Last of the China Coast Newsmen

A memorial is being held next week for the life of journalist, editor and author Kevin Sinclair. It will be a big one.
The doyen of Hong Kong’s press corps was the last upholder of the tradition of China Coast journalism, standing in the lineage of men like Richard Hughes, Graham Jenkins and Austin Coates.
Tell Me A Story, Kevin’s memoir, was completed just two weeks before his death at the age of 64 on December 23, and it tells of a place and a profession that have since changed utterly. It’s imperfectly written, but all the more compelling for that. These are, after all, the words of man who knew he had weeks, maybe days, to live. And it’s all in there—his impoverished upbringing as the offspring of a 16-year-old single mother; his accidental entry into journalism (a juvenile court in his native New Zealand referred him to a menial job on a local paper to keep him out of trouble); his descent into alcoholism; and his seeming endless struggles with cancer, which he faced six times in thirty years. The fact that book has appeared at all tells you everything you need to know about the man’s character.
Kevin was disliked by Hong Kong’s liberal intelligentsia, who depicted him as a barking, right-wing grump. He had a gruff, pugnacious writing style, and championed deeply un-modish things like law and order. But on re-reading his work, it strikes me that posterity will see him rather differently. Here was a man who chanced upon a library copy of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China at the age of 14, and developed from that a lifelong passion for China. From the moment he arrived in Hong Kong in his 20s, he refused to inhabit the comfy confines of Western media circles, or to subscribe to their patronizing stereotypes of Chinese people and society. In later life, he became a foremost authority on the village culture of Hong Kong’s New Territories, and the only English-language journalist to achieve any sort of profile among the Chinese population. Most Western journalists in Hong Kong never learn to speak Cantonese. Kevin insisted on speaking it despite a tracheotomy at the age of 33.
The two compatriots were poles apart politically, but in his attitudes to China Kevin was a latter-day Rewi Alley, and a love for China courses through his writing. They really don’t make them like Kevin anymore. Hong Kong is a smaller place for his passing.