To prevent a Communist clamp down on Hong Kong in 1997, publisher Jimmy Lai is unleashing a storm of muckraking today.
Hong Kong is a strange beast, a schizy megalopolis with an awful lot of money and very little soul. At eye level it's shops and bars, but up above, it's strictly business: giddy monoliths of marble and steel drip air-conditioner water onto pedestrians below. Heavy clouds drop dark shadows into the South China Sea, and the humidity makes clothes stick to the skin like Colorforms. Climbing out of the Quarry Bay MTR subway station into pork bun-steamer heat, I slog past fashion outlets blasting meat-locker cold. Sweat freezes to ice in the nape of my neck, only to boil off again a few seconds later.
I'm looking for the coolest man in town. Five minutes later, buzzed through new security doors into the offices of Next magazine, I find him.
Jimmy Lai sits at a round table, hands folded. Hong Kong's most notorious media maven is 46 but looks well under 30. His crew cut is thick as a carpet, without a single gray hair. I can't see a line on his cherubic, almost beatific face - or a sweat stain under the arms of his tailored shirt. It's hard to believe this is the same guy who's being threatened by organized crime, hounded by vandals, and sued for libel by the People's Republic of China.
Lai is a legend in Hong Kong. In 1960, at age 12, he was smuggled here from Canton in the hull of a boat. The former street urchin took a succession of jobs in garment factories and picked up some English along the way. Smart and ambitious, he quickly rose through the ranks until, in 1975, he started his own clothing line. Giordano (named, oddly, after an Italian restaurant in New York) now has 600 stores throughout Asia, pulling US$350 million in annual sales. But Lai became bored with retail. The offspring of his ennui was a ground-breaking weekly called Next, conceived on June 4, 1989, as Lai sat in his Hong Kong living room glued to the Cable News Network's coverage from Beijing.
"I got the idea to do this magazine during the Tiananmen massacre," he nods. "The fact that the Chinese government was responding to the demand for democracy by shooting people - that they were completely unable to deal with the demonstration - showed me just how desperate and doomed they were. I realized right then that there was no reverse role for China. It would have to open up to the free flow of information; and when it did, it would be the biggest market in the world."
Tiananmen was China's first lesson in the realities of contemporary media technology, and it was a brutal one.
"The Chinese government had no idea the media was so powerful." Lai leans back in his chair, thumbing his suspenders. "Otherwise, I don't think they would have dared handle the events of June 4 the way they did. The price they paid was higher than any they could have imagined. No dictatorship, no government in history has ever been exposed to the world as instantly as the Chinese government was during that massacre."
Lai's response to Tiananmen has been to twist the knife. Using information as a weapon - or, more accurately, a crowbar - he's trying to forcefully jimmy the lid off one of the world's most xenophobic and information-starved nations.
"I've always wanted to change things." Lai's stocky, compact frame conceals restless energies; I wouldn't be surprised to learn he was a martial arts expert. "The events of June 4 gave me the inspiration I needed. Now I'm no longer in a business that just delivers merchandise and makes money; I'm in a business that delivers information - and information is freedom. That's a great motivator for me. I've never been able to relate to my home country, yet now I'm directly involved in bringing more freedom to the Chinese people."
This kind of idealism might seem naive to jaded westerners, but the situation in Hong Kong demands it. The territory, ceded to the British for 99 years in 1898, reverts to Chinese control on July 1, 1997. Free-market visionaries like Jimmy Lai have a real interest in preserving freedom of information, and it's hard to imagine a better way to trump the incoming regime than by establishing a popular, fearless magazine.
The first issue of Next was released in March 1991 - less than two years after the Tiananmen blood bath. The weekly glossy magazine comes in two parts: a news, finance, and features book, and an equally thick entertainment/lifestyle section. Stories have included exposés of the powerful Chinese criminal organization known as Triad, reports on prostitution, and investigations into alleged government corruption. The latest issue, Lai's boldest so far, features a cover story on how communist China enforces its "One Family, One Child" policy with arrest, blackmail, and forced abortions. Retailing for about $2.50 an issue ($18 HK), Next already has a weekly circulation of 180,000, and a readership of more than 1 million, making it Hong Kong's largest circulation weekly. What makes this remarkable is that it's published only in Cantonese; there's no English-language edition.
"Next is for the educated Chinese middle class," Lai explains. "There's really no market for an English-language weekly. If the English speakers want information, they don't need an indigenous magazine; they can read Fortune, The Economist, or the International Herald Tribune."
For many Hong Kong residents, Next is a godsend, an indication of what might yet be possible in a country where idealists are few and the obsession with getting rich (and getting out) dominates contemporary thought.
"Jimmy Lai is a genius," one Hong Kong gallery owner summed up, "and Next is a miracle."
Not everyone, however, is as infatuated. Early last summer, Triad thugs broke into the Next offices and smashed the magazine's computers. The Hong Kong storefronts of Giordano have been spray painted, and Lai's house has been targeted by firebombs. But Lai grew up in the ghetto and refuses to be intimidated. "If they threaten me, they won't kill me," he wryly observed in a New York Times interview. "If they want to kill me, they won't threaten me."
The most serious threat to the magazine, of course, is the specter of 1997. The imminent transfer of power looms like the twilight zone, an ominous threshold beyond which nothing can be assumed. It is something no longer even talked about; the switcheroo of '97 has become one of those rare scandals in which anticipation has worn itself threadbare, and speculation has dissolved into a deep existential weariness rooted in the knowledge that no one really knows squat about what's going to happen. Things have reached a point where one person's guess is no better than another's, where the well-honed predictions of an economics PhD are no more or less likely to come true than the wildest ravings of the blind leper rattling his cup in the Jardine House overpass.
Still, it does seem unlikely that the Chinese, never known for open-mindedness, will tolerate a magazine that openly busts their chops. Last August, in fact, Chinese authorities closed down a trendy new Giordano outlet in Beijing. The action was clearly a response to one of Lai's editorials, in which he blithely asked Chinese premier Li Peng to drop dead (the move inspired Lai to resign as chair and director of the clothing chain). What's to stop the new regime from using similar strong-arm tactics against a pesky free press?
Jimmy Lai shrugs. "They can stop the print media," he allows, "because they can physically stop the presses. But they can't stop the electronic media. Information technology is advancing by the day, while the technology for disrupting the flow of information has stagnated since the collapse of the communist bloc. There's simply no market for that kind of equipment anymore, and nobody's putting any money into researching or developing it, either.
"OK, a lot of governments think they can control the media. And some governments can - like in Indonesia, where they've been closed off from the outside world for years." He slaps the table for emphasis. "But if China thinks they can control us, they don't understand the state of technology today. Even if they can control 90 percent of the media - and the costs of doing that would be prohibitive - but even if a government was crazy enough to spend that kind of money, the surviving 10 percent would still be powerful and efficient enough to keep the population informed.
"There are two reasons why I'm optimistic about our chances for survival after 1997," Lai smiles and leans forward. "First of all, within three years we'll probably see the death of Deng Xiaopeng. What kind of changes will that bring? Nobody knows. Great change is inevitable after the passing of such a strong man; no one can replace him. Secondly, by 1997, what new tools will exist for disseminating information? Again: nobody knows. But I can guarantee you that they won't be able to stop television.
And if they can't stop that," he concludes with satisfaction, "what's the point of trying to stop us?"
China, meanwhile, has shrewdly taken another tack. In July of 1994, the People's Republic sued Next magazine for libel.
"There was a 'Campaign of Hope,' "Lai explains wearily, "to build schools in poor areas of China. Nine million US dollars were raised. Months went by, the people didn't receive the money, and Next printed an investigative story to that effect. The Chinese government responded that the transfer of money was in process, but that their infrastructure moved slowly. Then they turned around and sued, claiming that our story would damage future fund-raising drives. We just printed the facts," he says evenly, "but the case is going to court."
Nothing short of bankruptcy, though, is going to stop Lai from becoming the top information broker of the new China. He has already announced his intention to acquire a high-profile daily paper and is waiting (but not holding his breath) for an opportunity to expand into the new economic zones of South China - a move that could instantly increase the magazine's circulation tenfold. His dreams are more ambitious still. In October of 1993, speaking at the World Free Press Conference, Lai proposed creating a "United Nations of Free Media." He envisions the quasi-political collective as a multimedia task force, modeled on the UN and dedicated to preserving freedom of information around the world.
"World peace depends on the free flow of information," he declared. Under the collective's imagined charter, governments that seek to limit such freedoms (e.g., China) could be saddled with crippling 'information embargoes.' A sideswipe onto the cold shoulder of the information superhighway, observes Lai, may some day be far more effective than an embargo of material goods.
The venue for this new organization? Slyly: "Hong Kong." And why not? Locating the planet's top information watchdog in Hong Kong - mere months before the region rolls under the wheels of the People's Republic - would be a stroke of genius. Such a move would put China's leaders in a real fix: either they virtually guarantee a free press in the region or face loud protests and international suspicion. What's a dictatorship to do?
When I left the offices of Next magazine, I reemerged into the sauna of summertime Hong Kong. It was rush hour. A Petite Chinese woman barked into a cellular phone, while harried bankers and kwai lo - the Chinese term for "ghosts," meaning "foreigners" - rushed from air-conditioned offices into air-conditioned taxis. I had to laugh. Six million people obsessed with keeping cool - and Jimmy Lai, turning up the heat.
