| Abstract | This dissertation examines popular Shanghai « tabloids » between 1897 and 1911, a type of increasingly mass-targeted newspaper that was meant primarily to be entertaining. A mix of scandal, gossip, literary game playing, serially produced novels and stories, and political parody and commentaries, these publications reached beyond an audience with high literary skills to an audience of middling literary abilities. This dissertation engages a long ignored subject, namely, the role played by popular media in political change during the late Qing. Historians have hitherto focused on intellectual and institutional forces that conditioned the fall of the Qing; however, little attention has been given to the popular assimilation of lofty ideas of reform and to popular perceptions as a part of those conditions. My thesis is that Shanghai's tabloids, with their daring breach of political, social and moral boundaries, created a “public culture” of unprecedented openness and tolerance that eroded Qing authority and its power of persuasion. This culture, shaped in turn by the social and political changes of the time, presaged the seemingly sudden collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and made it palatable to the general public. The dissertation has a prologue and five chapters. in the prologue, I define source materials and terms that I use in research and writing. Chapter 1 introduces the tabloid literati and their tabloids. Chapter 2 examines how tabloid literati made the pursuit of fun and play a cultural fetish for their readers, and how they lived as the exemplars of that culture. Chapter 3 examines how tabloid literati, through their cynicism and humor, fashioned a sense of “public” anxiety and skepticism concerning contemporary society and Qing authority. Chapter 4 examines how their commercial interests dominated what and how they produced, and how they acted as entrepreneurs and cultural brokers in the pursuit of fame and profit. Chapter 5 analyzes the acute political, social, economic and intellectual alienation felt by low-rank literati. It analyzes how tabloid literati helped to cultivate a profound “public consciousness” and a shared feeling that the Qing regime was no longer trustworthy, reliable, and capable as a government. |
