About Yishi Bao

Yishi Bao

Yishi Bao (Chinese: 益世報; 'Benefit the World News', also translated 'The Social Welfare') was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Tianjin. It was founded in 1915 by the Belgian Catholic missionary Vincent Lebbe, and was the first Chinese Catholic daily newspaper. Combining Catholic sponsorship with broadly professional journalism, extensive news coverage and respected supplements, it grew into one of the most influential newspapers in northern China during the Republican era: within three months of its launch it had become the leading daily in the north, appreciated by Christians and non-Christians alike for the accuracy of its news and its independent outlook. Published from Tianjin's concessions-era press world alongside Ta Kung Pao, it was counted with Ta Kung Pao, Shen Bao and the Minguo Ribao among the Four Major Newspapers of the Republic of China. It ceased publication in 1949, as Tianjin changed hands in the civil war.

Vincent Lebbe and the road to a Catholic daily

The paper's founder, Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe (1877–1940), was a Belgian priest of the Congregation of the Mission — the Lazarists, or Vincentians — who arrived in China in 1901, assigned to the vicariate apostolic of Peking, and became vicar general of the Tianjin diocese, known by his Chinese name Lei Mingyuan. Lebbe was a pioneer of a movement within the missionary church calling for its leadership to relinquish the protection of foreign powers and become truly Chinese, with a native clergy and a church rooted in Chinese society. In Tianjin he built a lay apostolate through public lecture halls, where talks on religion and on contemporary social and moral questions drew large non-Christian audiences, and through Catholic Action organisations for laypeople. A newspaper was the natural extension of that work: as contemporaries put it, newspapers were considered a very effective medium for reaching the city.

A weekly first: the experiment of 1912

Lebbe's newspaper work began before the daily. In 1912, with the support of Ying Lianzhi — the Catholic Manchu aristocrat who had founded Ta Kung Pao — he launched the first Catholic weekly newspaper, named Guangyilu. The weekly tested the proposition on which the daily would be built: that a Catholic-sponsored Chinese newspaper, edited with talented Chinese Catholic collaborators and addressed to the general reader rather than to converts alone, could find a public in a treaty-port city. The support of Ying Lianzhi connected Lebbe's venture to the most accomplished tradition of Chinese Catholic publishing — Ying's own Ta Kung Pao, founded in Tianjin a decade earlier, had shown what a Catholic-founded Chinese daily could achieve — and the weekly's reception encouraged the far larger step of a daily paper.

Founding of the first Chinese Catholic daily in 1915

In 1915 Lebbe, with the collaboration of a group of talented Chinese Catholics, published Yishi Bao — the first Catholic daily newspaper in China. It was launched, one account of his life records, on China's national day of that year, amid the patriotic ferment provoked by Japan's Twenty-one Demands on China, and it was founded, in the terms of his mission, to promote patriotism and religion together as a means of saving the nation. The title he chose — Yishi, "benefit the world" — stated the paper's ambition in two characters: this was to be a newspaper in the service of society as a whole, Catholic in sponsorship but public in purpose.

Instant success in northern China

The newspaper was an instant success among the Chinese, Christians and non-Christians alike, because of the accuracy of its news and its independent outlook. Within three months it became the leading daily in northern China — by one account, the most widely circulated publication in the region. The achievement was remarkable for a missionary-founded paper: Tianjin readers bought it not as a religious duty but as the best news available. Its credible reporting and independent stance distinguished it in a press world where most titles were identifiable as the organs of a party, a warlord or a foreign interest. From its base in Tianjin, the northern treaty port whose concessions housed a dense cluster of Chinese and foreign newspapers, Yishi Bao reported national politics, society and culture for northern readers for more than three decades.

Catholic sponsorship, professional journalism

The paper's defining tension — and its historical interest — lay in the combination of Catholic sponsorship with broadly professional journalism. It was a church paper that behaved like a metropolitan daily: extensive news coverage rather than devotional matter filled its columns, and its respected supplements carried the cultural and literary material by which Republican-era dailies competed for educated readers. Lebbe's model held that a Catholic newspaper earned a hearing for the Church precisely by serving all readers honestly; the paper's independence was therefore not despite its sponsorship but, in its founder's design, because of what that sponsorship demanded. The model anticipated the direction the universal Church itself would soon bless: Lebbe's advocacy contributed to Pope Benedict XV's missionary encyclical Maximum Illud of 1919, which insisted that missions be carried out selflessly and that local clergy be trained — the programme of a truly Chinese Church of which Yishi Bao was the journalistic expression.

The Laoxikai incident of 1916

The paper's independence was tested, and proved, within a year of its founding. In 1916 the French consul in Tianjin attempted to expand the French concession by annexing the district of Laoxikai, land the Chinese authorities had refused to grant — and did so with the collusion of church authorities who expected the mission to benefit. Lebbe, together with his Lazarist confrere Antoine Cotta, openly denounced the attempt, and Yishi Bao played a key role in the affair, championing the Chinese public protest against the annexation. The stand put a Catholic missionary and his newspaper on the Chinese side against a European power and against his own ecclesiastical superiors. Lebbe and Cotta were punished by their superior for it and removed from Tianjin — Lebbe was sent back to Europe — and the two jointly wrote to the Holy See setting out their case on the problems of the Chinese church: its strong European character, the deficient formation of the local priesthood and the lack of cooperation among the foreign missionary congregations. The episode made the paper's reputation for independence a matter of record rather than of claim.

Among the Four Major Newspapers

The standing the paper achieved is registered in the standard grouping of the Republican press: Yishi Bao was renowned, along with Ta Kung Pao, Shen Bao and the Kuomintang's Minguo Ribao, as one of the "Four Major Newspapers of the Republic of China". The company is telling. Two of the four were the greatest commercial dailies of Shanghai and Tianjin; one was a ruling party's organ; and one was a Catholic-founded paper from Tianjin whose circulation rested on professional credibility. In the fragmented politics of the Republic, when no national newspaper could command the whole country, regional supremacy was the highest rank available, and Yishi Bao held it in the north alongside its neighbour and sometime partner Ta Kung Pao, the paper of its founder's early patron Ying Lianzhi.

The paper in the Catholic press movement

Within the Church, the paper served as the exemplar of the Chinese Catholic press. The 1924 Council of the Chinese Church had decreed the promotion of the press, and at the Shanghai general meetings of the Catholic publishing world in the 1930s the paper was represented among the movement's leading voices — Liu Huoxuan of Yishi Bao appears in the record of those gatherings alongside the editors of the Church's other principal publications. By then Lebbe's own story had reached its vindication: the first native Chinese bishops whose cause he had championed had been appointed, and in 1928 he had received one of his dearest wishes, Chinese citizenship. The newspaper he had founded in Tianjin in 1915 stood as the working proof of his argument that the future of Catholicism in China was Chinese.

The long Republican run and the end in 1949

The paper published on through the Republic's worsening decades — the warlord years, the Nanjing decade, and the war with Japan that from 1937 subjected Tianjin to occupation — reporting national politics, society and culture for its northern readership. Its survival for more than three decades from a missionary foundation was itself an institutional achievement in a press world of short lives. It ceased publication in 1949, as Tianjin changed hands in the civil war: the Communist victory ended the concessions-era press order in which the paper had been created, and with it the world of independent, commercially sustained metropolitan dailies of which Yishi Bao had been the north's Catholic exemplar. Lebbe had died in 1940; his paper outlived him by nine years, and the Republic it chronicled by only months.

Legacy

Yishi Bao is remembered on three grounds. In press history, it was one of the most influential newspapers of northern China and one of the Republic's Four Major Newspapers, proof that accuracy and independence could build a mass readership without party or commercial empire behind a title. In church history, it was the first Chinese Catholic daily and the model of Lebbe's indigenising mission — a paper whose patriotic stand in the Laoxikai incident embodied, earlier than almost any missionary institution in China, the principle that the Church must be Chinese. And in the biography of its founder, canonised in memory as the apostle of the Chinese Church, it remains the most public of his works: the daily that carried his conviction — benefit the world — into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers who never entered his church.