Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The first printed Spanish newspaper, the official weekly La Gaçeta Nueva, began to appear only in 1661, but just as in France, the failure to mention anything negative created a ‘credibility gap’, which a host of specialist writers filled by compiling manuscript avisos that conveyed news about ‘the other Spain’: assassinations and armed robberies; sodomy, rape and sexual promiscuity; political discontent, military defeats and, finally, rebellions. Discretion remained advisable, because several of those who criticized official policies in streets or taverns were never seen again; but anonymous manuscript newsletters avoided censorship and also appeared almost instantly. Some were the work of unemployed graduates, who reproduced a few pages on demand, almost like a modern photocopier, while others came from the pen of specialists who could reconstruct even a complex text (such as a play with five acts and multiple scenes) from memory in a single night – a remarkable feat that few today could match.55

  As the situation of the Spanish Monarchy worsened, historiographer royal José de Pellicer y Tovar created a clandestine information network: he employed a team of scribes to write avisos to fellow scholars around the peninsula. Each one received a common core of news, together with additional items of local interest, and Pellicer expected full reports back to assuage what he called his ‘sed de saber’ (thirst for knowledge) – and to pass on to other correspondents in his next bulletin. These avisos left no doubt about the perils facing the Spanish Monarchy. On 12 June 1640 Pellicer transmitted the first news of the revolt in Barcelona (one week before) under the heading: ‘Almost all the news reports today will be tragic and, more than tragic, extraordinary: things that neither the Spanish Monarchy nor many states in the past have seen before.’56

  As in France, major changes occurred when rebellion put an end to censorship. Catalan pamphlet production, which averaged three items per year in 1620–34, and 13 per year in 1635–9, soared to 70 in 1641, reflecting the decision of the rebel regime to spend 5 per cent of its total war budget on printing and distributing propaganda ‘to inform all Catalans, men and women, old and young, of the true state of affairs, so that they can distinguish truth from lies’. Catalan printers published more in the 1640s than ever before – and more than in any later decade before the mid-nineteenth century.57 Much the same happened in Portugal, where publications leaped from two in 1640 to 133 in 1641, and the 800 Portuguese works published during the war with Spain (1640–68) exceeded the total of those produced during the rest of the century. In addition, the Portuguese printed a Gazette of their own modelled on the French precursor – the first newspaper to appear in that language – and, like other rebel regimes, kept those living abroad abreast of their aspirations and achievements through print. Many Catalan and Portuguese pamphlets were also published in France and the Dutch Republic, sometimes in translation; a dozen or more printed justifications of the two rebellions circulated in Germany, sometimes translated into German.58

  The abolition of censorship in England had an even more dramatic impact on the ability to spread the ‘contagion of revolution’ through print. The year 1641 saw the publication of over 2,000 works there, more than ever before, and in 1642 the number doubled – an annual total unequalled until the eighteenth century (see Fig. 37). Interested readers living in the English provinces had long been able to pay correspondents in London (rather like Pellicer in Madrid) to send them weekly manuscript reports on political developments – so much so that Charles II's tutor, the marquis of Newcastle, believed that these professional news-writers had done immense damage to the king's cause ‘for in a letter [one] might be bolder’. Whereas in the 1630s those who desired news from London had to pay £20 a year in return for perhaps one manuscript letter a week, a decade later a penny could buy thousands of words of printed news; and whereas only one newsbook appeared in England in 1639, and only three in 1641, over 60 periodicals and newspapers came out in 1642 and 70 in 1648 (the highest number for any year of the seventeenth century: see Fig. 36). A recent calculation showed that 23 newsbooks printed in the first six months of 1654 contained almost 900,000 words – and between 1642 and 1660 English presses turned out over 7,000 newsbooks. Each issue carried foreign and domestic news stories, including accounts of sermons and speeches taken down in shorthand by the first paid ‘reporters’ in history; and each newspaper had a ‘party allegiance’ (to king or Parliament) that gave its reporting a distinctive spin. The marquis of Newcastle advised Charles II to ban these, too, because they ‘overheat your people extremely, and do Your Majesty much harm. … Every man is now become a statesman, and it is merely with the weekly corantos both at home and abroad’. A Scottish visitor to England in 1657 agreed: ‘There have been of late,’ he wrote, ‘more good and more bad bookes printed and published in the English tongue than in all the vulgar languages of Europe’.59

  A ‘public sphere’ in China?

  Just as no other seventeenth-century state became as politicized as England, so no other seventeenth-century state saw as many people participate in political upheavals as China. An unprecedented number of imperial subjects, from a wide range of backgrounds, reported and disseminated news throughout the empire in both speech and writing. According to Timothy Brook, ‘More books were available, and more people read and owned more books, in the late Ming than at any earlier time in history, anywhere in the world’; and, based on a rigorous survey of extant sources, Lynn Struve has argued that ‘the vocality in writing of the Chinese populace during the entire imperial era may never have been so great as it was in the early and middle seventeenth century’. This ‘vocality’ reflected the same combination of factors that occurred in Europe at the same time: a reading public of unprecedented size, reading material of unprecedented quantity, and unprecedented arenas in which to discuss them.60

  As in Europe, China's enlarged public sphere reflected an ‘educational revolution’ in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – but involving a very different infrastructure. Because Chinese is not an alphabetic language in which all words are composed from a relatively small number of characters, even functional literacy requires familiarity with several thousand characters, each one composed by several strokes in a specific order from upper left to lower right. We find no Chinese equivalent of Thomas Tryon, who learned to read without any formal instruction, or of Oliver Sansom, who could read a chapter of a complex work ‘pretty readily’ after only four months of school, let alone of Elizabeth Angier, who ‘at six years of age [could] write down passages of the sermon in the chapel’.61 Nevertheless, schools abounded in late Ming China. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a survey of 500 Chinese counties revealed almost 4,000 schools: one-quarter in the towns and the rest in the countryside. In some areas, schools became so numerous that, according to a Gazetteer from Zhejiang province, ‘nowadays even the very poor would be ashamed if they did not instruct their sons in the classics. From tradesmen to local-government runners, there are very few who cannot read or punctuate’. A Jesuit who travelled around rural Fujian in the 1620s concurred:

  Schools are extremely numerous in China. Scarcely a hamlet of twenty or forty houses lacks its school and in towns scarcely a street does not have several. We came upon one of them at almost every step, and could hear the children reciting the lesson by heart. Lots of schools are needed in view of the multitude of young boys and the fact that each teacher is only responsible, in his class, for between 12 and 15 pupils at a time.62

  China's educational revolution seems to have reflected two distinct stimuli. Some of the Confucian scholars who stressed the need for introspection and intuition (page 121 above) believed that ‘anyone could become a sage’ and that moral principle might be found in the lives of ‘ignorant men and women’. They therefore favoured education for all. Other scholars favoured the schooling system where boys learned to memorize and reproduce accurately the canon of Classical texts on ethics and history necessary to climb the ladder of examination success, with all the social and economic advantag
es that success brought (see chapters 5 and 18 above). This process normally required several years of classes that ran from dawn to dusk, with a short break for lunch, all year round (except for two weeks at New Year and a few holidays), because the canon required to pass even the shengyuan exam included 400,000 different characters of text, some of them archaic or arcane. Although some prodigies managed this feat by age 15 and most completed it before 20, many other students dropped out. Nevertheless, since even those who dropped out acquired some reading skills, the functionally literate public of mid-seventeenth-century China far exceeded a million and may have exceeded five million. Put another way, perhaps 20 per cent of the adult male population of late Ming China boasted respectable educational attainments.63

  The existence of this huge potential readership fuelled a rapid expansion in printing. In the 1630s, 38 firms in Nanjing produced or sold books, with 37 more in Suzhou and 25 in Hangzhou (all in Jiangnan), and 13 more in Beijing. Although some enterprises specialized in producing a few high-quality items in which calligraphy mattered almost as much as content, others shifted to a simpler ‘artisan style’ of cutting characters that reduced costs. The cumulative impact was remarkable: of 830 commercial works known to have been printed in Nanjing during the Ming era (1368–1644), over 750 appeared after 1573. The output of other centres seems to have increased at a similar rate: by the early seventeenth century, the printers of Suzhou employed 650 woodblock carvers.64

  Chinese printers enjoyed three advantages over their European colleagues. First, whereas over 50 written languages were current in early modern Europe, all subjects of the Chinese emperor used the same script (even though they spoke many different tongues), so that a book published anywhere in China could be bought and read by millions of people – a market far larger than that enjoyed by any European printer. Second, the development of cheap paper suitable for printing made from bamboo, rather than cloth fibres, brought down printing costs significantly. Finally, the use of carved woodblocks (xylography) meant that Chinese booksellers could produce illustrated works without either a printing press or a stock of type – two items of heavy capital expenditure essential for European printers who used movable type. Moreover, they could print only as many copies as the market required at any one time, storing the blocks for future use; and once the initial print run had sold out, it was easy to print more from the existing blocks without the need to re-compose the text (as with movable type).65

  These various factors gave rise to a distinctive ‘shengyuan culture’ in Late Ming China, composed of satire and poetry, dictionaries and collections of famous texts, ‘how-to’ books (how to write letters, how to cure illnesses) and collections of successful examination essays. For the first time in Chinese history, men below the official class participated in book culture and so created an unprecedented ‘public sphere’: authors included merchants (who published poetry as well as commercial manuals) and commoners (who published fiction). Some of these works became best-sellers (notably primers for the examination system), and a European long resident in China marvelled at ‘the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold’. Some bibliophiles in Jiangnan boasted collections of up to 10,000 volumes, some of them illustrated in black-and-white or in colour – because, as one editor complained in 1625, some books ‘simply do not sell without pictures. So I, too, ape the fashion and furnish these illustrations for your pleasure. As they say, “Can't go against the tide”’.66

  The last Ming emperors also resorted to print on an unprecedented scale. They not only issued innumerable posters for public display but also printed a daily broadsheet known as dibao (later the Peking Gazette) to inform all officials of imperial edicts and decrees, to announce promotions and demotions, and to provide news of domestic and foreign affairs. But still manuscript copies abounded because regional officials hired scribes – many of them no doubt failed examination candidates – in the capital to make and distribute copies of entries in the Gazette relevant to them. Some maintained a permanent news bureau where scribes copied unofficial as well as official news. Merchants produced commercial versions of these dibao, often adding local news and gossip to the official pronouncements, while news entrepreneurs also compiled excerpts from the Gazette and other sources and offered them for sale. The efficiency of this network is reflected in the memoirs of the minor official Yao Tinglin, living in a small town of Jiangnan. One day in 1644 he and ‘other men of his family were drinking together when a friend rushed in in a panic, holding a “small gazetteer”’ – that is, an unofficial news-sheet – ‘that said that the troops of the rebel Li Zicheng had captured Peking ten days earlier and that the Chongzhen emperor had committed suicide’. Confirmation from the official Peking Gazette arrived one day later.67

  Yu Shenxing, a senior minister in Beijing, once complained about the false information spread by ‘news bureau entrepreneurs who are out for the most miniscule profits and give no thought to matters of national emergency’. He asked, like so many later politicians frustrated by journalists, ‘Why aren't they strenuously prohibited?’68 But even had Yu prevailed, closing down the news bureaux would not have prevented the diffusion of information, whether true or false, because it also spread rapidly by word of mouth, via Ming China's excellent communications system. Travellers on the extensive network of highways would find courier relay stations (in theory) no more than 25 miles apart, connecting all provincial and prefectural capitals, and postal stations (in theory) every 4 miles along the main roads of each county. The Ming legal code decreed draconian penalties for delay in delivering messages: 20 lashes for a courier who was a day late, or for a postal worker who arrived three-quarters of an hour late (the greater severity of the penalties reflecting the fact that postal workers covered much shorter distances than couriers).

  The network's impressive infrastructure promoted social intercourse at many levels. It enabled tens of thousands of students to travel to take examinations in prefectural, provincial and (for the successful) metropolitan capitals. It also facilitated the journeys of thousands of government officials required to travel to distant postings, and of hundreds more sent on tours of inspection around the empire, to say nothing of itinerant merchants (some of whom might also spend prolonged periods on the road), of peddlers carrying their wares between the different market towns in their area, or of refugees hoping to find better conditions elsewhere. In the words of Louis Le Comte, a French Jesuit who travelled thousands of miles around the Qing empire in the 1680s: ‘All of China is on the move: on the roads, on the highways, on the rivers, and along the coasts of the maritime provinces you see hordes of travellers’. All these people wanted to hear news from home, and whatever their condition and wherever they went, travellers disseminated news of the ‘outside world’ to entertain those with whom they stayed and those they met on the road, while their servants also exchanged news in their humble overnight lodgings.69

  In the 1620s Wei Zhongxian's persecution of Donglin alumni, and his subsequent fall from power (see chapter 5 above), offers an early snapshot of this developing ‘public sphere’. Many intellectuals wrote private letters reporting each development that, together with the public edicts distributed by the courier and postal systems, excited public interest throughout China. Enterprising printers brought out compilations of personal accounts and official documents to satisfy public interest about what had happened and why; while the Suzhou rioters, punished so harshly for their support of the ‘Donglin martyrs’ (see chapter 18 above), became heroes of stage plays and popular literature, including four historical novels. The author of one novel assured readers that he had been at work for three years and ‘based my book on what I read and heard’, including scrutiny of a pile of copies of the Peking Gazette that stood ‘more than three meters high’, as well as ‘several dozens of official documents and unofficial accounts’.70

  According to historian John Dardess, ‘probably no earlier event in
China's long history has available for modern retelling anything like the archive available for the Donglin affair’; but, just one generation later, those who survived the violent transition from Ming to Qing rule produced even more memoirs, almost 200 of which still survive. Among these, Grace Fong has noted, Jiangnan (the lower Yangzi valley) produced ‘a proportionately larger corpus of historical source materials’ than any other area, reflecting the higher density of literate men and women living in the ‘cultural and economic nexus of the Ming empire’ who wanted to leave a written record of what they had seen and suffered before they died (many of them by their own hand). Lynn Struve estimates that the volume of documents concerning the political turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century ‘was not surpassed as a distinct outpouring in Chinese cultural history until the latter part of the twentieth century’.71

  This combination of the unprecedented diffusion of information about the common problems facing China with the unequalled number of readers allowed men and women in all regions to set their own experiences of adversity in a broader perspective and to develop comprehensive solutions. Huang Zongxi, a scholar whose father had been a Donglin martyr, probably exaggerated when he claimed in 1676 that in some areas of China, ‘we find agricultural tenants, firewood gatherers, potters, brick burners, stone masons, and men from other humble walks of life attending public lectures and chanting classics’; but nevertheless several million imperial subjects took an active role in the Ming-Qing transition. The oldest state in the world had never seen anything like it – which is one reason why the transition claimed so many lives and lasted so long.72