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13 CHAPTER 1 Domesticating an Alien Medium: Incorporating the Western-style Newspaper into the Chinese Public Sphere Barbara Mittler China did not have newspapers in the Western sense of the word before foreign missionaries and merchants published their first Chinese-language papers in China. Thus, the developing Chinese press also shared the particular features of its Western counterparts.1 And yet, for these paper to be operative in the new environment, they had to change. This chapter will analyze this process of change. Starting from the normative late nineteenth century Western and Chinese discourse of what a paper should be, it will turn to an exploration of what such an early Chinese paper actually could be. It will argue that the process of domesticating the newspaper in China involved a number of ironic twists, which radically changed its function and status. These twists made the medium into a rival rather than a simple copy of the Western model. WHAT IS THE NEWSPAPER? THE FOREIGN VIEW By the time the press medium was introduced to China it already had become a fixed institution in the West. The new profession of the journalist had formed and consolidated, and as the self-confidence of this group grew, so did their public projection of the benefits of the papers. The normative discourse on newspapers at the time can be found in the great encyclopedias such as the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du 19ième Siècle2 and the Encyclopaedia Britannica .3 Such works tend to reflect notions widely shared by the educated classes 14 JOINING THE GLOBAL PUBLIC at a given time and place.To flesh out the picture, I have added seminal quotations from editorial and inaugural statements from several newspapers. While the history of the press is, over long stretches, the history of official publishing from official sources and under official supervision,4 the ideal of the independent press has been emphatically evoked at least since Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751), in which the article dealing with the press states: “People ask if freedom of the press is advantageous or prejudicial to a state.The answer is not difficult. It is of the greatest importance to conserve this practice in all states founded on liberty. I would even say that the disadvantages of this liberty are so inconsiderable compared to its advantages that this ought to be the common right of the universe, and it is certainly advisable to authorize its practice in all governments.”5 Accordingly, encyclopedia definitions of the “true” press exclusively focus on the idealized form of the “free newspaper”6 even though to this day the bulk of newspapers would not fit this rubric. Press laws and censorship are depicted not as legitimate supervisory instruments of the state but as unnatural curtailments of the “free press.” The idealized newspaper has, first, the ability to gather and spread a broad range of news. The Encyclopaedia Britannica thus cites the publisher of The Daily Courant (London) claiming in 1703: “The author has taken care to be duly furnished with all that comes from abroad.”7 Similarly, the inaugural issue of the Universal Daily Reporter stresses its efforts at diversity in 1785: “A News-Paper . . . ought to be the Register of the times, and faithful recorder of every species of intelligence; it ought not to be engrossed by any particular object; but, like a well-covered table, it should contain something suited to every palate.”8 The idea of offering a broad variety of domestic and foreign, serious and entertaining news was among the earliest promises and purposes of newspapers. It appears prominently in the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du 19ème Siècle through a fine quotation from a rhymed gazette published in 1609: The Gazette in these verses/satisfies the brains: for from all over the universe/she gets her news The Gazette has a thousand runners/who live everywhere without a quarter master. Everybody has to answer her/on her restless course Here and there,/from Orient to Occident and all the parts of the globe/without leaving a single matter out be it edicts, or commissions, or wars/general indulgences or bulls. She relates also/difficulties and prosperities, and whatever it is, nothing is forgotten/for the Gazette multiplies without reposing postillions/and is fast like the eagles.9 With their range from Orient to Occident, from the texts of edicts to reports about wars, news publications are able to speedily satisfy their readers’ curiosity . Their varied contents have...

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