Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (review)

"The specific impact of printing cannot be understood if we consider only the technological advantage of printing in communication. It is not printing itself that determines how it will be used, but rather the specific attitudes of the group who came to use that technology as well as the ecological, economic, social, and political conditions under which a specific technology is developed, introduced, marketed, used, and resisted. These various factors also shaped the symbolic production of the technology itself." This is the conclusion (pp. 252–53) to Kai-Wing Chow's study of the role of printing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chinese literati culture, and it reflects its three main foci: the economics of Chinese printing; its political uses in imperial times; and the comparative study of print technology and its economic and political contexts. In each of these areas, the author is exploring new territory in English-language scholarship on the Chinese and comparative history of print technology.

The economics of print in pre-eighteenth-century China is the subject of the first two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that the cost of paper, woodblocks, and labor had declined by the sixteenth century to the extent that commercial printers were able to sell editions affordable by low-wage laborers at substantial profit margins; the second chapter surveys the production process from the acquisition of manuscripts to the distribution of printed copies. Here, the author's explanation of the economic rationale behind the continued preference for woodblocks despite the growing impact of movable type provides a useful corrective to perceptions of woodblock printing as a sign of the Chinese inability to develop the technology that produced modernity.

The remaining three chapters address the political implications of the commercial uses of print. The author argues that the expansion of commercial printing spurred the growth of a class of literary professionals who formed societies that effectively challenged state authority. He points to civil-service examinations as an example of the fading authority of the state in the wake of the expansion of commercial publishing. In contrast to the view of late imperial culture as "a cultural prison," he argues that commercial printers and literary societies successfully presented "competing models of literary excellence" and "open and pluralistic interpretations" (pp. 189, 150–51) of the Confucian canon.

The author is to be applauded for taking up unexplored questions in the history of Chinese printing, for engaging with analytical frameworks derived from sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and literary theorists such as Gerald Genette, and for introducing a comparative perspective. His book is to be read, however, as a first exploration into late imperial Chinese and comparative print culture rather than as an authoritative synthesis. There are several methodological and interpretive problems. For example, the application of a model of economic rationality to the activities of commercial publishers leads to questionable inferences about business decisions. Kai-Wing Chow occasionally resorts to arguments based on contemporary or presumably universal marketing practices rather than on hard evidence. Along the same lines, the narrative presents a linear interpretation of the history of Chinese print culture that fails to take seriously twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments. It is telling that the only number the author cites for pre-sixteenth-century book production is an estimate of government publications (2,482) before the sixteenth-century "boom"—a number that obscures the earlier expansion of commercial printing, especially when juxtaposed to the number of Ming publications (15,724). The work of Lucille Chia (Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian [11th–17th Centuries]) and others has shown that commercial strategies deployed by late Ming Dynasty publishers went back to earlier models and similarly amplified tensions in examination culture. These findings suggest that a cyclical interpretation of Chinese print culture may provide a more appropriate model, a model that has been successfully developed for the economic history of the eleventh through seventeenth centuries.

Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern...