Printing, Reading, and Revolution: Kaiming Press and the Cultural Transformation of Republican China

The celebrated May Fourth Movement (1917-1923) occurred within the context of the rise of modern publishing in China. The movement in turn inspired a publishing boom that changed the Chinese cultural landscape. This dissertation explores publishing as a nexus of cultural politics, intellectual sociability, cultural economy, and the reading public. It does so through an exploration of the history of Kaiming Press (1926-1953), the most successful publishing house launched by May Fourth intellectuals. Founded by a large network of May Fourth intellectuals initially as an avant-garde press, it grew into the fifth largest publisher in Republican-era China and exerted a profound influence on the generation of middle-school students who constituted the bulk of its readership. This study challenges both the classic interpretation of the May Fourth movement as an enlightenment movement and the revisionist view of it as a hegemonic cultural project. Instead, it establishes how the modernizing market required writers of the era to transform themselves into publishing professionals and their presses into profit-earning ventures. To meet this challenge, my study demonstrates that the May Fourth writers associated with Kaiming Press reached out to a broader readership, which then created an open and interactive cultural space in the post-May Fourth decades. In this new cultural space, intellectuals and their student readers each articulated their collective sentiments and transformed their identities based on the parallel experience of being prophets and vanguards of the Chinese revolution as well as members of a petty-bourgeoisie in decline. Their identity crisis ultimately contributed to creating a social and cultural environment that made "communist revolution" conceivable and eventually welcomed by many educated people in urban centers. This dissertation also reveals the distinctive May Fourth pattern of intellectual sociability that transcended the dichotomy of tradition and modernity. The social and cultural networks reconfigured during the May Fourth era with help from the modern press, functioned as historical agents of ideological formation and historical change. Ultimately, however, it was the dynamics of traditional literati sociability marked by personal networks that germinated and spread new ideas, initiated modern organizations, and made the May Fourth business of enlightenment possible.