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The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low: the Shenbao As Platform for Yangwu Discussions on Political Reform, 1872-1895

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The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low: the Shenbao As Platform for Yangwu Discussions on Political Reform, 1872-1895 _full_journalsubtitle: International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie _full_abbrevjournaltitle: TPAO _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5322 (online version) _full_issue: 3-4 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en _full_article_subject: 0 T’OUNG PAO 116 T’oung Pao 104-1-3Wagner (2018) 116-188 www.brill.com/tpao The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low: The Shenbao as Platform for Yangwu Discussions on Political Reform, 1872-1895 Rudolf G. Wagner (Cluster Asia and Europe, Heidelberg University) Introduction In scholarly analyses of late Qing dynasty (1644-1912) political thought, the importance of the Yangwu 洋務 (“Foreign Affairs”) current has been justly emphasized, especially since leading Han Chinese officials were involved. According to the still prevailing master narrative, however, the Yangwu protagonists were focused on government mechanisms facili- tating the import and production of modern military equipment as well as the training of Chinese soldiers in its employ, but they began discuss- ing the root causes of China’s troubles as well as a need for fundamental structural change only after China’s defeat in the war with Japan in 1895.1 In 1960, Onogawa Hidemi 小野川秀美 debunked the basic assump- tion of this narrative, documenting a lively public debate on China’s structural problems and ways to deal with them that took place, begin- ning in the 1880s, primarily among men of letters from the private secre- tariats (mufu 幕府) of high Yangwu officials.2 Probably sharing the 1) A widely quoted and reprinted summary of this view is in Zhang Hao 張灝, “Zhuanxing shidai zai Zhongguo jin xiandai sixiangshi yu wenhuashi shang de zhongyaoxing” 轉型時代 在中國近現代思想史與文化史上的重要性, Dangdai 9 (1994): 86-93. Zhang defined “transition period” as the time between 1895 and 1920. On early Yangwu discussions, see Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-chih Restoration, 1862-1874 (1957, rpt. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991). 2) Onogawa Hidemi 小野川秀美, Shinmatsu seiji shisō kenkyū 清末政治思想研究 (Kyoto: Tōyōshi Kenkyūkai, 1960). For a Chinese translation see, idem, Wan Qing zhengzhi sixiang yanjiu 晚清政治思想研究, tr. Lin Mingde 林明德 and Huang Fuqing 黃福慶 (Taibei: Shi- bao wenhua chubanshe, 1982). The enlarged Japanese version, Onogawa Hidemi, Shinmatsu © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 T’oungDOI: Pao 10.1163/15685322-10413P04 104-1-3 (2018) 116-188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:04:19PM via free access _full_journalsubtitle: International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie _full_abbrevjournaltitle: TPAO _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5322 (online version) _full_issue: 3-4 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en _full_article_subject: 0 The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low 117 intellectual historians’ disdain for the newspaper as a relevant source, he only explored writings by famous men of letters. A perusal of the Shenbao 申報 newspaper will show, however, that it was an important part of the intellectual history of the time and its opinion pieces on the first page were, from the paper’s founding in 1872 through the 1880s, the most important Chinese-language platform for this debate. It was on the pages of the Shenbao where key argumentative tropes and referenc- es for the public debates of later Yangwu protagonists were developed.3 Given the rapidly growing distribution of the Shenbao throughout the social hierarchy and across the country,4 it is reasonable to hypothesize that, compared to books or manuscripts, the opinion page had a larger impact on the development of Yangwu thinking, even if individual read- ership is notoriously hard to document. I propose to study as a test case the development of the idea that the main obstacle to China’s wealth and power was the “lack of communica- tion” (butong 不通), or the “disconnect” (gehe 隔閡), between high and low, and that the establishment of a free flow of communication be- tween high and low (shangxia zhi tong 上下之通) would be a crucial ingredient of a reformed political structure, which in turn would enable China to regain its footing in the world.5 The relevance of this test case is evident from the fact that, as will be shown below, by the time of the seiji shisō kenkyū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2009-10), has no changes relevant to the discussion here. 3) See Andrea Janku, “Electronic Index to the Early Shenbao 1872-1895” (http://shenbao.uni- hd.de/Lasso/Shenbao/searchSimple.lasso), last accessed 4 March 2018. 4) By 1877, the average daily circulation of the paper had reached 10,000. (“Lun benguan xiaoshu” 論本館銷數, Shenbao, 10 February 1877). References to the paper in diaries and memoranda suggest that it was read not just in the Zongli Yamen 總理衙門 and by the first batch of diplomats such as Guo Songtao 郭嵩燾 (1818-1891), but also by high-ranking offi- cials and members of the Hanlin Academy 翰林院, and rumor had it that the Empress Dowager herself was using it as a source of information. Its horizontal spread was facilitated by the development of a regional distribution network, supplemented by the option to sub- scribe via the postal service from anywhere in the country. As Mary Rankin has documented, local elites in the Jiangnan region knew about each other’s forays (even in their own home- town such as Hankou) mostly through Shenbao reports, see her Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986). 5) This study is part of a larger project about the structure and development of the public sphere in premodern China and the impact of some of its institutions on governance across Eurasia. T’oung Pao 104-1-3 (2018) 116-188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:04:19PM via free access 118 Wagner Sino-Japanese War this lack of communication was pervasively quoted as the root cause of China’s crisis. The discussions in these early opinion pieces were important for their approach, the medium in which they were conducted, the institu- tional setting of this medium, and the resulting impact. Rather than of- fering a series of pragmatic proposals to fix things, their approach consisted of a systematic probing of the flaws in the Chinese body poli- tic that prevented the country from finding its bearing in the modern world; the medium was a modern public forum, the newspaper, which allowed for continued editorial coverage and a dense interlocking of opinion and news information; the institutional setting was that of a foreign-owned property managed by an Englishman with excellent Chi- nese, and a business seat in Shanghai’s International Settlement, thus outside the guidance and control of the Peking court, but with conve- nient accessibility across the entire country in terms of newsgathering and newspaper distribution; and the resulting impact was the insertion between state and society of a platform where information could be ex- changed and opinion debated in the public sphere. At the same time, the paper’s success hinged on its—conscious or unwitting—interaction with broader trends in Chinese society at the time and its conscious use of authoritative tropes of Chinese political analysis that were familiar even to non-elite readers. These trends were, first, a perception shared by growing numbers of officials and elite members since the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820) that the state was no longer up to the task of personnel recruitment and management, water con- trol, and the maintenance of social order. Drastic measures were needed to “save” (jiu 救) the polity, although a notion of an acute crisis was not yet articulated.6 These often wide-ranging proposals were, however, 6) During the early years of the Qing, the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors had gone out of their way to signal their interest in and openness to the concerns of the people, most impor- tantly through their “Southern Tours” of inspection as described in contemporary official and private records. See Pierre-Étienne Will, “Vue de Shanghai,” in Kangxi, empereur de Chine, 1662-1722: La Cité interdite à Versailles: Musée du château de Versailles 27 janvier–9 mai 2004 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 29-41; Michael G. Chang, “Historical Nar- ratives of the Kangxi Emperor’s Inaugural Visit to Suzhou, 1684,” in The Dynastic Center and the Provinces: Agents and Interactions, ed. Jeroen Duindam and Sabine Dabringhaus (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 203-24. In a lecture entitled “The first Kangxi Southern Tours Revisited” given at the Tōyō Bunko on Sept. 29, 2016, Prof. Will took up the issue again in greater detail. He T’oung Pao 104-1-3 (2018) 116-188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:04:19PM via free access The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low 119 kept from public view and circulated only in manuscript form. This was still true for Feng Guifen’s 馮桂芬 (1809-1874) Jiaobinlu kangyi 校邠盧抗 議, dated to the early 1860s.7 One reason for this reticence to go public was a quite realistic fear of harsh government reprisals against the “fac- tionalism” associated with public debates of national issues.8 Even though the Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編, Wei Yuan’s 魏源 (1794-1857) compilation of more restrained and practical statecraft es- says, did appear in print in 1825-1826, it started to be widely circulated with numerous reprints only during the institutional reconstruction, which followed the Taiping War (1850-1864).9 Even such leading lights of the Yangwu current as Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811-1872) and Li Hong- zhang 李鴻章 (1823-1901), who, we might suspect, felt some sympathy for these forays, were actively intervening down to the 1890s to prevent the distribution of printed works that went further into probing kindly shared the lecture manuscript with me.
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