Shum Kim-chi (1929 – 20 March 2019), who wrote under the pen name Hung Choi-chai, was a former editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong Economic Journal, a veteran music critic and a writer. Born in the Shanghai foreign concessions, he fled the Japanese invasion to Hong Kong with his family in 1938, attending Ling Tung primary school and then Diocesan Boys' School; after the fall of Hong Kong he returned to Shanghai with his parents. His mother, Tsar Teh-yun, was a guqin player, and his father a returned student sent to the United States from the Tsinghua school. Graduating from St John's University in 1949, he worked at Hong Kong trading houses while studying languages and the arts. From 1953 he wrote film reviews in the Ta Kung Pao under the pen name Siu Chi-ming, sharing the column with Cha Leung-yung (Jin Yong), who wrote as Yiu Ka-yi. He joined Rediffusion in 1956 as a programme producer and helped prepare its television service; when RTV began broadcasting on 29 May 1957 he was master of ceremonies, and after the television programme supervisor resigned he became acting supervisor in charge of all programming. Leaving television, he joined the Sun Sun film enterprise as manager and director, then moved to Phoenix as a director, making several features, and translated the English subtitles of the Yue-opera film Dream of the Red Chamber, earning praise in the film world. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966 he left cinema for the Hong Kong government, helping found the Hong Kong Productivity Council, and from 1968 was posted to the Asian Productivity Organisation in Tokyo, earning an MBA and a doctorate in international economics whose thesis made the dean's honour list, during some eighteen years in Japan. In 1986, at Lam Hang-chi's invitation, he returned to edit the Hong Kong Economic Journal through the run-up to 1997. He retired in 1996 and settled in San Francisco, where he died on 20 March 2019 aged ninety. His memoir records the cultural changes of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Japan in the mid and late twentieth century.
Shum Kim-chi helped launch Hong Kong's first television service and shaped its early programming, then spent more than a decade editing the Hong Kong Economic Journal, setting a more rigorous professional standard for the city's financial press in the 1980s and 1990s. His music criticism and memoir record the cultural worlds of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Achievements
- 1956 · Joined Rediffusion as a programme producer and helped prepare the launch of RTV television.
- 1957 · Was master of ceremonies when RTV television began broadcasting, then became acting programme supervisor.
- 1986 · Returned to Hong Kong at Lam Hang-chi's invitation to become editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong Economic Journal.