Newspapers and the Journalistic Public in Republican China

Offering an entirely new approach to understanding China's journalism history, this book covers the Chinese periodical press in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on five cases, either occurring in or in relation to the year 1917, this book emphasises the protean nature of the newspaper and seeks to challenge a press historiography which suggests modern Chines...

Offering an entirely new approach to understanding China's journalism history, this book covers the Chinese periodical press in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on five cases, either occurring in or in relation to the year 1917, this book emphasises the protean nature of the newspaper and seeks to challenge a press historiography which suggests modern Chinese newspapers were produced and consumed with clear agendas of popularizing enlightenment, modernist, and revolutionary concepts. Instead, this book contends that such a historiography, which is premised on the classification of newspapers along the lines of their functions, overlooks the opaqueness of the Chinese press in the early twentieth century. Analysing modern Chinese history through the lens of the newspaper, this book presents an interdisciplinary and international approach to studying mass communications. As such, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, journalism, and Asian Studies more generally.

Qiliang He is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University. He has published several books, including Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication-The Case of Huang-Lu Elopement (2018) and Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949 (2012).