Hong Kong weekly pokes China in the ribs

“Change is accelerating,” says author and publisher Stephen Vines in his spartan office overlooking a sprawl of high-rises and warehouses in the unglamorous Kwun Tong district. “Unfortunately, it’s in the wrong direction. Where you had areas of liberty, the government is trying to erode them. Where you had possibilities of extending representative government, they’re pulling back.”

So Vines and editor John Marsh started their own magazine, the English-language weekly Spike, to address these issues -- and also provide a “good read.” “We looked around and thought how little of interest there is to read these days,” says Vines, a British citizen who has been a correspondent for the Guardian and the Independent and who has spent the last two decades in Hong Kong. “And a real lack of humor too.”

He launched Spike last November, hiring some of the expatriate journalists he has known and worked with over the years -- only one on the staff of six is a Hong Kong native. Marsh is also a veteran, having been an editor for the South China Morning Post and the short-lived Asia Times, published out of Bangkok in the 1990s.

Every week the insouciant front cover, a photograph or illustration contained in a blue border, signals their attitude. In January a cover compared the scowling face of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, with that of a white gorilla. Over them hovered the words “One System, Two Monkeys” -- a reference to the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that communist China announced when it took back capitalist Hong Kong in 1997. A March cover showed a propaganda poster from the Maoist era in which one pink-cheeked young woman reads to two others bearing rifles. Except the add-on bubble caption from one says, “What does it say, Doris?” The woman with the pamphlet replies, “Voting gives you piles.” This is clearly a dig at the continuing inability of the Hong Kong population to elect a chief executive, who is and will be for the foreseeable future appointed by Beijing.

It’s British schoolboy humor, of course, which some find offensive and others revel in. The taste for the magazine is highly limited; circulation figures for Spike average 8,000 per issue, Vines says during an interview in its offices. But it’s a select group. Marsh says he believes Spike’s readers to be “educated professional middle classes who are (a) unhappy with what’s happening here and (b) what they get to read about it.”

Vines and Marsh tout the magazine as an “anger management tool” whose underlying leitmotif is that there is much to be angry about in post-handover Hong Kong. One of the most depressing things, they say, is the opacity of the new regime, which has largely blockaded itself from interviews and press conferences. “The strange thing about this government is that I’ve never come across one so unresponsive,” Vines says. “Their means of communication is almost entirely government by the principle of silence. They never really explain what they’re doing; they’re not even competent at being defensive. It’s practically impossible to interview the chief executive. Isn’t that odd?”

With a small staff, the magazine relies mainly on columnists and freelancers for their material. “Our strength isn’t in news gathering,” Vines admits. “It’s in presentation and analyses and putting a smile on it. Things are depressing enough without our adding to it.”

Vines himself writes an editorial for each issue; business editor Cathy Holcombe looks behind economic news; there are contributors from Beijing and Shanghai; and humorist Gloria Wu deconstructs modern life. A regular column called “Betty’s Diary” is said to be “the intimate journal of the wife of a very important person” -- a not so subtle dig at Tung Chee-hwa, who is referred to as the “Old Man.” It’s highly irreverent, showing the Tungs as isolated, self-serving and hyper class-conscious. The magazine also takes swipes at other publications and Hong Kong politics alike.

Vines says they do try to be careful. “We don’t sit there worrying about defamation suits, but we don’t want to get involved in any that are unnecessary.”

Some of the juiciest material is borrowed from the Hong Kong press. Spike has an agreement to use articles from Next, a highly popular Chinese weekly that runs everything from celebrity gossip to muckraking journalism. Next has proved an invaluable source for investigative profiles of businessmen, gangsters and celebrities -- often entwined in the hothouse climate of Hong Kong. The pieces are translated and then adapted for a Western audience.

Everyone seems to understand that tighter controls on Hong Kong media are being indirectly exerted. This spring three top radio talk show hosts departed suddenly, citing threats to their person and family. Two were from “Teacup in a Storm,” a phone-in program often critical of government policy. Before quitting, Raymond Wong, who had another show, was going to the studio with a bodyguard and staying at a hotel for safety.

Spike hasn’t received any harassment from the powers that be. “We may be under the radar,” Vines suggests.

Advertising has been slow in coming, but Vines is upbeat about Spike’s future. “As depression about the political situation grows, people get more angry about it, and the demand for satire rises,” he reasons. “We’re in a rising market.”

Marsh believes that the middle classes are getting restless about the lack of democracy and freedoms they’ve been brought up to expect. Case in point was the huge number -- one estimate was 500,000 -- who turned up last July 1 to protest overly encompassing “anti-sedition” regulations. So somewhere down the line, new readers may find Spike to their liking.

Vines and Marsh could certainly move elsewhere if they wanted, but they don’t plan to. As Vines, a permanent resident, notes: “Who would want to leave at such an exciting time? It’s like leaving in the middle of a movie. Why would you do that?”