Cynthia Brokaw

From Woodblocks to the Internet

These essays examine the transformation of Chinese print culture over the past two centuries during which new technologies, intellectual change, and sociopolitical upheavals expanded reading audiences, spawned new genres of print, and reshaped the relationship between publishing and the state.

PUBLISHING, SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN PRE-MODERN CHINA: THE EVOLUTION OF PRINT CULTURE

Inoue Susumu, Chūgoku shuppan bunkashi: shomotsu to chi no fūkei ( A Cultural History of Chinese Publishing: Books and the Landscape of Knowledge ). Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2002.

The History of the Book in East Asia

Contents: Introduction Part I China: The making of an imprint in China, 1000-1800, Joseph McDermott Tu and Shu: illustrated manuscripts in the great age of song printing, Maggie Bickford Byways in the Imperial Chinese information order: the dissemination and commercial publication of state documents, Hilde de Weerdt Mashaben: commercial publishing in Jianyang from the Song to the Ming, Lucille Chia Ming audiences and vernacular hermeneutics: the uses of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Anne E. McLaren Writing for success: printing, examinations, and intellectual change in late Ming China, Kai-wing Chow The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: a study in 17th-century publishing, Ellen Widmer Visual hermeneutics and the act of turning the leaf: a genealogy of Liu Yuans Lingyan ge, Anne Burkus-Chasson Commercial publishing in late Imperial China: the Zou and Ma family businesses of Sibao, Fujian, Cynthia J. Brokaw. Part II Korea: Propagating female virtues in Choson Korea, Martina Deuchler Literary production, circulating libraries, and private publishing: the popular reception of vernacular fiction texts in the late Choson dynasty, Michael Kim. Part III Japan: Centres of printing in medieval Japan: late Heian to early Edo period, K.B. Gardner Provincial publishing in the Tokugawa period, P.F. Kornicki Manuscript, not print: scribal culture in the Edo Period, P.F. Kornicki The transfer of learning: the import of Chinese and Dutch books in Tokugawa Japan, W.J. Boot The Daiso lending library of Nagoya, 1767-1899, Andrew Markus Books and book illustrations in early modern Japan, Ekkehard May The history of the book in Edo and Paris, Henry D. Smith II Entrepreneurship and culture: the Hakubunkan publishing empire in Meiji Japan, Giles Richter Name index.

Book Review: Xiantao ZHANG, The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press: The Influence of the Protestant Missionary Press in Late Qing China. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 178 pp. with notes and index. ISBN: 978-0-415-38066-9 (hc). Price: US

In the personal anecdote that opens the book under review, Xiantao Zhang explains the experience that, in part, inspired her to write this work: as a young reporter in Beijing in the late 1990s, one of her articles exposing a local official’s exploitation of the peasantry was quashed by her editor on the grounds that it was simply not possible to publish such an article, since the official “had a national reputation as a ‘model figure’ in rural development, and so was simply beyond the reach of prudent criticism” (p. 1). This experience—and her growing frustration as a journalist with state control of the media—led her to the question that guides this study: why has the press in China “been so consistently dominated by the state”? (p. 2). Rejecting the idea that the Communist Party is to blame, on the grounds that this explanation confuses a “particular regime with [a] more general and historically persistent trend,” Zhang seeks the cause of contemporary state control in the historical origins of the press in the Western missionary periodicals of the late 19th century (p. 2). She concludes the current problem has its roots in the peculiar nature of the missionary press—particularly the Review of the Times (万国公报)—in late Qing China: the fact that this press was not “legally constitutionalized,” but rather reliant onWestern gunboat diplomacy, inhibited the development of a Chinese free press. “So the freedom the missionary press had achieved, to some extent, was ‘given’ rather than ‘struggled for’, ‘imported’ rather than ‘driven’ by an inner force” (pp. 145–6). Furthermore, the cultural agenda of the missionary press— that is, its mission to spread Christianity and its instrumental use of modern scientific information as ameans to that goal—meant that this press “did not cherish the essential idea of liberty of the press at its core” (p. 146). Rather, Zhang argues, the missionary-journalists of the late 19th century actually encouraged Chinese reformers (those, for example, who produced Current Events事务报) to identify themselves with the state, “rather than fighting for institutional independence of the press” (p. 147). Although this line of reasoning deserves serious consideration—and might in fact contribute to our understanding of contemporary press censorship in China—Zhang fails to persuade the reader that themissionary failure to advocate for a free press in the late 19th century explains the lack of press freedom Book Rview s