Missionary Press In The Late Qing Dynasty: As The Beginning Of Chinese Modern Journalism

In"The Evolution and Value of Chinese Press", Liang Qi-chao pointed out that,"It's no doubt that Chinese ancient newspapers are regarded as ancestors of all the world-wide newspapers. Therefore, after commercial intercourse, the forms of western newspaper flew into China for the first time."The missionary press is one of the most important symbols that the missionaries of the late Qing dynasty began to preach their religions. As the beginning of Chinese modern journalism, they imitated the mature western newspaper models and promoted the development of Chinese journalism from the perspectives of both news operations and thoughts.However, so far when the most researchers discuss the proposition of "the missionary press is the beginning of Chinese modern journalism", they have considered it as one part of the foreign newspapers in China and mix the foreign business press and the missionary one together. This situation weakens the enlightenment significance and model effect of the missionary press to the Chinese modern journalism. Therefore, a deeper study on this subject will help us to get a further understanding of"the western newspapers form"and establish the historical position of missionary press. This study also has a positive meaning for the effects of missionary press on the Chinese and western cultural communication.This article is divided into four chapters. From the perspective of media sociology, it focuses on the important impacts of missionary press during the late Qing dynasty on the development of Chinese modern journalism and lays the foundation of understanding the historical evolution of Chinese modern journalism.Chapter one summarizes the realistic reasons for the assistant effect on press from the perspective of the historical position of missionary press. As a part of the strategy which uses written language to assist the spread of religion, Protestant missionary published press as a media and tried to find a perfect way to balance our traditional Confucian and Christian culture in order to achieve the goal of Christianization in China. Such activities pushed the transformation of Chinese press from ancient form to modern one by accident. Chapter Two discusses the model effect of missionary press on the Chinese modern journalism from two aspects of their news practice and technologies. Missionary press expanded Chinese vision no matter with their own writing style or their layout method, no matter from their printing or their publishing management. It created a lot of"First"of Chinese journalism history, such as the first piece of news, the first piece of lithographic newspaper, the first compilation of columns and so on. All these promoted our change from the ancient newspaper to a new one.Chapter Three analyses the missionary press is the enlightening teacher of Chinese modern journalism from the perspective of the news thoughts. Their newspapers have clear purposes which are quite different from our ancient ones. Otherwise, their concepts such as"press freedom","newspaper","daily news"and so on made Chinese realize the importance of newspapers to nation's economy and people's livelihood, produced the idea of"newspaper is beneficial to nation affairs", and accelerated our steps on publishing our own newspapers from the mental level.Chapter Four talks about the impact of missionary press on the Chinese own publishing newspaper. Starting from the missionary press, the newspaper translating movement proposed by Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan, Chinese modern journalism began to develop independently. In this progress, Chinese and western protestant missionaries interact with each other. From the facts such as Liang Fa's assistance to the Protestant and Wang Tao's independent newspaper press, we can feel the real beginning of Chinese modern press finally arrived.Once talking about the relationship between eastern and western civil, Professor Xu refers to the fact that ," These two kinds of civilizations are not closer to each other, but more and more farther from each other. Only when one of them gained enough power and skills and successfully expand itself to the other one's area for its own interests, can the two civilizations meet with each other." This is just the same with what the missionary had done. Their newspapers monopolized Chinese press market with the name of"some knowledge about geography, history, civilization, politics, religion, science, arts from western countries." The monopoly was not only an opportunity but also a challenge. Facing the violent modernization trend, Chinese chose a positive attitude to participate into it instead of passive resistance. That is to say, the development of Chinese modern journalism is not a simple process of"been modernized", but resulted in the progression of our imitation and learning.