Mark Clifford

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Mark L. Clifford is the Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post, the leading English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. He has held this position since February 2006. From January 2004 until his appointment to head the SCMP, Clifford served as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Standard, a rival Hong Kong English-language daily newspaper. Clifford is an experienced business journalist specializing in Asia. He began his career in 1987 with a job in Seoul for the Far Eastern Economic Review and held a number of positions with that magazine, including Business Editor, before leaving to join BusinessWeek in 1995. At BusinessWeek, Clifford served as Hong Kong Bureau Chief and later as Asia Regional Editor where he oversaw the magazine's coverage of 20 countries in the Far East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

Clifford generated controversy early in his tenure at the South China Morning Post after a November 2006 incident in which he fired two SCMP copy-editors for what he believed to be a vulgar joke. The two editors had been involved in creating a "leaving page", or a spoof front page of a newspaper containing inside jokes that is traditionally given to departing colleagues and not intended for public circulation. In this case, the page was intended as a gift to Niall Fraser, an editor Clifford had recently dismissed, and was headlined “You’re a c**t, but you’re a good c**t” (written with the asterisks intact). About a third of the Post's editorial staff signed a petition urging the paper's owners to reinstate the copy-editors Clifford had fired. Clifford was widely criticized by journalists worldwide for his handling of the incident.

Clifford is the author of several books, including China and the WTO: Changing China, Changing World Trade (ISBN 0470820616), which he wrote in 2002 with former World Trade Organization Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi. He is also the co-author of the 1999 book Meltdown: Asia's Spectacular Boom and Devastating Bust (ISBN 0735201412) and the sole author of Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats, and Generals in South Korea (ISBN 0765601400), which was revised in 1998.

An American by nationality, Clifford is an alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, and also attended Simon's Rock College of Bard for one year.