Nur leere Reden: Politischer Diskurs und die Shanghaier Presse im China des spaten 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Andrea Janku's Nur leere Reden: Politischer Diskurs und die Shanghaier Presse im China des späten 19. Jahrhunderts (Only empty talk: Political discourse and the Shanghai press in late nineteenth-century China) is one of the intellectually stimulating works that have come out of Rudolf G. Wagner's research group on the structure and development of the public sphere in China. Together with Barbara Mittler's A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai's News Media (1872-1912) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and Natascha Vittinghoff's Die Anfänge des Journalismus in China (1862-1911) (The beginnings of journalism in China) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002) Janku explores the consequences of the growth of the press in late Qing China. But while Vittinghoff, for example, uses a more general approach that analyzes the unfolding of the (in Bourdieu's sense) field of journalism and the evolving habitus of the new journalists, Janku approaches her subject with a perspective that at first glance seems to be much narrower. It is her aim to show how the "ways of speech" (yanlu), that is, the official political discourse among the literati elite, once tightly controlled by the imperial censors (yanguan), were slowly taken over by the semi-official or unofficial channels offered by the emerging newspapers. To achieve this aim she looks mainly at the role of the Shenbao from its founding in 1872 until the year 1905, when Huang Xiexun was removed from his post as editor-in-chief. She focuses on the development of the "leading article" (lun or lunshuo) as a new genre in the Chinese political discourse, but the close reading of a number of the articles that she includes in her study is able to open up fascinating points of view on the political and intellectual scenes during this crucial period in Chinese history.

Janku has chosen a most complex approach to get hold of the enormous material that is now available on the political, social, and journalistic developments in late Qing China and to integrate as many aspects of them as possible in her study. She uses a twofold strategy to organize the texts and events presented. First, her chapters alternate between accounts of the political, social, and rhetorical background and introductions of case studies with translations and thorough analyses of selected texts. Second, she concentrates on a wise selection of examples that she explains in extenso rather then trying to incorporate in her account every possible detail and debate from the period she covers.

After the introduction, chapter 2 on "The Chinese Wenren and the New Press" uses the roles played by Ernest Major and Huang Xiexun, the leading figures during the founding and establishing of the Shenbao, to explain the cultural background of the rise of the "leading article." Especially the section on literary societies and the social network that grew behind the scenes shows how the occupation of literati journalist more and more became, at least temporarily, an acceptable alternative to an official career. It is also in this section that Janku formulates one of her major theses: "The debates that were led in the marginality of Shanghai started to exert an always growing pressure on the [established] communicative structures of the Qing bureaucracy" (p. 50). The next chapter takes us a step back and explores the double origin of the new genre in the missionary and early commercial presses and in the Chinese political essay (jingshiwen) of the late imperial period. It becomes evident that the founding of the Shenbao and its orientation toward Chinese interests signified definite progress compared to the sporadic political debates in the earlier Western press in Chinese language. At the same time, the traditions and rhetoric of the elite discourse used for the lunshuo genre laid the basis for a broader acceptance of this genre among the literati...