Publishing Center of Cultural China: Shanghai's Commercial Publishers and the Overseas Chinese Market in Southeast Asia

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presents Professor Robert Culp from Bard College who will speak on Shanghai's commercial publishers.

Speaker:
Robert Culp
Associate Professor
Bard College

Republican-period Shanghai's role as the center of cultural production for the modern Chinese nation is well established. This paper explores whether that influence extended outside China as well. It does so by analyzing the efforts of Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company to spread their distribution networks to overseas Chinese communities in colonial Southeast Asia, and it assesses the cultural impact of the circulation of Chinese-language publications into those communities.

As in China proper, the presses marketed textbooks aggressively and used them as a prime mechanism to extend their distribution networks to culturally Chinese communities living abroad. Initially the presses sold overseas Chinese the textbooks produced for a domestic market. However, by the 1930s Zhonghua and Commercial Press were producing Chinese-language textbooks in multiple subjects that were designed specifically for overseas Chinese schools in places like British Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, and Dutch Indonesia.

This paper argues that the presses' publications and distribution networks cultivated a sense of China as a cultural community that extended far beyond the sovereign borders of the Republican Chinese state. The presses' expansive distribution networks integrated overseas Chinese communities into a common reading public with the citizenry in China proper. Further, textbooks designed for overseas Chinese children exposed them to Chinese culture and addressed them as Chinese citizens. To the extent that an expansive culturally Chinese nation emerged during this period, Shanghai became its capital by serving as the dominant center of Chinese-language media production.