ABSTRACT
In the case of the modern Chinese press, however, there seems to be general agreement that its origins may be traced to 1895. China’s humiliating defeat by Japan and the rise of a new reform movement provide the context for the development. Sun blasted Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s gradualism as too little and too late. Only a republic, Sun maintained, could save China. The country’s tortuous path of history since the early 1900s tends to validate the wisdom of the incrementalist approach advocated by K’ang Yu-wei and Liang. Liang’s publications were reformist, perhaps even radical, in yet another sense. Around 1900 he began to incorporate in his periodicals not only the ideas of Western writers but also their literary technologies: punctuation marks, paragraphing, topic sentences, quotation marks, numbered points, as well as charts and tables to organize quantitative data and other information.
