Seattle Paper Fills Gap for Chinese Diaspora Seeking Local News

Founding a newspaper is rarely easy, but when Assunta Ng was preparing to launch the Seattle Chinese Post in 1982, she faced an unexpected challenge: The Chinese-script typewriters ordered from Taiwan were lost in transit.

The typewriters eventually turned up at the Port of Seattle, eight days before the newspaper was due to publish. A short window to train typists on the hard-to-use equipment.

But they got the job done, Ng said. In the early hours of January 20, the Post went to print and became the first Chinese-language paper in the Pacific Northwest since 1927.

Forty years on, the paper’s weekly circulation is in the thousands, but its small size belies its significance as one of the few independent Chinese-language outlets to offer local news in the United States.

Mandarin and other Chinese dialects combine to make up the third-most-common language in the U.S., with some 3.5 million speakers, according to a Census Bureau report.

And while major papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal publish in Chinese, they typically don’t provide hyper-local news.

That is where outlets like the Seattle Chinese Post and the New York-based website NYChinaRen come in.

Both cover typical community news – a mix of local politics, crime, weather, business and culture.

That focus is what separates them from the broader — though still narrow — Chinese-language media landscape in the U.S., which Human Rights Watch researcher Yaqiu Wang says is politically polarized.

Some Chinese news outlets have ties to Beijing. Others are backed by opposition groups, such as the Epoch Times, which is reported to be aligned with Falun Gong, a controversial religious movement that claims persecution by Beijing.

Assunta Ng is pictured outside the Seattle Chinese Post’s original office in 1984. (Courtesy – Assunta Ng)

Finding accurate, unbiased outlets can be a challenge, says Wang. And while American media publishing in Mandarin provide independent coverage, their reporting doesn’t necessarily target a Chinese audience living in the U.S., Wang said.

Rare outlets like the Seattle Chinese Post and NYChinaRen, both of which publish in Mandarin, provide a snapshot into the small landscape of independent and impartial Chinese-language media in the U.S.

In Seattle, Ng is proud of her paper’s independence and neutrality.

Before the Post was founded, members of the city’s large Chinese population would gather at bulletin boards in Seattle’s Chinatown to get the latest news. Ng, who moved to Washington from China for college, wanted to fill that gap.

The local community was initially skeptical of Ng’s newspaper until she assured them that it would be politically neutral.

“We’re not pro-Taiwan or China,” Ng said. “We want to serve the community, and we want to write stories, and we write stories that other newspapers have not been able to see.”

That local knowledge and connection with the community in Seattle came into play in 1983, when 13 people were killed at a gambling club.

“The mainstream media – I wouldn’t say they didn’t cover our community – they did,” Ng said. “But they always liked to feature us with food. So I always laughed at them. ‘Boy, we look like a very hungry community.’ You always write about us about food and nothing else. And now there’s this murder – biggest murder in the state – and you didn’t know how to cover it.”

“Overnight I had so many mainstream media calling me to ask for help because they couldn’t communicate with the Chinese immigrants in Chinatown,” Ng said. “I was like a bridge between our community and the mainstream media.”

The Seattle Chinese Post is an outlier, but Ng doesn’t really view it that way. For her, its neutrality is not a political statement. Ng views the Post first and foremost as a local newspaper, one that just happens to publish in Mandarin.

“We are an American newspaper, except written in Chinese,” Ng said.

In leading NYChinaRen, Cheng Yizhong was similarly motivated. He worked at state-run and privately owned outlets in China before an arrest in 2004 on corruption charges, a move seen widely as retaliation for his outspoken reports.

Being jailed in China is behind Cheng now. “It doesn’t really matter to me anymore,” he told VOA in November. “It only makes me believe firmly that our industry is extremely important.”

Cheng acted as editor-in-chief from when NYChinaRen was founded in 2019 until he stepped down in January, citing “political risk and pressure” but reaffirming in a statement that the website is independent. For him, media play an important role in reporting on local Chinese communities

“Their news may not be reported by mainstream American news channels. But that’s what we care about,”’ he said.

Assunta Ng’s family members help mail copies of the Seattle Chinese Post in the 1990s. (Courtesy – Assunta Ng)

Beijing’s reach

For the past decade, China has worked to extend its influence over global media, using training opportunities, content sharing agreements, media trips and funding to try to curry favor with foreign outlets, all while restricting and expelling correspondents in Beijing.

Experts including the International Federation of Journalists believe China uses such tactics to influence global media coverage in its favor.

Wang, of Human Rights Watch, said Beijing made similar efforts to influence Chinese-owned media in New York and other cities “through ownership or making the businesspeople who are close to Beijing buy those newspapers.”

In an email to VOA, China’s Washington embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said that Chinese media “should not be assumed to be led or interfered (with) by the Chinese government,” adding, “The Chinese government supports closer cooperation between Chinese and foreign media.”

Being relevant to Mandarin-speaking audiences can bring challenges, including whether to connect via the popular app WeChat.

With more than 1.2 billion active monthly users worldwide, the Chinese social media, messaging, and payment app is a powerful tool. It is also under the reach of Beijing’s censors.

Rights groups have cited how sensitive topics, like criticism of the government and human rights, are suppressed on the app.

The WeChat question is an important tradeoff, according to Sheng Zou, a University of Michigan postdoctoral research fellow. Chinese-language outlets can access more readers, but at the expense of editorial independence.

“If you want to cater towards the Chinese community, then you inevitably have to use WeChat,” Zou said.

Embassy spokesperson Pengyu denied that Beijing censors web content and said that “Chinese people have extensive access” to online information.

The website for NYChinaRen is blocked in China, but it has two public WeChat accounts with about 250,000 subscribers, according to Cheng. The accounts act as a news portal or blog page that app users follow.

Ng decided to not disseminate Seattle Chinese Post content on WeChat.

But despite challenges of adapting in the digital age, local news remains at the core of both media outlets.

Although some mainstream media in the U.S. publish in Mandarin, they do not concentrate as closely on what’s happening in the Chinese diaspora communities, Zou said. That’s what makes local-language media all the more important.

“Identity — this sense of belonging, this sense of rootedness — is a very important factor in their consumption of the media,” he said. “Identity politics is crucial to understanding why people want to consume Chinese media.”

And, as Ng says: “People are hungry for information and what’s going on in the community.”

Bo Gu contributed to this report.

Olympics a Sweet, Complex Homecoming for Chinese Diaspora

BEIJING — 

When Madison Chock looks outside here in the Chinese capital, the U.S. Olympic ice dancer sees glimpses of herself.

“Every time I’m on the bus, I’m just looking out and studying the city and just imagining my roots are here, my ancestors are here,” says Chock, whose father is Chinese Hawaiian, with family ties to rural China. “And it’s a very cool sense of belonging in a way, to just be on the same soil that your ancestors grew up on and spent their lives on.”

She adds: “It’s really special, and China holds a really special place in my heart.”

At the Beijing Winter Games, opening Friday, it’s a homecoming of sorts for one of the world’s most sprawling diasporas — often sweet and sometimes complicated, but always a reflection of who they are, where they come from and the Olympic spirit itself.

The modern Chinese diaspora dates to the 16th century, says Richard T. Chu, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Its members have ranged from the drivers of the colonial economy and laborer workforces on land and sea, to the highly educated who moved away for a chance at greater prosperity, to the unwanted baby girls adopted internationally during the government’s one-child policy.

“The Chinese diaspora is really very diverse, to the extent to that they maintain their Chinese-ness,” Chu says. “There’s no one kind of Chinese identity because each country has a unique kind of history.”

The question of ethnic Chinese identity is an especially delicate one for athletes with roots in Hong Kong and Taiwan. U.S. women’s singles figure skater Karen Chen, whose parents immigrated from Taiwan, says she identifies as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and uses those labels loosely and interchangeably.

Taiwan, which split from the mainland after a 1949 civil war that propelled the current Chinese government into power, is an island of 24 million people off China’s east coast.

FILE- Eileen Gu, of China, makes a run in the slopestyle finals, Dec. 17, 2021, during the Dew Tour freestyle skiing event at Copper Mountain, Colo.

It functions in many ways like a country with its own government and military. But China claims Taiwan as its territory, and only 14 countries recognize Taiwan as a nation. Most nations of the world, including the United States, have official ties with China instead.

Chen’s self-identification is not uncommon among the Taiwanese, as many trace their heritage back to mainland China. Some 32% of the islanders identify themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese, according to an annual survey by National Chengchi University in Taipei.

While in Beijing, she’s pledged to speak as much Mandarin as possible and is proud to give a nod to her heritage on the ice.

“My free program is to ‘Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto,’ which is such a famous and classical piece that came from China … it’s kind of a Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet,” Karen Chen says. “It definitely relates to my background.”

The many athletes of Chinese descent here at the Beijing Games represent the many variations of the diaspora: some are one, two or many generations removed; others are biracial and multicultural.

And even similar backgrounds can diverge on the Olympic stage. For example, Nathan Chen and Eileen Gu are two superstar athletes fronting the Winter Games. While both were born and raised in the U.S. by Chinese immigrants and have fond memories of spending time in their ancestral homeland, Chen is competing for the U.S. team as a medal contender in men’s singles figure skating, and Gu is the hotshot freestyle skier competing for China.

FILE- Karen Chen competes in the women’s free skate program during the US Figure Skating Championships Jan. 7, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn.

Gu has raised eyebrows for switching to the China team after training with the U.S. team, but the San Francisco native — who speaks fluent Mandarin and makes yearly trips to China with her mom — is clear-eyed about how she defines herself.

“When I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” Gu told the Olympic Channel in 2020. “When I’m in the U.S., I’m American.”

For some, the Olympics in Beijing is the first time they’ll set foot in China, an unforgettable professional accomplishment on top of a very personal milestone.

That’s the case for U.S. women’s singles figure skater Alysa Liu, whose father, Arthur Liu, also longs to visit China. The elder Liu left his home country in his 20s as a political refugee because he had protested the Communist government following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

“I so much want to go to the Games and go back to China to visit my hometown,” said Arthur Liu in a phone interview from his home base in California. “I so much want to go back to the village I grew up in, to go to the high school that I went to, the college I went to. I so much want to go and have the spicy noodles on the side of the street.”

Arthur Liu eventually settled in the Bay Area, put himself through law school and nurtured one of America’s most promising athletes. Now his Chinese American daughter is set to make her Olympic debut in the women’s singles competition. He has no qualms about her competing in the Olympics in China, and no resentment toward a home country he still loves.

Like many biracial children, Alysa Liu used to wonder why she didn’t look like her parents though she has always identified as ethnically Chinese. Arthur Liu and his then-wife, who is also Chinese, decided to have children via surrogacy and sought white egg donors because Arthur Liu saw himself as a citizen of the world and wanted biracial children.

FILE- New York Islanders center Josh Ho-Sang (66) celebrates his goal against the Philadelphia Flyers with teammates in the third period of a preseason NHL hockey game in New York., Sept. 26, 2016.

In a culture that can be xenophobic, Arthur Liu says his daughter is warmly embraced by his home country, as Chinese fans and media consider Alysa Liu to be one of their own.

“I’m super happy the Chinese people welcome her and think highly of her,” Arthur Liu says.

The Olympics will also be the first time Josh Ho-Sang, the multiracial, multicultural Canadian ice hockey player, will visit China.

His paternal great-grandfather moved from mainland China to what is modern-day Hong Kong for business opportunities, then fell in love on vacation in Jamaica, which makes the Canadian hockey team forward one-eighth Chinese. From his mother’s side, Ho-Sang’s heritage is rooted in European, South American and Jewish cultures. For him to represent Canada as a “melting pot poster boy” is a testament to how inclusive the Olympic spirit has become.

“It really shows how far we’ve come as a society, to have these different faces representing home for everyone,” Ho-Sang says. “A hundred years ago, you would never see such diversity in each country that you see now. It’s a sign of hope and progress.”