Chip Tsao, born Tso Chik in Hong Kong on 17 August 1958 and also writing as Yang Fei-kip and Jiang Yijiao, is a Hong Kong writer and media figure with ancestral roots in Guiping, Guangxi, known for essays that contrast East and West with humour and satire and nicknamed 'the first wit of Hong Kong'; the media have also grouped him with Lin Xi, Leung Man-tao and Stephen Chan as a new 'four great talents of Hong Kong'. Raised near Morrison Hill Road in Wan Chai, he began publishing as a schoolboy and won the 1976 territory-wide secondary school essay competition with 'Elegy of a House', after which he sent pieces to papers under several pen names and moved into the media. He left for Britain at seventeen, took a BA in English literature at the University of Warwick, studied international relations at the London School of Economics and spent eight years with the BBC while also serving as RTHK's London correspondent, living in Britain for more than a decade. Invited back by the martial-arts novelist Jin Yong in 1991, he became deputy editor of Ming Pao's supplement and later held the same post at Wah Kiu Yat Po and was political editor of the English-language Eastern Express. His columns ran for years in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and am730, and he long hosted Commercial Radio's talk programme Above the Skies, which ran for about twenty-two years and ended in January 2026. His essay collection The Thames won the third Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature in the prose category, and he has published many collections of essays, fiction and travel writing. He moved to Britain in 2021.
Tsao built a personal style on cross-cultural essays and barbed commentary, carrying British literary learning into Hong Kong's newspaper columns; his long-running radio programme Above the Skies shaped a generation's sense of public debate, and a literary award confirmed his standing as a writer.
Achievements
- 1976 · Won the territory-wide secondary school essay competition with 'Elegy of a House'
- 1991 · Returned to Hong Kong at Jin Yong's invitation as deputy editor of Ming Pao's supplement
- 2021 · Moved to Britain