ABSTRACT
In the last Qing decade, the journalists who wrote for the Shanghai daily Shibao (“Eastern Times”) confronted the issue of “the people” in the context of rebellion and domestic upheaval. The sequence of reform and protest which had been a leitmotif throughout Chinese history reached a new intensity in this period. The reform publicists’ interpretations of and commentaries on these disturbances revealed a tension between the two forces inherent in their status as new-style intellectuals—elitism and nationalism. Their paternalistic posture to ward the common people—reflected in a broad spectrum of attitudes, from benign concern to condescension and contempt—was inherent in the nature of their political ambitions. Refusing to simplistically label the protesters as revolutionaries or lawless barbarians, the journalists brought the complexities of the disturbances—their sources and meanings—into the print-mediated public realm. In stressing the reformability of the bad elements, the reformists did not, however, go as far as the late Qing revolutionaries in embracing secret society leaders and activists.
