Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Paul French, author of Carl Crow, a Tough Old China Hand and North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula has written a book about foreign journalists who reported from China from the 1820s to 1949.

Below is an introduction and excerpt from the book. You can also see a Danwei video interview with French here.

By looking back at the men and women who have reported and written on China since the late 1820s, it might just be possible to gain some perspective on the media’s current obsession with the China story.

For a start, such a glance at those who wrote, edited and launched newspapers in China, as well as those correspondents who visited briefly to report back, might constructively give us pause for thought about the accepted wisdom that today the West is obsessed with China as never before.

Arguably, more column inches were devoted to China in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century than since. In an article entitled “Work of the Foreign Newspaper Correspondent in China” written anonymously for The China Weekly Review in 1928 and simply signed “By One of Them”, the author opened by writing: “During the past two years more space in the world’s press has probably been given to China than during the previous decade”. The anonymous author was referring to the start of Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition from Guangzhou to unite the country under Nationalist rule and rid it of warlords in 1926. This did indeed seem to be the case.

In 1928 the Sunday edition of the New York Times was “… running seven and sometimes eight columns of material on China” from their correspondent Hallett Abend and sending urgent telegrams instructing him to send yet more China news.

Even then, this heavy volume was not necessarily anything new. Starting around the time of the Boxers and the Siege of the Legations in 1900, the world’s public began to want significantly more information about China, and so the world’s great newspapers started sending and hiring full-time correspondents backed up by an army of stringers. Their numbers grew and then spurted in the 1920s, as “One of Them” notes.

China was among the biggest and most prestigious foreign postings since the First World War as the fragile country appeared besieged on all sides, internally as well as externally.

It is certainly true that the foreign press corps from 1900 until 1937 was significantly larger than it has been at any time since. There were more magazines and non-academic journals devoted to understanding China then than now. From long- running publications such as J. B. Powell’s China Weekly Review to short-lived upstarts such as Edgar Snow’s Democracy, their number fluctuated but compared to today’s handful of serious publications they were legion.

And, of course, foreigners established, edited and filled numerous newspapers published in China from Guangzhou to Shanghai and on to Tianjin and Beijing. Those are now all gone and there are no equivalents of the North-China Daily News or the Peking Times and Tientsin Times today, except in Hong Kong.