A Newspaper, and an Experiment in Public Opinion Cut Short | Shenzhen at 40 ③

"Freedom from want, freedom from fear."

Several big things happened in the Shekou Industrial Zone in 1984. That January, Deng Xiaoping came to Shekou. He gave brief, clear approval of how far the place had drifted from the rest of China, and, in good spirits, wrote out the calligraphy for "Sea World," a hotel converted from a cruise ship.

The little zone's reformers breathed a bit easier after that. Since 1979, Shekou had housed China's first joint ventures and first wholly foreign-owned factories and companies. Wages were no longer flattened to one national scale, and managers were elected by a vote of everyone in the zone instead of being posted in from above. There were plenty of civic associations too, which people called "instruments of pressure."

These changes used to be called gambles. Now the word was experiments. An experiment, by definition, has backing, costs little, and is worth a try.

The zone's slogan — "Time is money, efficiency is life" — had taken on a new meaning as well. The line first traveled out of Shekou through the newspapers, and it drew many objectors: however you heard it, it sounded like a commandment of capitalism, and socialist China at the time was neither rich nor fond of money. Then, unexpectedly, the central government endorsed it. By 1984 you could hear people arguing about it in any city. At that year's National Day parade in Beijing, the Shekou Industrial Zone had a float of its own, with the slogan pasted across it in giant characters.

The zone's top administrator was Yuan Geng, 67, who had been an intelligence officer, a diplomat, a prisoner, and the head of China Merchants' Hong Kong operation during its most decrepit years. He did several important things in 1984, one of them signing the agreement to build a float glass plant. Another was deciding to start a newspaper inside the zone.

A year earlier he had no such plan — "it never even came up" — but "now the time had come when Shekou had to have a newspaper."

Shekou Tongxun. At first the paper's name did not even contain the character for "newspaper"; only in January 1986 was it renamed the Shekou Bulletin (《蛇口通讯报》) and released to the public. It was ambitious in some ways and very careful in others. It called itself a small in-house company paper, printed few copies, and for a while circulated only inside the zone. But before long — because nothing in a Chinese newspaper had ever read or sounded like this — it was reprinted everywhere, for all sorts of reasons, and became one of Shekou's most successful reforms.

Right up to the day it closed in 1989, the Shekou Bulletin was something of a legend in the world of public opinion. Nothing before it had been like it. And afterward? People kept trying to make it again. In 1990 a new paper appeared in Shekou, the Shekou News (《蛇口消息报》).

"A piece of reform news the size of a date — we worked to blow it up to the size of an apple, or a watermelon," said Li Ming, head of the new paper's editorial department.

1

Han Yaogen moved to Shekou in the winter of 1984. The zone paid five times what he had earned in Shanghai, but he lived badly: a small warehouse with rats, water on the floor most of the time. Nobody cared whether he was comfortable. Shekou had scrapped the mainland's job-assignment system, so people found their own work and their own housing, much like Chinese laborers newly arrived in New York. Han Yaogen was 44. "Not to ride the wave of your times is to waste your life," he thought, and decided that "even a thatched shed would feel comfortable enough."

What this middle-aged "warehouse entrepreneur" set out to do was plan a newspaper unlike any that existed in China. He had solid newspaper experience and knew how to assemble an editorial team that could win a paper public recognition fast. The paper brought in Huang Zongying to edit the literary supplement — nearly 70, a film star with literary talent, the kind of name readers seek out.

Beyond that, what mattered most was the front page. It would decide what this new paper was actually trying to say.

Outside Shekou, most papers then were Party organs of a locality or a big state enterprise. The World Economic Herald, where Han Yaogen had worked in Shanghai, was different: a reformist paper that covered the trade war between Japan and the United States and argued about how backward countries could modernize their economies.

For the new Shekou paper, Yuan Geng wanted one that would "not just say nice things," a paper "that dares to criticize cadres." He talked with Han Yaogen twice. At Fudan University's journalism department, what Han Yaogen had hated most was "uniformity of opinion." He decided the two of them thought alike.

Han Yaogen came in as deputy editor-in-chief — the paper had no editor-in-chief — and counting him the staff numbered four. The paper was not expected to cover its own costs; the zone paid for it. It was printed in the Nanfang Daily building in Guangzhou, still with movable type. The first trial issue came out on December 30, 1984, monthly thereafter. That June the Shekou Bulletin applied to Guangdong Province for a license to publish openly, and got it in December.

In this period the paper ran a report disclosing a conversation between Yuan Geng and Yao Yilin, then a vice premier. Because parts of it touched on how the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone should be built, and because it had not been cleared by the censors, it was swept into a "fake news" affair. In the end Yuan Geng came forward himself to confirm the conversation was real. What they had discussed was whether the central government should keep funding Shenzhen — keep up the "transfusion" — or "pull out the needle."

You could still be punished for what you said, and people were not used to airing their own views in public. In those years Yuan Geng repeated, tirelessly, things that now sound like plain common sense: "A society that lives in fear is not the society we want," and "Freedom from want, freedom from fear." The second line, from Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, ran on the front page of the Shekou Bulletin on September 24, 1985. Every time Yuan Geng said something of this kind, it counted as a major event worth reporting. Outside the Shekou Industrial Zone, after all, hardly any region's top official would speak about "freedom" so directly.

Soon enough, though, someone pointed out that this enlightened administrator's grasp of freedom was still shallow. Yuan Geng approved of people questioning his conduct in the open, and in the same breath, in the voice of a superior talking down, criticized the "twos and threes muttering" in "dark corners." Chen Nanxian, founding principal of Yucai School, the first school in Shekou, who had come from Hangzhou in 1983, saw it otherwise.

"Don't be afraid of people talking in twos and threes, and certainly don't call it a 'dark corner,'" Chen Nanxian said. Opinions always start with twos and threes, and they may well begin in one corner or another.

Han Yaogen ran Chen Nanxian's dissent in the Shekou Bulletin in November 1985, under the headline "Half of What Yuan Geng Says Is Worth Taking." The headline left Chen Nanxian deeply uneasy, but Han Yaogen, running the paper, thought he understood Yuan Geng, and he had sharpened the headline on purpose. Which is why the Shekou on the page was often freer and more open than the Shekou outside it.

Short-term visitors then all came away with the same impression. The place felt fresh, and the freshness came from nothing more than this: apart from Bitaoyuan, the housing compound built for foreign businesspeople, and the "Sea World" cruise ship, most of it was still grassland. Tan Ziqing, visiting her brother, stayed at Meijingge; stepping out at night, "everything opposite was pitch black, just grass."

What felt fresh to Tan Ziqing was the Shekou Bulletin's table of contents, hand-copied and hung up in a little shop. She had never read headlines like these in a mainland newspaper. Tan Ziqing joined the Shekou Bulletin in 1988 as editor of the arts pages.

2

All through 1984 Han Yaogen looked for people willing to publish criticism in the paper on their own initiative, and it was hard. "They'll say it, but they won't put it in print," he wrote in his diary, after another rebuff. He grew anxious, partly because the paper had not yet met Yuan Geng's expectations.

Han Yaogen cared what Yuan Geng thought. To get anything done, he believed, he needed his superior behind him. Yuan Geng, Party secretary of the Shekou Industrial Zone, seemed strongly in favor of a paper that criticized and watched over. He told Han Yaogen that opinion work mattered enormously: its job was to promote democracy in Shekou, to make Shekou's personnel and financial affairs public, to give the people of Shekou the right to know and the right to oversee.

That produced a sensation in 1985. In February the Shekou Bulletin published "It's Time to Focus on Management — A Word of Advice to Comrade Yuan Geng," which argued that Yuan Geng's inexperience as a manager had caused no end of problems in the zone. The author was anonymous. Before the issue came out, Yuan Geng announced at a meeting that this one would criticize him and that every cadre present should read it carefully. Once it was out, the stock sold out fast.

Criticizing a leader — the region's most senior leader, no less — had been unthinkable, and Han Yaogen saw that it had stirred people's curiosity, whatever that curiosity was made of. He seized the moment shrewdly: he wrote down everything that had happened around the article's arrival at the editorial department and, a month later, ran "The Story Behind the Publication of 'A Word of Advice.'" That issue's print run went up to 8,000. More important, both pieces were reprinted widely — by Guangdong's Yangcheng Evening News and Nanfang Daily, by papers in other provinces, and by the People's Daily. The authorities recognized the report's value too, giving it the Special Prize in the 1985 National Good News Awards.

Some people thought the whole thing had been "arranged," and some still think so. Han Yaogen has said on many occasions that nobody arranged anything: the critical article really did arrive at the editorial department unsolicited.

He has tried to reconstruct the weighing and testing that went on before publication, to show that it happened by itself. He was not sure at the time, he recalled, what Yuan Geng really thought, and sent the manuscript over for him to look at anyway. Yuan Geng changed only the form of address, "Mister," to "Comrade," and the two exchanged a few words. "From now on, as a rule, don't send manuscripts up for review." "There will still be plenty of cases where you'll need to be the gatekeeper," Han Yaogen made sure to answer.

But these scenes and exchanges only confirmed, for others, the sense that it had been arranged. Guo Jianxin, who joined the Shekou Bulletin later, wrote in a memoir that no real reform had happened in Shekou; it had carried on the old practice. "You put out a slogan, and all I do is defend your slogan." "Nothing but one set of slogans swapped for another."

Han Yaogen has said something similar. He told QDaily this past May: "The editorial line at the time clearly advocated reform, advocated democracy. Yuan Geng said the line could not be violated, because a line set by the Party secretary cannot be violated." "The Shekou Bulletin handled its relationship with the Party, with the newspaper and with readers better than anyone. It never crossed Yuan Geng or went off on its own. I came out of a journalism department, after all — I knew the Party led me; you were just giving me a limited amount of power, that's all."

"Enlightenment in the manner of Emperor Taizong." "Democracy by rule of man." Those were criticisms at the time, but Han Yaogen thought it was already progress. His young reporters felt that "he was always afraid, and we were never afraid." Sometimes Han Yaogen was uneasy; most of the time he believed he had a firm hold on these bold, radical stories. "It isn't fairness I believe in, to be honest. It's Yuan Geng's authority."

In 1986 Yuan Geng announced he would not stand in the election for the second management committee. Han Yaogen left the Shekou Bulletin soon after; before he went, he was caught up in a row over co-founding the Asia-Pacific Economic Times. He resigned his post on July 30, 1987. This newspaperman, who had trained as a gymnast in his youth, said it was like a gymnast losing his coach's spot: with only himself to fall back on, he would stop attempting the hard moves. He had written his resignation letter long before, ready at any moment for the risks anyone who rides the wave of his times runs into.

Even so, Han Yaogen still thinks 1986 was the most permissive year.

3

He was not that much of an idealist, and did not believe democracy could arrive overnight under the conditions of the time, but Han Yaogen had already seen the need to "cut back, as far as possible, the tint of the wise ancient monarch." Before he left, in 1986, the Shekou Bulletin started a news salon. At 7:30 p.m. on March 3, 1986, on the eighth floor of the Shekou Training Center, 45 people came to the first one. "Salon," it said on the blackboard.

The news salon copied the World Economic Herald's early biweekly forums on the economic situation, except that where those drew scholars and economists, this one drew a more mixed crowd. Among the subjects they took up: reforming board elections, the investment climate, and how to live well on your own.

"I like dialogue. Only through dialogue do you get government by the people, democracy, democratic centralism, sensible solutions. Second, only through dialogue do you get news, do you learn what readers are thinking, do you get something to fill the pages. I had so few people — with no reporters, where was the interviewing going to come from? So we wrote down what was said at the salon."

The salon ran until the paper closed in 1989. By the tenth session nearly 90 people were coming. People called the eighth-floor room a council chamber, or a parliament. The training center stood by itself, a single white building, and people joked that it looked like the White House. Yuan Geng never once set foot in that council chamber.

Shekou had many such forums. According to a record of a managers' forum published in the Shekou Bulletin, the questions the zone's managers cared about in those years included separating Party, government and enterprise; converting the district administrative bureau into an elected management committee; and making sure no leading cadre's term ran on indefinitely. They also argued over whether board elections should copy the government's democratic voting system at all, given that even in the West the rules of business and the rules of politics differ. People generally came to agree, later, that the Shekou of those years should not be thought of as merely an industrial zone. It was closer to a small government with an experimental streak.

In Shenzhen and in Beijing, more and more salons sprang up over the same years. Controversy and Its Lessons (《争议与启示》), a book recording the Shekou experiment, compared them with a "Youth Sports Theory Salon" in Beijing and judged it less mature than Shekou's, both in how it was run and in how it chose its topics.

Before long the council chamber produced an enormous controversy. In January 1988 several young education specialists then at the height of their fame — known as the "moral education professors" — got into an argument at the news salon with Shekou's young people. The young ones, sick of the specialists' hollow preaching, said in the rebellious way the young have that plenty of people came to Shekou simply because you could earn more money here, and that not everyone goes to the library after work. The specialists were no happier. Back in Beijing they wrote articles in the press attacking these unconvinced young people as too utilitarian. The Troubleshooters (《顽主》), the film adapted from Wang Shuo's novel, later reproduced a scene much like it.

The argument reached no conclusion. After the People's Daily ran "Q&A on the Shekou Storm" on August 6, 1988, it received a heap of letters every day from readers giving their views on the affair — "several sacks' worth by the end." But the "moral education professors," who had been lecturing all over the country to great acclaim, never recovered from that People's Daily report.

The Shekou Bulletin did not cover it at once. Then the editorial department got a call from Wang Keng, Yuan Geng's secretary, asking why they weren't reporting it. The call was Yuan Geng's idea, Wang Keng said later; after the argument, Yuan Geng "stood with the young people." On February 1, 1988, the Shekou Bulletin published "Shekou: A Fierce Clash Between Stale Preaching and Modern Consciousness." The message was clear enough.

"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," Yuan Geng said afterward of the whole affair.

Zhang Xinmin read that line in Hainan and thought: yes, this is how it should be, this is right. He moved from Hainan to Shekou in November 1988 and went to work at the Shekou Bulletin.

When Li Ming went to Shenzhen on business in 1988, he had in his luggage the very issue that carried "Shekou: A Fierce Clash Between Stale Preaching and Modern Consciousness." He also called on members of the already-dissolved editorial department of the Shenzhen Youth Daily, a paper shut down over a 1986 article, "I Support Comrade Xiaoping's Retirement — A Discussion With Comrade Weiyin." What he found was not pleasant. The former firebrands would not give their opinions; others were busy cooperating with the government in exchange for new jobs. Li Ming and Zhang Xinmin would later become the mainstays of a new paper.

Then it was the last summer of the 1980s, and the paper closed. Guo Jianxin wrote in his memoir that the whole staff went swimming together at Dameisha, and came back drunk, singing the entire way: the biggest banknote is the 10-yuan note, the smallest is the 1-fen coin, and biggest or smallest, the people love them both.

4

Li Ming always regretted missing the Shekou Bulletin. When he arrived in Shekou in 1993 to join a newly founded paper, the Shekou News, the place felt "repressed," with "no trace of a romantic character." There were no tall buildings, parts of it were run-down, and the roads were all named "Industrial Road No. Something." It also felt like "a gathering place for old loyalists, and every one of these loyalists was a former reformer." By then they could do nothing.

Li Ming ran the Shekou News's editorial department. The Shekou Industrial Zone's new paper had 12 people, three times what the Shekou Bulletin started with. But its influence was small, and the editorial staff sometimes took copies to the Shenzhen train station and handed them out themselves.

Zhang Xinmin was in on the founding of the Shekou News from the start, spending a whole afternoon on it with editor-in-chief Xi Shangren. They agreed on a name quickly: Shekou Xiaoxi Bao (《蛇口消息报》), the Shekou News. The old paper's tongxun and the new paper's xiaoxi are different Chinese words that both come into English as "news" — they wanted the new paper to carry something over from the old one.

But the mood in Shekou had changed; more precisely, the mood of the whole country had changed. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour put reform back on the table. Everyone knew this reform was not the old one. Shekou's slogan was no longer just "Time is money, efficiency is life"; now it had to stress "Empty talk harms the nation, hard work revives it." Zhang Xinmin became famous overnight in 1992 for a photograph taken at a share-offering site: a man clutching a bundle of banknotes, soaked in sweat, his eyes full of despair. He had queued for two days, and was pulled out of the line half an hour before the lottery forms went on sale.

Li Ming wanted to "use every news peg there is to shore up the old dream of reform." "A piece of reform news the size of a date — in substance, we worked to blow it up to the size of an apple, or a watermelon." "What we were really doing was closer to agitation, closer to nostalgia. By professional standards, that wasn't news," he told QDaily this past April. Not everyone in the editorial department agreed. Some wanted no part of change that drastic, and did not want to carry that much responsibility or risk. "There were arguments at almost every Monday news meeting, and at their worst people even smeared each other."

Xi Shangren, the editor-in-chief, backed Li Ming most of the time; he wanted the Shekou News to become a real platform for public oversight and to build real influence. Li Ming wrote in a memoir: they publicly took Shekou to task for its arrogance, its numbness, its decline; they ran a running series on the seizure of public space at Sihai Park, on the lion statues put up outside a police station, on consumer disputes at a duty-free shop; and they reported the Kuichong fire that burned 87 women workers to death.

On January 26, 1994, Deng Xiaoping came to Shekou again, ten years after the first visit. Li Ming decided to give the whole front page to one photograph of Deng Xiaoping. Xi Shangren agreed, and Zhang Xinmin found the right picture. While it was being laid out and printed in the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily building, someone asked: how do you dare run a photo that big? Did anyone approve it?

Li Ming left the Shekou News in 1995. He went back to Qingdao and opened an advertising company, writing news commentary on the side for Street (《街道》), the China Business Times and Vanke Weekly. His Shekou News column, "News Fast Food," ran until 2004. He is now a writer documenting Qingdao's history, and curates avant-garde art.

After 2000, Xi Shangren tried to push market reforms at the Shekou News. When they failed, he emigrated to New Zealand.

Around 1993, Zhang Xinmin took part in the discussions that founded another influential publication, Street. Among its actual founders was Xiao Quan, who had made his name with the photography series Our Generation (《我们这一代》). Xiao Quan had access to the best resources in the country and brought in many senior figures in the field to write for the magazine, even though on paper it was merely a magazine attached to the Yuehai Subdistrict of Shenzhen's Nanshan District. After 54 issues, Street was shut down over a single photograph, and Xiao Quan went back to Sichuan. Zhang Xinmin shot a great many photographs of the city changing and of reform stories, collected them in a book, Encircling the City (《包围城市》), and mounted several large exhibitions. He always looked like an uncooperative man, but his position at the Shekou News never changed, and he retired from there.

On June 30, 1989, Han Yaogen founded another paper, the Hainan Pacific Post, in the floor below the shuttered Shekou Bulletin. He founded 14 papers in all, but the only one people still come to ask him about — as he often points out, "the only one anyone still interviews me about like this" — is the Shekou Bulletin. He lives in a spacious Art Deco apartment in Shanghai and goes back to Shekou every year.

The Shekou News is still around. But it is close to an official gazette now. On April 23, 2018, the anniversary of Yuan Geng's birth, the most important story on its front page was a half marathon held at Shenzhen University.

Cover image from Wikimedia Commons, Florian Klauer on Unsplash