6 - (Un)Covering Cosmopolitan Hybridity: Every Great City Deserves a City Magazine

Summary

Thanks to these magazines, I can consume a city like any other packaged product.

Abstract

Among the many popular print media in Hong Kong, City Magazine was considered an outlier that showcased fashion trends, celebrities, talk of the town, and even philosophy and literature. Co-founders Koon-Chung Chan and Peter Dunn, among others, also wrote pop fiction that exhibited a new metropolitan sensibility of the emerging class of yuppies. This chapter considers how this magazine defined the fashionable and cosmopolitan taste of the city throughout the 1980s and beyond. All in all, this chapter uses the magazine as an example to explore Hong Kong's “cosmopolitan hybridity” – to borrow Allen Chun's term – in the context of Hong Kong pop cultures in the 1980s.

Keywords: magazine covers, yuppie, urban literature, middle class, paradigm shift

Birth of a City Magazine

In the 1970s, Hong Kong gradually developed into a cosmopolitan city as a result of its rapid economic growth. As the media and entertainment industry grew exponentially in Hong Kong in this decade of changes, there were more and more channels for multimedia stardom. Rising stars spawned new trends among fans who emulated their styles – from fashion to hairstyles – and increased demand for cultural industries products and consumption goods offered new opportunities for magazine journalism. Although there were some magazines such as Ming Pao Weekly and youth journals such as The Chinese Student Weekly and The 70's Biweekly, Hong Kong was yet to have a city magazine at that time. ‘City and regional magazines have always fitted uncomfortably into traditional imaginings of magazine journalism,’ as noted by Miglena Sternadori and Susan Currie Sivek, and ‘their function often is to promote a positive image of their areas and construct a cheerful local identity – comfortable environs for both readers and advertisers.’ Seeing a niche market opportunity, young pioneers Koon-Chung Chan (aka John Chan), Peter Dunn, Henry Wu, and Joseph Yau founded a city magazine originally entitled The Tabloid [Haowai] in September 1976.

According to Chan, the idea to produce The Tabloid could be traced back to The Chinese Student Weekly, The 70's Biweekly, and The Youth Weekly. Influenced by the ‘counter-culture’ of those publications, The Village Voice and other similar publications left a deep impression on Chan while pursuing further studies in Boston in 1974.