Reading Journal week 5

9970878

Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 203-240, 253-256

- between 1912 and 1928 traditional Chinese print culture entered a new stage
- there were three leading corporate enterprises: Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books and
World Books and people referred to them as “the three legs of the tripod”  these
publishers remade the Chinese publishing world before and after the 1911 Revolution
- 1917-1927  greatest class polarization
- 1928 was a turning point because of the new state that altered the business environment
- Part of their success was given by their marketing methods, luck and good strategy regarding
government control
- These three wanted to either dominate, manipulate or satisfy markets
- There was a great expansion of modern educational opportunities
 100,000 students enrolled in 1905
 13 million students in 1937

The Commercial Press, Ltd.,1904-37

- Shanghai’s leading comprehensive publisher

- changed the face of Chinese education and informed opinion
- set the pace of the publishing marketplace
- introduced large readership to their first articulate impressions of Western modernity
- by 1913 workers started manufacturing lithographic printing presses, letterpress machines,
gallery presses, etc.
- Wang Yunwu perfected the four-corner system for classifying Chinese characters
- In 1928 the Nationalist government established at Nanjing and this had consequences:
 Shanghai publishers started to think more carefully about the modern works
they were publishing
 The Nationalists drove the Communist Party labour activists out of the
printing plants and other factories; they also forced all Shanghai publishers
to join a government-directed trade association
 The Nationalists demanded the creation of new textbooks
- A historian pointed out that the most productive years of the Commercial Press were
between 1933-1936

Zhonghua Book Company, Ltd.,1912-1937

- Founded in 1912 with less than 10 people and by 1937 there were over 3,000 employees
- Republican China’s most important printing and publishing alternative to the Commercial
Press
- Lufei Kui reorganized the firm as a corporation and led it into collaboration with Nationalist-
allied capital (one step back in corporate independence but it advanced its corporates’
objectives with the Nationalist state)
- Between 1928 and 1937 Zhonghua became a permanent client of the government’s
patronage
- Lufei mentioned that Chinese print capitalist firms could not be successful without
technology, organization, finance and government patronage
 He also made clear that profitable Chinese print capitalism required the
presence of the Chinese state

- they didn’t expect a political vacuum would have a great impact on publishers only because
their economic foundation was textbooks
- the textbook wars ended in 1928 and the development of new publications continued until
1937
- “three legs of the tripod”
 the legs were never equal
 the Commercial Press controlled 65% of the textbook market
 BUT they were equal in their need for a strong Chinese state that could
ensure the development of school patronage

WEEK 7 – PERIODICALS AND REVOLUTION