Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911 by Juan Wang (review)

Although the late Qing tabloid press played a crucial role in the creation of a public sphere in early modern China, it has not drawn sufficient scholarly attention so far. Juan Wang’s research on the late Qing Shanghai tabloid press presents a trail-blazing effort on this subject. With its abundant primary sources and convincing arguments, the book not only provides a comprehensive account of the late Qing tabloids and their substantive contributions to the formation of a “public consciousness that delegitimized the Qing rule” but also sheds much light on the relations of the tabloid press with elite culture and with other important social and intellectual phenomena and trends such as nationalism, modernity, populism, and the rise of a modern market economy in China.

The book is divided into six chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The introduction provides the historical background for the explosion of print journalism in the late Qing period, the reasons for the emergence and flourishing of the tabloid press in Shanghai at that time, and the composition of the tabloid community, especially its two leading figures, Li Boyuan and Wu Jianren. According to the author, Shanghai’s cosmopolitan environment, the city’s vibrant consumption and entertainment milieu, the foreign concessions, the New Policy implemented by the Qing government, and the sense of social, political, and moral crisis on the part of the literati largely accounted for the boom of tabloids in Shanghai during the last fifteen years of the Qing era.

Chapter 1 discusses how the tabloid editors manipulated various juicy topics and activities to entertain readers for fun, fame, and profit. Most topics and activities centred on two things: courtesans and wordplay. The tabloid editors, writers, contributors, and readers formed a social network whose concern eventually went beyond pure entertainment. The pursuit of pleasure and fascination with sexuality broke state taboos and values, making fun a “form of popular resistance.” Chapter 2 explores how the tabloid community contributed to the fall of the Qing dynasty by creating a critical discourse centred on bashing officialdom. They took aim mainly at the moral degeneration of the officials and the government’s lack of power. In the process of exposing the corruption of the Qing officialdom, the tabloid community formed a clear “community consciousness.” Chapter 3 demonstrates how the Shanghai tabloid press articulated three important facets of modern Chinese nationalism – sentiments, discourses, and movements – with comparison to the nationalist discourse promoted by the intellectual elite as presented by Liang Qichao. The tabloid community shared with the intellectual elite the sentiment and discourse of anti-imperialism, but they were not racially “anti-foreign.” Chapter 4 deals with the tabloid community’s attitude toward Western learning by examining their stance on reform, writing history, and social morality. Whereas Zhang Zhidong upheld the stance of “Chinese Learning for fundamental principles, and Western Learning for practical application,” and whereas Liang Qichao went to another extreme by valorizing only the New Learning, “the attitude of the tabloid community fell somewhere between Zhang and Liang.” Chapter 5 examines the tabloid community’s attack of the “new establishment” – the appropriators of the New Learning. While essentially supporting reform, they ruthlessly criticized the reformers. They “questioned the authenticity of these presumed agents of change, challenged the legitimacy and the power they acquired, and attacked them on moral grounds.” Chapter 6 investigates the relation between market forces on the tabloid populism and aesthetics. It was the gradually growing modern market in Shanghai during the late Qing period that largely contributed to the emergence and flourishing of the populism and aesthetics created by the tabloid press. The conclusion briefly discusses the course of the tabloid press’s emergence and boom.

Despite its groundbreaking effort and remarkable achievement, the book somewhat overrates the role of the tabloid editors and writers as critics of government corruption and champions for social progress while overlooking their role as entertainers and profit pursuers. It...