No one has done more to advance our knowledge and understanding of late Qing media and the “public sphere” than Rudolf G. Wagner and his fellow scholars clustered around the University of Heidelberg. This edited collection appears to be one of their last joint research products, but individual researchers may nonetheless continue to develop their work in new directions.
This collection considerably enhances the current literature on the development of China's modern, urban press and print culture. Newspapers such as Shanghai's Shenbao and its news pictorial, Dianshizhai huabao (1884–98) seem to suggest themselves as the primary institutions of China's burgeoning “public sphere.” But in which particular ways are they significant? As these invaluable scholarly accounts show, they can inform us about new occupations (journalism, lithography, publishing), social relations (urban, bourgeois, petit bourgeois, or “petty urbanite”/xiao shimin), and cultural phenomena (leisure, entertainment, consumerism, and the rise of the image). These studies give us fascinating detail on Ernest Major, Shenbao's English proprietor; Dianshizhai huabao's chief artist, Wu Youru (in chapters by Wagner and Nanny Kim); and tabloid (xiao bao) publisher extraordinaire Li Boyuan (Catherine Vance Yeh's chapter). Barbara Mittler's chapter adds to her substantial work on Chinese adaptations of the newspaper format and style, while Natascha Gentz presents a dual comparison between Shanghai and Hong Kong newspapers, and commercial and semiofficial ones. Beyond these in-depth accounts, interpreting the historical significance of the subject is more open to debate.
To begin with, the concept of the “public sphere” remains highly contested. Although Wagner's excellent introduction to the book explicates and revises the concept of the “public sphere” for a Chinese context, this theme is less prominent in each chapter. For Habermas, at least, the “public sphere” was an explicitly political category, and he lamented its degeneration into the nonrational, emotional, and sensationalist discourse of popular or mass media. Not surprisingly, given their subject matter, the authors join those who reject as elitist both “high” politics and its “rational” discourse. The “advocacy” journalism of Liang Qichao and other transformative political actors is not for them. Instead, Wagner argues that the late Qing “public sphere” was a “hybrid” space: transnational and international, marked by spatial variation in openness and “civilized rationality,” and using the “entire span of forms of articulation and behaviour at the disposal of different segments of society, of different ‘publics’” (p. 4). Enlarging or fragmenting the “public sphere” in this way nonetheless risks diluting the critical force of the original concept and suggests that the more fluid ideas of so-called postmodernism might have something to contribute to an interpretation.
While not a study of China's modern political elites, neither is this book a study of popular culture. Defining “popular” is itself a problem, but it clearly cannot include Shenbao or Dianshizhai huabao. These commercial publications aimed at well-educated, young, mostly male readers who were attempting to chart new pathways in the “hybrid” urban environment of Shanghai. Wagner's chapter on Dianshizhai huabao describes these readers as a “new class of urban intellectuals” (p. 143), while Nanny Kim's on the same news pictorial places them between the “trendy young gentleman and the distracted shop assistant” (p. 184). Thus, pictorial representation or the rise of the image during this period was one indication of the transition from classical literati culture to a new, literate urban culture, but it was not yet a sign of popular or mass culture. We approach this kind of popular culture in Yeh's thorough chapter on the amusement and entertainment tabloids of Li Boyuan (particularly Youxi bao). Published around the last years of the Qing dynasty, they prefigured movie star and celebrity culture with their gossipy coverage of courtesans and opera stars. Yeh portrays vividly the ironic, self-referential pleasure culture of Shanghai, China's biggest playground, but where does this sit in the “public sphere”? That many such tabloids were severely censored or closed down during the 1920s and 1930s for their criticism of government figures suggests that amusement and “high” politics were not always mutually exclusive.
Similarly, how was the press and print culture of the late Qing “new”? The progenitors and consumers of the new urban lifestyle represented a break from the classical educated elite, but they were neither radical innovators nor even necessarily modernist reformers. Shenbao's proprietor, Ernest Major, was careful to employ Chinese editors and writers and to pitch his “product” at a Chinese audience. Operating out of Shanghai's International Settlement or Hong Kong, early Chinese newspapers and news pictorials reflected the “hybrid” culture to which Wagner refers. Dianshizhai huabao in particular played upon the new, the strange, and the curious while offering a safe, “armchair” ride (wo you) that helped, in Nanny Kim's words, “confirm the existing order of things” (p. 194).
The seemingly “middlebrow” nature of this new culture should not diminish its importance to our understanding of China's part in the creation of modern urban worlds, both national and international. This volume contributes significantly to that understanding through in-depth, painstaking research.
