The iconic ding-ding trams that creep through the traffic along Hong Kong Island were plastered in February with billboards trumpeting “a new chapter in the China story” — adverts for the South China Morning Post’s flagship annual conference.

The event, which put local politicos and tycoons on stage with Communist Party grandees from the mainland, is a sign of how the 115-year-old Post, a storied English-language daily, has in recent years restyled itself as a window into China for the rest of the world, at a moment when Beijing’s relationship with its neighbours, with the West — and with the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong itself — are under intense scrutiny.

“Over the past two years we have changed from a very kind of local and print-oriented media into a global brand covering China. When we are telling the China story to the world, we mean not just the Western world, but our own people in this continent,” says Tammy Tam, the paper’s editor in chief.

The Post’s website pumps out more than 100 stories about China a day, ranging from straight-up business news to political commentary, to clickbait pieces culled from social media on the mainland. The paper’s Twitter feed offers up unusual juxtapositions of articles about China’s burgeoning trade war with the US, stock market news and videos of septuagenarian body builders: “Monkey causes chaos in chicken coop” alongside “Opinion: Democracy has no defence against rich, autocratic China”.

• Tags: Issue 15, Peter Guest, South China Morning Post, Tammy Tam