About Chen Bao

Chen Bao

Chen Bao (Chinese: 晨報; 'Morning News') was a Chinese-language political daily newspaper published in Beijing. It was founded on 15 August 1916 as Chen Zhong Bao (晨鐘報, 'Morning Bell') by figures of the Research Clique around Liang Qichao and Lin Changmin, and it holds a singular place in Chinese press history as the first daily newspaper edited by Li Dazhao, the future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, who was its first editor-in-chief and wrote its founding manifesto. Renamed Chen Bao in 1919, its seventh-page supplement became an important forum of the New Culture Movement and of early socialist discussion in China, publishing Li Dazhao, Hu Shi and others. Its offices were burned by student protesters in 1925, and the paper ceased publication on 5 June 1928.

Founding as the Morning Bell

The paper was launched in Beijing on 15 August 1916, after more than a month of preparation, under the name Chen Zhong Bao — the Morning Bell. It appeared in the political opening that followed the death of Yuan Shikai in June 1916, when the restored parliament and a freer press briefly made Beijing the centre of a national debate about China's constitutional future. The Research Clique, the political grouping formed around Liang Qichao and Lin Changmin within the restored parliamentary order, stood behind the venture: the paper was the clique's daily voice in the capital, intended to argue for constitutional government, national strengthening and resistance to both militarist fragmentation and monarchist revival. Its very name announced the mission — a bell rung at dawn to wake the nation.

Li Dazhao, the founder-editor

The paper's first editor-in-chief was Li Dazhao. Li had returned to China from his studies in Japan in mid-May 1916, arriving in Shanghai, and in July he was invited by Tang Hualong, the president of the House of Representatives, to come to Beijing to run a newspaper. The Morning Bell was the result, and it was the first daily newspaper that Li edited himself. The name of the paper, in the account preserved of its founding, was taken by Li himself, to mean "vibrating this morning bell" — evoking, in his words, "the self-consciousness of my nation" and undertaking the "historical mission" of "the creation of youth China". The young editor, not yet thirty, thus stamped on a parliamentary faction's newspaper the awakening rhetoric that would define his career.

The masthead bell and a famous maxim

Li Dazhao designed the paper's masthead himself. It was printed with the pattern of an ancient bell, and a warning sentence — an aphorism — was engraved, as it were, upon the bell each day. Among the earliest of those daily mottoes appeared the phrase for which Li became famous: "iron shoulders bearing morality", the image of the journalist and intellectual carrying the weight of moral responsibility on shoulders of iron. The line, later endlessly quoted in Chinese accounts of Li's life and of journalistic duty, first reached readers as a piece of newspaper furniture, the daily inscription on the Morning Bell's masthead bell. Few mastheads in Chinese journalism have carried so much of their editor's philosophy in their design.

The founding manifesto

Li wrote the paper's founding manifesto, setting out what the Morning Bell existed to do: to sound an alarm for a nation he believed was slumbering, and to summon into being the self-conscious, youthful China of his manifesto's vision. The document belongs to the first phase of Li's thought, before his turn to Marxism, when his hope rested on national awakening and cultural renewal led by the young. Read today, it is a founding text twice over — of a Beijing daily that lasted twelve years, and of the public voice of a man who within five years would help to found the Chinese Communist Party. The manifesto's language of awakening also placed the paper squarely in the current that was becoming the New Culture Movement, the campaign for intellectual and cultural transformation centred on Beijing and its university.

Editorial change and the Research Clique paper

Li Dazhao's own tenure at the paper was short: he was soon forced to resign the editorship because of political discord, as the tensions between the young editor's increasingly radical enthusiasms and the parliamentary politicians who owned the paper became impossible to manage. He moved on to the posts that made him famous — in January 1918 he became director of the Peking University library, and then a professor — but he remained a contributor to the paper he had founded. The Morning Bell, and then Chen Bao, continued as the Research Clique's organ through the clique's years of influence and decline, its columns following Liang Qichao's circle through the politics of the Anfu period and the shifting cabinets of the Beijing government. Li's brief editorship nonetheless remained the episode for which the paper is chiefly remembered.

Renamed Chen Bao in 1919

In 1919 the paper was renamed Chen Bao — Morning News — dropping the bell from its title while keeping the morning identity Li's naming had given it. The change of name came in the year of the May Fourth Movement, when student protests in Beijing against the Versailles settlement's treatment of Shandong ignited a nationwide movement and transformed the capital's press. Under its new name the paper settled into its mature form as one of Beijing's significant political dailies: a paper of news and political comment aligned with the constitutionalist tradition of its founders, in a city whose newspapers — the capital's press being close to the seat of a contested national government — lived and died by the politics of the warlord era.

The seventh-page supplement

The paper's most influential pages were not its news columns but its supplement. The seventh-page supplement of Chen Bao became an important forum of the New Culture Movement and of the early discussion of socialism in China. It published Li Dazhao — returning to his old paper as a contributor — and Hu Shi, the leading advocate of vernacular literature and pragmatic reform, among others. In the years when the New Culture debate was conducted largely through newspaper supplements and university journals, the seventh page gave Beijing readers a daily arena in which the era's competing programmes — liberal reform, cultural revolution and the new doctrines arriving from revolutionary Russia — could be argued side by side. Supplements of this kind were the true journals of the movement, and Chen Bao's was among the recognised ones.

Reporting a world in revolution

The paper's columns registered the shock waves of the Russian Revolution. Chinese newspapers followed the October Revolution of 1917 closely, and the Morning Bell was among the papers that reported on the process of the revolution, on the labour regime the Bolsheviks proclaimed, and on their anti-landlord and anti-capitalist policies and their foreign policy of peace. For Li Dazhao, the paper's founding editor, that reporting formed part of the background to his own celebrated essays of 1918–19 hailing the victory of Bolshevism, published in the movement's journals. The paper he had created to ring an alarm for national awakening thus also served its readers as a window on the event that would redirect the awakening itself towards Marxism.

The burning of the offices in 1925

The paper's political entanglements eventually brought violence to its door. In 1925 its offices were burned by student protesters, an attack that made the paper a casualty of the very student movement whose world its supplement had helped to shape. Beijing in the mid-1920s was a city of demonstrations, in which newspapers identified with unpopular governments or foreign settlements of China's grievances could become targets of patriotic crowds. The burning destroyed the paper's premises and stands in its history as the dramatic sign of a changed era: the constitutionalist press of 1916, founded to persuade, now faced a politics conducted in the street, and the generation the New Culture Movement had educated was prepared to burn the offices of a paper it judged to have betrayed the nation.

Closure and legacy

Chen Bao ceased publication on 5 June 1928, days before the Beijing government it had reported on collapsed and the city passed to the Nationalist order — the paper's twelve years spanning almost exactly the life of the Beijing republic of parliaments and warlords. Its legacy rests on three grounds. It was Li Dazhao's first newspaper and the vehicle of his founding manifesto and his "iron shoulders" maxim, and so a primary document of his early thought. Its seventh-page supplement earned it a lasting place in the history of the New Culture Movement and of socialism's first Chinese debates. And as the Research Clique's daily it records, issue by issue, the constitutionalist alternative in early Republican politics — the road of parliaments and reform that its founders, and its first editor in his different way, each hoped would save China.