Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1837

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

While there are many excellent studies of China’s complex relationship
with modern Western intellectual culture, most are limited to Western
missionary educational institutions after 1860, Chinese-initiated
programs between 1895 and 1949, or the influence of Western political
thought after 1895. In this thoughtful book, Christopher Reed redirects
attention to the overlooked area of communications technology as an
indispensable ingredient in the larger process of intellectual change in
pre-revolutionary China. His area of research is the burgeoning world of
late 19th- and early 20th-century Shanghai, whose printing and
publishing economy supplied words and ideas to two generations of
Chinese determined to set their nation on the path to wealth, power, and
international prestige.

Historically—and for many surprisingly—China had long had a large
market for printed text. Studies of the Qing period (1644–1911)
suggest that between 30 percent and 45 percent of the male and 10
percent of the female population were at least functionally literate in
the 18th and 19th centuries. Given a mid-19th-century population of
approximately 450 million, China had an enormous reading public, much of
it urban, that was capable of absorbing new ideas via the print that
would soon flood from the Shanghai presses. Reed documents and discusses
the fascinating growth of presses and publishers and their roles in the
collapse of the Imperial system and the rise of Nationalist and
Communist ideologies.

Well-researched and thoroughly documented with useful appendixes and
glossaries, Reed’s Gutenberg in Shanghai blends investigation of the
technology, politics, and intellectual culture of Shanghai’s printing
industry into an intriguing study and a timely example of how
communications technology can work to change a nation.