The Middle Class and Publishing Industry01

作者：admin  点击次数：27  发布时间：2025-02-15

As the site of the above-mentioned interactive process, the publishing industry played a multi-functional role in the middle-class society of the late Qing Dynasty. It was a way to reproduce cultural values ​​and stimulate social integration, and it was also the earliest and most important political tool. Many historians and theorists who study the publishing industry in China and the West have paid close attention to the important connection between the publishing industry and politics, especially publishing and revolution, publishers and revolutionary fighters. Very extensive historical records have also confirmed this connection. Lenin, the advocate of the Bolsheviks, once asserted that newspapers were both the material basis and the symbol of the revolutionary cause. French revolutionary journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot also said: "Without the participation of newspapers, the American revolution could not have won." Liang Qichao, the most important newspaper theorist in the late Qing Dynasty, also said in 1912: "The establishment of Republican China should be a revolution of pen and ink, not a revolution of bloodshed."
Although publishing has played a political role in many countries, the role of the newspaper industry in late Qing China is particularly important. It has neither a party system nor a national parliamentary representative. Independent of the court and accessible to the reading public, political publishing provides a forum for reformers to express their political ideas. New magazines opened a platform for consultation for different classes in late Qing society, and also provided a possibility for reform journalists to challenge imperial authority and express public grievances, encouraging people to debate around government policies and enlightening the Chinese people to the urgent need to reform the imperial monarchy structure.
Since its founding in 1904, the primary task of the Times was to split and weaken the central government through constitutional reform. When the late Qing government officially announced the implementation of the New Deal on January 29, 1901, the Times also published a mandatory notice to gradually implement constitutionalism. Since then, the main task of the newspapermen has become to expose the gap between the legislative promise of constitutional reform and the political reality of the empire. The increasingly fierce competition between the two interconnected things is reflected in the writings of the newspapermen as a contest between central power and representatives of public opinion.