Fang

[Joseph Tracy]

Just read a sad, insightful  and artful article by Richard Rodriguez  
about the decline of newspapers. He sketches  the history of the news  
biz in San Francisco to develop his thoughts. One fact that may be  
coincidental but is interesting is the role of the Fang family, who  
started Asian Week in 1979 and bought and ran the Examiner when  
Hearst bought the Chronicle. Information about the Fang Family is  
very scarce considering their prominence in SF politics, serious  
wealth and role in 2 newspapers. In the 60's he published papers for  
the Kuomintang. In the 70s he seemed to have been publishing  
"Chinatown Handy Guide"s in major cities with chinatowns. That would  
certainly include LA.
Interestingly the KMT was a major player in opium distribution which  
after after retreating to Taiwan was shifted from Sichuan &Yunnan to  
Burma where they had a stronghold from fighting Japan In Burma. This  
expanded to Laos &Thailand and the region became the Golden Triangle.  
They also continue to retain a lucrative publishing biz in  
China.                                                                   
                                                                         
                                                                         
                         In late 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang  
up in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge,  
and unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the  
United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies of  
heroin, America's total number of addicts skyrocketed. H
Here's another interesting tidbit connected to the themes and players  
in our little drama.

In 1971, Newsday published a lengthy series that focused on the  
financial relationships of Senator Smathers, President Nixon and Mr.  
Rebozo, particularly on Florida land deals. Mr. Nixon withdrew from  
one project in 1970 and Newsday said he had realized a huge profit  
from his Fisher's Island dealings.

Also here is an interesting link between Gold, funny money, and the  
KMT from wikipedia
"Second, the KMT government proved thoroughly unable to manage the  
economy, allowing hyperinflation to result. Among the most despised  
and ineffective efforts it undertook to contain inflation was the  
conversion to the gold standard for the national treasury and the  
Gold Standard Script (traditional Chinese: 金圓券; pinyin: jīn  
yuán quàn) in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold,  
silver, and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals and  
foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold Standard Script  
in exchange. The new script became worthless in only ten months and  
greatly reinforced the nationwide perception of KMT as a corrupt or  
at best inept entity."

This from RRodriguez


"But in 1999, the founding publisher’s posthumous grip was pried  
loose by a majority vote of family members to sell. At that time, the  
Hearst Corporation was desirous of reclaiming the San Francisco  
market. Hearst paid $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San  
Francisco Chronicle.

To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department, the Hearst  
Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco Examiner to the  
politically connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek, the oldest  
and largest English-language Asian-American newspaper. The Hearst  
Corporation paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the  
Examiner. Florence Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor’s  
chair. Within a year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang  
threatened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold the  
Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur from Colorado  
who deflated William Randolph Hearst’s “Monarch of the Dailies”  
to a freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the  
street twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San  
Francisco municipal buses."

Lost source on Fang

He (John Fang)came to San Francisco in 1952 to study "everything" at  
UC-Berkeley. His dream was making it big in the white-dominated  
newspaper business.

Instead of getting a master's degree in journalism, however, he  
founded the Grant Printing House (community-based print shopt) then  
began working at the Chinese Daily Post and Young China Daily News  
newspapers - both organs of the Kuomintang, Taiwan's then-ruling  
Nationalist Party. While on a trip back to Taiwan, he married  
Florence Fang in 1960.

Capitalizing on the fact that Chinatowns were becoming tourist  
attractions, John Fang began publishing "Chinatown Handy Guide"  
booklets in major cities.

In 1979, he started the family's newspaper dynasty by founding  
AsianWeek, an English-language tabloid aimed at Asian American  
communities.

Acquiring San Francisco’s Examiner, the once notoriously anti- 
Chinese Hearst-owned newspaper via its support of the Chinese  
exclusion act and the Japanese internment camp during World War II,  
is a major step in a history of success for the Fang Family. It made  
Florence and her three sons - James, Ted and Douglas) the first Asian  
Americans to own a major daily newspaper in the United States.