Author:  Laura Díaz-Esteve

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15433611

Publisher, editor, and journalist based in Shanghai who worked as a propagandist for the Spanish authorities of the Philippines during the 1896-1897 phase of the Filipino Revolution.

Henry David O’Shea was born into an Irish Catholic and Nationalist family in the 1860s – probably in 1869: according to an obituary in the North China Herald, he was twenty-two when he arrived in Shanghai in 1891. He was the son of John O’Shea, a well-known voice in Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and United Ireland and, after emigrating to the United States, in the American Catholic press. In 1891, Henry David followed his father’s footsteps into journalism, while also joining a significant diaspora of Irish intellectuals who settled around the British Empire’s global trading hubs, stretching from Africa and India to Chinese treaty ports such as Shanghai (Christopher Shepard, “Irish Journalists in the Intellectual Diaspora…”, 2010, 76). He moved to that city and began working as a reporter and later editor of the Shanghai Mercury. In July 1894, as proprietor and editor, he started the China Gazette, an evening journal. He held that post until 1909.

It was in that position when, in late November 1896, O’Shea turned to an affair intensely discussed in the region’s press: he travelled to the Philippines to cover the hostilities between the Spanish colonial government and the Filipino revolutionaries. The outbreak of the conflict in late August raised many criticisms against the Spanish administration of the islands from Anglophone newspapers in Asia, especially those in Hong Kong and Singapore. For example, they attacked the overwhelming power of the monastic orders and their abuses, next to those of the colonial officials, over the local population. However, what attracted most press criticism were the methods the Spanish authorities used to suppress the rebellion—such as the arrest, torture, and execution of civilians without confirmed links to the revolution. They were considered contrary to the laws of humane warfare and prone to increase the animosity between Spaniards and Filipinos, making a soon and stable end to the revolution impossible. Consequently, most of the region’s English-language press encouraged Spain to apply reforms in its rule and handling of the rebellion.

By contrast, O’Shea’s coverage glaringly supported Spain’s war effort. On the one hand, O’Shea’s chronicles responded to the reports about Spanish troops’ atrocities by praising their alleged discipline, restraint, and kindness towards the Philippines’ inhabitants. At the same time, he argued that if there had been exceptions to that behaviour, it had only been due to Filipino alleged savagery, which demanded the most heavy-handed reactions. In all his chronicles, O’Shea presented a defamatory depiction of the revolutionaries. To begin with, he portrayed the rebel leaders as ambitious liars who, for personal thriving, had deceived the masses into wrongly believing they would be better without Spain. According to O’Shea, they had been overeducated, had exploited the general hatred against the monastic orders, and, inspired by the successes of the Japanese, were now carrying on a racial war aimed at expelling Westerners. To do so, O’Shea’s argument followed, Filipino combatants would resort to the most treacherous and unmerciful methods to end the Spanish rule.

Defending Spain’s conduct in war by emphasizing alleged Filipino barbarism was the same rhetoric the Spanish authorities themselves would use. Their historical archives demonstrate this similarity is not a coincidence: O’Shea had agreed with them to spread messages favourable to the Spanish war effort in the Philippines before traveling to Manila, hoping to obtain the colonial government’s support. According to the Spanish consul in Shanghai, Hipólito de Uriarte, O’Shea had written to him condemning the attitude of the British publications in Asia that had been critical of the Spanish regime. He considered that all Western powers had the utmost interest in preserving the “prestige and superiority of the white race” among Asians. As a result, according to this editor, there was no “worse political fault” than supporting an insurrectional movement like the Filipino. He aimed to rectify “the errors disseminated and to direct the flow of opinion towards the line that protected the European and American political and colonial interests” (quoted in Laura Díaz-Esteve and Albert Garcia-Balañà, “Civilized violence…,” forthcoming). Besides the content of O’Shea’s published texts, the private correspondence of Spanish authorities and other sources indicate that they did actively support his mission—by allowing him to travel with the Spanish troops, dictating some of those shared messages about Filipino savagery, and praising his work in newspapers like Manila’s El Comercio. The result of that shared effort was a series of telegrams and chronicles O’Shea wrote from the islands between December 1896 and January 1897, which appeared in the China Gazette and, occasionally, in other newspapers in Asia, Europe, and the United States. 

No proof has been found so far that demonstrates that the Spanish authorities paid O’Shea for his good press. This journalist’s career, however, offers several episodes where his coverage of a conflict was criticized as biased and untruthful. Moreover, as the following paragraph explains, at least in one of them, the Russo-Japanese War, evidence of an economic arrangement between O’Shea and one of the belligerent parties was found. Also, those episodes suggest that, leaving aside potential subsidy payments, it was the sense of racial solidarity between Westerners in Asia, as O’Shea had expressed them to the Spanish consul, what influenced his professional path. Just as in his coverage of the Filipino Revolution, O’Shea seems to have covered the main conflicts in Asia between 1895 and 1905 positioning himself with the “whitest” combatant while emphasizing the alleged savagery of its Asian enemy.

His career with the China Gazette started with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, when he earned the reputation of reporting the perspective of the more westernized Japan (Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions…, 1906, 360). During the 1898 Russian military build-up in Manchuria, his work was also criticized as propaganda (Shepard, 80-81). Next, O’Shea’s coverage of the Boxer Uprising also involved considerable scandal. Thomas Cowen, editor of the rival Shanghai Times, denied the authenticity of O’Shea’s reports. In particular, he accused O’Shea of being the anonymous writer of a fake chronicle, widely circulated both in China but also in New York and London papers, that accused the Boxers of boiling alive in oil every Westerner found during their capture of the legations in Pekin. As a response, O’Shea sued Cowen for libel and won the case, which allowed him to buy, with Frank Maitland, the Shanghai Times, in 1901 (Wright, 358). Finally, O’Shea began working for the Russian authorities during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Historian Dimitri Pavlov’s analysis of the Russian State Historical archives explained that “O’Shea was granted a subsidy of $2500 to $3000 a month in exchange for agreeing to obtain the Russian government’s approval of all his articles” about the conflict and to exclude any compromising information (quoted in Shepard, 81).

O’Shea died in Shanghai in 1913 and was recognized in many contemporary accounts as a pioneer of journalism in the city, a prominent member of the local British society, and a defender of the region’s Catholic community. Exceeding this local relevance, however, O’Shea’s journalistic career, whose outcomes circulated much beyond Shanghai, and, especially, his changing alliances with Spain’s and other empires’ struggles in Asia, offer a revealing window to a myriad of trans imperial dialogues and collaborations, in this case, and repeating O’Shea’s words, to preserve the “prestige and superiority of the white race”. 

Selected Sources:

Christopher Shepard, “Irish Journalists in the Intellectual Diaspora: Edward Alexander Morphy and Henry David O’Shea in the Far East,” New Hibernia Review 14, no 3 (Autumn 2010): 79–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20779267; Frank H. King and Prescott Clarke, A Research Guide to China-Coast Newspapers, 1822–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 89-90, 142; Arnold Wright, ed., Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company, LTD., 1908), 358–360; Laura Díaz-Esteve and Albert García Balañà, “Civilized Violence: the appeal to the Laws of Warfare in the 1896-1897 Philippine Revolution”, article under peer review; “The death…,” Shanghai, London and China Telegraph, December 22, 1913, 5; “The Funeral of Mr. Henry O’Shea”, The North China Herald, December 13, 1913.

How to cite:

To cite from this page, please use any style (Chicago, Harvard, etc). Our preferred citation form is: Laura Díaz-Esteve, ‘O’Shea, Henry David (1869 – 1913)’, The Hispanic-Anglosphere: transnational networks, global communities (late 18^th to early 20^th centuries), project funded by the AHRC and the University of Winchester in partnership with the National Trust-Tyntesfield and the Centro de Estudios Americanos-Universidad Adolfo Ibañez [https://hispanic-anglosphere.com/individuals/oshea-henry-david-1869-1913/, accessed – please add date].

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15433611

Thematic categories:

Press, journalism and the media; Peace and Diplomacy; Politics; Translation; War and the Military