Newspapers and the Spread of Ideas in Modern Inland China

Geographically, China can be divided into coastal and inland regions. Much of China's arable land is near the eastern coast, where we also see the highest population density. Most of the cities were, and today still are, on or near the eastern coast. Lack of good transportation in Chinese history, lack of resources, especially water resources in many northern inland regions, accounted for low productivity, sparse population, and backwardness in the inland area compared with the coastal region. Harrison's article on the spread of modern ideas in the rural areas in Shanxi Province aims at achieving three goals: 1. to show that modern news and ideas that the May 4th leaders hoped to proliferate in China had been steadily spreading in China, including the inland/rural areas, 2. but that the pattern how modern ideas spread differed from what people usually perceive, and 3. that through "consuming" and participating in the same modern news and opinions, the Chinese in different parts of China were more integrated and developed a greater modern national identity. Harrison chose as her subject of study villages in Shanxi Province (today the "coal province" of China) south of the provincial capital Taiyuan. She chose to focus on the diaries of a local literati, Liu Dapeng, whose life story itself suggested changes in Chinese society. Liu passed the second level of the imperial examinations, a high honor in earlier centuries that would have netted him a job such as a provincial governor, county magistrate, etc., in the 1700s, but in the late 1800s, it was not sufficient to get him a job. It was likely that he was lined up for some provincial or county job, but because several more were in line before him, it was not possible for him to get the job in his lifetime. Population growth and the limited government positions meant in the late Qing Dynasty, more and more successful imperial examination candidates failed to get government jobs. Bribery became common for governors-in-waiting or those in line for other positions to get ahead other candidates. Liu still enjoyed high prestige in his local area, and was hired as a private tutor in a nearby village where he apparently enjoyed a comfortable life, until the republic came along. The modern school system was perhaps the reason why he went back to his home village and accounted for the drop of his living status. Harrison did not tell us if he was "retrained" as a modern school teacher. Liu, a local literati, received news about nearby and distant coastal regions through three sources: oral transmission--from either witnesses of what happened nearby or people who had read about the news earlier because they had resided in the provincial capital or some other place that was an earlier stop on the transmission route of government gazettes and newspapers, then the gazettes and newspapers. Since newspapers were printed in the coastal cities, and their volume was apparently limited, they were read at every stop of their transmission, and it would take months before they would reach their final destination. Inland residents like Liu would often have greater difficulty in differentiating between rumors and truth when news reached them orally. Compared with the coastal region where a much wider exposure to Western ideas, practices, and information happened, people from inland region would received much delayed transmission of news. Still, the proliferation of news in the coastal and inland regions was something new in the late Qing and republican eras, as before the rise of newspapers, people in different regions of China would have only access to the government gazettes, as well as oral transmission, for news. Government gazettes, for their limited distribution, had only a limited readership. Newspapers, on the other hand, had the potential to reach a much larger audience. Unlike some people who speculated about the transmission of modern ideas--that people accepted what they read in the newspapers, or what was read to them from the newspapers, Harrison points out that from Liu's diaries, he exercised his own opinions in interpreting news. A general pattern one finds in Liu's interpretation of news items shows that he tended to interpret news in a more nativist or nationalistic way than how news was conveyed in the newspapers.  Regarding World War I, for instance, he interpreted it as heaven's wrath on the European powers for their invasion of China, though he also expressed sympathy for the loss of so many European lives during the war. Comparing public opinion in coastal and inland China, one often finds (though not invariably so) that the inland people tend to be either more conservative or more radical than the coastal people. This may have much to do with the exposure to information and to new ideas/practices in the coastal region or the limitations of it in inland areas. In the late 1910s, Harrison tells us the speed of newspaper transmission picked up, partly because provinces also started printing their own. Liu was now able to get his newspapers one or two days after they were printed. The increased speed of newspaper transmission also suggested the more rapid circulation of news. Newspapers, according to historian Benedict Anderson, helped bring people of different parts of the country together with their "consumption" of the same news and events every day, forging a common identity for people inhabiting the same country, and leading to the growth of modern nationalism. Harrison borrows that idea in this article, arguing that reading newspapers bound inland people like Liu with the coastal region, forging a common identity for them all, contributing to Chinese nationalism. The modern mass media created more contemporaneous bonds between peoples across China, unlike in the past, when Chinese were linked together primarily through their culture, namely the written language and Confucian classics. A modern Chinese national identity, however, did not mean every one in China would see eye to eye on the same issues. But rather, a greater extent on participation, in knowledge of what was happening around China and the world, and identifying the events as falling within the interest and concern of the newspaper readers.