A newspaper for China?

About this book

"In 1872, in the International Settlement of the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, Shenbao. His publication won praise as a "department store of news," a "forum for intellectual discussion and moral challenge," and an "independent mouthpiece of the public voice." Paradoxically, in a country where the government monopolized the public sphere, Shenbao became one of the world's most independent newspapers." "As a private venture, Shenbao was free of the ideologies that constrained missionary or advocacy papers published in China during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it 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. By analyzing the prose styles and literary genres used in Shenbao, its format, its language, its contents, and its readerships, this book shows how the managers of this paper made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers such as Shenbao became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as part, indeed 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.""--BOOK JACKET.