The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press

The Influence of the Protestant Missionary Press in Late Qing China

Xiantao Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134179305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

This book traces the emergence of the modern Chinese press from its origins in the western Christian missionary press in the late nineteenth century.

It shows how the western missionaries and their evangelical/educational newspapers changed the long-standing traditional practices, styles, content, print culture and printing technology of Chinese newspapers and, in the process, introduced some of the key ideas of western modernity which were to have a profound effect on Chinese society. Xiantao Zhang demonstrates how missionary publications reshaped print journalism, rather indirectly, from a centuries-long monopoly by the state - the Imperial press - into a pluralized, modernizing and frequently radical public journalism. She focuses in particular on the relationship between the missionaries and the class of 'gentry scholars' - literati and civil servants, educated via the traditional state examination system in the Confucian classics, who were the prime target readers of the missionary publications. This key group and the independent press they established at the end of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in shaping the ongoing struggle for a modern democratic media culture in China.

1 The press in imperial China

Before 1815, the Chinese press had experienced no Western involvement. In August of that year, Robert Morrison, a Protestant missionary from the London Missionary Society,¹ set up the China Monthly Magazine, which has been widely recognized as China’s first modern journal. The word ‘modern’, though much debated in the social sciences, is used here to stress the contrasts between the official Imperial Gazette and the unofficial missionary press. These contrasts imply a much deeper set of cultural meanings which we shall explore in later chapters.

Before investigating this new era of the press in China, it will be useful briefly to trace the history of the newspaper before the nineteenth century and the social settings from which the modern press arose. It is impossible to grasp the fundamental nature of the changes which occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without understanding the social structure and political institutions of the earlier period. As Hsu puts it, ‘The study of the Western impact must be preceded by a knowledge of what that impact was on’ (Hsu 1990: 5).

The origins of the Chinese newspaper: poetry, annals or bureaucracy?

It is well known that the Chinese mastered paper-making and printing technologies ahead of the rest of the world. Without doubt, ancient China had an extraordinarily rich written communication history, not to mention its rich traditions of oral communication. But for reasons of scope, we will have to confine ourselves here to print media disseminated on a regular basis in the journalistic sense: in newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

So, when did the practice of journalism originate in China? It is a controversial subject. While a majority of academics agree that the official gazette, either in the Han or the Tang dynasty, constituted the earliest imperial newspaper, others argue that the origins of print journalism can be traced back to even earlier poetic and historical writings. Thus, in 1896, in the opening issue of Shiwu Bao, Liang Qichao wrote an article entitled ‘Newspapers are beneficial to the state’ in which he traced the earliest newspaper back to ancient Chinese ballads that were collected and presented to the ‘Son of the Heaven’ for the purpose of informing him about current affairs. Liang Qichao called the ballads the ‘People’s Newspaper’ (Zhang 1999: 18). In the 1930s, another Chinese writer, Lin Yutang, echoed this view. Lin believed that folk song rather than prose was the very origin of Chinese journalism. In his account, the ancient ‘epigrammatic verses and ballads’ recording opinions on current affairs, ‘were very effective as weapons of public criticism’, which made them very similar to modern newspapers in terms of their function (Lin 1937: 12). He cites, for example, the ‘great number of satirical poem’ contained in the Book of Poetry collected by Confucius (Lin 1937: 20).

More recently, journalism and poetry have been linked in detailed historical research by the Taiwanese scholar Zhu Chuanyu. Zhu (1988: 12–17) claims that ancient ballads played a very similar role to modern journalism in communicating public information. He supported this claim by rewriting a poem from the Book of Poetry in modern journalistic prose. However, despite such formal similarities between ancient ballads and modern journalism, the Book of Poetry has more value as a literary and historical record of oral communication than as a link with print journalism.

Apart from poetry, early historical works have been considered as the other source of journalism. ‘Following the decline of the Book of Poetry arose the Spring and Autumn Annals.’ This saying of Mencius was known to all the Chinese. The famous ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ were identified by Lin as the beginning of the written press in China. He argues that the custom of news collecting by appointed officials across the country every spring and autumn² from the eighth century BC constituted ‘the earliest official gathering of news’ (Lin 1937: 13). In fact, according to Zhu (1988: 20), many modern Chinese assume that the Spring and Autumn Annals gave rise to Chinese journalism. The description ‘the King without a crown’ which was given to Confucius for his compiling of the Spring and Autumn Annals is often used as a phase describing modern journalists. In Zhu’s view, the records contained in the Spring and Autumn Annals shared an enormous amount of common ground, in terms of their news-gathering value, with modern newspapers. Like present-day journalism, they recorded a wide range of current affairs and, moreover, these were, during the feudal period, remarkably open in terms of access to a wide readership, including scholars from different states.

In these ways, Zhu concludes that these court historians can be compared to modern journalists. However, although the Spring and Autumn Annals may be narrowly regarded as the results of the ‘earliest official gathering of news’, it seems more convincing to consider these court-historical records, in an era before paper and printing technology, as the earliest forms of Chinese historical work, rather than as a prototype for the press in China.

The more widely accepted view that the Chinese newspaper was born of DiBao – the official gazette – owes a debt to the scholar and journalist Ge Gongzhen. In his seminal book The History of Chinese Journalism, Ge claims that the Chinese newspaper developed from DiBao, firstly in its written version in the Han dynasty, and then its printed version during the Tang dynasty. Despite the various names it bore, such as ZhaoBao, TiaoBao, and JingBao in the Qing dynasty, the contents and general practice of the official gazette remained largely unchanged throughout the dynasties (Ge 1935: 24). Following Ge, mainstream Chinese journalism studies (Huang 1930; Wu 1933; Britton 1933; Guan 1943) endorse the view that Chinese journalism originated from DiBao. It is still debatable when the term ‘DiBao’ was first used, Lin suggesting the Tang dynasty but Zhu insisting on the Song dynasty. But certainly, the word ‘Di’ occurs as early as in the statutes of the Early Han dynasty (Ge 1935: 25; Lin 1937: 14) and was defined then as ‘the residence of provincial prefects for the purpose of communicating official reports’.

According to Zeng Xubai (1977: 66), it was the growth in military power, culture and trade in the Han dynasty, during the reign of Emperor Wu, that first gave impetus to the production of an official gazette. In his view, the vast geographical area and centralized political structure in the Han dynasty produced the requirement to circulate political information amongst the bureaucratic hierarchy.

However, it was in the Tang dynasty that a specific bureau – the Bureau of Official Reports (Jin Zhouyuan) – was created to accommodate local representatives. During this time, there were many rising powerful dukes, princes or governor-generals in charge of large territories, equal in size to a modern province in China. These dukes or princes would naturally provide for their own news service at the capital Chang’an,³ which handled all official documents submitted by these representatives and transmitted imperial edicts in return. Recent archaeological research has uncovered such official reports from the Tang dynasty. Two archive documents of that period originally found in Dunhuang⁴ have been regarded by Chinese scholars as the earliest forms of newspaper in the world (Fang 1997: 53–8).

Whether or not one accepts this claim depends to some extent on whether written documents can be considered as print journalism. The surviving archive documents were composed by handwriting and despite earlier suppositions that woodblock printing may have been utilized in the Tang official gazette (Ge 1935: 27–9), recent research (Zhu 1988: 109–14; Fang 1997: 62) suggests there is insufficient evidence for this.

It is probably wisest to discount handwritten documents. As Raymond Williams observes, though writing had made possible the recording of communication; printing made possible its rapid distribution, and it was in this form that the press (literally defined as printing) is ‘the great means of modern communication’ (Williams 1973: 22). Viewed thus, we should regard the printing of DiBao in the Song dynasty as the first manifestation of the Chinese press (Zhu 1988: 14; Britton 1933: 1), and it was DiBao that dominated right up to the Qing dynasty.

The rise and development of DiBao

To understand the advent of Di and DiBao, we need to grasp the politicalinstitutional context of its emergence. In 221 bc, the twenty-year war among the feudalistic states came to an end with the victory of Qin, who was able to proclaim himself Emperor of all China. Unification had come to China and a vast nation arose. Emperor Qin introduced bureaucratic political institutions which were to shape Chinese politics for the next two thousand years: until the late Qing dynasty and, to some extent, until the modern Republic of China. In order to replace the pre-Qin feudalistic power structure dominated by the aristocrats with land and political muscle, Emperor Qin created a bureaucratic centralized government – dividing his kingdom into thirty-six ‘commanderies’ (i.e. provinces) and sending officers chosen on the basis of ‘proven ability’, and regardless of their family background, to manage these localities. In each commandery, there were three officers. Two of them were responsible, respectively, for ‘defence and commanding the local armed forces’ and ‘civil administration, economics and industry’. The third one – ‘directly responsible to the Emperor’ – was in Cottrell’s account the Emperor’s special envoy to keep the two other officers in order (Cottrell 1964: 123).

As territory expanded through the Han dynasty, the political structure remained but required a larger bureaucracy. In particular, more communication between the central authorities and the local level was required. In these circumstances, representatives began to be sent by the local authorities to lodge in the capital, and it was because of this that the Dis appeared. Qin had in fact already laid some of the grounds for this mobile bureaucracy in his programme of military road construction:

Under the Emperor of Qin, military necessity had caused him to build an elaborate system of military roads and post-relays, with regular stations ten li apart, and his system of roads and relays was elaborated upon during the Han Dynasty, with regular post stations at regular intervals of thirty li. Both post-houses and post-chaises, with from one to seven horses, were in use, as well as couriers on foot.

(Lin 1937: 15)⁵

Thus a material communicational infrastructure – the beginnings of a postal system – can be attributed to Emperor Qin. But to understand how the Dis became such effective forms of political-bureaucratic communication, we should mention one further achievement of the Emperor: his establishing of a standardized corpus of written characters, from which modern Chinese derived, and which made communication among different areas of the empire possible. As Benedict Anderson remarks in Imagined Communities, ‘the reach of the mandarinal bureaucracy and of painted characters largely coincided’ in imperial China, as contrasted with medieval Western Europe where the universality of Latin never corresponded to a universal political system (Anderson 2003: 41). In effect, we could argue, the Chinese sovereign monopolized the standard written language and made it ‘his-and-only-his-language-of-state’ (Anderson 2003: 41). This considerably contributed to end the political fragmentation of pre-Qin China and build a new political entity: a centralized powerful state. It is instructive to notice the early and deeply embedded bond between language and written communication, on the one hand, and the bureaucratic political system, on the other. And this state monopoly over the written medium was even further enhanced and sustained when Confucian ideology became authorized.

By the time of the Tang dynasty, the Di system had become more developed owing to further territorial expansion and economic prosperity. During the reign of Emperor Taizhong, archive records suggest plans to build over three hundred new Dis in the capital city Chang’an (Fang 1997: 35). In ad 777, the ‘Bureau of Official Reports’ was set up to deal with correspondence sent to provincial authorities. The well-developed postal service of that time – some 1,643 postal stops, of which 1,293 operated by land, 260 by water and 86 by both – also greatly contributed to the circulation of DiBao (Fang 1997: 34). As Elvin (1973: 133) observes, with the government postal service, ‘the capital of the middle Chinese Empire, in Tang times, was only eight to fourteen days away from the most distant city of any importance’.

Nevertheless, it must be remembered that DiBao in the Tang dynasty were published only at irregular intervals. It was not until printing technology was adopted in the Song dynasty that DiBao grew into the standard official periodical gazette of imperial China.

Following the elaboration of the bureaucratic political institutions in the early Song dynasty, the imperial authority terminated the ‘Dis’ set up by the local officers and instead established the ‘Central Petition Court’ to regulate and control official news distribution. According to Zhu (1988: 122–4), newsgathering, editing and distributing then became divided amongst several departments of the central bureaucracy. In contrast with the random semiofficial handwritten newsletters in the Tang dynasty, DiBao in the Song dynasty developed into an important system of daily printed official news with an increasing amount of information (Fang 1997: 71–2). What DiBao carried were mostly details of imperial court affairs, such as the official edicts and orders for promotion and dismissals; memorandums by the ministers and provincial authorities; selected edicts of the emperor and other official documents (Zhu 1988: 129–38).

More importantly, during the Song dynasty, DiBao started to enjoy a larger circulation among a wider range of officials and gentry-scholars all over the country. Extensive references to DiBao are found in the notes, letters, poems and biographies of the scholars of that period. Su Shi, a well-known poet in the Song, wrote that his source of information on officialdom was through reading the DiBao (Ge 1935: 31). DiBao’s growing popularity was also reflected in the variation of its names. Besides being called DiBao, the official newspaper was also known as ZhaoBao, Jizhouyuan Bao, DiZhuang, DiLi ZhuangBao and so on (Fang 1997: 77–8).

While DiBao was reaching a wider readership from the Tang to the Song, it was also becoming more manipulated by the central authorities. It was moving from being the channel for mass communication to becoming the mouthpiece of the government. Through the Yuan, Ming⁶ and most of the Qing dynasty, DiBao continued to developed without significant changes and interruptions. Its dominance was not challenged until the arrival of the modern press in the nineteenth century.

XiaoBao: the ‘unofficial press’ in imperial China

Having sketched the emergence and development of the official imperial gazette, DiBao, we can turn now to the relationship between this and the emergence of an unofficial press.

In Chinese Journalism History, Ge (1935: 31–2) notes that during the Song dynasty, while reading DiBao became a general habit for many scholars, there emerged a kind of unofficial newspaper, the XiaoBao. The XiaoBao were the ‘tabloid’ newspapers of the Song dynasty, originally established by the local representatives in the capital, the ‘Di officials’. They emerged as a result of ‘a feverish demand for up-to-date news’ among the scholars. They were also considered to be potentially subversive, to the extent that a petition to the Emperor was made by the official Zhou Linzhi for them to be banned on the grounds that they often contained inaccurate or groundless statements damaging to imperial authority and were involved in leaking information from the Bureau of Official Reports.

Lin (1937: 17–18) regards the XiaoBao as an attempt by the Di officials to confront imperial censorship and to break the control of the Bureau of Official Reports. And for this reason he describes them as ‘the first important growth of journalism in China’. The rise of the XiaoBao can be dated back to the early days of DiBao, and the establishment of the Bureau of Official Reports was in part an attempt to thwart the development of XiaoBao. As Zhu (1988: 155–68) observes, political messages became imperative in the Song dynasty as political turmoil intensified. With its limited and often outdated official news, DiBao became an insufficient and frustrating monopoly of intelligence for the rising political factions and the gentry officials in and out of the imperial court. The XiaoBao, therefore, provided for the growing appetite for more and more timely political information. In one sense, the XiaoBao emerged in direct reaction to the censorship and the restricted circulation of DiBao, Zhu stresses that these XiaoBao were often handwritten by the Di officials and reached a very limited readership. But there was a more vigorous form in which information was collected by reporters rather than Di officials. Lin quotes from a widely cited contemporary source:

The Chaopao . . . [another name for DiBao] records the important events of the day. Every day the office of the Court Chamberlain would compile this news and submit it to the editorship of the Court Secretariat, and then pass it on to the Bureau of Official Reports for general promulgation. There were, however, private reporters such as ‘court reporters’, ‘provincial reporters’, and ‘yamen reporters’ who were connected with the tabloid papers, and as these were often accused of leaking out official news, they concealed them under the title of hsinwen [news].

(Lin 1937: 17)

According to Zhu, the ‘hsinwen’ carried by XiaoBao meant the same as ‘news’ in the modern sense. The ‘court reporters’, ‘provincial reporters’ and ‘yamen reporters’ could be compared to present-day political correspondents who report in the national, provincial and local newspapers. These were professional reporters who could, apparently, make good money. The wide variety of sources of their reports may have contained court news, some of it censored, along with social and political gossip and rumours on the street. Zhu even presumes that the XiaoBao contained some form of commentary on current affairs, though this must have been indirect so as to avoid official intolerance of the free expression of opinion. Because of the breath and diversity of their contents and their wide circulation, in Zhu’s view, these XiaoBao could only have been produce...