1
Regardless of whether one examines politics, culture, economy, or nearly any other facet of the Tang dynasty, it is clear the Tang was one of the most flourishing golden ages in all of Chinese history. This period (618–907) is equally as dazzling when placed into the frame of world history, and has been safely smelted into recognition as China’s pride and joy. The Encyclopedia of China summarizes:
Ever since entering a state of feudalism in the Spring and Autumn period and during the Warring states, China’s social economy, politics, and culture followed a complicated path of advancement, during which three distinct periods of noticeable flourishing appeared. The first high tide was during the Western Han, the third in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the second, naturally, was born of the Tang. Especially during its preliminary stages, the Tang was characterized by booming agriculture, increasingly intricate handcrafts, and an unprecedented business economy with bustling cities thriving like never before. After the Tang, the Jiangnan Southern region continued to develop, overtaking the economic strength of the North and eventually establishing a strong foundation therein. In the political theater, the lauded reigns of Emperor Xuanzong and Emperor Taizong brought a national unification and social stability that culminated in a peaceful era surpassing perhaps even the Great Peace of Emperor Wen in the Eastern Han Dynasty …… from a global perspective, the Tang Empire was one of the most important and strongest countries of its time …… the Tang is able not only to stand out among the nations of the world, but belongs to the most advanced thereof …… in its contemporary world, India, Arabia, and China were the most important centers of cultural exchange. Among these three, China is the undisputed standout. …… the Tang dynasty was certainly an extraordinary age.1
Naturally, in the face of this kind of “extraordinary age,” later generations always hold a special kind of robust interest in researching its multitudinous facets, which has thereby caused Tang studies to be one of the most fertile patches of soil in the modern academia, proving to be endlessly flourishing and holding countless achievements. “The Tang’s unprecedented political power and influence, as well as its achievements in the cultural and artistic arenas, led it to be a topic of meticulous study. Japanese scholars vehemently research this period as well, if not only for reasons of personal interest, then primarily due to that the Tang exerted a deep influence on contemporary Japan. ……Western scholars were also entranced by this period; as early as 1753, the Jesuit missionary Antoine Gaubil completed an entire history of Western Tang political studies; in recent years,2 Westerners have contributed a great volume of invaluable Tang dynasty studies (Denis Twitchett 1990: 1).”
In my professional opinion, Tang culture not only epitomizes the success of the classical world, but also opened a new voice for modern history. The expansive clarity of “Glittering gates of Nine Heavens shine upon the palace, one thousand emissaries bow in reverence to the gilded emperor”,3 the majestic power of “The general brings order with merely three arrows, the warriors’ songs peal into Han pass,”4 the vibrant tenor of “I cannot help but drink and sing in this brilliant sunshine, for a bright road filled with Spring will carry me back home,”5 and the lofty sentiment of “A slew of sails pass by the overturned boat, a hillside of greenery flourishes near the withered tree”6—the glittering heights of Classical Chinese culture be seen everywhere, and furthermore find faint yet intimate connections with later conventions. With imperial examinations and the Penal Law Code of the Tang (816–907) (Tanglv shuyi) as the source of legal structure, the political framework set up in the Tang had a heavy influence on later generations such that said framework was often directly adapted. One could say the Tang was a commanding period of Chinese history that borrowed heavily from its predecessors while simultaneously offering deep inspiration to later dynasties. If we look both forward and backward from this point toward the five thousand years surrounding the Tang, it is easier to have a systematic understanding of what came before, as well as what followed. Especially in the face of a twenty-first century filled with opportunity and difficulty, hope and danger, to a postmodern situation writhing with both psychological fragmentation and the homelessness of the soul, the legacy of Tang culture becomes even more valuable. Joseph Needham, in the opening section of The History of Science and Technology in China, compared the predominant characteristics of the Tang and Song dynasties, saying that “The Tang was humanistic.” Of course, saying that the Tang’s humanistic essence can fully solute the hardened rationality of the modern age is potentially as suspicious as claiming that scattered militaristic control over outlying regions in the Tang was the direct forerunner to the Republican period’s fragmented military centers.7 That being said, Tang culture and its “lyrically poetic essence” can undoubtedly be seen as a plentiful and realistic resource of assistance for the healthy and complete development of modern society. This, perhaps, is one of the many reasons more and more scholars unrelentingly conduct meticulous research in the field of Tang studies.
2
In comparison with other fields of research, the topic of journalism and communication is no doubt a less popular subject. In comparison with the way modern and contemporary journalism studies are meticulously combed through, the Tang Dynasty’s journalism and communication studies is rather uncultivated virgin soil. While a few researchers over the past thirty years have entered this academic field from different vantage points with definite success, the late start and relatively wide range of the field has led to a seeming barrenness of research results, with just a few names in the field standing alone like cowboys on the early American frontier.
Ge Gongzhen, in the first complete explication of the development of China’s journalism and media history Journalistic History of China (1927), spend a short time on Tang scholar Sun Kezhi’s Anthology on Morals and Norms (Jingweiji), bringing up “Kaiyuan Miscellaneous Reports (known as Kaiyuan Zabao).” For roughly half a century afterwards, understanding of Tang media communication stopped at this level without much development. The only exception was Zhu Chuanyu, a media history professional from Taiwan, whose Tang Newspaper Studies written in 1966 “started from the Kaiyuan Miscellaneous Reports” (K’ai-yüen-tsa-pao) and went all the way through the Tang dynasty’s official palace reports.8
By the 1980s, just as the ice finally started to melt, the situation became lively. Studies on the Tang Dynasty journalism and communication finally started to show some life force. There were roughly two reasons for this: one was the dawning of popularity of journalism and communication studies as an independent field, wherein news history became an area of widespread interest following the academization of news studies; and two was the introduction of media studies, which led to a vast broadening of academic horizons causing what appeared to be previously very cramped topics to transform into rich and meaningful areas of inquiry. At the beginning of this wave, Fang Hanqi of Renmin University’s “Observing the Newspaper of Ancient China from the Chin-tsou-yüen Report of the Tang Guiyi Army Housed in the British Library,” collected in Collection of Papers on Journalism and Communication (1983, Vol. 5), was an incredibly influential academic achievement that proved with immaculate textual research that pointed out chin-tsou-yüen reports of the Tang as being the oldest newspapers in both terms of China’s history, and in the history of the world (Here chin-tsou-yüen refers to the liaison office set up by the local government in the capital).
The force of Fang’s thesis goes without saying, and has led to widespread interest in academia. Not long after, Zhang Guogang of the Tianjin Social Sciences Research Institute (currently a history professor at Tsinghua University), published a paper in Academic Monthly’s July 1986 issue entitled “Study on Two Official Documents of chin-tsou-yüen in Dunhuang,” a paper that the author and Fang deliberated seriously over. Of the titular “two,” one was Fang’s original research object, currently housed in the British Library under S.1156 Tang Guiyi Army’s Chin-tsou-yüen Reports (887), whereas the other was discovered by Zhang dated to even earlier than that discussed by Fang, currently housed in the Parisian Library under P.3574 Tang Guiyi Army (c. 876). Zhang’s thesis is of course clear in his title: the papers are not in fact “newspapers,” but rather “documentations.” Before this, Zhang had already expressed this point that “chin-tsou-yüen reports are not ancient newspapers,” which had run in the Tianjin Daily (March 23, 1986). For our concerns, the significance of Fang’s research into these Tang documents was of course not in his thesis itself—although it was certainly of eye-catching tenor—but rather in that it grasped something solid amidst a chaotic miasma, something that sparked widespread academic interest and incited a wave of related research. Borrowing the idea of “agenda-setting” from media studies, Fang essentially set an agenda for the entirety of Tang Dynasty journalism and communication research. In relation to the topic itself there were of course a plethora of differing opinions, but as everyone was vehemently arguing about the same subject, a rather wide range of new information was uncovered. That is to say, as soon as the problem of these “chin-tsou-yüen reports” was overturned, the entire pan of Tang Dynasty news media was shaken to life. Therefore, we should not consider Fang as having solved a problem that confounded prior generations, but rather recognize his major contribution as having made a critical fissure in the dam holding back a reservoir of related questions. Though his central thesis will have been corrected, Fang’s contributions to the Tang communication studies are unquestionably valuable, much in the same way that the theory of heliocentrism, though flawed, was undoubtedly valuable to the development of the physical sciences.
3
Other than Fang Hanqi, Yao Fushen of Shanghai Fudan University has also delved deeply into the field of Tang media research, quietly producing surprisingly relevant results. In the 1980s, he has published the following list of notable articles:
“Discussions of Several Questions of ‘Ti-pao’,” from Hsin-wen Research Documents, 1984(4).“Investigation into the Activities of Journalism and Communication of the Tang Dynasty,” from Journalism Bimonthly, 1982(5).
“Investigation into Miscellaneous Reports from the Period of Kaiyuan,” from Collection of Papers on Journalism and Communication, 1985(9).
“Investigations based on Whether Sun Chuxuan Used the Term ‘Hsin-wen (news)’,” from, Journalism Bimonthly, 1989(1).
These articles explore Tang Dynasty journalistic and communicative activities from various different angles, with particularly precise usage of historical documentation, causing Yao Fushen to be a giant among ants in the field. As Fang Hanqi so aptly put it:
He is diligent in learning. His essays are meticulously argued and flawlessly justified, often with great results, never letting down former worthies, and seriously worth our respect.9
The article “Investigation into the Activities of Journalism and Communication of the Tang Dynasty” is especially prominent, for it uses official remonstrations, reports, liaison office gazettes and reports, and various papers to offer a complete unpacking and organizing of Tang Dynasty media activity. Although it cannot avoid certain oversights common to pioneering research, it is still an incredibly valuable article.
Ever since the introduction of communication theory, and even including the head of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ News Research Institute Sun Xupei’s support of a “nativist” movement in the 1990s (Yu Yelz 1994; Sun Xupei 1997), a considerably new atmosphere was imparted upon Tang Dynasty journalism and communication research. For example, in 1996, Li Yiping and Tao Diqian of Jinan University’s Journalism and Communication Studies Department published “On the Outward Communication of the Tang Dynasty,”10 which was the first instance wherein Tang communications were discussed in the context of intercultural communication, and further undertook topical categorization (political communication, communication of Confucian thought, communication of science and economics, communication of culture, communication of religion, etc.) and methodological categorization (political marriages, educational communication, business transactions, communication among citizens, etc.) of relevant documents. Another example would be Liu Guangyu and Guo Shubin’s “On Changing Communication Methods and their Influence on Lyric Poetry in the Tang and Song” from the 1997(1) issue of Qilu Academics; although heavy-handed on literature, it is still an influential paper for our purposes.
Of course, in a final contemporary analysis, research into Tang Dynasty journalism and communication is still in its budding stage, for there are still many things that have not yet been addressed by clear, systematic research. Of particular note, it is a whole slew of unanswered questions relating to news communication studies, especially those whose related discussions remain unclear or contradictory, or those whose seemingly watertight aspects are still in need of further verification. To this day, the most exhaustive work d...