Citizen Publications in China Before the Internet

S. Jiang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349696796, 9781137492074
• eBook ISBN: 9781137492081
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents the first panoramic study of minkan (citizen publications) in China before the Internet. This recent history of citizen publications contributes to the reclamation of a lost past of resistance. It is an exercise in remembering a past that has been marginalized by official history and recovering ideas obliterated by state power.

CHAPTER 1

Minkan as a Way of Resistance

Wildfire never quite consumes grass,

They are tall once more in the spring wind.

—Bai Juyi¹

General Introduction

Under Communist rule in mainland China, there has been a reemergence of independent societies or resistance, in spite of institutional repression. The unofficial magazines provide a narrative of how the civil society began from the underground publications and expanded into other forms of resistance (such as underground labor trade unions and family churches) and other activities defending human rights (such as petitions, protests, and strikes).

The term minkan in this book has multiple connotations. First of all, it can simply be understood as “citizen magazines” or “unofficial magazines”. Literally, minkan consists of two Chinese characters: min (民, people, citizens) and kan (刊, magazine, publication, print). It refers to those print publications with autonomous organizational and editorial policies, whose production and distribution are independent of any authorities. Minkan participants and readers make a cash donation toward the cost of publication in almost all cases. Under the Communist regime, minkan endeavored not only to make available to the public sensitive news otherwise controlled by the party, but also to give alternative comments and independent criticism. Minkan in my research refers to those publications that existed outside of the party-state institutions. The specificities of minkan are clearly different from that of the official publications.

The term minkan first appeared in the 1910s to describe nonstate publications.² Minkan not controlled by the ruling party and state had not existed from 1949 to 1956, until several independent student magazines reappeared in 1957. Minkan were a popular phenomenon, later used during the Democracy Wall period from 1978 to 1981 and afterward. This book researches the unofficial or citizen magazines since 1949, but it will also pay some attention to the historical emergence of the magazine genre and unofficial publications before 1949 in Chinese print history.

Minkan could be a “social barometer of political and social interaction.”³ In addition, it has a rather hybrid format as a genre. I have identified the following common characteristics of minkan:

1. An “open text,”⁴ that is, a collection of miscellaneous texts or images that encourage the reader not only to understand but also to “overstand” what is written (this “overstanding” means that readers can interpret more and explore further than the content of the text itself, especially under strict censorship)⁵

2. Aiming to influence public views

3. Attempting to publish at regular intervals until being shut down⁶

4. Commenting on events rather than simply reporting

5. Reproduction in multiple copies

6. A mode of organization under conditions of restricted freedom of association

7. A publication within the relatively closed network of a student or a prodemocracy movement

Based on these descriptions, the term minkan can be expanded to incorporate various formats of civic expression in the Chinese context, for instance, the format of the minkan for my research period sometimes manifests itself in the form of a wall fully pasted with big-character posters (wall posters). From 1949 to 1989, many minkan republished parts of their content as big-character posters, and so minkan became the source of wall posters to an extent. Equally, the articles in the minkan are regarded as building a continuous brick or stone construction in the space of public expression. Some magazines are directly named The Democracy Wall or Democracy Brick or are an actual Anthology of Big Character Posters.⁷ Striking articles and sensitive news first appeared in minkan and were then turned into big-character posters.

In its broadest sense, minkan can be understood as a method of civil resistance. In the totalitarian Chinese system, public space has been effectively destroyed or turned into an official propaganda space by means of indoctrination and the direct violence of the power holders. In such a society, unofficial magazines have represented a thinking that diverges from totalitarian ideology and propaganda; they have carried out an important mission of creating public forums; educating, enlightening, and cultivating citizens; and laying a foundation for a future civil society in mainland China.

Minkan’s functions in China raise many further questions that need examining. For example, what is the specific role of minkan in the context of Chinese print culture, and what role did it play in the transition to civil society? To what extent did minkan influence social movements and social discourse and finally lead to social and structural change? How did minkan develop and influence contemporary political forms and the future of media since the 1990s? This study attempts to answer these questions by addressing the following: was minkan a passive or reactive recipient of the political institutions, or was it a subjectivity and consciousness creator in Chinese society? What has fertilized the underground publications in mainland China since 1949? What is the relation between minkan and Chinese society and between minkan and resistance? How do they engage with the state and the society? How has this form of minkan and resistance managed to survive? Has there been any accumulation of resistance subjectivity from one generation to the next? What limitations do these publications embody? Do they have any enduring legacy?

Minkan Review and Meaning

A review of the existing literature shows that there is no detailed previous study of the evolution of unofficial publications published in mainland China from 1949 to the 1980s. Although recent research has noted the relations between media and politics in mainland China, most of them focus on the official media. Much of the existing work on unofficial magazines in mainland China traces the history before 1949, for example, History of China’s Newspapers by Ge Gongzhen (戈公振) from dibao or zabao (official gazette) in the early eighth century to the early twentieth century, as well as the study of Observation (1946–48) by Xie Yong (谢泳).⁸ I will review these studies in the section titled “Historical Overview,” which will cover the publication history before 1949.

There is little research on post-1949 unofficial magazines; when it exists, it is focused on case studies of a particular magazine, for example, Qian Liqun (钱理群) has studied the magazine Square (from May 19, 1957, to July 20, 1957). In addition, Liu Shengqi (刘胜骐) and Claude Widor have studied the minkan from 1978 to the early 1980s, based on a collection of magazine contents during the period.⁹

Qian examined three magazines produced in 1957 by students at Beijing University. Two of them, Honglou (红楼，Red Mansion) and Langtaosha (浪淘沙，Ripples Sifting Sand), were funded and supervised by the university authorities, while the third, Guangchang (广场, Square), was funded by the students themselves. Red Mansion, a literary magazine published at the beginning of 1957, showed the “students’ spiritual awakening” initially but was soon enough turned into an official tool to criticize Square.¹⁰ Qian compares the contents of these three magazines that demonstrate a significant distinction between official and unofficial magazines. For example, Square challenged the official ideology and opposed political repression, while the other two official magazines strictly followed the official ideology and supported any oppression by the party. Qian’s innovative investigation into this period inspired quite a few minkan participants to publish their memoirs and reflections on these magazines.¹¹ My own research is partly based on Qian’s contribution and largely draws on the new materials unveiled by the Square participants. Interviews and correspondence with these survivors is a significant component of my research methods (see “Theories and Concepts”). Based on these materials, I am able to go beyond the contents to study minkan’s formats, circulation, and networks, which in turn helps in the study of minkan as a self-conscious contribution to the formation of an independent political culture. Qian’s research, mainly referring to the contents of these magazines, did not investigate the context of minkan: how were these magazines produced and circulated? How did minkan network form and evolve? These are the questions that my research intends to explore.

Studies by both Widor and Liu focused on minkan publications from 1978 to the early 1980s. Widor’s Samizdat Press in China’s Provinces 1979–81 archived the publication records of 88 magazines, providing basic publication information on their background, issue number, and circulation.¹² His other book further brought together both the contents of seven magazines and their detailed introductions on relevant activities.¹³ It was during the reading of these stories that I first realized that minkan went beyond the publication of magazines: it had developed into a resistance network. Liu Shengqi’s parallel study of a dozen magazines from the same period provided a perspective that included overseas magazines alongside the study of domestic publications, references to media reports, and casual conversations with a couple of participants of overseas minkan. Liu also attempted to map the different political stands among the minkan: radical, moderate, literary, divergent (dissidents inside the political institutions). Although it is laudable to find a plurality and difference of minkan, Liu’s approach has its limitations. Liu’s categorization of minkan excluded literary minkan and lacked definition or explanation of radical, moderate, or divergent minkan. Instead, it seems that the classification was based on Liu’s own political stand (“Unifying China with the Three Principles of the People”)¹⁴ and on a calculation of word frequency (such as criticizing the CCP and supporting democracy).¹⁵ However, such a categorization ignores the complexity and reality of the fact that the political stands of minkan cannot be demonstrated by examining their ideological distance from the “Unifying China with the Three Principles of the People”. In addition, word frequency in minkan cannot represent the political stand of minkan, since this method excludes the context of minkan. Minkan not only used punning, allusion, indirect speech, and irony, but it also explored the different sensitive issues relevant to democracy without using the direct term “democracy.” Moreover, mixed political stands often coexisted in the same publication, and all these publications shared similar political positions, especially when facing the same experience of repression. Furthermore, Liu’s classification of minkan ignored the fact that minkan creation proliferated in various formats and spheres to gain new features from 1980 onward. He considered the overseas minkan to be simply inheriting the domestic minkan. The reason for this might partly be that Liu did not recognize the election magazine in 1980 (see chapter 5) as a post-1980 minkan format in mainland China.¹⁶ For his theoretical approach, Liu examined the minkan from 1978 to 1982, referring to David Easton’s A Framework for Political Analysis, and concluded that minkan activists are the idealists and reformists inside political institutions.¹⁷ Easton’s theory, which only focuses on the interaction of different actors in the established political system, is not equipped to offer a sufficient interpretation of minkan as a self-conscious organization struggling for autonomous space. Thus, it merely sees minkan as echoing the open-minded reformers inside the establishment.

Liu’s and Wider’s studies of minkan focused on the period when the prodemocracy movement was at its upswing. But, even more generally, throughout the four decades from 1949 to 1989, minkan showed a persistent resistance to consistent harsh repression. For many minkan, there was an upsurge phase (when there would usually be around five hundred copies) and recognition, but they all experienced the different stages—birth, growth, coordination, shutdown, rebirth, or transformation—as a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Minkan as a Way of Resistance
• 2  Reemergence
• 3  Polarities
• 4  The Democracy Wall
• 5  Development and Transformation
• 6  Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index