A Newspaper for China?: Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai's News Media, 1872-1912

Harvard East Asian Monographs #226

by Barbara Mittler

In 1872 in the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, the Shenbao . His publication quickly became a leading newspaper in China and won praise as a "department store of news," a "forum for intellectual discussion and moral challenge," and an "independent mouthpiece of the public voice." Located in the International Settlement of Shanghai, it was free of government regulation. Paradoxically, in a country where the government monopolized the public sphere, it became one of the world's most independent newspapers. As a private venture, the Shenbao was free of the ideologies that constrained missionary papers published in China during the nineteenth century. But it also lacked the subsidies that allowed these papers to survive without a large readership. As a purely commercial venture, the foreign-managed Shenbao depended on the acceptance of educated Chinese, who would write for it, read it, and buy it. This book sets out to analyze how the managers of the Shenbao made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as a powerful part of the Chinese public sphere within a few years. In short, it describes how the foreign Shenbao became a "newspaper for China."

528 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2004

Reviews

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

【A Solid Counterargument Against Media Studies / A Newspaper for China? (2004) / Barbara Mittler】

This book, still cited in its academic field, is also a grest reading for those who are interested in media studies in general. There are tons of critique on media studies, even caustic ones. However, they rather looked groundless to me. This one is really a convincing counterargument against media studies, represented by Marshall McLuhan and his practical successor Tom Wolfe especially (Wolfe was even openly criticized on P114).

New journalism for which Wolfe stood, or McLuhan predicted, was already a typographic staple for Chinese newspaper using Chinese characters - a simplified and developed kind of hieroglyphics, I'd say - one century before the emergence of Wolfe himself. The author eagerly examined the style and rhetoric used in those actual papers with a great amount of both literary and analytic scrutiny, and it's a great reading for literature students as well, if you are interested in the fields outside the Anglosphere in general.

As I am Japanese and can understand most characters appeared in this book, it was really a great contribution to my academic foundation as well as everyone else's - as far as I can notice hahaha. McLuhan's "medium is a message / massage" was much more complex with exuberant language, ranging from citing classics in an orthodox way to authorize themselves to parody the status quo - it's an extremely free language as a newspaper section called "free talk" often appears in this book.

It might be bulky - but it's not illegible. It's written in a even witty style rare to see in a work by an academic historian (I've seen something similar in the works by Skinner and Greenblatt though, but they were more of cultural historian or even scholars of poetics). It's a great read with light feeling which I could finish in a day with comprehending its idea with a plenty of thinking.

[Louloulou · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great research in a time when Shenbao index and digital database were not availabe. Quoting from a professor: "This book's title should be: A Newspaper for China? Lack of Power, Ambiguous Identity, and Not So Much Change in Shanghai's News Media, 1872-1912(But the title on the book spine shows 1872-1924)."