Background
Mr. S. P. Hung was born in Hongkong in 1892.
Mr. S. P. Hung was born in Hongkong in 1892.
Mr. Hung studied English in Queen’s College at the place of his birth. In 1910 he went to Peking and entered the College of Communications, a government institution in the Capital.
In August of 1911 Mr. Hung became translator and reporter for the Associated Press in Peking. In 1912 he became assistant correspondent in Peking of the Chicago Daily News. In 1914 he was reporter for Reuter’s Agency in the Capital and was transferred to Tianjin after the war broke out in Europe.
In 1914 he became translator and reporter for Reuter’s Tientsin Agency and the Peking and Tientsin Times and illustrator and artist of the China Illustrated Weekly and the Tianjin Press. In 1917 the Chinese Peking and Tianjin Times was established, and Mr. Hung acted concurrently as managing editor of that paper. In April of 1921 he attended the Press Conference of the Far East in Tokyo. While in Japan he succeeded in sectoring assistance of the Japanese press in putting an end to the Japanese morphine traffic in China. The Japan Times and Mail in one of its April issues stated: “It was partly through Mr. Hung’s efforts that a black list was published in the English and Chinese newspapers in China, containing the names of dealers, Japanese and others, who helped to carry on this deadly traffic which resulted in the death of 100,000 people in China every year.”
Mr. Hung attributed his anti-Japanese attitude to the Japanese merchants in China secretly trafficing in opium and said: “Out of every hundred known opium smugglers, 93 are Japanese while statistics reveal 100,000 victims of this traffic annually. If this trade continues several hundred years more, one-fourth of the whole Chinese population will perish.”