Reading Shenbao

Reading Shenbao
Author: W. Tsai
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230246710

Through a study of the readership of the most popular commercial daily newspaper in China during the early twentieth century, Reading Shenbao investigates ideas of nationalism, consumerism and individuality, looking at the relationship between advertising, modern lifestyles and changing social attitudes in China as it underwent modernization.

Body, Society, and Nation

Body, Society, and Nation
Author: Chieko Nakajima
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684175909

"Body, Society, and Nation tells the story of China’s unfolding modernity by exploring the changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. The pursuit of good health loomed large in Chinese political, social, and economic life. Yet, “good health” had a range of associations beyond individual well-being. It was also an integral part of Chinese nation-building, a goal of charitable activities, a notable outcome of Western medical science, a marker of modern civilization, and a commercial catchphrase. With the advent of Western powers, Chinese notions about personal hygiene and the body gradually expanded. This transformation was complicated by indigenous medical ideas, preexisting institutions and social groups, and local cultures and customs. This study explores the many ways that members of the various strata of Shanghai society experienced and understood multiple meanings of health and body within their everyday lives. Chieko Nakajima traces the institutions they established, the regulations they implemented, and the practices they brought to the city as part of efforts to promote health. In doing so, she explains how local practices and customs fashioned and constrained public health and, in turn, how hygienic modernity helped shape and develop local cultures and influenced people’s behavior."

Print, Profit, and Perception

Print, Profit, and Perception
Author: Pei-yin Lin
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-02-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004259112

Print, Profit, and Perception examines the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges occurring in China and Taiwan from the first Sino-Japanese War to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing examples from various genres, this interdisciplinary volume presents nine empirically grounded case studies on the growth in the production, dissemination and consumption of texts, which lay behind a dramatic expansion of knowledge. The chapters collectively address the co-existence of globalization and localization processes in the period. By taking into account intra-Asian cultural encounters and tracing the multiple competing forces encountered by many, this book offers a fresh and compelling take on how individuals and social groups participated in transnational conceptual flows. Contributors include: Paul Bailey, Che-chia Chang, Elizabeth Emrich, Tze-ki Hon, Max K.W. Huang, Mei-e Huang, Mike Shi-chi Lan, Pei-yin Lin, and Weipin Tsai.

A Newspaper for China?

A Newspaper for China?
Author: Barbara Mittler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684173884

In 1872 in the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, the Shenbao. His publication quickly became a leading newspaper in China and won praise as a "department store of news," a "forum for intellectual discussion and moral challenge," and an "independent mouthpiece of the public voice." Located in the International Settlement of Shanghai, it was free of government regulation. Paradoxically, in a country where the government monopolized the public sphere, it became one of the world's most independent newspapers. As a private venture, the Shenbao was free of the ideologies that constrained missionary papers published in China during the nineteenth century. But it also lacked the subsidies that allowed these papers to survive without a large readership. As a purely commercial venture, the foreign-managed Shenbao depended on the acceptance of educated Chinese, who would write for it, read it, and buy it. This book sets out to analyze how the managers of the Shenbao made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as a powerful part of the Chinese public sphere within a few years. In short, it describes how the foreign Shenbao became a "newspaper for China."

The Suicide of Miss Xi

The Suicide of Miss Xi
Author: Bryna Goodman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674259130

A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China’s troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi’s family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated “new woman” exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang’s trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.

Frontier Fieldwork

Frontier Fieldwork
Author: Andres Rodriguez
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774867582

The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, and missionaries who took to the field in China’s southwest at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population. Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which placed China’s margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.

Joining the Global Public

Joining the Global Public
Author: Rudolf G. Wagner
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0791479986

Joining the Global Public examines early Chinese-language newspapers and analyzes their impact on China's modernization. Exploring a range of media such as regular dailies, illustrated weeklies, and entertainment papers, contributors look at factors that influenced the nature of these publications, including foreign models, foreign managers, and a first generation of Chinese journalists, editorialists, and "newspainters." With analyses demonstrating how the growth of popular media would enable China to join the global public, contributors also examine the impact of inserting an alien medium—a newspaper—into a Chinese universe and note the spread of new attitudes and values as entertainment papers filled the space of a newly created urban leisure. A superb and pioneering documentation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese-language media, Joining the Global Public serves as an introduction to this important yet little-studied part of China's modernization.

A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature

A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature
Author: Yingjin Zhang
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 699
Release: 2015-08-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118451600

This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship

Religious Publishing and Print Culture in Modern China

Religious Publishing and Print Culture in Modern China
Author: Philip Clart
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1614512981

Scholarly interest in print culture and in the study of religion in modern China has increased in recent years, propelled by maturing approaches to the study of cultural history and by a growing recognition that both were important elements of China's recent past. The influence of China in the contemporary world continues to expand, and with it has come an urgent need to understand the processes by which its modern history was made. Issues of religious freedom and of religion's influence on the public sphere continue to be contentious but important subjects of scholarly work, and the role of print and textual media has not dimmed with the advent of electronic communication. This book, Religious Publishing and Print Culture in Modern China 1800-2012, speaks to these contemporary and historical issues by bringing to light the important and abiding connections between religious development and modern print culture in China. Bringing together these two subjects has a great deal of potential for producing insights that will appeal to scholars working in a range of fields, from media studies to social historians. Each chapter demonstrates how focusing on the role of publishing among religious groups in modern China generates new insights and raises new questions. They examine how religious actors understood the role of printed texts in religion, dealt with issues of translation and exegesis, produced print media that heralded social and ideological changes, and expressed new self-understandings in their published works. They also address the impact of new technologies, such as mechanized movable type and lithographic presses, in the production and meaning of religious texts. Finally, the chapters identify where religious print culture crossed confessional lines, connecting religious traditions through links of shared textual genres, commercial publishing companies, and the contributions of individual editors and authors. This book thus demonstrates how, in embracing modern print media and building upon their longstanding traditional print cultures, Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious groups were developed and defined in modern China. While the chapter authors are specialists in religious traditions, they have made use of recent studies into publishing and print culture, and like many of the subjects of their research, are able to make connections across religious boundaries and link together seemingly discrete traditions.