Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (review)

The Chinese invented wood-block printing during the Tang dynasty (618- 907 C.E.) and enjoyed a sophisticated print culture well before Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press in Europe. In the nineteenth century, Westerners seeking profits and converts in China brought with them print technologies descended from Gutenberg's press. Christopher Reed's book examines the confrontation between these two print traditions in China's treaty ports during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Resisting the assumption that European-style printing presses would inevitably replace wood-block techniques, he investigates the accommodation and adaptation of these technologies into a particularly Chinese form of print capitalism.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Shanghai's printers adopted mechanized printing and modern organizational practices that allowed them to distribute new-style journals, newspapers, and textbooks to ever expanding audiences. The values and aesthetics of traditional Chinese print culture, however, significantly shaped their choices of technologies and techniques, and continued to exert an influence over Shanghai's printing and publishing, even into the twentieth century. Reed contends that Chinese print capitalism therefore represents a case distinct from both conventional histories of Western print capitalism and the best-known accounts of its development in non-Western contexts such as Benedict Andersen's Imagined Communities (1983).

Reed first lays out the process through which Western print technologies were transferred to China. Western missionaries introduced a considerable range of such technologies to port cities in the early nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1870s that Chinese printers in Shanghai began to view the printing press as a plausible alternative to wood-block printing. At this time, Chinese printers found lithographic printing techniques best suited to reproducing calligraphy and reprinting traditional books in greater quantity and at lower cost than wood-block printing. By the late 1890s, these printers had begun to adopt letterpress printing to satisfy a rising demand for the quick delivery of news. By the first years of the twentieth century, Chinese-owned machine shops could repair and reproduce lithographic and letterpress printing machinery, breaking Shanghai printers' former dependence on foreign equipment and facilitating the diffusion of these technologies throughout China.

Reed analyzes the social and institutional features of print capitalism that emerged among Shanghai's printers and publishers: the cooperation between reformist literati and industrial entrepreneurs as well as publishers' embrace of the trade association, the joint-stock firm, and intellectual property as ways to protect their investments in modern print technology. Finally, Reed examines the heyday of print capitalism in Shanghai through the activities of and competition among three of the largest publishing firms of the 1920s and 1930s.

The focus on the technological, social, and business history of Shanghai's printing and publishing industries distinguishes Reed's book from a recent wave of studies of modern Chinese publishing that tend to focus on the cultural contributions of particular periodicals. His study is extraordinarily rich. Reed skillfully employs anecdote, fiction, and memoir to evoke the beliefs and dilemmas of those participating in Chinese print capitalism at all levels. Intertwined with his main argument are other narratives that underscore the ways in which the publishing industry was indeed a significant hub of multiple aspects of Chinese modernity. He considers, for example, the significance of place in Chinese print capitalism by tracing the development of Shanghai's "Culture Street" (wenhua jie), where booksellers and publishers concentrated their businesses. He also traces the development of class polarizations in the printing industry, from evidence of exploitative relations between masters and apprentices in the early print-machine industry which anticipated the polarization of class relationships and the subsequent radicalization of print workers.

One issue that is not fully addressed in this study is the relationship of Shanghai's print capitalism to the highly politicized terrain of Chinese capitalism under semicolonial conditions. Reed notes that publishing was the third largest area of Chinese investment after the cigarette and brocade-weaving industries...