Imagining Citizenship: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897-1911

This paper examines the idea of citizenship in the Shanghai tabloid press between 1897 and 1911. Tabloid writers, editors, and, to a lesser degree, readers appropriated and challenged Liang Qichao's (粱啟超1873-1929) discourse on citizenship. The paper shows that modern Chinese discourses on polity and "the people" came in multiple shapes and from diverse sources. Liang Qichao, the most influential of Chinese intellectual elites, did not however monopolize the construction of modern Chinese discourses on citizenship in the last decades of the Qing.