World Journal - History

History

The newspaper began on February 12, 1976. Originally its headquarters were in Chinatown, Manhattan. The headquarters has been located in Whitestone, Queens since 1980.

The newspaper has the largest circulation among a Chinese American and Chinese Canadian readership. World Journal is owned by the same media conglomerate that runs the United Daily News in Taiwan and is mostly run by Taiwanese Americans. Until the mid-1990s, it was viewed as very hostile to the People's Republic of China, in part because the paper referred to people from mainland China as "Communist Chinese." Furthermore, its coverage on mainland China usually comprised only one article or so each day out of dozens of pages and sections.

However, the newspaper has changed rather drastically ever since it began increasing its coverage of mainland China. Following the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, coverage increased to two pages each day. A rapid shift to neutralism also occurred in the early 1990s as part of an attempt to expand its readership to recently arrived Chinese immigrants, most of whom left the mainland after the expansion of access to green cards following the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. The other reason for the rapid shift was rooted in the newspaper's sympathy to the Chinese democracy movement. The shift was further strengthened during mid-1990s in part due to the new wave of mainland Chinese immigrants to North America and in part due to political developments in Taiwan, where multi-party elections have been allowed.

Like its parent the United Daily News, the World Journal is widely seen as taking an editorial line that favors the pan-Blue coalition and the Kuomintang. It also opposes the Taiwanese independence ideology of the pan-Green coalition. Consequently, this editorial position has made it much less hostile toward the People's Republic since the 1990s. Immediately after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, the newspaper no longer referred indiscriminately to all mainland Chinese as "Communist Chinese," and additionally praised pro-democracy efforts on the mainland. During the mid-1990s, it began to give credit to the positive progress made in mainland China, and by the late-1990s, it began to criticize wrongdoings within the Chinese democracy movement and in the West in the same manner with which it criticizes corruption within the Chinese communist regime. After 2000, there has also been a marked increase in the representation of mainland Chinese immigrants on the newspaper's reporting staff. The anti-Taiwan independence editorial positions that the paper has taken have also made it popular among mainland Chinese immigrants to the United States.