Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China, 1890-1929
Author(s)
Harrison, Henrietta
Abstract
Nationalism in its modern form was a Western import into China, though its people had a strong sense of identity often called “culturalism.” By privileging modern nationalism over traditional forms of identity, elites, and the historians who follow their accounts, have been able to dismiss popular opposition to modernizing and Westernizing policies. The development of newspapers did not eliminate oral reports as a source of news, and the kind of nationalism promoted by the newspapers did not simply replace the culturalism of the rural population, a good example being the reporting of the Boxer crisis. Nationalism was not injected into the countryside verbatim by an urban elite but was transformed and reinvented by the concerns and interests of those who saw and reported local and national news.
