This collection of thirteen essays examines the multifaceted transition of Chinese publishing and print culture from the Qing through the early twenty-first century, two centuries of profound transformation brought about by two waves of technological innovation—lithography and letterpress printing as well as computerized and Internet publishing.
This anthology demonstrates that only under favorable historical conditions were Chinese publishing and print cultures transformed by foreign technologies into their modern forms, at varying speeds and with regional variations. This body of scholarship opens multiple windows into the protracted transition in which old and new technologies as well as indigenous, foreign, and new literary forms and publishing practices overlapped and coexisted. As Cynthia Brokaw demonstrates, before the spread of Western printing technologies, not only was commercial publishing in Qing China flourishing, producing large numbers of educational primers, traditional texts, and fictions, but it also continued to expand geographically and socially, serving a “fairly broad and deep reading public, particularly in south China, during the Qing” (p. 40).
Letterpress printing initially was economically prohibitive, aesthetically undesirable, and technologically cumbersome. As Andrea Janku points out, it was unpopular until “the application of the electrotype process to Chinese printing” in 1859 (p. 132). It took another half century before letterpresses became widely available and affordable. Despite its steady downward course, woodblock printing continued to be used by small commercial and private publishers (Brokaw), Catholic missionaries in Shanghai (Joachim Kurtz), as well as Buddhist publishers in Guangzhou and Sichuan (Jan Kiely) in the late Qing and the Republican periods. It persisted well into the 1940s and 1950s.
As Janku aptly remarks in her chapter on genres in late Qing journals, “modern technology was no more and no less than a tool. It neither initiated nor determined the process” (p. 153). Choices and marketing strategies of publishers, writers, and readers predominantly determine the triumph or demise of a technology. It was not so much Western printing technologies as the risk-taking “new presses” publishers who sought to print the radical writings of the May Fourth/New Culture intellectuals (Ling Shiao). It was faith and nostalgia that prompted Buddhist revivalists and scholars to opt for woodblocks and traditional print forms (Brokaw, Kiely).
Some indigenous trends in Chinese print culture did not disappear as a result of the adoption of Western printing technologies. In fact, Ellen Widmer's chapter on Qing fictions argues that elements of what have been regarded as literary modernity—massive production and widening distribution, internationalism, and inclusion of expanding female readership—had been amply evident before the Opium War. Another publishing practice that persisted and speedily adapted to the new technologies was collective publishing by organized groups of writers and readers. Reading and writing communities, since the late Ming, had fashioned an inextricable relationship with commercial publishing (Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004]). Shiao's chapter reminds us of the crucial role of literary societies (tongren) such as the Creation Society in popularizing the radical ideas of the May Fourth intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The local journals on education in Zhejiang examined by Robert Culp bear witness to the prominence of organizations in constituting a local public sphere via publishing. It was overseas Chinese student organizations that first fiddled with publishing their literary works online. Since the 1990s cyber reading and writing communities as well as commercial portals in China have thrived on the success of Internet literature and the dissemination power of electronic social networking (Guobin Yang).
Communications technologies and commercial publishing invariably involve the state. The late imperial state had figured prominently in the matrix of publishing, culture, and power. This book demonstrates indubitably how the Qing state, the Guomindang, and the Communist government directly and indirectly shaped publishing practices (Brokaw, Shiao, Culp, Paize Keulemans, Christopher Reed's “Advancing”). Commercial providers of Internet services have operated within the parameters laid out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1990s and the early 2000s (Daria Berg, Yang, and Gudrun Wacker). Armed with new computer technologies, the CCP has been effective in controlling and censoring communications on the Internet (Wacker).
Some chapters are not without problems. Transfixed by the idea of a “Gutenberg revolution,” Reed states that even the CCP's “print communism,” a term of his creation, “advanced China's Gutenberg revolution” (p. 308). Since technologies have no inherent ideological orientation, the CCP's choice of letterpress printing is not different from their use of woodblock printing. The idea of “print communism” explains nothing. Equally outlandish are concepts like “Internet communism,” “print Christianity,” and “print capitalism.” “Communist print culture” or “Christian print culture” will be more fruitful in characterizing distinct systems of publishing practices in which print technologies are employed to disseminate specific ideologies—political or otherwise. One is also struck by Kiely's ahistorical statement about how letterpress printing “made long-standing Buddhist dreams of sacred-text reproduction possible on an unprecedented scale” (p. 185). “Unprecedented scale,” yes; but “dreams of sacred-text reproduction” in grand scale made possible only with the adoption of letterpress printing? Pas question.
This collection of essays, comprehensive in scope and illuminating in many aspects, has enriched our understanding of the history of Chinese print culture in the modern period.
