Chinese Journals Discard Up-Down for Left-Right Reading in US

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Chinese Journals Discard Up-Down for Left-Right Reading in US

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Chinese Journals Discard Up-Down for Left-Right Reading in U.S.

The world of Chinese-language newspapers in America has been turned upside down. Actually, it is just the text that has been completely flipped and reversed, although that has made for plenty of confusion all the same.

Within the last few months, the country's biggest Chinese-language dailies, all based in New York, have radically altered their printing formats. Instead of hewing to the decades-old tradition of printing the text vertically, from right side to left, the newspapers now read like their English-language counterparts with the text horizontal, from left side to right.

The newspapers also open up in reverse, so what used to be the front page is now the back page, and vice versa. And one daily paper has even abandoned traditional Chinese characters, so famously associated with ancient texts and paintings, in favor of the simplified ones that were introduced by Beijing in the 1950's.

Officially, the newspapers say that many practical reasons lie behind the changes. Chief among them are the ease of printing English terms like the critically important immigration law known as 245i, as well as an acknowledgment of New York's recent surge of immigrants from China, where newspapers are read horizontally, from left side to right.

But as hundreds of thousands of readers try to reorient themselves to a fundamental routine of their daily lives, the transition so far has been uneven, producing a range of visceral reactions to the new reading reality, one in which left is now right, horizontal is vertical and front is back. Some say that they feel liberated and are reading the newspaper again for the first time in years. Others, by contrast, speculate that a political conspiracy may be afoot to court Beijing at the expense of Chinese Taipei.

Still others say that their eyes hurt from trying to read the paper.

Appreciated another way, imagine the uproar if an American paper suddenly decided that all text would be printed from right to left and that columns would run horizontally instead of vertically. Or if newspapers in Hebrew or Arabic, which read from right to left, decided to do an about-face.

Any time a newspaper experiments with changes, be they graphic design, color photographs or new sections, complaints from readers are inevitable. But for many Chinese, the newspaper is an especially crucial and sensitive staple of life.

The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, used traditional characters in its overseas edition until about five years ago. But at least the text read from left to right.

In recent years, there has been a surge in immigrants from China, both the highly educated and the undocumented poor. And circulation figures, hard as they are to confirm, reflect such changes, with the biggest paper, World Journal, which is owned by a conglomerate of Taiwan province, claiming a readership that is now half from Taiwan and half from China's mainland.

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