Part 1: Origins and the Davies era (1946–1989)

The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) was founded in Hong Kong in 1946 with seed capital from the Kadoorie family, Jardines, and HSBC by Eric Halpern, a Viennese Jewish émigré who had worked for a business biweekly in Shanghai before the Chinese civil war (1927-1937, 1945-1950). Halpern decided that Hong Kong would be the stable English-language base for East Asian business news. Halpern’s bet — that a postwar East Asia would need a serious English-language journal of record — turned out to be one of the great calls in East Asian publishing.

The magazine’s identity, though, was built by Derek Davies, a Welsh ex-Foreign Office diplomat who took the editor’s chair in 1964 and held it for 25 years. Under Davies, the Review went from a niche Hong Kong newsletter to the most authoritative English-language source on East Asia. At its peak it had around 90,000 subscribers and roughly 80~100 editorial staff in 15 bureaus across the region — a larger East Asian reporting footprint than anything except the wire services. Its writers in that period included Nayan Chanda, David Bonavia, Bertil Lintner, Nate Thayer (who would later get the Pol Pot interview in 1997), and a long bench of veteran regional hands.

What made FEER different was structural and cultural, not just talented. Davies ran it like a federation of bureau chiefs rather than a head-office hierarchy. Correspondents were trusted to cultivate sources without American-style “you must have two on-record quotes” rules, which let them tap officials, military officers, and businesspeople who would talk only without attribution. Editorial autonomy was real. The magazine covered corruption, military politics, ethnic conflict, and corporate scandals at a depth no one else in the region matched, and it took book reviews and long essays seriously rather than as filler.

The Singapore campaigns

The price of that journalism was constant legal and political pressure, mainly from Lee Kuan Yew. In the late 1970s, Singapore correspondent Ho Kwon Ping was jailed under the Internal Security Act, made a televised confession, and was fined. Lee at various points accused Davies personally of participating in “a diabolical international Communist plot.” In 1987 Singapore “gazetted” the Review under press laws and cut its Singapore circulation from about 9,000 to 500 copies as punishment for coverage of detained Roman Catholic church workers. Davies finally stepped down in 1989 after losing a libel case to Lee directly.

This pressure was, paradoxically, evidence that FEER mattered. Authoritarian governments don’t sue irrelevant magazines.

The Dow Jones takeover and the 1992 inflection point

Dow Jones had been a minority shareholder since 1973. In 1987 it acquired the 51% stake held by the South China Morning Post and took full control. This is the structural problem that explains almost everything that followed: Dow Jones also published the Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ), launched in 1976, and the AWSJ competed directly with FEER for the same regional English-language business advertising. Dow Jones now owned both sides of that market — and as Bowring later put it bluntly, “It was corporate imperialism more than commercial sense which brought Dow Jones to buy control of the Review.”

Davies’s successor was Philip Bowring, a respected economics writer. He lasted three years. In 1992 he was forced out after editorial clashes with Karen Elliott House, then vice president (later president) of Dow Jones International. Bowring’s complaint, written years later, was that “people in New York thought they understood what the readers wanted more than those who were on the ground in Asia,” and that House tried to graft the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s conservative American pro-Western voice onto a magazine whose entire franchise was built on being none of that.

After Bowring, FEER cycled through several editors in a relatively short period. The “dumbing down” complaint — shorter pieces, more lifestyle, less hard political-economic reporting, more attempts to look like a glossy — was a real editorial shift. One editor described the result as a “snappy, happy, trend-conscious delight for the Internet age” designed to “lure readers who presumably don’t care about thoughtful coverage of politics and economics but do want to know which wine goes with which chili pepper.”

The conflict of interest becomes operational (2001)

In November 2001, Dow Jones merged the FEER and the Asian Wall Street Journal editorial operations. About 25% of combined headcount was cut, including roughly 36 editorial jobs. Equally important — and this is the part less appreciated — the ad sales teams were also merged. Two former senior correspondents later said that East Asian corporate clients told them that they couldn’t get the FEER ad team to return phone calls. The structural conflict (one sales force pitching two competing products to the same advertisers) resolved itself the way you’d predict: the daily newspaper won, the weekly magazine got starved.

This is the heart of the Bowring “killed by neglect” thesis, and it’s not really refutable on the sales side. Where former editors Plott and Vatikiotis pushed back was on editorial interference — they argued that Dow Jones didn’t impose top-down editorial mandates so much as simply preside over commercial mismanagement. Both can be true.

The regional ad market was collapsing anyway

However, there is important context that the “Dow Jones killed FEER” narrative tends to skip. The 2001 cull wasn’t just FEER. By 2001, technology had moved onward.

At the same time, Time Inc. shut down Asiaweek in December 2001, weeks after a costly relaunch. Asiaweek (founded in 1975 by ex-FEER staffers TJS George and Michael O’Neill) had been FEER’s main regional weekly competitor with a circulation of 120,000. Time, like Dow Jones, owned a conflicted competing title — Time Asia — and chose the American flagship’s regional edition over the locally-grown title. The South China Morning Post laid off 18 journalists. Hong Kong iMail cut roughly 100 of 140 staff. The East Asian financial crisis (1997–1998) had punctured regional advertising. Sept. 11 and the dotcom bust finished the job. The Economist diagnosed FEER’s specific commercial collapse as the moment when Western luxury brands stopped seeing East Asian elites as a distinct ad market worth a dedicated regional book.

So the period 2001–2004 represents both a structural advertising collapse for English-language regional print and the consolidation of two competing markets (Dow Jones with FEER/AWSJ; Time with Asiaweek/Time Asia) into single American flagships. The Financial Times entered East Asia properly with FT Asia in October 2003, into this same wreckage.

The monthly experiment (2004–2009)

In December 2004 FEER was relaunched as a monthly “journal of opinion.” Staff went from roughly 80 to five, with reportedly only two of them journalists. Articles were largely commissioned from outside specialists — economists, ex-officials, academics, etc. Hugo Restall, previously of the AWSJ editorial page, became editor. The result was respectable enough as a policy quarterly-style product (it won SOPA awards in 2002, 2003, 2005), but it was not a news magazine. It had no reporting capacity left.

The 2006 Singapore confrontation

The monthly’s most visible moment came in July and August 2006, when Restall published “Singapore’s ‘Martyr,’ Chee Soon Juan,” an essay framing the Singapore government’s use of defamation suits as a tool to suppress opposition and shield official corruption (it referenced the National Kidney Foundation scandal). Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong (his son) sued. Singapore’s Ministry of Information required FEER to appoint a local legal representative and post a SGD $200,000 bond (about SGD $306’000 in 2026, which is about USD $239’000 in 2026). When it didn’t comply by the deadline, Singapore revoked distribution rights in September 2006.

In September 2008 the Singapore High Court ruled by summary judgment that FEER and Restall had defamed both Lees. FEER appealed and lost in October 2009. Damages were assessed later. The Columbia Journalism School case study on this episode is interesting because it shows Dow Jones legal counsel weighing FEER’s defense against the company’s much larger Singapore business interests — AWSJ readers, advertisers, and a printing plant. The structural conflict ran all the way to litigation strategy.

News Corp and the formal burial

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp completed the $5 billion-plus acquisition of Dow Jones in December 2007, ending Bancroft family control. Karen Elliott House had retired in March 2006, so the final shutdown is not directly hers. News Corp’s announced strategy was to push the WSJ brand internationally — Robert Thomson became publisher, Les Hinton CEO. The Asian Wall Street Journal continued; FEER, by then a five-person monthly losing the Singapore litigation, did not fit anywhere in that plan.

In September 2009 Dow Jones announced FEER would cease with the December 2009 issue. The stated reasons were declining readership and ad revenue; the company said the savings would “catapult the company’s growth in the burgeoning Asian marketplace.” Jonathan Manthorpe’s response was the obvious one: a magazine in vegetative state since 2004 with five employees was not generating savings that catapulted anything. The title was not sold despite reported outside interest — that, more than the shutdown itself, is what former editors found unforgivable.

What the English-language East Asia print market looks like now (2010s–2020s)

The post-2009 landscape is essentially what the 2001–2004 consolidation produced. The WSJ Asia (Asian Wall Street Journal was rebranded The Wall Street Journal Asia in 2005) continued in print but the print edition was shut down in 2017, replaced by a digital-only regional product. Time Asia continues as the East Asian edition of the US flagship. The Financial Times has built probably the most credible East Asia coverage among the global papers, particularly through the Lex column and through its desks in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore. FT Confidential Research and Nikkei Asia (after Nikkei bought the FT in 2015) have emerged as the closest functional replacement for what FEER did — Nikkei Asia in particular reads in places like a successor publication.

Beyond that: Bloomberg has built out a serious East Asia operation; Reuters covers the region; the South China Morning Post under Alibaba’s ownership (since 2015) has moved between credible and constrained depending on the year and the topic. The Economist still does East Asia modestly well at the level of single articles, but it doesn’t pretend to have bureau depth and its Oxbridge inbreeding often exposes bias. Caixin in China and various national English-language outlets (The Hindu, Korea Times, Bangkok Post; Jakarta Post especially) fill national niches. Hong Kong’s English-language press has been hollowed out post-2020 by the National Security Law — Apple Daily folded in 2021, Stand News in 2021, and SCMP self-censorship has visibly tightened. The regional English-language news weekly as a category — the Davies-era proposition — is essentially extinct.

Verdict on the “destroyed” framing

The honest reading is that FEER was killed by three converging things, not one:

The structural problem was Dow Jones owning a direct competitor and refusing for two decades to either resolve the conflict cleanly (by selling FEER to someone who could run it as a standalone) or commit to it (by killing AWSJ and consolidating into FEER). Instead it did the worst available thing — merged the sales force, starved the weaker title, and let it die slowly while keeping the trademark caged.

The personal problem was Karen Elliott House’s specific decisions between 1992 and 2004 — removing Bowring, churning editors, pushing an editorial voice that misread the regional market, and overseeing the 2001 merger and 2004 monthly conversion. Bowring’s “death by a thousand cuts” line has a real basis. Plott and Vatikiotis’s defense — that this was broader business mismanagement, not editorial interference — softens but doesn’t refute it.

The structural-environmental problem is that the East Asian English-language ad market for regional weeklies collapsed in 2001–2004 and never came back. Asiaweek went the same year FEER was merged; no regional weekly survived. Even a hypothetically independent FEER under heroic management would have had to reinvent its business model, probably as a digital subscription product like The Economist today or a B2B intelligence service like the Economist Intelligence Unit or FT Confidential. Whether it could have done that with its existing cost structure is genuinely uncertain.

So: Dow Jones (and, in the final administrative act, News Corp) killed FEER, yes. But the magazine’s particular form — 80 reporters, 15 bureaus, a weekly news magazine selling to East Asian business elites via luxury-brand advertising — was already a dying species by 2001. The crime is that it was killed badly, by an owner with a conflict of interest, when it might have been sold to someone who could have salvaged the franchise into something. Nikkei Asia today is roughly what FEER could have become.

Part 2: The original Asia Times (1995–1997)

Sondhi Limthongkul, the Thai media tycoon behind the Manager Group, launched Asia Times in Bangkok on Dec. 6, 1995, as an English-language regional broadsheet, with an initial $20 million investment and plans to spend $40 million more. The explicit pitch was to build a pan-Asia daily as a regional rival to the Asian Wall Street Journal — note that this was the period when FEER had just been hollowed out under Karen Elliott House and Bowring had been forced out (1992). The market gap was visible.

Initial print run was 30,000 copies, distributed five days a week across Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong via satellite-printing arrangements. It hired internationally, paid well, and produced credible regional coverage for about 18 months. The paper folded in mid-1997 — literally the week before the Thai baht devaluation kicked off the East Asian financial crisis. Sondhi’s wider business empire effectively collapsed alongside it.

[Side Note: Sondhi himself went in a strange direction afterward. He became a leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (the “Yellow Shirts”), helped destabilize the Thaksin government in 2005–2006, was a central figure in the 2008 airport occupations, and survived an assassination attempt in 2009 (over 100 rounds fired into his car). He’s a controversial figure in modern Thai politics. That’s relevant background for anyone evaluating Asia Times’ lineage, though the current publication is several owners removed from him.]

Asia Times Online (1999 onward)

In early 1999 a group of journalists from the defunct print paper relaunched as a web-only operation at atimes.com, claiming the same editorial DNA. This was an early entry in East Asian English-language digital publishing — well ahead of most peers. It built a niche audience for contrarian geopolitics, particularly on US-China relations and the post-9/11 strategic environment. The “Spengler” column (David P. Goldman, writing pseudonymously then) became a signature feature.

In March 2015 ownership changed: Goldman, Uwe von Parpart, and others took over from Sondhi’s group. In October 2016 they relaunched with a new design and with Parpart as editor-in-chief. In February 2019 they dropped “Online” from the name, moved to asiatimes.com, and added a Simplified Chinese (Mandarin) edition. The current operation is registered as Asia Times Holdings Limited in Hong Kong, with newsrooms in Bangkok and Hong Kong and bureaus in Seoul, Beijing, Singapore, and New York.

The actual FEER-to-Asia Times link

The clearest case is Shawn Crispin, currently managing editor at Asia Times. He was FEER’s Bangkok bureau chief 1999–2004, then ran the AWSJ Bangkok bureau from 2001 (during the merged-editorial period). He won SOPA’s Excellence in Magazines award in 2004 for FEER’s AIDS coverage; he was on a Thai government deportation blacklist in 2002 alongside FEER colleague Rodney Tasker and editor Michael Vatikiotis. He doubles as the Committee to Protect Journalists’ senior Southeast Asia representative. He is essentially running a FEER-style Southeast Asia desk inside Asia Times.

However, it’s worth being precise: there was no wholesale FEER staff migration to Asia Times. Most of the FEER diaspora went elsewhere. Crispin is the most prominent FEER alumnus inside Asia Times, but the bulk of Asia Times’ lineage comes from the original 1995 Bangkok project plus later additions, not from FEER.

The actual direct FEER successor: Asia Sentinel

If you’re looking for the publication that most explicitly inherits FEER’s editorial mission, it’s Asia Sentinel, founded in Hong Kong in August 2006 by four journalists, with Philip Bowring — yes, the same Bowring who Karen Elliott House forced out of FEER in 1992 — as co-founder and consultant editor. Editor-in-Chief John Berthelsen is a former AWSJ correspondent in five countries and former managing editor of the Hong Kong Standard. Other co-founders included A. Lin Neumann (ex-Standard executive editor, ex-CPJ Asia representative).

The pitch in Bowring’s own words was that the retrenchments of regional weeklies (FEER, Asiaweek) had created a structural gap that internet publishing could fill cheaply. Asia Sentinel has twice won SOPA’s top award for investigative and interpretive reporting (2013, 2014). In 2017 it moved its legal entity from Hong Kong to California — note the timing, before the National Security Law but after Hong Kong’s media environment had visibly tightened. It runs on a subscription-plus-advertising model, five free articles a month for non-subscribers. The reporting is uneven (it had to issue a public apology to former Indonesian President SBY in 2018 over a poorly-sourced story), but the editorial DNA — adversarial, regional, willing to take on Singapore and Malaysian governments — is recognizably the Davies-Bowring lineage.

The other contemporary FEER-tradition publications

By function rather than direct lineage, the current ecosystem looks roughly like this:

Nikkei Asia is the closest functional successor in scale and ambition. Launched as Nikkei Asian Review in November 2013, rebranded Nikkei Asia in September 2020, now backed by Nikkei’s 2015 acquisition of the Financial Times. It has serious bureau depth across the region, deep business coverage, and a deliberately East Asia-centric editorial stance (“The Voice of the Asian Century”). Chief editor through much of its rise was Gwen Robinson, a former FT veteran with a long Bangkok career. Coverage is generally high quality, sometimes more cautious on Japan-related topics than on the rest of the region. Mainland China has accused it of anti-CCP bias, which is roughly the credential authoritarian governments used to award FEER. If you want one publication that reads like FEER reborn with a real chequebook, this is it.

The Diplomat (founded 2002 in Australia, now headquartered in Washington, DC) is the leading online journal of Asia-Pacific geopolitics and security, strong on strategic affairs, North Korea, South China Sea, and defence policy. It is less business-focused than FEER was; more think-tank-adjacent. Crispin has contributed to it as well.

South China Morning Post still has significant East Asia bureau depth and breaks real stories, but Alibaba ownership since 2015 and Hong Kong’s post-2020 political environment have visibly constrained its Mainland China coverage. It’s complicated to evaluate piece by piece.

Caixin Global is the English arm of Mainland China’s most credible financial publication. The Mainland China-only focus and the constraints of operating from inside the PRC make it a different proposition from FEER, but on Mainland Chinese corporate and financial reporting it’s frequently the best source available in English.

Rest of World (founded 2020, US-based) covers technology across the global south, including extensive East Asia coverage. Different editorial DNA — born digital, tech-focused — but quality long-form regional reporting.

Nikkei’s FT Asia coverage itself remains strong, particularly in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and there’s now real institutional overlap between the two via the 2015 acquisition.

For Hong Kong itself, the picture is grimmer. Apple Daily folded in June 2021 after the Jimmy Lai prosecution. Stand News folded in December 2021. Citizen News closed January 2022. Hong Kong Free Press continues but operates under visible pressure. The regional English-language journalism ecosystem that FEER anchored in Hong Kong from 1946 to 2009 is, as a Hong Kong-based proposition, mostly gone — which is why so much of the lineage has migrated to Singapore (Nikkei Asia’s editorial base), Tokyo, Bangkok, and to US-registered entities.

What you actually want to read

If you want the closest editorial heir to Davies-Bowring FEER: Asia Sentinel, with the caveat that it’s a smaller operation than its ambition. If you want serious regional business and political reporting at FEER’s old scale: Nikkei Asia. If you want strategic-affairs coverage: The Diplomat. If you want the Crispin-led Southeast Asia desk in something resembling the old FEER house style: Asia Times, accepting that the rest of the publication mixes commentary of variable quality (the Spengler-era contrarianism is still part of its identity) with the harder reporting.

The honest summary is that no single publication today has FEER’s combined business model — 80 reporters, 15 bureaus, weekly news magazine, regional advertising base. That model is dead. What’s replaced it is a fragmented set of digital publications, each carrying a piece of what FEER did, and the reader has to assemble the picture across three or four of them.

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Tags: fiction, history, writing