CHARLES NG: The Australian Chinese Daily is a Chinese language daily newspaper. The office and the printing are all in Sydney and it's distributed to most major cities all over Australia.

The Australian Chinese Daily was first published nineteenth March 1987. We started with a very humble old unit in Chinatown in Sydney with about fifteen people. But now we own our own premises and we have over sixty people, regular and fulltime working in the newspaper.

We are probably the largest Chinese daily newspaper. First of all is the editorial office. We have chief editor, we've got daily chief, we've got reporters and translators. Because it's bilingual we need to translate news articles from English to Chinese. We have typists who are specialising in typing Chinese languages.

Our advertising department actually needs to design ads for most of the advertisers because that's the way that we started. When we started most advertisers didn't know exactly how to design their ads.


Our news, information come from (sic) a few major areas. First of all is the AAP, Australian Associated Press, which is providing us major Australian news. All of them needs (sic) to be translated. But we only see like mostly news related to Chinese or Asian affairs. Secondly is news from China, the People's Republic of China. From Singwa and China news service, which we also subscribe it (sic). They are news from Taiwan, the central news agency and also some news that our cooperation with Hong Kong newspapers (sic).

The other important area is local Chinese community activity. Sydney and Melbourne and a few major cities have fifty or a hundred Chinese different community organisations - especially Sydney has a very wide range of Chinese communities. So our community news is become (sic) a very important item.


Weekdays we have about fifteen thousand print run and the weekend about twenty five thousand print run. Also interesting survey that shows that Chinese readers bringing the newspaper home and read by members of the family, our survey indicated each paper was readed (sic) by about two point eight person (sic). So the readership is very high.


The magazine is a free complimentary together with our weekend edition of the newspaper. And now we've developed into two copies and print it in colour. The most important feature is that every edition, one feature articles, and most of those feature article is relate to Australian affairs.

The newspaper start off, you know, a very small newspaper, probably about, like, four thousand copies daily and the Tiananmen incidents happened to be at the time we estimate about forty thousand students stay on in Australia and also they are very eager to know day to day events unfolding in China and the only newspaper who actually actively participate in the students' groups and activities and providing all the information on day to day basis were our paper. So that they become our readers.


Most important of all the paper, from four thousand jumped to ten thousand overnight because of Tiananmen incidents. So the student needs to follow up all the time and they become our loyal readers because it's constant need to monitor their situation.

Now the paper basically we have no editorial comments because Chinese readers could come from many different places - they are not just coming from China. They all grew up in different educational, social and political, economic backgrounds and for that reason our role is mainly to provide information and we don't have political stance.

We believe that the Chinese newspaper would continue for a long time to come. One of the elements is the exercise in multiculturalism. Secondly is that Asia is very vibrant, both economically and socially. The interaction between Australia and Asia is only increasing and the technology, the improvement of delivery of information and also there's the significant Chinese language schools for children, they seize the future of economic benefits for the children's career if they are bilingual. So I think that we will believe that the Chinese reading population will not diminish like in the past.