"A Dime Store of Words": Liberty Magazine and the Cultural Logic of the Popular Press

In 1911, at the dawn of the new Republic, Wang Dungen (王鈍根 1888-1950) started the legendary literary supplement Ziyoutan (自由談 Free talk) for Shenbao (申報), one of the most widely circulating newspapers in early Republican China. In September 1913, he launched Ziyou zazhi (自由雜誌 Liberty magazine) as a repository (匯刊 huikan) of Free Talk.¹ The magazine ran for two issues under the joint editorship of Tong Ailou (童愛樓) and Wang Dungen and then changed its name to Youxi zazhi (遊戲雜誌 Pastime, published from 1913 to 1915). In one of the four forewords published in the inaugural issue, Wang Dungen explained that the contributions to Free Talk had been so overwhelming that it was impossible to accommodate them all in the cramped space of the column, and that he could think of no better place for these "brilliant specimens of writing" than a magazine created for this purpose. This was at best a partial truth, for the two contributing editors' names appeared in the byline of at least half of the entries in both issues. Nonetheless, Free Talk was so successful that Wang seemed confident that a magazine bearing the same name could only replicate that success.²

True to its namesake, Liberty magazine featured a wide variety of genres: satirical essays, anecdotes, jokes, travel notes, exotic tales, technological digests, classical verse, short stories, plays, librettos, couplets, song lyrics, drinking game limericks, self-help tidbits, and so on. Pride of place was given to the non-fictional genres of essays and vignettes collected in "Youxi wenzhang (遊戲文章 Playful essays)," the lead section and the only one with a separate table of contents. Fiction and drama were placed at the very end. Positioning their magazine as a middlebrow publication that bridged the gap between the elite and the vulgar and that met the needs of both learned scholars and average readers, the editors were proud of its unique blend of entertainment and edification and were at pains to stave off the impression of frivolity that its many "playful essays" might evoke. Wang Dungen insisted that the playful essays were in fact "didactic writings (救世文字 jiushi wenzi)" firmly committed to the moral mission of criticizing social ills and redeeming the world. In the Fakanci (發刊辭 mission statement), however, Tong Ailou invited the readers to approach the magazine as though they were strolling into a "dime store of words (文字雜貨店 wenzi zahuodian)" where they would find an assortment of amusement and knowledge at their fingertips.

Liberty's lively, heterogeneous contents open up a small but revealing window onto the world of the popular press in the first decades of the twentieth century. The burgeoning scholarship on print culture in the late Qing and Republican periods has shed much light on the ways in which high-profile newspapers helped foment social and political change through the creation of a print-mediated public or counterpublic.³ Historians and literary scholars have also shown that the tabloids (小報 xiaobao) and pulp fiction genres of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School (鴛鴦蝴蝶派 Yuanyang hudie pai) that were apparently preoccupied with the trivial and private were in fact vital players in the literary public sphere and instrumental in shaping modern, metropolitan identities among urban residents.⁴ The contours of this public sphere, however, have been difficult to delineate given its fluid and fragmentary character wrought in a volatile political climate and mercurial commercial environment. Meng Yue has gone so far as to call Shanghai, the capital of print culture, an "unruly" city on account of the heterogeneous people, goods, ideas, and lifestyles that have found refuge here.⁵ The residual, emergent, and uncontrollable cultural practices that have given Shanghai its roguish image were, in her view, what set off the radical political changes of the late Qing and early Republic. How this unruly public culture was perceived and experienced at the everyday level can be best glimpsed through the lens of a mass cultural phenomenon like Liberty that self-consciously cast itself as a literary dime store capable of rendering the vertiginous urban world legible and enjoyable for the average reader.

Liberty makes an interesting case...