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Reviewed by:
  • Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China
  • Joan Judge
Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. by Kai-wing Chow (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004) 397 pp. $49.50

Chow's rich, meticulously researched, and theoretically informed study investigates how a stable print technology—nonmechanized woodblock printing—brought about significant changes in social, cultural, and political practice in early-modern (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) China. He focuses on the repressed history of a specific social group, the shishang (literati merchant-businessmen), whose economic status, political influence, and intellectual habits—if not their habitus—were transformed through the growth of commercial publishing in this period.

Chow lays the study's theoretical groundwork in the introduction, and proceeds with chapters about the economics of book production; publishing in the early-modern period, the commodification of materials used to prepare for the civil-service examinations, the rising importance of paratextual elements in enhancing a text's value, and the shishang's expanding public authority within political culture. The conclusion highlights meaningful comparisons between the worlds of print in China and Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, untainted by assumptions of Western superiority.

This Sino-Western matrix is one of Chow's central theoretical concerns. He opens the book with a critique of what he terms the "sinologisitic mode" of writing non-Western history using narrative schemes from three related Western discursive systems—historicism, Eurocentrism, and modernism. His primary objective is to liberate the history of early-modern Chinese printing from these schemes, which reduce the multiple temporalities of non-Western histories to chronicles of failures and absences.

Chow does, nonetheless, invoke the work of an interdisciplinary array of fields from sociology to literary theory and cultural history. Reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu, he considers theory usable when it "is not undertaken in any historicist and European schemes" (191).

Bourdieu's work is particularly illuminating for Chow's analysis of the shishang class.1 He views the shishang as the product of both the history [End Page 507] of their position as literary professionals and of their dispositions as scholarly and official aspirants (100)—the latter occluding the former. He further uses Bourdieu's theorization of the field of cultural production to highlight the unique relationship between print and power in early-modern China where commercial publishing, which was subject to less state control than in Europe, weakened government authority over literary standards.

Some of Chow's more sustained engagement with Western theory concerns cultural historians. In examining the Chinese civil-service examination system, he agrees with de Certeau's critique of Foucault's overestimation of the power of the state but critiques de Certeau's underestimation of the "constraining effects of reading protocols" on the reader.2 Chow further uses a range of literary theory to unlock the meaning of specific texts, reflect on the establishment of literary value in early-modern China, and examine the function of the paratext in the context of social relations.

Chow's multidisciplinary approach to Chinese print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of the book's greatest strengths. It enables him to relate the social, technological, economic, cultural, and political elements of this story to one another, and, more fundamentally, to convey the intricate nature of cultural development and the complexity of historical change.

Joan Judge
University of California, Santa Barbara

Footnotes

See Pierre Bourdieu (ed. Randal Johnson), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York, 1993), 61.

2. See Michel de Certeau (trans. Steven Randall), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 45–49. De Certeau critiques Michel Foucault (trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith), The Archeology of Knowledge (London, 1972).

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