complained that, in recent years, FEER had been dumbed down and defanged, no longer going after the hard-hitting investigative and in-depth reports on the region that had made it a must-read in its hey-day. But many good journalists remained and are now out of jobs – including FCCC members present and past David Murphy and Susan Lawrence and David Lague. We extend our sympathy to them and to the many others formerly at FEER, and wish them success in finding new jobs.

We also wish new FEER editor Hugo Restall success with the FEER relaunch. He aims to make the new monthly commentary publication a sort of “Foreign Affairs” for Asia – thoughtful, concise, scholarly, without photos or fancy layouts…for a much smaller readership. The first issue will be out on December 17.

The Children of Ningxia

December 2004 - As many may know, Pierre Haski of French newspaper Liberation met a schoolgirl called Ma Yan in Ningxia several years ago. She was from a poor family that could not afford to send her to school, even though she dearly wanted to study. When Pierre visited, she thrust her diary into his hands. It contained her thoughts about life and about the difficulties of growing up poor in China. Pierre had the diary translated and turned it into a book, which has become a runaway success in France. It has also been published in the UK and is due to be published in the U.S. in June. So far they have helped more than 200 children attend school, dug a well in the area and supplied 50 computers for a local school.

Pierre says if you would like to contribute to the work of his project (“Enfants du Ningxia,” or Children of Ningxia) there are bank accounts in Hong Kong and Paris to which you can send money. Website: www.enfantsduningxia.org.