Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870-1910

Rudolf G. Wagner

Feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Rudolf G. Wagner is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg and the author or editor of many books, including A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi's Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation, also published by SUNY Press.