EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 13 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 157 The main steps of this affair can be recalled thanks to the personal archive of Giovanni Caselli, which is still only partially catalogued, providing information about a moment of Chinese and Western media his- tory remained mainly unknown, allowing the investigation on an extremely original example of Western communication technology and the attempt for its application in China, and ultimately revealing its strong points as also the definitive reasons of its failure. Vradiy Sergey (Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnology of Far-Eastern People FEB RAS) China's Perception of theWest in the19th Century Qing Scholar Papers Key words: China, Japan, Korea, XIX century thought Before the OpiumWar, the Chinese took little notice of the world beyond the traditional Chinese realm, China’s inadequate knowledge of overseas countries proved to be a strategic disadvantage in the course of the war. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China’s defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small group of Chinese set out to expand China’s knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China’s survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Lin Tse-hsu 林則徐 (1785–1850), Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–1856), Hsu Chi-yu 徐継審 (1795–1853), and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective. They were the first, who being in an extremely unfavorable situation of Anglo-Chinese conflict, showed an interest in the outside world, in scientific and technological achievements of the West, and became opponents to the policy of isolation. China’s “response to the West” was not a simple one, and Chinese knowledge of the West was often filtered through traditional concepts. The major elements of an ancient worldview still prevailed, even as the Chi- nese began to assimilate new knowledge regarding the West. Thus, in defining the shapes of world politics and by introducing the basic, elementary information which helped China form ideas about the manifold sources of western power, pioneering works influenced a whole generation of nineteenth-century Chinese, Japanese and Korean intellectuals. The main purpose of the paper is to make a brief description and evaluation of the works of scholar- officials of the first half of XIX century China, who became proponents of the ideas of learning of “Foreign Matters”, to show their positive influence upon the “Open Door” policy promoted in Korea, and on the social thought of Japanese society on the eve of Meiji Restoration. Wagner Rudolf G. (Cluster Asia and Europe, Heidelberg University) The Free Flow of Communication Between High and Low: The Shenbao as Platform for Yangwu 洋务 Conceptual Discussions 1872–1895 Key words: Political thought; newspapers; institutional change; late Qing intellectual history. In the scholarly analysis of late Qing political thought, the importance of the Yangwu (“ForeignAffairs”) current has been justly emphasized, especially since leading Han Chinese officials had been involved. As the prevailing master narrative current both in the PRC and among foreign scholars (as epitomized by Zhang Hao) has it, however, the Yangwu protagonists focused until China‘s 1895 defeat in the war with Japan on the need of (mostly military) hardware from the West rather than on a need for structural change in China. The paper will challenge this master narrative on three counts. It will show that substantial discussions on institutional change in China went on in the public domain since the early 1870s; that a medium neglected by intellectual historians, namely the newspaper (the foreign-owned- and — managed Shenbao), was the main platform for these discussions and that the men of letters from the Yangwu environment, who joined this discussion (as discussed by Onogawa) by the 1880s, took their cues from this paper; and it will show that the Shenbao editorial page put the lack of “free flow of communication between high and low”, shang xia zhi tong, into the center of the analysis of the flaws in the Chinese political structure, claimed that the success of some Western states hinged on institutions securing this free flow, and set itself up as a medium to overcome the obstacles in the way of such a free flow.