Over the past 25 years, the study of journalism has become a burgeoning academic field both within and outside of China. As a major reference work, the History of Journalism in China in ten volumes is a very welcome contribution enabling scholars and students not familiar with the Chinese language to acquire a general knowledge overview of the field.

The volumes span the period 200 BC to 1991 covering mainly print publications, but also other aspects of journalism such as television, photography, news agencies and documentary films. It is a translation of the original three volume work Zhongguo xinwen shiye tongshi (General History of Chinese Journalism) published in 1991; a second edition, on which this translation is based, was published in 2004 by Renmin University Press. This massive publication of more than 3,500 pages in Chinese was edited by Fang Hanqi (1926–), emeritus professor at Renmin University who is probably the most prominent historian of Chinese journalism, along with an editorial team of over 50 co-editors and contributors. While more recent scholarship has made further contributions to our knowledge of Chinese journalism history, at the time of its production Fang Hanqi's set of edited volumes was a pioneering work, and it is still the broadest reference work on Chinese journalism in Chinese.

The heavily edited ten-volume translation edition follows the original chronology very closely and covers the period from “Ancient China” to (then contemporary) journalism of the 1980s in ten volumes. It does, however, set very distinct priorities. While the period of “Ancient China” until the “1911 Revolution” is covered in volumes one and two, volumes three to seven deal with the Republican period, with four and a half of these volumes dedicated to covering the period of the civil wars. Volume eight attends to the “Period of the Construction of Socialism” and Cultural Revolution, while volume nine turns to the “New Era of Socialist Modernization.” The last, volume ten, provides an overview of the history of journalism in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau from 1949 to the 1990s for the first 110 pages, followed by an extensive 200 pages general bibliography.

The original version is a rich collection of new information and original sources, and a most useful tool in the study of Chinese publishing activities. Yet, as a publication from the early 1990s, this is obviously not scholarship critically engaging with latest insights and sources of Chinese journalism, but a classic example of Chinese scholarship of this period (including its mandatory contemporary political correct interpretations).

As the chapter titles reveal, the account follows a periodization according to political history, and conclusions are often more political and normative. To give but one example, the section “Lessons learned from the Anti-Rightist Movement” ends: “This kind of practice made people dare not to propose comments to the Party [sic]. Some newspapers even groundlessly labeled themselves in the investigation of the issues of rectification and expression of opinion [sic]. This kind of practice was understandable during the pro-revolutionary atmosphere, yet it was not realistic at all” (vol. 8, p. 16).

Yet if the reader neglects these interpretations or takes a historiographic perspective on them, the collection presents a very rich documentation of the history of Chinese journalism, including a wealth of primary sources, references and bibliographical information.

Hence, a translation of this monumental scholarship into English is potentially a great contribution to the field of Chinese journalism studies for non-Chinese readers. Rather than going into detail on the content of each volume, which would not be meaningful with the space given for this review, the following discussion will focus on this translated edition, as it becomes clear rather quickly, that the translators/editors must have felt rather overwhelmed by this task.

Probably in order to attain a version that is more readable and easier to understand, the translators decided to shorten the original work significantly. A first unfortunate consequence of this is the omission of most of the rich quotes from primary sources in the original version, and very often the sources themselves as well, (of approximately more than 10,000 footnotes in the original 3,500 pages a total of around 700 remain across all ten volumes). To give an example, the first volume, which originally covered mainly the Song to late-Qing period in 520 pages, has been reduced to 128 pages. These reductions at some points render the text almost meaningless to a reader who is unfamiliar with the subject and historical context, as it often leads to a mere descriptive account of data – publication titles, names of journalists, etc. From this conclusions are drawn (directly translated from Fang Hanqi's original) which sometimes are hard to relate to the information given, not least to be verified for an academic scholar. To be fair, these reductions decrease in the following volumes, which deal with shorter historical sections and present a huge amount of useful detailed information in a more coherent fashion.

As a reference work for quick retrieval of information, the edited and translated version is not very user-friendly. While the original version has a very detailed table of contents, guiding the reader through the massive amount of material, the translation has reduced this to usually two or three headings, referring to the historical period. e.g. the table of contents of volume five, (177 pp.) has three headings: “Kuomintang Journalism during the Ten-Year Civil War”; “Private Journalism during the Ten-Year Civil War”; and “Journalism in the KMT-Controlled Areas during the Anti-Japanese War.” The text itself has subheadings similar to the original volumes, but for some reason they are not included in the table of contents. The inclusion of an index, whilst a very welcome addition to the original version, unfortunately does not include names (apart from well-known figures such as Deng Xiaoping or Chiang Kai-shek) and only very rarely titles of newspapers and other publications. Instead, the first volume has categories like: “failure,” “falsification,” “followers,” “foreign countries” (p. 127), or “shipping schedules,” “shortcomings,” “speeches,” “standpoints,” “subscribers” (p. 129), which are not meaningful search categories.

Another problem making it difficult to find information is the translator's choice to use her own English translations for newspaper and magazine or book titles throughout the text. For instance, as seen in the quote above, the Xunhuan Ribao, which is usually translated as The Universal Circulating Herald (which was its official contemporary English title) is referred to as Cycle. “Lithography” is occasionally also referred to by the contemporary old term “polyautography.” This would not be problematic if the index included the titles and referred to the originals, or indicated where the original is cited in these volumes, but as mentioned this is unfortunately not the case.

Overall, more attention to a coherent and readable translation would have been welcome as numerous unfortunate mistakes have crept in such as those examples from the first volume mentioned below but similar mistakes occur throughout the volumes.

There are inconsistencies in the pinyin transcription of Chinese names, e.g. the printer Liang Fa is named Leung Fa in next section (p. 52); the Japanese “scholar” Sugimura Kōtarō in the original is presented as a Japanese “journalist” named “Sukimura Koutarou” – and, moreover, on the same page Sugimura Kōtarō is cited for advocating two contradicting views on the origins of newspaper in China, as either in the Zhou Dynasty, followed by a section where he is cited for claiming newspapers originated in the Han Dynasty (p. 5).

The translator seems to have struggled with historical dates. The section discussing the circulation of lubu (explained as “the publicly announced official document without any seals on it”), during the Han to the Six Dynasties concludes, “it had been adopted since the late Qing” (p. 3). Year numbers are confused, e.g. 1920 and 1930 with 1820 and 1830 (p. 62) or as in “in the early 1970s, the publisher of Shanghai's Shen Bao even assigned people to come to Hong Kong to research [sic],” which obviously must be 1870s (p. 67).

Another issue that will have become apparent by now is language and style, which at times make the text a hard read. There are also sentences with grammatical errors, such as “the debate soon became the attack between the editors Wood and Keating” (p. 63), while some others are nearly incomprehensible, such as “According to the current materials, Wang Tao's publishing objective and political standpoint could be reflected in the Cycle, but there was still room for conservation” (p. 107).

These examples will suffice to explain why the translation is not very helpful as an academic reference work, and this treatment does not do justice to the effort and amount of scholarship of the original work edited by Fang Hanqi. All this is even more disappointing in view of the considerable investment libraries and departments have to make to purchase the set of volumes.

However, in spite of these shortcomings, the History is still a valuable reference work for newcomers to the field in Chinese journalism history and offers, as a general introduction to aspects of journalism in China, a wealth of useful information and details on Chinese journalism that might inspire readers to further explore contemporary scholarship on specific aspects.