The Book Trade in Early Modern China

According to Songchuan Chen’s essay, “An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834-1839,” while the increased ability to disseminate mass printed materials had notable effects within Europe, it also had a substantive impact upon the ways in which Europeans interacted with foreigners. The Qing Dynasty in China met with considerable resistance when it attempted to create protective trade barriers to prevent the facilitation of opium trade between itself and Europe. Of course, this eventually resulted in the decisive military conflict, ending in a victory of British economic interests.
But even before that, the British engaged in a war for Chinese hearts and minds. As noted by Chen, in British thought and writing, it was assumed that the Chinese regarded the British as uncultured barbarians, although this was a highly schematic view of how the Chinese actually perceived the outside world. This resulted in the establishment of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (1834-1839), a society which, of course, considered useful knowledge the type that would support a highly Eurocentric worldview. A good example of the perspective of the society was its attempt to “teach the Chinese that the world was more than the Middle Kingdom…and that foreigners were not barbarians” (Chen 1713). The Society framed the conflict between the Chinese leadership and the West as that of ignorance versus experience, rather than addressed the genuine potential security concerns of the Chinese.
It should be noted, however, that the Society did research the book market within China to better understand what the Chinese were actually reading, including the Yellow Calendar (a kind of almanac) and Collections of Useful Information (Chen 1715). The Qing Dynasty had placed a ban on all foreign publications and ultimately all material of the society had to be printed in Singapore. Regardless, the fact that the Qing had aggressively worked to prevent foreigners from gaining control over the hearts and minds of the populace through its regulation of the book trade highlights the extent to which it took the threat of European intellectual propaganda quite seriously. Chinese booksellers were likewise prohibited from disseminating books published by foreigners, which meant that the Society, despite its secular mission, was forced to adopt a similar method as European missionaries and personally disseminate copies of their material on a one-on-one basis. The fact that it was willing to do so is again testimony to the power of printed material.
Some of the earliest Society publications included histories of the world and histories of England, again framed from a very European perspective to ostensibly educate the ignorant Chinese. Even maps became a tool in the intellectual war, as maps of the world were used to replace those which depicted China found in the Yellow Calendar. Again, this underlines the European belief that Western dominance was so obvious and so unquestioning, that only ignorance of the West could explain such a worldview, not a difference of opinion. The attempts to control the book trade reflects an unquestioned Eurocentric worldview that resisted all potentially competing epistemological viewpoints.
The Society was ultimately a curious mix of motivations. It contained opium merchants, so it had obviously self-interested economic motives to influence the Chinese in favor of the West. Yet it also funded missionary efforts. Regardless, its interests were Eurocentric in nature and shows how the history of printed material and books was used to advance the interests of colonialism and knowledge in a very biased and self-interested rather than dispassionate manner.
Works Cited
Chen, Songchuan. “An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834-1839.” Modern Asian Studies, 46. 6 (2012), 1705-1735.