About Shen Bao

Shen Bao

Shen Bao (申報, pinyin Shen Bao, known in English as Shanghai News and transliterated in its own era as Shun Pao or Shen-pao) was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Shanghai from 30 April 1872 to 27 May 1949. Its name was short for Shenjiang Xinbao, Shenjiang being a shortened form of Chunshen Jiang, the old name for the Huangpu River on which Shanghai stands. Over a run of seventy-seven years it became the longest-lived newspaper of its time in China and, under its most famous owner, Shi Liangcai, the most influential Chinese newspaper of the late Qing and Republican periods. Histories of the Chinese press group it with Xinwen Bao, Ta Kung Pao and Minguo Ribao as one of the four great newspapers of the Republican era.

Founding by Ernest Major

Shen Bao was founded by Ernest Major (1841–1908), a British businessman whose command of Chinese was regarded as remarkable, together with investment from several other Britons. The first issue appeared on 30 April 1872, published by the Shenbaoguan, the paper's own publishing house, in the Shanghai International Settlement. Because it was produced inside the foreign-administered Settlement, the paper was subject to fewer regulations than Chinese newspapers published under direct Qing authority, a shelter that shaped its early freedom to report and comment.

Major made clear from the start that the newspaper was intended for Chinese readers, not for foreigners. He therefore chose news and subjects that would interest a Chinese audience, placed Chinese compradors in charge of the business side, and had Chinese editors select the news and write the editorials. Jiang Zhixiang served as the first editor-in-chief, with He Guisheng and Qian Xinbo among his assistants. The formula worked quickly: within about eight months the newcomer had forced the closure of the Shanghai Xin Bao, a rival that had been publishing for ten years.

Content and early innovations

The mature Shen Bao was organised into sections covering editorials, international news, domestic news, local news, industry and trade, law and society, sports and education, literature and art, and advertisements. It reprinted essays from Hong Kong's Xunhuan Ribao (the Universal Circulating Herald) and official announcements, and it frequently published the essays of Liang Qichao, the reformist publicist later hailed as a father of modern Chinese journalism.

The paper was also a technical and journalistic innovator. It adopted new printing technologies, sent a military correspondent to cover the Sino-French War in Vietnam in 1884 — among the earliest instances of Chinese war correspondence — and made use of vernacular Chinese (baihua). Its vivid, detailed accounts of the Japanese invasion of Taiwan in 1874 and its on-the-spot coverage of the 1884 conflict between China and France over Indochina were credited with lifting its circulation in its first decades.

Politics: from conservatism to constitutionalism

Politically, Shen Bao was a commercial newspaper that remained conservative for its first three decades and broadly supported the Qing government. Its orientation began to change in 1905, when on New Year's Day it quoted Liang Qichao's constitutionalist slogans. In 1907 the paper was sold to Xi Zipei (1867–1929), its former comprador, who owned a well-capitalised Shanghai publishing operation and was influenced by the industrialist and reformer Zhang Jian. Under Xi the paper became moderately liberal and strongly supported the constitutional movement.

When Major had returned to England in 1889, the business had been reorganised as Major Company Limited. The ownership changes of the following decades were contentious. After the 1911 Revolution a group of businessmen acquired the paper and engaged Shi Liangcai as its manager in 1912. Xi Zipei, who had nominally remained as a manager, sued the new ownership in 1915, claiming he had not been paid on time and that the Shen Bao trademark was being misused. The Shanghai Mixed Court ruled in his favour, and the previous owners withdrew; using money borrowed from the cotton merchant Xu Jingren, Shi Liangcai acquired full ownership of the paper.

The Shi Liangcai era

Shi Liangcai (1879–1934) transformed Shen Bao into the centre of a press and business empire. When he and his associates acquired the paper in 1912 its daily circulation was about 7,000 copies. Under his management it reached about 20,000 in 1917, 30,000 in 1918 and 50,000 in 1921, and by 1928 the paper was claiming a paid circulation of 140,000, the largest in China. By the early twentieth century the paper printed about 30,000 copies a day, of which some 9,000 circulated in Shanghai and the rest across China; by the end of the 1920s circulation stood near 100,000, and by the mid-1930s it reached about 150,000.

Shi sought to maximise advertising revenue and expanded the paper's distribution network, while steering it carefully enough to avoid the crackdown on dissident papers under Yuan Shikai's rule. In the 1930s he was a strong supporter of the Human Rights Defence Alliance established by Soong Qing-ling, together with Cai Yuanpei and Lu Xun. His influence extended well beyond journalism: he helped to found or expand enterprises including a bank, a cotton mill, a dispensary company and a major book company, and he consolidated much of the Shanghai press industry under his ownership.

Assassination and the war years

The paper's strident attitude against Japan angered the Nationalist government. On 13 November 1934 Shi Liangcai was assassinated on the Shanghai–Hangzhou highway, a killing widely attributed to government agents angered by the paper's stance. After the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, as the city fell under Japanese control, the paper was transferred to American ownership in an effort to avoid repression. In 1938 Norwood Francis Allman (1893–1987), an American lawyer who had been a United States consul in Shanghai in the early 1920s, was asked by the Chinese owners to take over as editor. The arrangement ended in 1941, when Japanese forces seized the paper and pushed it to a pro-Japanese stance for the remainder of the occupation.

Final years and closure

After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Kuomintang seized Shen Bao, and the locally dominant CC Clique came to control its content; by February 1946 its daily circulation was around 70,000. The paper's long life ended with the Communist capture of Shanghai: Shen Bao published its final issue on 27 May 1949, the day the People's Liberation Army's takeover of the city was completed. Its seventy-seven-year run made it, at the time, the longest-running newspaper in China.

The Shenbaoguan and its editors

The paper was the flagship of the Shenbaoguan, the publishing house Major built around it, which also issued periodicals and the celebrated lithographed Dianshizhai Pictorial — Major is remembered as the founder of the Dianshizhai enterprise as well as of the newspaper. The Shen Bao's editorial chair passed through notable hands: in the Qing period Jiang Zhixiang, He Guisheng, Qian Xinbo and Huang Shiquan; in the Republican period Chen Leng and Zhang Yunhe, and finally the American Norwood Allman during the wartime trusteeship. Qian Xinbo's presence created a family link to Hong Kong's reform press: he was the son-in-law of Wang Tao, founder of the Universal Circulating Herald, to which the young Shen Bao regularly turned for essays. The combination of foreign capital and technology, Chinese editorial labour and comprador business management that Major assembled became the template on which much of the later Chinese commercial press was built.

Legacy and archives

Shen Bao is remembered as one of the first modern Chinese newspapers and as a formative institution in the creation of a Chinese public sphere. It helped to establish the commercial daily — financed by advertising, organised in specialised sections, and addressed to a mass urban readership — as the standard form of the Chinese press, and its history traces the larger arc of modern Chinese politics from the late Qing reforms through the Republic to 1949. A complete run of the paper is held by the Shanghai Library, and nearly 27,000 issues from 1872 to 1949 have been digitised, making it one of the most heavily used primary sources for the history of modern Shanghai and of China as a whole.