The former Reuters stalwart is now cutting a swathe through Shanghai's economic scene. Kevin Sinclair reports

When Graham Earnshaw was posted to Shanghai as Reuter's bureau chief in 1995, he found himself enthralled with the explosive energy and intellectual excitement of the city. He also found himself pondering the role of the journalist in society.

Was he merely a pedestrian standing on the pavement watching the world rush by? Was this sufficiently satisfying? Or should be become an active player in the vast drama streaming so turbulently past him?

When the respected newsman decided he wanted to join the action it was a decision that stunned many of his friends. Earnshaw the entrepreneur? Few gave it much credence.

Today, the gaunt figure of absent member Graham Earnshaw, cut a knowing swathe through Shanghai's bubbling economic waters With partner Tony Zhang Haodong he's the imaginative brains behind the highly-creative, English-language website() He's an investor in the hugely popular Park 97 Restaurant. He has a three-book contract with Oxford University Press on unlikely tales of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Another tome is half-finished. He's speaking about importing wine into China and exporting Chinese ideas to the world. Name a pie in Shanghai and chances are the former Hong Kong reporter has got a finger somewhere in it.

It's an unlikely metamorphosis, but one he finds both invigorating and compelling.

In a rough old demin shirt and a pair of cordoroy trousers that most Shanghai construction workers would disdain, Earnshaw does not cut a yuppie-like figure. But he fairly bristles with the electronic tools of the era: a tiny mobile phone shrills from one pocket and in another is a palm-top computer that contains all the information he needs to survive.

These electronic gadgets allow him to stay in constant touch as he moves around the city he now calls home - the fourth Chinese city on which he has bestowed that status. He's lived, studied and worked in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing before moving to Shanghai. In his two decades in China, he has travelled widely throughout the country.

His laconic manner, sudden laugh and warm smile remain the same. So does the shrewd brain that made the 46-vear-old one of the most astute and respected journalists in Asia right up to the moment he decided the world held more than being a spectator. Although the notion would plunge him into dire embarrassment, Graham Earnshaw has for years not only been respected by other journalists, hut for 20 years has been admired by people in many fields. A total professional with a passion for news, his skills as a reporter were outweighed only by his toughness of mind, his courage and his determination.

Born in Manchester, he emigrated with his family to Australia in 1965. His father, Arnold, was a Fleet Streeter (Daily Mail among other titles) recruited by Rupert Murdoch when he launched The Australian.

Graham had no overwhelming urge to follow his father's path. He failed his second year in university in Sydney - "Otherwise I would be a boring rich lawyer" - and a family friend offered him the chance of becoming an executive trainee with Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong.

The legendary Hong Kong publisher and FCC raconteur Gareth Powll wasz then putting out Cathay's in-flight magazine, Discovery, and he got the young Earushaw a slot. Earnshaw retains great affection for Powell and gratitude for the chance that forged his life. "Swire's was an intensely English public school organisation, very British," he recalls. "My hair was too long." He didn't fit neatly into corporate life in a mighty hong. He was also unashamedly obsessed. From his first day on a Hong Kong street, he bad become fascinated with the Chinese language. It is an obsession that has never waned.

He got a job as a cadet reporter on the South China Morning Post and loved it. It gave him a chance to plunge into the community, to see at first hand and close-up the daily life, the hard challenge, the tough choices, of the people.

It was 1973 and a time of monumental change in the Middle Kingdom and Hong Kong. The Cultural Revolution was ending, but nobody knew it. Most journalists worked hard and played hard in an era of riotous uncertainty. Earnshaw worked hard and studied harder. He signed up for language courses that laid the solid foundation for his perfect Cantonese.

He gives that unexpectedly deep laugh..." I went to full-time courses designed for civil servants, mostly policemen. I was the only one interested in learning; the others had to do it if they wanted promotion in the force. The teachers were long suffering; they had to teach people who had a total lack of interest in learning Cantonese. Strangely, this made the courses highly effective."

Added to the newsroom gossip, in which he could increasingly take an easy part, and to his widening circle of friends, the 22 weeks in the classroom prepared him for a personal crisis.

As a boy, he had spent two years in hospital with tuberculosis of the bone, then comparatively common, now thankfully a rare human blight. It had struck again when he was a teenager in Australia. Then, in Hong Kong, it came back again.

He found himself a $2 a day patient in Queen Mary Hospital, the only European among drug addicts, sick workers, the poor and the dying. "It was a great opportunity," he says, and he means it. Six months in a cast concentrated the mind marvelously, and he chatted with his fellow patients.

It also gave time for him to continue his fascination with written Chinese. He would devour newspapers, then look up unknown characters, searching for the radical core of every character in old fashioned dictionaries, hunting the meaning down labyrinthine paths of language.

He also chatted to the staff - former nurse Lam Fung-yee and he have been married 24 years, their daugher Jennifer is now at Durham University. A considerable part of Earnshaw's talent as a singer-composer have been directed towards writing songs about his wife.

I was lucky," he says of his time in hospital. He walked out to rejoin the editorial fray with the painful limp that is part of his physical signature. News from Hong Kong and China was even more intense than it had been when he was hospitalised. It was a time of rare fascination, and Earnshaw plunged into it.

His language fixation knew few bounds. Taipei was a virtually closed society, but through the canny old Shanghainese reporter Victor Su, he got into the Mandarin Daily News Language Centre to study the national tongue. Today, he grins, his Mandarin is better than his Cantonese. Native speakers of each dialect say he is tone-perfect.

When Reuters wanted a local reporter in 1976, bureau chief Alan Thomas chose young Graham Earnshaw. Two years based in Hong Kong gave him an appetite for wire service life. He wanted more. He asked to move on within Reuters. There came that time in the life of every upwardly mobile Reuters reporter when he did his stretch at the bottom of the world desk in London. He hated it. London on no money is no fun," he sums up.

In China, momentous events were stirring. Mao had died. The Gang of Four had risen. Deng Xiaoping had been purged and unpurged. There was a battle for leadership. Reuters got permission to add a third arrow to their Beijing quiver and Earnshaw got the nod. It was baffling times in Beijing. The two correspondents in place were hardy veterans. But neither spoke nor wrote nor read Chinese. And in the centre of the city, at a place which was to resound around the world as Democracy Wall, the old China was tumbling down. The world wondered what the hell was going on. Earnshaw could tell it. He could read the roughly hand-printed big-character posters with their calls for a less restrictive life. He could talk to the people putting them up. He knew what was happening. He was in the cockpit of change.

Looking back, he sees how Deng so cunningly and cynically used the press and idealists to manipulate events and wage propaganda war against his enemies inside the party. When Deng gained the upper hand, the usefulness of the Democracy Wall liberals came to an end.

The iron fist once again was unveiled.

He left the wire service, spent three years in Beijing for The Daily Telegraph, every day improving his linguistic skills as he interpreted the astonishing patina of evolution. He went back to Reuters and was posted to Tokyo, but as events in Tiananmen Square avalanched towards catastrophe, he was pulled back urgently to Beijing.

He was in the square that fateful night of June 4. He was detained in the square, his passport seized, then released. He managed to get a new passport from the British embassy that allowed him to leave China.

He then spent five years as Editor for Asia at the Reuters office in Hong Kong. It gave him managerial and executive skills, taught him budgets and planning and personnel care, the sort of disciplines that are a rarity among reporters. When that came to an end in 1995, he asked for a posting to New York where he wanted to play a part in the latest cultural revolution, the one taking place on the Internet.

That role was filled. Instead, he went to Shanghai. To many, it looked like a demotion. From Editor for Asia, he was a Bureau Chief again, a working reporter. Maybe, but he loved it. It was enthralling. The very air was an intoxication. He had a big old pre-revolutionary apartment, hugely spacious. Once a month, he would throw a party. Hundreds would turn up, about two-thirds of whom he didn't know.

He had always loved music. He sang through the Seventies and Eighties in Beijing's first rock group and earlier as a Bob Dylan soundalike with his own compositions poking fun at the pretentious of colonial Hong Kong. The parties were full of music. And characters who make up the vibrant, multiethnic New Shanghai. Here were the movers and shakers of the 21st century.

One of them was Tony Zhang, a China-born, US-educated entrepreneur. The two had a lot in common. They chatted. They exchanged visions of excitement. Earnshaw asked himself the fatal question: Was there life after Reuters for someone who had all his working life been a newsman?

"Bloody right there is," was the answer he gave himself. Life without a salary is challenging. Ideas sparkle. New enterprises loom. He now spots opportunities the way he used to find stories.

"You see something, you put it together," he shrugs. Tony has the managerial side, Graham has the web knowledge. They both have guangxi. "It's the era of opportunity," he preaches, sipping an orange drink in a restaurant so obscure that only veteran Shanghai Hands could find it. And Shanghai is going to be the epicentre."

Down an ill lit side lane past what used to be Lafayette Park in the old French Concession, Earnshaw strides fluently into the future.