Newspapers and the Journalistic Public in Republican China

1917 as a Significant Year of Journalism

Qiliang He

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429796692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Offering an entirely new approach to understanding China's journalism history, this book covers the Chinese periodical press in the first half of the twentieth century.

By focusing on five cases, either occurring in or in relation to the year 1917, this book emphasizes the protean nature of the newspaper and seeks to challenge a press historiography which suggests modern Chinese newspapers were produced and consumed with clear agendas of popularizing enlightenment, modernist, and revolutionary concepts. Instead, this book contends that such a historiography, which is premised on the classification of newspapers along the lines of their functions, overlooks the opaqueness of the Chinese press in the early twentieth century.

Analyzing modern Chinese history through the lens of the newspaper, this book presents an interdisciplinary and international approach to studying mass communications. As such, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, journalism, and Asian Studies more generally.

Part I

1917

Hu Zhengzhi, Dagong bao, and literati-cum-political commentators

On January 5, 1917, Hu Zhengzhi, who had been appointed as Dagong bao’s editor-in-chief just a few months ago, declared to undertake a sweeping reform of this daily newspaper. Hu established an agenda to transform this Anhui Clique-affiliated newspaper into a self-sufficient enterprise by providing its readers with first-hand political news. In July 1917, a political crisis in Beijing, caused by General Zhang Xun’s failed restoration of the Qing dynasty, offered Dagong bao an unparalleled opportunity to achieve commercial success as demands for political information soared. Chapter 1, the only chapter of Part I, documents Hu Zhengzhi’s activism in refashioning Dagong bao in an attempt to attain two goals. First, by exploring the commercialization of a partisan newspaper, this chapter is intended to destabilize the line between the political and commercial press. Second, the study of Dagong bao’s evolution allows for a re-examination of a scholarly assumption that “literati-cum-political commentators” was a universal journalistic practice in modern China.

1 Between literati and journalists

Hu Zhengzhi and Dagong bao in the late 1920s

On July 1, 1917, General Zhang Xun, a notoriously staunch Qing loyalist and warlord, stunned the whole nation by staging a coup d’état to restore the dethroned Emperor Puyi. Although this short-lived restoration campaign lasted only two weeks before Duan Qirui took prompt action to crush Zhang’s army, this political event galvanized the general population across the country. As General Zhang managed to shut down newspapers and discontinue mailing and telegraphic services in Beijing, newspapers in Tianjin, particularly Dagong bao, enormously benefited from the 1917 Restoration by providing their readers with first-hand information about the ongoing event inside Beijing and military campaigns that ended this political crisis. In a period of a dozen days in early and mid-July, the popularity of Dagong bao, the mouthpiece of Duan Qirui and his Anhui Clique, ran unprecedentedly high with its circulation number more than quadrupled. This chapter used the 1917 Restoration to probe into Dagong bao’s success in 1917 in particular, but its reform in the late 1910s in general. Between 1916 and 1920, Hu Zhengzhi, its editor-in-chief and a member of the Anhui Clique coterie, proactively initiated a series of reforms to alter the paper’s layouts, reassembling the team of news-gathering and reporting, set up to a trans-regional news network, to update its printing technology, and to introduce a new punctuation system, among other things. Although the newspaper received investments and subsidies from Anhui Clique politicians and warlords throughout the late 1910s, Hu pursued a clear agenda to make this partisan newspaper a profitable business.

My exploration of Hu Zhengzhi’s reforms between 1916 and 1920 is intended to fulfill a number of goals. First of all, the history of China’s warlord era has long been dismissed as the “dark age,” during which time anti-intellectualist militarism trampled on progressivism and reformism. As Edward McCord puts it, historians find it difficult to acquire “meaning in the constant civil wars and complicated political maneuvers.”¹ Lucian Pye contends that the dismissal of the significance of the warlord period stemmed from “the shame of having to admit that the arbiters of Chinese society were the military—the very element the Chinese always liked to treat as insignificant.”² Thus, Pye is willing to view this period as “an aspect of the Chinese process of modernization.”³ Following Pye’s line of thought, this study turns attention to the mechanism of modernization and reform in the warlord period by focusing on a warlord-controlled newspaper’s capacity to effect changes and improve itself in various respects. As a matter of fact, the first two decades of the twentieth century have been viewed as the “Golden Age” of Chinese newspapers,⁴ largely because of the “stupidity, inefficiency, and transiency of the warlord regimes” that afforded the press “more freedom than ever before.”⁵ To say that all warlords were stupid and inefficient certainly does injustice to history. Actually, some warlords showed an avid interest in patronizing periodicals for purposes ranging from advancing their own political agendas to promoting a new visual culture in China. For example, Yuan Shikai invested in English- and Chinese-language papers, while Beiyang huabao (“North Ocean Pictorial”) was founded under Zhang Xueliang’s (1901–2001) auspices. By comparison, Dagong bao’s patrons, the Anhui Clique warlords, adopted a laissez-faire approach and permitted Hu Zhengzhi the liberty to implement numerous changes in the newspaper.

Second, this study is an attempt to fill a scholarly void in studying Dagong bao—a Chinese newspaper with an international reputation in the first half of the twentieth century. Chin-chuan Lee notes that very few English works about Chinese newspapers center on Dagong bao,⁶ whereas a corpus of books and articles in Chinese has been devoted to this newspaper.⁷ In virtually all those works, in English and Chinese alike, the period between 1916 and 1920 found little, if any, mention. Zhou Yu’s 448-page-long Dagong bao shi (History of Dagong bao), for example, devotes only one page to Hu Zhengzhi’s tenure with the newspaper in the late 1910s. Even Hu himself was reluctant to look back on the period between 1916 and 1920. In a conversation between Hu and Chen Jiying (1908–97), a long-time correspondent of Dagong bao, for example, Hu highlighted two periods (1902–16 and after 1926) as key to the development of this newspaper, thereby markedly leaving out his first four-year stint with Dagong bao.⁸ Such a glaring omission, wittingly or unwittingly, attests to a pervasive mentality to denigrate the warlord times as backward and chaotic in both GMD and Communist historiographies. At the tail end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 when Dagong bao was under the Communist Party’s critical scrutiny, for example, the newspaper’s status as the organ paper of Anhui Clique warlords was emphatically cited as the evidence of its “reactionary nature” (fandong shizhi).⁹

This study of Dagong bao between 1916 and 1920 recovers a missing piece of history and argues that even partisan newspapers controlled by warlords possessed a dynamism for reform and progress. It also stresses the continuity of Dagong bao as an organ of warlords and the same newspaper advertised as “the most progressive and best edited paper in Chinese in this country” after 1926, to borrow Lin Yutang’s phrase.¹⁰ In fact, Lin’s compliment, as well as his scorn for some of the commercial newspapers of the day, exposed Chinese intellectuals’ ingrained bias for a specific style of newspaper content. This content allowed intellectuals and scholars to use the new media of newspapers to disseminate political commentary as if they continued to play a vital role in national and regional politics, like the literati of imperial times. After 1926, Dagong bao won widespread acclaim, in no small part, because of its highly intriguing and inspiring editorials on the ongoing political situation in China. Thus, Dagong bao in the 1930s and 1940s was viewed as an exemplary newspaper that carried forward a unique Chinese journalistic practice, wenren lunzheng or “literati-cum-political commentators.” Blending the American progressive journalism and the time-honored Confucian tradition for scholar-officials to instruct and admonish their rulers,¹¹ “literati-cum-political commentators” helped the politically and culturally marginalized Chinese intellectuals in the modern era recast their identity as the enlighteners of the masses and the advisers to political leaders. Elsewhere, Chin-chuan Lee calls those intellectuals “Confucian-liberals.”¹² Therefore, this has long been touted as a distinctive practice that sets Chinese journalism apart from its counterparts in the rest of the world. On the dustjacket of Chin-chuan Lee’s book, for example, a reader considers “literati-cum-political commentators” as the defining characteristic of Chinese journalism.¹³

By studying the evolution of Dagong bao, this chapter questions the assumption about the universality of the practice of “literati-cum-political commentators.” In other words, “literati-cum-political commentators” was merely one way in which newspapers were produced and used in the twentieth century. I call attention to its temporal and geographical specificities by arguing that such a practice was created at a particular time (the early twentieth century following the collapse of China’s dynastic system) and in a specific region (the Beijing/Beiping and Tianjin area where journalists had easier access to varieties of educational and political resources, but were usually unsupported by local businesses). More significantly, it resul...