The press explosion of the late Qing – the mass of newspapers that jibed at the establishment through the first decade of the twentieth century, creating a public opinion that made nationalism and revolution possible – could not have taken place outside the foreign concessions in cities such as Shanghai, where extraterritoriality permitted a degree of intellectual freedom not possible elsewhere in the empire. In 1904, the fugitive Liang Qichao risked his life to return to Shanghai – a price of 100,000 ounces of silver still on his head – to start a new paper. In 1911, the accidental bomb
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