New-Style Gazettes and Provincial Reports in Post-Boxer China: An Introduction and Assessment

Vol. 8, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1987 NEW-STYLE GAZETTES AND PROVINCIAL REPORTS IN POST-BOXER CHINA: AN INTRODUCTION AND ASSESSMENT* Roger Thompson* Government gazettes published in the first decade of this century at the metropolitan, provincial, and sub-provincial levels differed significantly from gazettes published before the twentieth century, which were simply vehicles for edicts, memorials, and regulations. New-style government gazettes (guanbao) could also include articles reprinted from other government gazettes and the popular press, petitions by local elites, directives from provincial officials, announcements, and even advertising. In many respects these new-style government gazettes resembled the newspapers envisioned by Liang Qichao in his 1896 essay calling for newspapers to print information in the following categories: world news, new government policy, and information on Sino-foreign problems.1 New-style gazettes * This research was assisted by a grant from the International Doctoral Research Fellowship Program for China of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Funds for the Program were provided by the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge the financial and administrative support provided by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China for doctoral research carried out in China in 1983. Additional research was assisted by a research grant from the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ** I would like to thank Jonathan D. Spence, Yu Ying-shih, and Kandice Hauf for their critiques of an earlier version of this article. The comments made by anonymous readers for Late Imperial China were also appreciated. Finally, I would like to thank Philip Kuhn for encouraging me to submit a revised version of this essay for publication. 1 Britton, 1933:89, 109. Andrew Nathan, in his recent intepretation of the evolution of government gazette publishing, describes government attitudes toward gazettes in terms of change from disapproval to approval. Nathan argues that the government's attitude toward gazettes moved from disdain in 1851, when the Xianfeng emperor rejected a proposal for a government gazette, "to official sponsorship and finally to reliance upon gazettes to give force to the law." Nathan goes on to speculate that the "pro-reform officials and organizations which sponsored the gazettes apparently hoped to entrench themselves against political opposition from conservatives by creating a constituency for their reform programs both throughout the bureaucracy and also among the attentive public." See Nathan, 1981:1292. For a slightly different version of this essay see Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew Nathan (1985). Nathan fails to note the similarity between traditional government gazettes, which were compilations of edicts and memorials, and the content of the main central government organ of 1911, Neige guanbao. 80 New-Style Gazettes and Provincial Reports in Post-Boxer China81 incorporated the chief function of old-style gazettes-informing readers of government policy-with the purpose of the press discussed by reformers in the 1890s, which included presenting information on government policy, international news, and reform ideas. New-style government gazettes were not only a source of information on government policies and actions but also a means by which to shape and influence public opinion. Because these gazettes are rare, surviving only in a few libraries in the United States, China, and Japan, government gazettes are often overlooked in bibliographic surveys of source material for late Qing history, though the monographs on periodical publishing in the late Qing by Ge Gongzhen, Roswell Britton, and Fang Hanqi discuss some of these gazettes. These scholars note that through much of the Qing dynasty the government published, or allowed to be published, compilations of memorials and edicts which were distributed throughout the empire and formed the basis for provincial editions.2 The function of this type of publication-dissemination of official information-remained central to some of the government publishing efforts in the late Qing. /. Initial Publication Efforts The earliest of these efforts was initiated in Zhili by Yuan Shikai in late 1901, when he established a government publishing bureau (guanbao ju) in...