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47 CHAPTER 2 Useful Knowledge and Appropriate Communication: The Field of Journalistic Production in Late Nineteenth Century China Natascha Gentz Studies on the public sphere and political culture in general in late Qing China have only recently started to focus on newspapers and other print media. This was in part due to the influence of Habermas’s study of the pivotal role of print media in the development of the public sphere in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe;1 it also resulted from the discovery that these materials—even if descried by historians as a “weak source”—do at the very least contain a lot of unintended information on the political culture and social communication of the communities in which they are circulating. Until recently, however, studies with this new focus have mainly concentrated on the development of the Chinese press after the beginning of the twentieth century. This emphasis follows the PRC periodization, which has a truly “native” press starting only with the reform papers in the mid-1890s. It finds further justification in the claim that the professionalization of journalism made headway only during the last years of the Qing, and developed only during the 1910s and 1920s. The elements described by occupation sociologists as marking a “profession” such as a specialized and institutionalized education, the formation of professional associations, and a defined ethical code had indeed not now developed during the first decades of Chinese-language newspapers.2 An analysis of the archival record and the newspapers themselves, however , will show that the early stages of a Chinese press in the Shanghai Settlements and the Hong Kong crown colony already display a rather advanced perception of the role of the press in political and social communication as well 48 JOINING THE GLOBAL PUBLIC as a high level of organizational and intercommunicative structures among the people involved. This chapter follows a sociohistorical approach. It will be assumed that the position of the papers and the statements of the agents can only be fully interpreted and grounded within the broader context of what Bourdieu calls the “field of cultural production.” Cultural production emerges from an interaction of different institutions such as those for material production, distribution , reception, or symbolic production, and these institutions are again created or shaped by the agents in the field and their specific activities, networks, alliances , and so on. This allows for a flexible empirical approach that studies textual production mainly in a pragmatic context.3 For my analysis, I chose the two most important private commercial papers of the last half of the nineteenth century, the Shanghai Shenbao (申 報, 1872–1949) and the Hong Kong Xunhuan Ribao (循環日報, 1874–1949), as well as two little-known semiofficial papers in Shanghai, the Huibao (匯報, 1874) and the Xinbao (新報, 1876–1882). Using Western printing technology and quickly developing a national and international distribution network, Shenbao and the Xunhuan Ribao as the first important and successful enterprises of their kind circulated widely, found the most attention, and are justly reckoned as the most important and influential newspapers in Chinese of that time. The Xunhuan Ribao was established by Wang Tao (王韜, 1828–1897),4 a prose writer of renown, with the claim of being the first Chinese newspaper operating under an entirely Chinese management . The Shenbao, in contrast, was a joint venture of four British merchants , with Ernest Major (1841–1908) as the manager and editor assigned a majority share in both profits and losses.The Huibao and its successors Huibao (彙報, 1874–1875) and Yibao (益報, 1875) were the first attempts by an interest group to establish a newspaper—Cantonese merchants in Shanghai with the support of a Chinese official, the District Magistrate Ye Tingjuan (葉廷 眷); these short-lived papers were set up to counter the Shenbao. The Shanghai Xinbao, for its part, can be seen as an attempt by the Shanghai Daotai Feng Junguang (馮浚光, 1830–1877) to establish within a market environment what in fact was an official organ. HISTORIOGRAPHY Although for the period under consideration, none of the papers has been the object of close source-based studies, the differences in their treatment have more to do with present-day political concerns than historical realities .5 The early Shenbao appears in Chinese newspaper histories already since the late 1920s in the main as a commerce-focused paper run by foreignerers for financial gain.6 Historical accounts on the development of journalism theory in China tend to completely disregard the Shenbao—all its importance notwithstanding—while dealing extensively with the Xunhuan [18.226...

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