The Origins of the Illiberal Party Newspaper: Print Journalism in China's Nationalist Revolution

T h e Origins of th e Illib era l P a rty N ew sp a p er: P rin t J o u rn a lism in China's N a tio n a list R ev o lu tio n * b y J o h n F itzg era ld In its most highly developed form the Chinese party newspaper (dangbao) has been an indispensable organ of the party-state. The Nationalist Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao) and the Communist Liberation Daily (liefang ribao) and Peoples Daily (Renmin ribao) have promoted approved policy, proclaimed official principles and prescribed acceptable limits of dissent for citizens of the Republic and People's Republic with predictable regularity. Yet, paradoxically, the emergence of the party newspaper at the tum of the century marked a distinctly liberal tum in the evolution of the modem Chinese polity. The illiberal party paper of the Communist and Nationalist party-states appears to have a liberal history. Joan Judge draws attention to the early history of the party paper in a recent essay that traces the developing role of party newspapers alongside changing conceptions of "public opinion" (y u lu n ) in late Qing China. Newspapers evolved over the last decades of the Qing from general information sheets into partisan organs promoting particular political interests within a developing pluralist polity. This transition took place alongside broader developments in the conception of public opinion. Initially a vaguely-defined concept referring to the ,expression of matters of public interest, public opinion rapidly evolved into an elite forum for informing and educating the general public and thence to a lively arena within which various party factions (dang), each thought to represent particular interests, came to compete with one another in pursuit of partisan political advantage (Judge 1995). These developments were followed closely at the time by activists involved in creating the new party press. Around 1902, for example, Liang Qichao began writing of dangbao as useful partisan institutions that might help inform a broader, multi-party and" in the aggregate, non-partisan medium of public opinion. Liang practised what he preached, establishing no less than seventeen newspapers over the length of his career, including the prominent reform journal Shibao ("The I am grateful to Stanford University for permission to'include material from m y book, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the NationalistRevolution (1996). REPUBliCAN CHINA, 21.2 (April 1996): 1-22 2 Republican China Eastern Times") in 1904. Yet, as Judge points out, Liang's early experience with client newspapers also highlights incongruities between party expectations on the one hand and the editorial performance of party· papers on the other. Party papers in the Shanghai area operated in a commercial market and within increasingly complex networks of social institutions that stimulated editors and journalists to engage openly with the broad range of reformist opinion circulating throughout the Lower Yangzi region. In effect, editors were able to defy the restrictions that Liang and his constitutional movement tried to impose upon them in their efforts to convert client papers into disciplined party institutions. JoanJudge concludes by emphasizing the "element of political pluralism" that characterized these early links between party papers and their political patrons, noting that they appear to have predicted a liberal trajectory for political reform in the early twentiethcentury (Judge 1995: 134). In light of Joan Judge's research into the history of the liberal party newspaper in the late imperial period, it behooves the Republican historian to trace the history of the illiberal party paper that came to displace. it. While agreeing with Judge's basic hypothesis, I am tempted to draw a somewhat different conclusion -or at least to phrase the question a little differently. Could it be that newspapers were politically eclectic despite, rather than on account of, the levels of tolerance extended by their parent parties? True, parties initially. lacked the determination and the means to give effect to their intolerance. But it was, in the end, the intolerance of editorial dissent that came. to characterize the history of the party paper and that ultimately predicted the trajectory of political reform in twentieth century China. The party paper took an illiberal turn in the...