The Middle Class and Publishing Industry 04

作者：admin  点击次数：24  发布时间：2025-02-19

Reformist publications also played an extremely important cultural role during the last conflict-ridden period of the late Qing dynasty. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, journalists who wrote for new newspapers and periodicals believed that journalism had an important cultural function. They believed that the print media could replace teachers and scholars in the production and dissemination of cultural values. Not only did they convey information and influence, their writings also widely conveyed ideas.
As defined, culture does not exist in a specific practice or production field, but is a network of meanings, a "form of interpretive mechanisms and value systems" that is clearly derived from "leastcultural" discourse and behavior. The most important cultural changes took place in China during the last decade of the late Qing Dynasty. Under the concept of "Chinese learning for substance and Western use for practical use", the new newspapers clearly realized their fearless pursuit of constitutional reform, expanding and enriching China's cultural form (repertoire). When we try to understand this cultural turn, we need to face two different cultural models and the complex interaction between them: maintaining familiar cultural models; developing new foreign ideas.
From the mid-to-late 19th century, one of the indirect results of Western military aggression and technological challenges was the gradual incorporation of Western ideas into the discourse of late Qing reform. The Western challenge inspired hundreds of thousands of Chinese to begin learning the "new learning" that emphasized Western politics and law rather than Confucian philosophical speculation, or to learn from Europe and the United States, and more often from "Eastern" Japan. Almost all the editors and journalists of the Times had studied in Japan. The courses they studied in Japan broadened their thinking and became the driving force for their efforts to change Chinese culture. When they incorporated the ideas of Western thinkers into their media writing, they gradually combined the traditional Chinese idyllic cultural ideals with Western concepts, and at the same time incorporated Confucius and Darwin, Mencius and Montesquieu into their constitutional reform agenda.