The Uses of Genres in the Chinese Press from the Late Qing to the Early Republican Period

Abstract

Genre attributions not only help us to understand the significance of texts but also create significance. This essay is an attempt to deal with some aspects of the universe of texts captured in the pages of Chinese newspapers, focusing on genres used for the articulation of opinion. It pursues the following questions: Which genres did early Chinese journalists favor, and why? When did new genres evolve, and what were the changing sociopolitical realities they reflected? And finally, how did the successive introduction of advanced print technologies affect their evolution? It looks at an eighteenth-century Chinese theory of genre and its role in the development of journalistic writing, and proceeds with the comparison of a newspaper editorial and an earlier political essay, both in the authoritative genre of the lun, showing how the policy-advisor stance of the quasi-official was adopted by the literati-journalist. Keywords:Chinese press; genres; journalistic writing; late Qing era; literati-journalist; Republican Period