新书：The Power of Print in Modern China

The Power of Print in Modern China

Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism

Robert Culp

Columbia University Press

PUB DATE: May 2019

ISBN: 9780231184168

344 pages

FORMAT: Hardcover

LIST PRICE: $65.00£50.00

Amid early twentieth-century China’s epochal shifts, a vital and prolific commercial publishing industry emerged. Recruiting late Qing literati, foreign-trained academics, and recent graduates of the modernized school system to work as authors and editors, publishers produced textbooks, reference books, book series, and reprints of classical texts in large quantities at a significant profit. Work for major publishers provided a living to many Chinese intellectuals and offered them a platform to transform Chinese cultural life.

In The Power of Print in Modern China, Robert Culp explores the world of commercial publishing to offer a new perspective on modern China’s cultural transformations. Culp examines China’s largest and most influential publishing companies—Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company, and World Book Company—during the late Qing and Republican periods and into the early years of the People’s Republic. He reconstructs editors’ cultural activities and work lives as a lens onto the role of intellectuals in cultural change. Examining the distinct Chinese modes of industrial publishing, Culp explains the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual through commercial and industrial processes rather than through political revolution and social movements. An original account of Chinese intellectual and cultural history as well as global book history, The Power of Print in Modern China offers new perspectives on the production of new forms of knowledge and culture in the twentieth century.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Culp is associate professor of history and Asian studies at Bard College. His books include Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (2007).

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Recruiting Talent, Mobilizing Labor
1. Becoming Editors: Late Qing Literati’s Scholarly Lives and Cultural Production
2. Universities or Factories? Academics, Petty Intellectuals, and the Industrialization of Mental Labor
Part I Epilogue: War, Revolution, Hiatus
Part II. Creating Culture
3. Transforming Word and Concept Through Textbooks and Dictionaries
4. Repackaging the Past: Reproducing Classics Through Industrial Publishing
5. Introducing New Worlds of Knowledge: Series Publications and the Transformation of China’s Knowledge Culture
Part III. Legacies of Industrialized Cultural Production
6. Print Industrialism and State Socialism: Public-Private Joint Management and Divisions of Labor in the Early PRC Publishing Industry
7. Negotiated Cultural Production in the Pedagogical State
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Rich, meticulous, and sparkling with insight, this work further cements Culp's position as perhaps the foremost scholar of modern Chinese print culture, knowledge formation, and intellectual history working today.

——Thomas S. Mullaney, author of The Chinese Typewriter: A History