Guest Editor's Note

Abstract

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA STUDYING THE DAILY MEDIUM: NEWSPAPERS AS SUBJECT AND SOURCE IN REPUBLICAN-ERA CHINA, 1911-1949 CONTENTS Guest Editor’s Note /2 ARTICLES Timothy B. Weston Minding the Newspaper Business: The Theory and Practice of Journalism in 1920s China /4 Bryna Goodman Appealing to the Public: Newspaper Presentation and Adjudication of Emotion /32 Peter J. Carroll Fate-Bound Mandarin Ducks: Newspaper Coverage of the “Fashion” for Suicide in 1931 Suzhou /70 ANNOUNCEMENTS /97 Twentieth-Century China disclaims any responsibility or liability for statements of fact or opinion expressed by contributors. 2006 2 GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE Newspapers exploded in number and variety and they were a vitally important site of public discourse during China’s Republican era. Their significance as public documents during that period dwarfed the significance they had during the last decades of the Qing dynasty. The dramatic growth in newspaper circulation during the Republican period resulted from a complex mix of factors, including greater political and cultural freedom, the breakdown of formal ties between intellectuals and the state, increased commercial wealth within Chinese society, more efficient printing technologies, and the emergence of a larger reading public—primarily located in cities—hungry for entertainment and information about all manner of things. Few other published mediums enjoyed as large an audience or as much daily contact with Chinese readers during the Republican period. Newspapers both reflected and helped shape society. Not only did famous and educated people publish in newspapers, so too did otherwise unknown men and women. Stories of the rich and powerful appeared next to stories about the poor, the average, and the weak. Newspapers published literature and they covered world affairs as well as national and local politics, culture, and society. They also published massive quantities of advertisements, which reveal a great deal about business strategies, taste and consumption patterns, and the culturally complex negotiation of modern Chinese identity. In short, for historians working on Republican-era China, newspapers represent a gold mine of information. Scholars have studied particular Republican-era newspapers and have made extensive use of newspapers as a source of information in discussions of a broad range of subjects, but the Republican-era Chinese newspaper industry itself has not received systematic treatment from the English-language academic community. The three articles that follow were originally presented at “Studying the Daily Medium: Newspapers as Subject and Source in Republican-Era China, 1911-1949,” a workshop held at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University on 28-29 May 2005 that was intended to initiate a broad discussion of newspapers in Republican China.1 The articles here provide information about a range of subjects related to newspapers and, we hope, successfully make a modest contribution to a more general research agenda on the social, cultural, and political role of newspapers during China’s tumultuous Republican period. 1 I would like to take this opportunity to thank my co-organizer of that workshop, Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, for all of her help, her abundant ideas, and her highly interesting workshop paper. I also wish to thank the other participants in the Harvard workshop. The papers presented by Sei Jeong Chin, Karl Gerth, Eugenia Lean, Stephen R. MacKinnon, and Barbara Mittler, and the comments offered by Timothy Cheek, Lucie Cheng, James Huffman, Christopher A. Reed, and Wen-hsin Yeh were all rich and highly stimulating. Finally, I am very grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for awarding Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and me a “New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society” workshop grant, without which it would have been impossible to convene the conference. TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 3 Although from different directions, the articles discuss a number of issues in common: newspapers as businesses, normative ideas about the proper role of newspapers, the nature and content of “social news (社會新聞 shehui xinwen),” newspapers as a forum for the negotiation of cultural and social values, newspapers as a published space available to a wide variety of voices, and the centrality of Shanghai in Republican-era China’s newspaper industry. Read together, the articles make clear that newspapers were a contested and unstable site that mirrored the multifaceted and shifting nature...