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The Early Chinese Press and the Agency of Its Readers: The Dynamics of the Transcultural Spread of the “Press” as an Institution

Abstract Habermas saw the public sphere as coterminous with the national space. Anderson dreamed of newspaper readers facing the same paper for breakfast forming an “imagined community,” which he saw as vital for supplementing the subjective side of nationhood. Historical evidence supports neither proposition. Both remain locked in a nation-state focused history and have to sideline large and crucial parts of the record. This article studies two early Chinese-language periodical publications characterised by their radical difference to the standard European models, the East Western Monthly Magazine (1833–1838) and the Shenbao (1872–1949), and considers the implications of these examples for dominant conceptual frameworks.