When Mao Zedong set out for Beijing in March 1949, he carried with him two ancient texts: Annals of History (史记, c.100 BCE) and Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (资治通鉴, c.1050 CE). Never short of words, the Chairman also carried tow modern Chinese dictionaries, the Ciyuan (辞源, Commercial Press 1915) and the Cihai (辞海, Zhonghua Books 1936).

Mao’s choice of reading material is no trifling matter for Christopher Reed, author of Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Rather, it symbolizes the importance of the two modern industrialized publishing firms and the development of print capitalism, the origin and culmination of which reveals one of history’s most striking shifts.

In their efforts to spread the word of God, 19th-century Christian missionaries introduced modern printing technology to china. Though their efforts to spread the gospel may have been limited, their propagation of technology was a roaring success.

Led by three major publishers, Commercial press, Zhonghua Books and World Books, Chinese print capitalism flourished during what is now known as the golden era from 1910-1927. However, that same technology was later used to spread a very different ideology; indeed, it became a platform for Chinese print Communism.

That’s: what role and influence did the missionaries have in the development of print capitalism and the formation of the People’s Republic of China?

Christopher Reed (CR): Over the course of the 19th-century, Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, brought about the initial transfer of (19th-century) Western-style printing technology to China.
As time went on, however, Christian missionaries often had their printing operations bought out by Chinese printers and publishers, who then created Chinese print capitalism. They accomplished this in part by borrowing technologies from abroad and in part by redeveloping Western technology for Chinese ends, manufacturing machines, fonts and paper locally.

That’s: Western technology was not favored in Shanghai or elsewhere prior to 1870s. What were the forces that later propelled its adoption?

CR: The first major Western printing technology embraced by Chinese printers was lithography. Shanghai-based Chinese printers embraced lithography form 1876 onwards because it allowed for rapid, mostly high-quality, reasonably priced reproduction of works for which there was a major national market. These works included educational texts, model civil service examination essays, examination aids, dictionaries, literature, medical texts, etc.

That’s: How did the Chinese publishing industry differ from that in the West?

CR: The Chinese publishing industry was different from Western publishing industries, especially in the Anglo-American world (as well as from other modern Chinese industries), because of the continuing influence of an older literati  ’service ethic’.

Part of what makes the Shanghai publishers interesting as historical subjects is that even as they were revolutionizing Chinese communications via the industrial printing press, they themselves typically held tight to this older, arguably out-of-date, service ethic.

At the same time, the demands of corporate industrial publishing necessitated night and day use of expensive machinery. This was the first step in an attempt to blanket China with publications from the presses of competing publishers.

It is for this reason that in the 1910-27 period one finds the fiercest, most ruthless forms of capitalist competition between the Shanghai publishers, resulting in what I call the ‘Textbook Wars’ between the Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books and World Books (the so-called Big Three Sima Lu [Fuzhou Road] publishers).