Abstract
Founded in 1906, the daily Shengjing Times (Shengjing shibao) would publish only for 39 years, but in that short lifespan would serve as both witness to and agent for vast and turbulent change.1 As a Chinese-language publication under Japanese ownership in a region that would eventually become the Japanese client state of Manchukuo, it is easy to dismiss the Times as a mouthpiece for imperial propaganda; by the end of its lifespan, it certainly was. However, the longer institutional and intellectual development of the newspaper was far more complex than its inglorious ending would suggest. While foreign-owned newspapers in China were at the time by no means rare, few spanned a range of regimes as vast, or a combination of national, economic and social interests as diverse as did the Shengjing Times
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Notes
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 465–470
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 37–46.
This process is also seen in postrevolutionary Prance by Jeremy Popkin, “The Provincial Newspaper Press and Revolutionary Politics,” French Historical Studies, 18, 2 (Autumn 1993), 434–456.
Kathryn Ragsdale, “Marriage, the Newspaper Business, and the Nation-State: Ideology in the Late Meiji Serialized Katei Shōsetsu,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 24, 2 (1998), 229–255.
Albert A. Altman, “Korea’s First Newspaper: The Japanese Chōsen shinpō” Journal of Asian Studies, 43, 4 (August 1984), 685–696.
The history of this publication is from Ri Sotetsu, Manshu ni okeru Nihonjin keiei shznbun no rekishi [History of Japanese journalism in Manchuria] (Tokyo: Gaifusha, 2000), 63–69
Inami Ryōichi, “Ō Kokuyui to’ shengjing shibao’” [Wang Guowei and the Shengjing Times], Tōyō gakuhō, 72 (2000), 525–572.
Barend ter Haar has argued convincingly that the term “White Lotus” was itself primarily used by outsiders to criminalize these groups. B. J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). On the importance of such teachings to village religion, see Thomas David DuBois, Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005).
Kurihara Ken, Tai Man-Mo Seisakushi No Ichimen: Nichi-Ro Sengo Yori Taishoki Ni Itaru [One Face of Historical Policy Towards Manchuria and Mongolia: On the Taisho Period Following the Russo-Japanese War] (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1966).
Louise Young notes that the robust coverage of events in Manchuria represented a break from an earlier, more pacifistic stance taken by the publishing industry. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 58–88.
As would the Japanese-supported regime of Wang Jingwei, the Manchu Daily had already begun speaking of the Kingly Way as the true inheritors of the vision of Sun Yat-sen, even before the foundation of Manchukuo. Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nihon No Bunka Togo [Cultural Integration in Japan’s Colonial Empire] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), 240–245.
This is presaged in the direction taken by the Shuntian shzbao, which in 1917 launched an opera competition, and engaged in a very public debate with another newspaper over its choice of winner. See Catherine Vance Yeh, “A Fublic Love Affair or a Nasty Game? The Chinese Tabloid Newspaper and the Rise of the Opera Singer as Star,” European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2, 1 (2003): 13–51.
The question of how information from newspapers and print novels reached ordinary Chinese has been discussed by Joan Judge, Print and Politics: “Shzbao” and the Culture of reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Fress, 1996)
Cynthia Brokaw, “Reading the Best-sellers of the Nineteenth century: Commercial Fublishing in Sibao.” In Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 184–234.
Henrietta Harrison, “Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China 1890–1929,” Past and Present, 166 (2000): 181–204.
Although the two terms were often used interchangably, the World Red Swastika Society was technically the charitable arm of Daoyuan, a religious society that was founded in 1928 in Shandong province, and grew rapidly throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Daoyuan was one of many new style White Lotus Societies (others would include the International Morality Society, Wanguo daode hui, or the Li Sect, Zaili jiao) founded or transformed during this period. Most of which were characterized by an expansive internationalism that fit with similar currents abroad, such as Theosophy in the United States, and the Eastern Buddhism presented in Chapter 3 by Judith Snodgrass in this volume. This internationalism and their close wartime ties with Japan would see such groups painted as collaborators after 1945. See Shao Yong, Zhongguo huidaomen [Chinese sectarians] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1997), 301–306, Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modem (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefîeld Publishers, 2003), 89–122
BCR Mukden January 18, 1936; Osugi Kazuo, Nichi-Chü jugonen no senso shi [History of the Fifteen Year Sino-Japanese War] (Tokyo: Chüō kor on shinsha, 1996), 131–153
ST July 30, 1937; ST September 2, 1937; ST January 25, 1943; ST May 27, 1943; ST June 29, 1943; ST April 7, 1943; ST February 12, 1944. Not coinci dentally, patriotic Buddhists in Japan and China also organized to raise money for “Buddhist airplanes.” Xue Yu, Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931–1945 (New York & London: Routledge, 2005).
ST July 10, 1940. Li Narangoa, “Japanese imperialism and Mongolian Buddhism, 1932–1945,” Critical Asian Studies, 35, 4 (December 2003): 491–514
For the chronology of the institution of this policy, see Wan-yao Chou, “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations.” In The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. by Peter Duus, et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
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DuBois, T. (2009). Japanese Print Media and Manchurian Cultural Community: Religion in the Pages of the Shengjing Times, 1906–1944. In: DuBois, T.D. (eds) Casting Faiths. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235458_10
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