About Xin Shu Bao

Xin Shu Bao

Overview

Xin Shu Bao (Chinese: 新蜀报; pinyin: Xin Shu Bao) was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Chongqing during the Republican era of China. It was founded on 31 January 1921 at Baixiang Street in Chongqing, in what was then Sichuan province — "Shu" being the historic short name for Sichuan, so that the title announced itself as a "New Sichuan Newspaper". The paper was initiated by Chen Yusheng, a leading figure of the Young China Association, and his colleagues, and financed by the Sichuan army generals Xian Ying and Luo Yisan. Its declared mission was "to import new culture and exchange new knowledge", a programme squarely in the spirit of the New Culture Movement then reshaping Chinese intellectual life.

Over its three decades the paper was transformed by the people who wrote for it. Ordered to suspend publication and reorganise in May 1922, it resumed with returned work-study students from France among its editors, and from the spring of 1923 the Communist writer Xiao Chunu served as its chief writer, turning it into a vehicle for Marxist commentary in Sichuan. It grew from a local opinion paper into a nationally influential Chongqing daily, reached its greatest prominence during the years when Chongqing was China's wartime capital, and was forcibly seized by Kuomintang agents in May 1945, after which it declined and ceased publication in 1950. This profile is written in the past tense, as the paper is closed.

Founding in Chongqing in 1921

The founding of Xin Shu Bao belonged to the New Culture moment in Sichuan. Chongqing, the great Yangtze port of the upper river, was one of the centres of the new-culture movement in the province, and in February 1921 a group of Young China Association members — Chen Yusheng, Liu Siying, Mu Jibo and others — gathered at Baixiang Street in the city's commercial district to launch the paper, formally established on 31 January 1921. The Young China Association, founded in 1918, was one of the most influential youth organisations of the era, dedicated to creating a young, new China through education and cultural renewal; a newspaper was its natural instrument, and the association's vice-director Chen Yusheng was the paper's chief initiator and first president.

The money, however, came from soldiers. The paper was financed by the Sichuan army generals Xian Ying and Luo Yisan, a reminder that in warlord-era China even a progressive cultural venture needed a military patron's funds and protection. The founding team balanced the two sources of support: Chen Yusheng as president embodied the Young China Association's programme, while Liu Siying served as chief editor. The declared aim — importing new culture and exchanging new knowledge — announced that the paper would be an opinion-led journal of the new ideas, and from its first day it threw itself into Sichuan's anti-feudal popular movements.

First campaigns, suspension and reorganisation, 1921–1922

The young paper quickly tested the limits of Chongqing's tolerance. In May 1921, defying a prohibition by the military authorities, Xin Shu Bao supported the Chongqing students' boycott of Japanese goods and published articles condemning the comprador merchants and the warlords who had suppressed the students — a stand that drew the anger of both the Chongqing chamber of commerce and the authorities. Anti-imperialist boycott agitation, defence of student protest, and attacks on warlord power were exactly the causes its founders had promised to serve, and the paper's willingness to print them made it, within months, a marked title.

The reckoning came on 29 May 1922, when the authorities ordered the paper to suspend publication and undergo reorganisation. Suspension-and-reorganisation was the era's standard instrument against troublesome newspapers: publication stopped, and resumption depended on changes the authorities could approve. When Xin Shu Bao reappeared, its editorial ranks had been renewed from an unexpected quarter — returned students of the work-study movement in France. Chen Yi, who would later become one of the People's Republic's most famous marshals and foreign minister, and Zhou Qinyue (1889–1984), a native of Ba County in Sichuan, took up posts as editors of the reorganised paper. The work-study generation brought with it the radical ideas circulating among Chinese students in Europe, and the paper's centre of gravity shifted accordingly.

Xiao Chunu and the Marxist turn, 1923–1927

In the spring of 1923, Xiao Chunu succeeded Chen Yi as the paper's chief writer, and accounts of the paper agree that from that point Xin Shu Bao stood in a new posture in the Sichuan press, lending its voice to the rising tide of popular revolution. Xiao Chunu (1893–1927), born in Hanyang, Hubei, was an early theorist and educator of the Chinese Communist Party who had worked as a newspaper editor since his youth and wrote under the pen name "Chunu". Invited to Chongqing and pressed by the city's revolutionary teachers, students and youth-league organisations, he took charge of the paper's daily political commentary — by some accounts from June 1923, with his role as chief writer and as a special commissioner of the Socialist Youth League's central committee consolidated in 1924.

His commentaries made the paper famous and feared. Contemporary descriptions recalled that his articles were sharp, militant and pointed — accusing local warlords, cursing corrupt officials — and that even newspapers controlled by reactionaries conceded their force, praising them as "words like wind and thunder, sounds like metal and stone". Through Xin Shu Bao, Xiao used a commercially founded Chongqing daily to publicise Marxism-Leninism and to expose, as his biographers put it, the crimes of imperialism and feudalism. In August 1924 he was appointed a special commissioner of the Communist Party's central committee for Sichuan, directing the Chongqing youth league and the province's revolutionary work from the same city where he wrote the paper's editorials. His Chongqing years, 1924 to 1927, made Xin Shu Bao one of the principal channels through which Marxist ideas reached readers in Sichuan, and the paper is still studied under that description — one scholarly account calls it "a banner for the propagation of Marxism".

Growth into a national Chongqing daily

The paper's own historical summaries describe an arc from a local "opinion newspaper" to a mass medium combining opinion with reporting and exercising influence across the country. That growth was inseparable from Chongqing's rise. In the 1930s the balance of Sichuan politics shifted — in early 1935, as Chiang Kai-shek's conflict with the Sichuan warlord Liu Xiang sharpened, Zhou Qinyue returned to Chongqing in the summer of that year to become the paper's general manager, at a moment when Liu Xiang was gathering talent to defend his Sichuan base and Communist agents were simultaneously working to win him to resistance against Japan. The episode captures the paper's mature position: a title important enough to be staffed, courted and watched by every side in Sichuan's politics.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, Chongqing became China's wartime capital and one of the country's cultural centres, and Xin Shu Bao's influence grew with the city's. National government, foreign missions, refugee universities and a national press corps all converged on the mountain city, and a Chongqing daily with a two-decade record, an established readership and a reputation for forceful commentary stood among the papers through which wartime China spoke to itself. The paper's historians credit it, across the central fifteen years of its life, with broadly answering the current of the times and the voice of the people, and with a considerable contribution to the advance of revolution in Sichuan.

Seizure in 1945 and closure in 1950

The paper's end was violent and political. In May 1945 — in the last months of the war, as the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists for post-war China intensified — Xin Shu Bao was forcibly seized by agents acting for the Kuomintang authorities. Zhou Qinyue, its general manager, was driven out; he left by way of Hong Kong for the liberated areas. A newspaper whose identity had been built by the writers who controlled its editorial line could not survive the loss of that control unchanged, and the seized paper entered a decline from which it did not recover.

Xin Shu Bao ceased publication in 1950, in the first year of the People's Republic, as Chongqing's Republican-era press was wound up or transformed into the new order's newspapers. Its run had lasted twenty-nine years — an exceptional lifespan for a Chinese newspaper founded in the warlord period, most of whose contemporaries died within a few years of their founding. The paper's near-thirty-year survival through warlord suppression, reorganisation, the Northern Expedition era, Sichuan's internal wars, and the eight years of the resistance war is itself the simplest evidence of the readership and influence it had built.

The Baixiang Street site and remembrance

The paper's founding address has been treated as part of Chongqing's protected heritage. The former site of Xin Shu Bao, at 115 Baixiang Street in the city's central district, was listed among Chongqing's second group of municipal-level protected cultural sites, entering the preliminary list on 23 January 1987 and the confirmed list on 19 March 1992, with its era given as 1921. The building itself was demolished at the end of the twentieth century, so the listing survives as an official marker of the site rather than as a preserved newsroom — a common fate for the physical traces of China's Republican-era press, whose legacy is held mainly in library runs of the paper itself and in the historical literature.

That literature is anchored by studies from within Chongqing's own newspaper establishment: the paper has been examined in the journal of the Chongqing Daily newspaper group, and Li Huafei's study of the paper as "a banner for the propagation of Marxism" reflects the theme that dominates its remembrance — not its commercial history, but its years as a platform for Xiao Chunu and the early Communist movement in Sichuan. In the memory of Chongqing journalism, Xin Shu Bao stands for the moment when a provincial daily became a weapon of ideas.

Assessment and key facts

Xin Shu Bao's significance rests on the combination of its origins and its writers. It was founded by cultural reformers with soldiers' money, launched to import new culture, and within two years of a government-ordered reorganisation it had become the platform from which Chen Yi learned newspaper work and Xiao Chunu addressed the readers of Sichuan in the language of Marxism. Few newspapers anywhere can claim to have employed, in junior editorial roles, both a future foreign minister of China and one of the Communist Party's earliest theorists; fewer still can claim to have been seized bodily by secret agents as an act of state. The paper's biography is a compressed history of Republican China itself — new culture, warlord censorship, revolution, war, and the final struggle of 1945–1949.

The verified facts are these: Xin Shu Bao was a Chinese-language daily founded at Baixiang Street, Chongqing, on 31 January 1921, initiated by Chen Yusheng and colleagues of the Young China Association and financed by the generals Xian Ying and Luo Yisan, with Chen as first president and Liu Siying as chief editor, under the declared mission of importing new culture and exchanging new knowledge. It was ordered suspended and reorganised on 29 May 1922; Chen Yi and Zhou Qinyue became editors of the resumed paper, and Xiao Chunu became its chief writer from the spring of 1923. Zhou Qinyue returned as general manager in 1935. The paper was seized by Kuomintang agents in May 1945, declined, and ceased publication in 1950. Its former Baixiang Street site was listed as a Chongqing protected cultural site in 1987–1992 and demolished in the late twentieth century.