Exception that shames the rule

From Liam Fitzpatrick's post on the death of Kevin Sinclair, who he calls "the doyen of Hong Kong’s press corps":

Kevin was disliked by Hong Kong’s liberal intelligentsia, who depicted him as a barking, right-wing grump. He had a gruff, pugnacious writing style, and championed deeply un-modish things like law and order. But on re-reading his work, it strikes me that posterity will see him rather differently. Here was a man who chanced upon a library copy of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China at the age of 14, and developed from that a lifelong passion for China. From the moment he arrived in Hong Kong in his 20s, he refused to inhabit the comfy confines of Western media circles, or to subscribe to their patronizing stereotypes of Chinese people and society. In later life, he became a foremost authority on the village culture of Hong Kong’s New Territories, and the only English-language journalist to achieve any sort of profile among the Chinese population. Most Western journalists in Hong Kong never learn to speak Cantonese. Kevin insisted on speaking it despite a tracheotomy at the age of 33.