ABSTRACT
Although the missionary press created considerable impact on the Chinese scholars and thus on modern Chinese journalism, we should not presume that they were the sole agency involved. Benjamin Schwartz (1964: 2) has warned against a too complacent assumption of the power of the West in this respect. The implication that traditional Chinese culture in its confrontation with the West was inert, capable of response only when stimulated from without – the implication of the concept of ‘impact’ – may lead us to underestimate the complex and dynamic qualities of traditional Chinese culture. Yu Yingshi (1995) also stresses the importance of looking into the inner dynamism of Confucian tradition in studying cultural transformation in the late Qing.
