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Updated Monday, June 30, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Joe Hung, Special to The China Post

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How might we save Taiwan’s media?

The decision by one of Taiwan’s four major newspapers to appear as a tabloid in September prompted the Government Information Office to call a meeting of press CEOs not long ago to find a way out for financially stringent media. Of course, there’s no easy way out. As a matter of fact, the conference is nothing but much ado about nothing. The days of great papers are numbered.

Let’s first review the development of the press in Taiwan. (Few press CEOs know exactly how Taiwan’s newspapers have grown and is now seeing its decline and, probably, fall.) During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, one newspaper was run by ethnic Chinese. The Taiwan Min Pao (People’s Journal) had a couple of pages published in Chinese. Its successor, The Taiwan Shin Min Pao (New People’s Journal), was ordered to publish all pages in Japanese in 1938. The paper wasn’t a money-making enterprise. The Hsin Sheng Pao (New Life Journal) took over the Taiwan Nichnichi Shimpo (New Daily Journal), the one the Japanese had formed by merging all papers for lack of newsprint toward the end of the Second World War, when the island was restored to the Republic of China in 1945.

Newspapers mushroomed in Taipei in the latter half of the 1940s. None of them were lucrative — most losing money except The New Life Journal which was owned by the Taiwan Provincial Government — simply because there weren’t many readers. Few native islanders could read Chinese-language papers. Most of them couldn’t afford to buy them, for papers were very expensive to them. The situation went from bad to worse for newspapers in Taipei then. One result was a merger of three almost bankrupt newspapers. Financial exigencies forced them to put out one edition a day in the name of Lien Ho Ban (聯合報) or United Edition. After martial law went into force following the removal of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government from Nanjing to Taipei at the end of 1949, no applications for daily newspaper licenses were accepted, The China Post being the only exception, because it was published in English.

The publication law, on the other hand, allowed those periodicals that appeared more than twice a week to apply for daily newspaper licenses. (There in fact wasn’t what is known as a ban on new newspapers; anybody could apply for a license, according to the paper-licensing system; but no license could be granted under the pretext that newsprint imports were not enough to supply the new demand. No newsprint was produced in Taiwan for decades after its retrocession and imported paper was rationed.) Runaway inflation compelled the provincial government to launch a commodity price control commission, which published Cheng Hsin Hsin Wen (徵信新聞), a mimeographed bulletin appearing on weekdays to report price changes.

It was a really hard time for the press in the 1950s. And all struggling papers had to “welcome” aboard a competitor. The Central Daily News, a Kuomintang mouthpiece, moved to Taipei and soon became the paper with the largest circulation in Taiwan. Another Kuomintang publicity organ was The China Daily News, owned by its Taiwan provincial chapter. It had two editions, one for Taipei and the other for Tainan. The New Life Journal had an affiliate in Kaohsiung, called The Taiwan Hsin Wen Pao.

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