China's America: The Chinese View the United States, 1900-2000 by Jing Li

Author:Jing Li [Li, Jing]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, Asia, History, China, General
ISBN: 9781438435183
Google: o0R_VhFpe4MC
Goodreads: 10166632
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Chinese Review America

The Dushu Magazine, 1979–1989

Dushu, or Reading, a book review monthly based in Beijing, came into being in 1979, when the wave of reform started to sweep across China. Riding the tide of the dramatic changes that followed, the journal soon achieved respectability and popularity among educated Chinese. The circulation numbers were never truly large, ranging from forty to one hundred thousand monthly copies. The relatively small circulation, however, does not tell the full story because among readers of Dushu were the best minds of China.

In part, Dushu derived its success from a particular persona—it was scholarly but not overly academic. This special trait had an interesting effect on the journal's fate. Generally, authorities in China kept a vigilant watch over standard academic publications because these journals enjoyed official or semiofficial status. The state was equally alert in regulating popular magazines in view of their large circulations and their massive following. In the 1980s, Dushu was one of the few periodicals that fell somewhere in between the two categories of periodicals mentioned above. More than most Chinese publications in the 1980s, therefore, Dushu could speak its own mind.

The greater freedom enjoyed by Dushu also came about as a matter of tradition. The journal was a publication of Beijing-based Sanlian Shudian (Joint Publishing House), the origin of which can be traced back to Zou Taofen, the pro-Communist journalist and publisher active in the 1930s and 1940s. Because of Zou's progressive and revolutionary past, after the communist victory in 1949, the Chinese government allowed his publishing house to continue its operation, in a consolidated form. The press came to specialize in translated works and books on world affairs. This gave the Sanlian Press a special status and unique identity, which partly accounts for Dushu's critical mind and its sense of independence. In some ways, one can compare Dushu to The New York Review of Books in the United States—it is respectable, liberal, and politically engaged.

While Dushu covered books of all kinds, it was particularly strong in the introduction of Western works, which was much needed with the end of the Mao Era in China. Not surprisingly, works by American authors and books about America took up considerable space in the journal. Dushu thus served as a lively and important forum for Chinese intellectuals who were actively involved in a continuous discourse on the United States, an enterprise intricately linked to the intellectual life and other larger events of China during the 1980s.

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