ABSTRACT
Having traced the emergence of the modern press from the missionary periodicals to the early élite Chinese press, we can see a link, as illustrated in the cases of Wanguo Gongbao and Shiwu Bao, between developing journalistic practices and wider cultural and intellectual perspectives. The impact of the missionary press, undoubtedly, went much deeper culturally than modernizing and pluralizing the print media. In this chapter, we will examine the way in which the missionary press contributed to transforming the cultural outlook of the Chinese intelligentsia towards models provided in Western modernity. In particular, we will explore the impact of the transformation of the social and cultural understanding and organization of time and space, and the implications of this for challenges to the traditional cosmological outlook of the Chinese scholars and, as a consequence, of their sense of national identity. Finally, we will explore the question of whether, and in what way, a transformed print media created, in a broad sense, a form of ‘public sphere’ in China in the late nineteenth century: shifting the state-society relationship, and re-defining the traditional role of the scholars.
