The Power of Print in Modern China

Reviews / Votes

Rich, meticulous, and sparkling with insight, this work further cements Culp's position as perhaps the foremost scholar of modern Chinese print culture, knowledge formation, and intellectual history working today. -- Thomas S. Mullaney, author of <i>The Chinese Typewriter: A History</i> The Power of Print in Modern China is unprecedented in its richly researched account of the three publishing powerhouses that helped establish the terms of modern Chinese discourse from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. In tracking multiple dimensions of this tumultuous trajectory, Culp is attentive to the complex ways both vestiges of late imperial culture and the economic imperatives of industrial capitalism shaped Chinese publishing and reshaped understandings of intellectual labor. -- Joan Judge, author of <i>Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press</i> Comprehensive, well organized, and theoretically informed, The Power of Print in Modern China looks at the Chinese publishing industry, through its three major houses, from the inside out. The book highlights the surprising continuities found in the publishing industry from the late Qing into the early communist era until it was, in effect, destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. This is an important contribution to the social, cultural, and business history of modern China. -- Peter Zarrow, author of <i>Educating China: Knowledge, Society and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902-1937</i> This groundbreaking work on the industrialization of book publishing in China's twentieth century resets the agenda of modern Chinese intellectual history. It offers a multifaceted interpretation about knowledge as work in the making of a pedagogical state under socialism. This is a must read for all concerned with issues about the state, knowledge professionals, and the structural transformation of the public sphere. -- Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley In his new book The Power of Print in Modern China, with the usual adagio of words, Robert Culp unfolds to us the radical changes in the Chinese knowledge system through commercial publishing from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. -- Lara Yuyu Yang * The PRC History Review * A must-read for anyone interested in print, power, modernity, or their interplay in China, and for anyone who might want to stroll through twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history with a new set of companions and not the usual suspects. * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture * [A] lively account. * Times Literary Supplement * It is fascinating to read about how ideas and hard work by enthusiastic and skillful people with physical tools created by mankind, as indicated by the cover of this book, are able to form a driving social force that moves the civilization forward. * Publishing Research Quarterly * A great contribution, not only to the field of Chinese studies but also to media studies. * MEDIENwissenschaft * Highly recommended for specialists of modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history, with classroom applications for instructors working with more advanced graduate students. * East Asian Journal of Popular Culture *