The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press, The Influence of the Protestant Missionary Press in Late Qing China (review)

The past decade and a half has seen the appearance of innumerable books and articles that analyze aspects of China's modern—that is, post-1800—print culture. Most of these publications demand a fairly high level of motivation from their readers, particularly but not limited to interest in and familiarity with the critical, methodological, and technical aspects of scholarly historical explanation. This short book is unlikely to appeal to the more sophisticated, circumscribed, and specialized audiences of that literature. Instead, it is best regarded as a general introduction to the relatively narrow Protestant origins of China's modern press as seen from the perspective of English-language media studies supplemented by a selection of English- and Chinese-language studies of the Chinese newspaper.

Author Xiantao Zhang, a former print and broadcast journalist in Beijing who is currently a research fellow in the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University, UK, does not pretend that the book is anything other than what it is. Indeed, she states quite clearly that "the book itself is not a history of Chinese journalism, and indeed makes no claims to original historical analysis."¹ Instead, "it is an attempt, within the fields of media and cultural studies and historical sociology, to seek for sources of the contemporary context of [Chinese] journalistic culture."² The author embarks on what she calls this "moral and political" process of discovery by focusing on Protestant missionary publishers and publications, Young John Allen's (1836–1907) Wanguo gongbao (Chinese Globe Magazine, 1874–1883; A Review of the Times, 1889–1907) in particular, and their possible influence on elite Chinese newspapers such as Liang Qichao's Shiwubao (Chinese Progress, 1896–1898). To my knowledge, there has been no English-language examination of Wanguo gongbao since Adrian A. Bennett's biographical study of its founder, Young John Allen, appeared in 1983.³Shiwubao, conversely, is familiar to most historians of the late Qing for its role in advancing late Qing gentry-led reformism and Liang's journalistic career.⁴

The book's main discussion covers the period from the early 1800s to 1900 with forays into ancient and middle-period Chinese history as well as investigations into more directly relevant Qing history. The book contains eight chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The introduction opens with a personal anecdote about how Zhang encountered routine censorship while working for a national newspaper based in Beijing in 1997. The experience led Zhang to wonder "why the modern press in China has been so consistently dominated by the state."⁵ Seeking an answer to this important perennial question, she starts from the assumption that many of the problems of the current Chinese press can be traced "back to the late nineteenth century and the origins of the modern press in China."⁶ The book's chief argument is that neither of the two groups on which the book focuses—the Protestant missionary journalists and the elite Chinese newspaper publishers influenced by them—were interested in or laid the foundation for a truly viable Fourth Estate in modern China. Instead, Chinese gentry-reformers and journalists adapted the missionary model to the Confucian political system, making journalism a servant of the state.

Chapter 1 lays the book's foundation with a discussion that follows Ge Gongzhen's 1935 (originally published 1927) history of Chinese newspapers in tracing their origins to the Han period, official Dibao. As Ge found in the Dibao the forerunner of various dynastic gazettes, so too Zhang finds it and its subsequent reincarnations to have been precursors of the Qing-era Jingbao (Imperial Gazette). The development of Dibao is explained through a short look at Qin, Han, and later dynastic periods. A related development, according to Ge and Zhang, was the complementary xiaobao, "'the tabloid newspapers' of the Song Dynasty," which...