Tung Hsien-kuang (9 November 1887-), known as Hollington Tong, American-trained journalist and biographer of Chiang Kai-shek who served during the Sino-Japanese war as vice minister of information at Chungking and a principal source of news for Western correspondents stationed there. Tong served as Chinese Nationalist ambassador in Japan from 1952 to 1956 and in the United States from 1956 to 1958.

Born into a family of some means in Yinhsien, Chekiang, Hollington Tong received his early education at a missionary school in Soochow. He remained a devout Presbyterian throughout his life. Tong later attended the Lowrie High School, the Shanghai High School, and Anglo- Chinese College, all of which were in Shanghai. In 1905 he taught at the Chien-chiu School in Ningpo, where one of his students was "a grave-minded, ambitious, unforgettable youth from near-by Chikow, named Chiang Kaishek." The two young men, who had been born less than a month apart, became friends. In 1906 Tong left Ningpo for Shanghai and a job at the Commercial Press.

Having decided to further his education abroad, Hollington Tong went to the United States in 1907, where he enrolled at Park College in Missouri. The following year, he transferred to the newly founded School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, from which he was graduated in 1912. He then became a member of the first class at the School of Journalism at Columbia University. Among Tong's 12 classmates was Carl W. Ackerman, who later became the school's dean. In New York, Tong also worked as a reporter on The New York Times and the World and as an assistant editor on the Independent.

Upon his return to China in 1913, Hollington Tong became the Peking correspondent for several Shanghai newspapers and, for a brief period, the English secretary of the Senate. After the so-called second revolution {see Li Lieh-chun), he was assistant editor of an English-language daily at Shanghai, the China Republican, which was owned by the Kuomintang. In 1914-16 he was again in Peking as editor of the English-language Peking Daily News. During this period, he also served as English secretary for the National Petroleum Administration and made a brief trip to the United States. In 1917 he became the Peking correspondent for the well-known Shanghai English-language weekly, Millard's Review (later the China Weekly Review) . A year later, he was promoted to assistant editor, though he continued to work in the Peking-Tientsin area. He also found time to serve as secretary to the Chihli river commission in 1918 and as adviser to Yang Yi-te (the Chihli police commissioner) and Chu Hsing-yuan (the Tientsin foreign affairs commissioner) in 1920.

In August 1920 Hollington Tong joined the ministry of communications in the Peking government as a junior adviser. Later that year, he was made executive secretary of the ministry's railway finance commission, and in May 1922 he was promoted to acting councillor of the ministry. He became secretary to Admiral Y. L. Woo, then minister of communications, in 1923. For his services to the ministry, he was awarded three decorations by the Peking government in 1923: the third class Chia-ho, the second class Chia-ho, and the second class Tashou Paokuang. After leaving government service, he was editor of the Tientsin Yung-pao from 1925 to 1931. In 1926 he served briefly as foreign affairs adviser to Wu P'ei-fu (q.v.), and in 1929-30 he accompanied Admiral Tu Hsikuei on a world inspection tour as his English secretary.

By this time, the Kuomintang had succeeded in unifying most of China through the Northern Expedition, and the center of political activity had shifted from Peiping in the north to the Nanking-Shanghai area in the lower Yangtze valley. Accordingly, in 1931 Hollington Tong accepted an offer to become managing editor of a Shanghai English-language daily, the China Press. Though founded by Wu T'ing-fang (q.v.) and controlled by Chinese interests, the paper had an American registration. Tong secured the services of such active and promising young American reporters as Tillman Durdin and Harold Isaacs. In mid- 1931 he was made managing director of the paper. He held that post until 1935, when he became managing director of a group which had acquired a controlling interest in four journalistic enterprises in Shanghai: the China Press, the Shih-shih hsinpao [China times], the Ta-wan pao, and the Shun Shih News Agency.

In 1935 W. H. Donald, an Australian correspondent who had been an adviser to Chang Hsueh-liang (q.v.) and who then was an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, informed Tong of Chiang's wish that Tong become chief censor of all outgoing foreign press messages. Donald appealed to Tong's patriotism, pointing out that "inefficient press censorship was responsible for an increasingly bad press abroad." Accordingly, Tong agreed to undertake this function, assuming the title of secretary of the Military Affairs Commission's Shanghai office. When the Sino-Japancse war began in July 1937, it soon became clear that in addition to the fighting on the battlefronts, a war of international publicity had to be fought. Thus, when the Military Affairs Commission was reorganized to cope with wartime needs, Tong was appointed vice minister of its fifth board, which was responsible for national and international publicity. While hostilities still were going on in the Shanghai area, Tong took the initiative to form an anti- Japanese committee in the International Settlement to publicize the Chinese cause. It was composed of C. L. Hsia (principal of Anglo- Chinese Medhurst College), Wen Yuan-ning (later Chinese ambassador to Greece), Herman Liu (Liu Chan-en, q.v.), and H. J. Timperley (correspondent of the Manchester Guardian). After Shanghai fell to the Japanese late in 1937, Hsia went to the United States, Wen went to Hong Kong, and Timperley went to Great Britain to take charge of overseas information operations under Tong's direction. Liu remained in Shanghai, where he was assassinated, probably by Japanese agents, on 7 April 1938.

Toward the end of 1937, Tong's department was transferred to the ministry of information. Tong then became vice minister of information, a post he held for the rest of the war. He set up a modest office at Hankow with a staff of 20-30 people and appointed the veteran newspaperman Tseng Hsü-pai as his deputy. The few foreign correspondents who had followed the National Government to Hankow included Freda Utley, Agnes Smedley, Lily Abegg, John Gunther, and Tillman Durdin. Tong remained in Hankow for ten months. In addition to censorship and publicity functions, he was often called upon to handle tasks connected with other aspects of foreign relations. He was among the last of the National Government personnel to leave Hankow, which he did on the evening of 25 October 1938, as the Japanese troops were entering the city. He then made a ten-day hike to Changsha, where he operated a temporary office until headquarters could be established for him at the wartime capital of Chungking. As the war developed, more foreign correspondents were drawn to Chungking. Early in 1939 Hollington Tong conceived the idea of building a press hostel to accommodate foreign correspondents. He obtained a small grant from H. H. K'ung (q.v.) and built a simple dormitory consisting of 13 rooms. The popularity of "Holly's Hotel" increased as Japanese bombings reduced accommodations elsewhere. Among those who spent time at this hostel were Brooks Atkinson, Theodore H. White, Spencer Moosa, and Tillman Durdin. In speaking of this period, Durdin said that Tong was "without official stuffiness or arrogance. He was always approachable. In Chungking, correspondents could get him out of bed at 4 in the morning to argue a point of censorship or check up on a news story, and he would show no impatience. He lived with his wife in a little plaster-walled cabin in the same compound as the correspondents' hostel. . . . He was indefatigable in getting facilities and interviews for correspondents." In addition to working with the Kuomintang Central News Agency (see Hsiao T'ung-tzu) to furnish the foreign correspondents with news dispatches, Tong's department published a general magazine entitled China at War and maintained the radio station XGOY, which was operated by Mike Peng (P'eng Lo-shan). Tong's efforts helped draw to Chungking such important American visitors as the publishers Roy Howard and Henry R. Luce.

In the course of the war years, Tong took three trips abroad. In February 1942 he accompanied Chiang Kai-shek on a two-week trip to India for discussions with Gandhi and Nehru. He accompanied Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling, q.v.) on her November 1942-June 1943 visit to the United States. And in November 1943 he was included in Chiang Kai-shek's entourage at the Cairo Conference.

While in the United States, Tong held discussions with his old Columbia classmate, Carl W. Ackerman, who had become dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, about establishing a training school for journalists at Chungking. With the assistance of Columbia University, a two-part program was established in 1943. Four journalists were employed by the United States Department of State and sent to Chungking to serve as guest experts in information agencies; one of the four was Floyd Taylor, who later became head of the American Press Institute. The second part of the program was the establishment of a Chinese-administered school of journalism at Chungking with an American staff. Harold Livingston Cross, then professor of newspaper law at the School of Journalism, went on leave to serve in 1943-44 as the Chungking school's dean. His teaching staff of four (later increased to seven) included Richard T. Baker, who in 1968 became acting dean of the School of Journalism. The Chungking school, which was affiliated with the Central Political Institute, trained more than 60 young journalists before it suspended operations in the summer of 1945. Dean Ackerman's 1945 report on the Chungking school spoke of its achievements "in helping the State Department's cultural cooperation program in China, in breaking down the hesitancy of Chinese officialdom to give out information and news, in spreading the gospel of freedom of the press, in teaching the responsibilities of men and women engaged in journalistic enterprises, and in training young Chinese to follow American methods in collecting and disseminating news through newspapers and by radio." Thus, the Chungking journalism school helped realize Hollington Tong's ambitions for Chinese journalism. In recognition of his wartime achievements, Tong was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang in 1945. After a short respite from official life, he assumed office as director of the Executive Yuan's government information office in 1947. The following year, he became minister without portfolio in the Executive Yuan. When the Chinese Communists won control of the mainland, he moved to Taiwan. From 1950 to 1952 he was managing director of the Broadcasting Corporation of China and a member of the Kuomintang Central Advisory Committee. He then spent four years as ambassador to Japan. From April 1956 until September 1958 he was ambassador to the United States, where he was much in demand as a public speaker. On his retirement from public activity in 1958, Chiang Kai-shek appointed him a senior adviser to the presidential office in Taiwan. Tong remained in Taiwan until 1961, when he came to the United States for a Moral Rearmament conference. He suffered a stroke and, after partial recuperation, went to live with a daughter in California.

Hollington Tong was married to Sally Chao (Chao Hsiang-ying), and they had three sons and three daughters. The youngest son died in an airplane crash in 1960.

The best known of Hollington Tong's published works in English are the authorized biography Chiang Kai-shek, Soldier and Statesman (1937) and Dateline: China (1950), an account of Tong's experience during the war years. Tung K'ang T. Shou-ching H. Sung-fen chu-jen & A