Kevin Sinclair (journalist)

Sinclair was born in Thornton, Wellington, New Zealand, to 16-year-old Margaret Hocking of Cornish extraction and a mixed Polynesian father who left, never to return, when he was three. A decade later, his mother remarried, and Sinclair did not get along with his stepfather. It was with some relief that, upon completing high school, he left home to take up an opening as a labourer-cadet with the Forestry Service at the age of 16.^{[1]: 35–41} At 14, he was deeply affected by Edgar Snow's glowing 1937 account of the Chinese Communist Party, Red Star Over China, later rating it the book that most influenced his outlook.^{[1]: 43–44}

Sinclair started as a 16-year-old copy boy at the Wellington Evening Post and then The Dominion for a year. Having left New Zealand in 1961, he lucked into his first job in Australia as the sole employee (and editor) of the south Queensland tourist-targeted rag, the Surfers Paradise Guide, and, by 1962, he was working as a reporter at Brisbane's The Telegraph. He spent a year crime reporting at Sydney's The Daily Telegraph from 1964, another year back at The Dominion, and then joined the sensationalist New Zealand Truth. He finally left his second stint at The Daily Telegraph to join The Star, another sensationalist tabloid, in Hong Kong, as news editor, in 1968. He arrived on the SS Oronsay in the spring of that year.^{[1]: 11, 19, 29, 44, 53, 55, 60, 73, 80, 90, 100}

Sinclair described the quality of his journalism in the 60s as "disgraceful" and "irresponsible" while taking to it with unbridled and unashamed alacrity.^{[1]: 111–112} The New Zealand Truth, where he had been a reporter, was a

training ground for generations of journalistic hoodlums, practised evaders of the truth and reporters who lived by skillful exaggeration and downright lies.^[1]: 114

On seeing out his two-year contract at The Star in 1970, he moved to the Hong Kong Standard as news editor.^[1]: 127 In 1972, he became news editor at the South China Morning Post, and, after a July 1978 demotion resulting from alcoholism,^{[1]: 172, 173} continued on in the newsroom till 1986, returning in 2003 to write for the Post's 100th anniversary publication, Post Impressions.^{[1]: 153, 166}

Sinclair was the author of some 24 books. His first, No Cure, No Pay: Salvage in the South China Seas was published by SCMP Books in 1981 and his last, Tell Me A Story: Forty Years of Newspapering in Hong Kong and China,^[2] also by SCMP Books, was published shortly before his death.

Sinclair was deeply distrustful of democracy for Hong Kong, believing that one man, one vote would turn it into a "give-it-away society". In 2007, Sinclair stated that he would "sooner vote for a rabid dog" than a democrat.^[1]: 288 He scoffed at suggestions of future communist repression and the jailing of dissidents.^[1]: 287