The San Francisco Independent was a free newspaper distributed several times per week in San Francisco, California and owned by the Pan Asia Venture Capital Corp., which also owned the AsianWeek newspaper. The newspaper began as the Lake Merced Independent before being purchased in 1987 by John Fang, who had been a Chinese journalist in pre-Communist China before moving to California where he ran a printing business. Fang gave the newspaper to his 24-year-old son Ted Fang as birthday present. When the established neighborhood newspaper San Francisco Progress folded, Fang gained advertiser and increased circulation, becoming a city-wide newspaper.