Plan to Close Chinese-Language Paper Deepens a Shadow Over the Ethnic Press.

There is nothing overt at the modest headquarters of The Ming Pao Daily News to suggest that the 12-year-old newspaper is under siege. In the paper's small warren of offices in an industrial building in Long Island City, Queens, the advertising and reporting staffs are still working the phones and putting out their scrappy broadsheet as if nothing were amiss. But looming over the entire enterprise is a plan by the paper's corporate parent, Media Chinese International Limited, based in Hong Kong, to shut it down. Though the plan has yet to be formally announced, and several of the paper's employees said they still remained in the dark about their future, the paper's general manager confirmed in an interview with The New York Times last week that the daily would indeed disappear from newsstands, possibly as soon as the end of the month. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]