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The Early Chinese Press and the Agency of Its Readers: The Dynamics of the Transcultural Spread of the “Press” as an Institution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2020

Rudolf Wagner
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Abstract

Habermas saw the public sphere as coterminous with the national space. Anderson dreamed of newspaper readers facing the same paper for breakfast forming an “imagined community,” which he saw as vital for supplementing the subjective side of nationhood. Historical evidence supports neither proposition. Both remain locked in a nation-state focused history and have to sideline large and crucial parts of the record. This article studies two early Chinese-language periodical publications characterised by their radical difference to the standard European models, the East Western Monthly Magazine (1833–1838) and the Shenbao (1872–1949), and considers the implications of these examples for dominant conceptual frameworks.

Keywords

Early Chinese pressEast Western Monthly MagazineShenbaopublic spheretranscultural dynamics
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 44 , Special Issue 2: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print , August 2020 , pp. 412 - 434
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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Footnotes

*

Rudolf Wagner was Senior Professor, University of Heidelberg, and an Associate of the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. He passed away on 25 October 2019.

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