About Li Bao

Li Bao

Li Bao (Chinese: 立報; 'The Upright News', also romanised as Lihpao) was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Shanghai. It was founded in 1935 by Cheng Shewo, one of the most celebrated newspapermen of Republican China, and it pioneered the small-format, mass-reader newspaper in China: an affordable daily written in plain language for ordinary people, rather than for the official and merchant readers of the great broadsheet dailies. Within a few years it had reached very large circulations. Its publication was disrupted by the war after 1937; it was revived in postwar Shanghai, where research collections preserve its 1946–1949 run. It is remembered as a landmark of Chinese popular journalism — the paper that proved a Chinese daily could be built for the common reader.

Cheng Shewo, the founder

Cheng Shewo (1898–1991) was born in Nanjing, with his ancestral home at Xiangxiang in Hunan, the son of an officer, Cheng Bi. He entered the newspaper world remarkably young: he went out into the world at fourteen, was working as an editor on the paper Jianbao at seventeen, began publishing articles in 1913, and in 1915 went to Shanghai to found a writing company, the Maiwen Company. He then moved to Beijing and graduated from Peking University in 1921, majoring in Chinese literature. By the time he came to found Li Bao he had already created a string of newspapers, run a news college, and seen the newspaper industries of Europe at first hand — a formation almost purpose-built for the experiment in popular journalism he launched in 1935.

The Beijing World newspapers

After graduating, Cheng built in Beijing a newspaper group of his own: he founded the World Evening News, the World Daily and the World Illustrated, a morning-evening-pictorial combination that taught him the economics of popular readership in the capital. In 1927 he returned to Nanjing to found Min Sheng Bao. The Beijing titles made his reputation as a publisher who understood ordinary urban readers — commuters, shopkeepers, students and clerks — and what they would pay for a paper. Those lessons, learned on the capital's competitive newsstands in the 1920s, were the direct preparation for the Shanghai daily of 1935, which applied them at national scale.

Europe observed, and a school for journalists

From 1930 to 1931 Cheng travelled in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom, observing modern European societies and cultures for the first time. The tour exposed him to the mass-circulation popular press of Europe at its height — cheap, compact papers written for a general public — shortly before he attempted the Chinese equivalent. Back in China, he also invested in the profession's future: in 1933 he founded the Beijing News College, a specialist school for journalism. The two ventures belonged together. Cheng's career joined practice to training: he wanted both a popular press and a supply of journalists educated to run it, and two years after the college he founded the paper that embodied his ideas.

The founding of Li Bao in 1935

Cheng founded Li Bao in Shanghai in 1935. Shanghai was the capital of Chinese publishing, dominated by great commercial broadsheets — Shen Bao and Xinwen Bao above all — whose large pages, dense columns and correspondingly higher prices addressed officials, merchants and the educated elite. Cheng's new paper was conceived against that model. His founding idea, for which the paper became famous, was the small-format newspaper: a compact daily that an ordinary person could afford, carry and finish, written in plain language that a reader of modest schooling could follow. The name he chose — Li Bao, the Upright News — announced a paper that would stand on the side of its common readers.

Pioneering the small-format mass newspaper

Li Bao pioneered the small-format, mass-reader newspaper in China. The innovation was simultaneously physical, linguistic and commercial. Physically, the small format cut paper costs and made the daily handy for readers on trams, in teahouses and at workbenches, where a broadsheet could not easily be opened. Linguistically, its plain writing put news within reach of the vast urban public that the elite press's literary register excluded. Commercially, a cheaper paper could be sold at a price the mass market could pay every day, and circulation — sold to advertisers in turn — became the business model, rather than subsidy or official patronage. In the history of the Chinese press, the paper marks the moment the common reader became the explicit foundation of a major daily's design.

A plain paper for ordinary people

The paper's stated aim was to give ordinary people an affordable, plainly written daily. That aim shaped its whole character: news selected and explained for readers who were not officials or specialists, presented directly and without the assumption of a classical education. The contrast with the established Shanghai press was deliberate. The great dailies were institutions of record whose pages mirrored the worlds of government, finance and the treaty-port elite; Li Bao addressed the city as most of its inhabitants actually lived it. Its populism was a publishing philosophy before it was a politics — a belief, which Cheng had practised since his Beijing papers, that a newspaper's first duty was to be read, widely and daily, by the people it claimed to serve.

Very large circulations

The formula worked. Within a few years of its founding, Li Bao had reached very large circulations, rivalling the established giants of the Shanghai market it had set out to outflank. The achievement was the more striking because the paper had no party machine behind it and no official subsidy: it lived by the copies ordinary readers chose to buy. Its success demonstrated, on commercial evidence, the existence of the mass newspaper public that reformers had theorised about since the late Qing — a public created by rising urban literacy, cheap print and the habit of daily news — and it showed every other publisher in Shanghai that this public could no longer be ignored.

War after 1937

The paper's rise was cut across by war. Publication was disrupted by the war after 1937, when the Battle of Shanghai brought the fighting to the paper's own city and the Japanese occupation that followed transformed the conditions under which every Chinese newspaper in Shanghai operated. Titles closed, moved inland, or survived in the compromised shelter of the foreign concessions as the "solitary island" period gave way to full occupation in 1941. Li Bao's wartime history belongs to that general catastrophe of the Shanghai press: the mass readership it had gathered was scattered, and the commercial world that had sustained a cheap popular daily was destroyed. Cheng Shewo himself, like many Republican newspapermen, was displaced by the war years from the scene of his greatest success.

Postwar revival

After the war the paper was revived in Shanghai. Research collections of Republican-era newspapers preserve its 1946–1949 run, the documentary trace of its second life in the brief, turbulent peace between the defeat of Japan and the Communist victory in the civil war. Postwar Shanghai's press revival was real but fragile, conducted amid hyperinflation, censorship and approaching political revolution, and few revived titles recovered their pre-war position. The preserved 1946–1949 run nonetheless matters to historians: it carries Cheng's experiment in popular journalism through to the very end of the Republican era on the mainland, closing the record in 1949, the year Shanghai changed hands and the press system that had produced Li Bao came to an end.

Legacy in Chinese popular journalism

Li Bao is remembered as a landmark of Chinese popular journalism. Its historical claim is precise: it was the pioneer of the small-format mass newspaper in China, the first great demonstration that a daily designed for ordinary people — small, cheap and plain — could win a mass circulation in open competition with the broadsheet establishment. Its founder carried the experiment's lessons into education: Cheng Shewo went on to found Shih Hsin University in Taiwan, which grew from his commitment to training journalists, so that the institutional legacy of the Beijing News College and of Li Bao itself survived in the education of generations of Chinese-language journalists. For press historians, the paper stands as the Republican era's clearest bridge between the elite newspaper of the nineteenth century and the mass media of the twentieth.