Seong Pow/ The Oversees Chinese Commerce of India
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
As in 2023
Aheli Banerjee, May 22, 2023: The Times of India
From: Aheli Banerjee, May 22, 2023: The Times of India
KOLKATA: The city's - and, possibly the country's - only Mandarin newspaper, 'The Oversees Chinese Commerce of India' or 'Seong Pow', may have gone forever, in a tragic blow to the rapidly dwindling Chinese community of Kolkata and their culture.
The last edition was printed shortly before the pandemic-induced lockdown in March, 2020. Circulation was anyway halted during the first wave of the pandemic, but the final nail in the coffin was the death of its editor, the elderly Kuo-tsai Chang, in July the same year.
As the years roll by, chances of reviving the paper have become slimmer.
Established in 1969 by Lee Youn Chin, 'Seong Pow' came 34 years after India's first Chinese newspaper, 'The Chinese Journal of India'. 'Seong Pow', a four-page daily, used to compile news from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Kolkata's leading English dailies, translating them into Mandarin. It also featured a hefty list of weddings, birth and death anniversaries and parties, acting as the first 'social media' for the close-knit Chinese community in Tangra's Chinatown.
'Not finding suitable people to run the paper'
In its heyday in the late 1980s, the editorial offices of 'Seong Pow' - on New Tangra Road - had a bustling Mandarin press. Back then, it had a circulation of about 2,000 copies. In keeping with the dwindling Chinese population, the paper fell into hard times and, for long, functioned as a shadow of its former self. Now, the office is deserted, nestled amid a massive heap of rotting garbage.
"The place is definitely not going to open," says garbage dealer Dipu Mistri, whose work as a scrap dealer often took him to the newspaper's offices in search of discarded newsprint and other paper. "The office," he says, "had a few chairs and desks, a printer and a computer. But after the editor's death, his assistants stopped coming and soon, every piece of furniture and appliance was stolen," Mistri adds, with a shake of his head.
Chen Yao Hua, the president of the Chinese Association of India, has grown up with a copy of the newspaper, fresh off the press, every morning. He says there has been intermittent talk in the community of the need to revive the paper, now that the pandemic had died down. But the lack of a robust Mandarin-educated workforce keeps the future of the paper in limbo, he says. "We are not finding suitable people who can continue the paper because the Chinese population in Tangra is rapidly dwindling and most of the few youths who are still here cannot neither read nor write Chinese," he tells TOI.
Chen also asked the late editor's assistant, Helen Yang, to cultivate a fresh group of recruits for the paper by teaching them Mandarin, as she used to give tuitions in Mandarin for children from the community. The plans never took off, perhaps partly because the Tangra population, too, has transformed into a majority Hakka Chinese community, for whom a Mandarin newspaper holds little value.
Chelsea McGill, a Kolkata-based researcher, says the newspaper had been started as a "form of resistance" after the Indian Chinese community was let out of the prison camp in Rajasthan's Deoli, referring to the forced relocation and incarceration of 3,000 Chinese-Indians in an internment camp during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. "Since 1962, there had been a government ban on the import of Chinese type, so originally the paper was published the old-fashioned way - by carving the characters from wooden blocks. It later upgraded to laser printing," McGill adds.
