Qing historians have always assumed, more or less, that officials read imperial edicts, announcements of personnel actions, and discussions of policy initiatives, but we have never known exactly how they read them. In The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China: State News and Political Authority, Emily Mokros tells us how officials came to read imperial pronouncements and the memorials that influenced them, but she also tells us much more. Exploring the early Qing origins and development of the Peking Gazette, she evokes the political culture of the dynasty, and develops the notion of a “curated transparency,” the degree of political openness necessary for a regime to enjoy legitimacy. Mokros also attends carefully to the audiences, both domestic and foreign, for gazettes. The domestic audience was the largest, and it grew over the Qing period; the foreign audience was not insignificant, and it accounts for the fact that today there are collections of gazettes in fourteen countries.
The Qing was not the first dynasty in which imperial pronouncements were sent to officials posted throughout the empire, but it organized the system of publication. During the Tang and Song, the states took the responsibility for distributing their own documents; in the Ming, particularly in its later years, private commercial publishers produced and circulated news of the court. The Qing retained the private commercial publishers, but developed rules and procedures to determine which documents could be released for publication. Eventually, even certain secret palace memorials were cleared for distribution in commercially published gazettes. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a fairly smooth process involving government clerks, capital liaisons for territorial officials, and commercial publishers produced the gazettes. Capital publishers’ gazettes were sent to provincial capitals; provincial publishers produced versions that circulated locally.
Commercial publication meant that the gazettes were sold cheaply on the streets of major cities. Officials could buy copies, but so could students, local yamen officials, anyone who could manage the official prose in which documents were couched. Over time, the domestic readership grew to include many who were literate but did not hold government office. As Mokros observes, reading the gazettes served a variety of purposes. Memorial writers could hone their arguments with references to previous edicts and memorials. Reading the records of appointments and dismissals, officials could see who was “in” and who was “out” at court and read at least the public reasons for dismissal. Publicly recording the reasons for administrative discipline was regarded as an important warning to officials not to engage in the sort of activity being sanctioned. Mokros's findings point to a more informed public community in the Qing than have previous studies, and future political histories will have to take this into account.
Chinese were not the only readers of gazettes; foreigners could also buy and read them as well. Mokros's Chapter 5, which begins with Jesuit admiration for the gazette and concludes with Mary Clabaugh Wright's purchase of what would become Stanford University's gazette collection, is a gem. The Jesuits, representatives of a pre-Enlightenment Europe, admired the apparent transparency of the Qing court. Later westerners, diplomats, and traders, read them for political intelligence from an often inaccessible court. Many westerners used edicts and memorials in gazettes as texts to learn to read Chinese, a tradition that lives on in twentieth century Qing documents syllabi for American students. Foreigners’ enduring interest in the gazettes partly accounts for the great number that have survived, some 33,000 by Mokros's estimate, located in Chinese and foreign libraries.
Changes in the news environment in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought an end to the gazettes. Chinese readers increasingly got their news from newspapers, which provided context (although in the early days, newspapers used gazettes as primary sources). The Zongli Yamen began censoring the gazettes, as it became aware of the press laws that existed in many nineteenth-century states. Foreigners became frustrated that the gazettes, as commercial publications, did not represent the official position of the state, unlike the press releases and gazettes of western countries. In 1907, the Qing prohibited private publishers from issuing gazettes.
Qing historians today have long known of the gazettes, but we've not known enough. This solid monograph fills the gaps in our knowledge and contributes to understanding of Qing political culture, its enduring institutions, and the origins of western sinological studies.
