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1 Introduction Rudolph G. Wagner The 1989 translation into English of Jürgen Habermas’s 1962 study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in Europe has provoked a debate among China scholars about the viability of concepts such as public sphere and civil society in China.1 In a pathbreaking study independent of Habermas’s work, Mary Backus Rankin has documented the gradual coagulation of local public spheres in Zhejiang into a regional Lower Yangtse Valley and even a national public sphere between 1860 and the end of the Qing in 1911.2 She pointed to the increase of “public” activities by new elite groups only loosely connected to the state apparatus, to a growing self-awareness of these groups, and a concomitant growth in cultural articulations, ideological claims, and social links. She saw the Shenbao newspaper in Shanghai as an important link between them, and even as their voice. Although her focus was not on the press, she often used the Shenbao as a source. In another important work, William Rowe also focused on Jiangnan local elites,3 but with a more “China-centered”approach. He saw a “civil society”developing in late imperial Chinese cities independent of foreign impact. While his Hankow merchants, as Frederic Wakeman pointed out, were mostly compradors of foreign firms in Shanghai and got the news about their own city from the foreign-owned Shenbao4 —also a key source for Rowe himself—the “foreign” media have no place in his argumentation. With the Habermas discussion, these works were reset into a larger context . Habermas’s focus was on the communication within the public sphere rather than the familiar social basis of its development. His sociological study could draw on a wide range of empirical studies done by historians. In Chinese studies, such historical studies are still in the first stages. Without them, broader conceptualizations have a weak foundation. The present volume is an effort to help strengthen this base.5 2 JOINING THE GLOBAL PUBLIC Habermas had linked the public sphere with a distinctly European enlightenment agenda of a society speaking with its own voice independent of the state and with a critical edge against manipulation by modern monopolized media. In the 1990 Preface to a new German edition of his book, he revisited some of his earlier pessimism. The developments in Central and Eastern Europe seemed to show that even after decades of a fully monopolized propaganda press and certainly without being a “population used to freedom ,” people were able to use niches to craft the elements of a civil society strong enough to delegitimate a seemingly all-powerful authoritarian state.6 To restrict the public sphere concept to Western Europe seemed too narrow. The PRC events in 1989 called for similar reflections.7 Habermas followed the Scottish enlightenment in defining civil society and the public as well as the public sphere of its deliberations in contradistinction to the state.8 The state is the object of, but not a subject in, the debate. The state was not treated as an actor in the public sphere. The Chinese case here may serve to highlight a blind spot in this approach. Long before the first Chinese newspapers had made their appearance, the court had regularly released approved information and documents to the public. Although managed by private print shops, the resulting Peking Gazette, Jingbao, had to reproduce the entire release—and this without changes or addition of other texts.The early Shenbao editorials from the 1870s about the function of newspapers were quite right in saying that the Peking Gazette format reduced the flow of communication between high and low, between state and society, to a top–down dispensation. The flowering of Chinese-language newspapers in Shanghai since the 1870s, their distribution throughout the country, and their gradual but evident acceptance by a broad readership did not mean that the government gazette dwindled into insignificance as it did in many parts of Western Europe. The Chinese state continued to have a loud say in the Chinese public sphere. Whenever a central government had the actual strength to reduce legitimate public articulation to the state’s voice, it did so, and it has done this most effectively since 1949. In China, the government gazette as well as other government media have been and are in fact the mainstream of public articulation; the existence of a multivocal press is perceived as the hallmark of a weak government unable to unify the minds of the nation...

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