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

Although China is credited for inventing movable type, woodblock printing was the preferred method in China until modern times. Kai-Wing Chow, who is now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argues that China's continued use of woodblock printing was not a technological failure, as some European scholars maintained, and instead shows that the use of woodblocks for printing not only made economic sense but also allowed Chinese publishers and authors to enter the market on very little capital and publish books that were affordable to the average workman. Xylography and inexpensive bamboo paper allowed books in China to be sold for what the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci called "ridiculously low prices." Blocks also had a permanence and mobility that type did not: they could be sold, traded, or stored for later use, just like latter-day stereotype plates in the West. Movable type was used along with block printing, often using wooden types, and it became more common in the Qing era (1644–1911). The commercial side of publishing was evident even in the sixteenth century, as advertisements for new books were included in the text and books were produced in varying bindings for different markets. The industry that Chow presents was sophisticated and highly developed. It was fairly widely dispersed across China and enjoyed a distribution system that included river-borne bookshops and an imperial postal system for moving manuscripts between authors and publishers.

Chow examines the relationship of printing, publishing, the examination system, and the rise of a new commercial-literary class and its impact on Chinese culture. Unlike the West, with its aristocracy and religious elite, political power in Ming China resided in a bureaucratic elite that admitted members via a rigorous series of examinations based on the Four Books and Five Classics, the foundations of the Confucian state. The number of examinees wanting study guides and model essays to read created a profitable publishing industry that drew editors and writers from that same relatively large body of students and scholars. The industry took not only successful examinees but also those who were well into an examination process that could take decades to complete. Their critical essays became important tools in establishing literary careers and in turn influenced the course of the examinations.

China may have had a larger literate audience than Europe, perhaps as high as 40 percent among men. Its meritocracy encouraged learning as a way to advancement. Books related to the examinations had the biggest share of the market in earlier years, until an audience that was not part of the examination system began to demand more fiction and drama. Chow argues that while a commercial career did not confer the status of a purely literary or official career and therefore was often unacknowledged in a successful writer's biography, those who engaged in commercial publishing, either as publishers or as literary workers, created a new class, the shishang, a merger of the literati with the merchant-business class. This was a fluid field that one could labor in during the long examination period and progress to official positions in the bureaucracy. Within this class some became recognized as minggong (famous masters), whose name alone on the title page or the preface could add value to a book, while others became known as shanren (mountain men), professional writers who lived from their writing skills. While shanren were often literary drudges, some writers and publishers used the name to indicate a certain independence of thought and as a marketing tool.

The book is made up of short, factual statements, each cited, so that there are often more than two hundred citations per chapter. It is as if Chow were re-creating the history of the era by reassembling the historical fragments that remained. Even so, the fragments fit together well and provide a solid and important work on the economic and literary foundation of Ming-Qing...