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JOSEPH MCDERMOTT
Author, A Social History of the Chinese Book
2007-05-01, That's Shanghai May 2007 Print Edition w ww.urbanatomy.com
By Mina Choi
Joseph McDermott is a Professor of Chinese at Cambridge University and author of A Social History of the Chinese Book, which traces the evolution of the book in China from 1,000 to 1,800 AD. Over Skype, we discussed literacy, printing and the flow of information in Imperial China.
that’s: What exactly is a “social” history
of the Chinese book?
Joseph McDermott (JM): By social history, I mean the social dimensions
of the history of the Chinese book: Whose book? Who reads it? Who writes
it? Who sells it? I’ve restricted my discussion in the book to
the literati wenren. In China, literati books were made available to
degree holders through government libraries, but private collectors
did not generally allow people to borrow their books, or even read them
– they were regarded as family property, right up until the late
19th-century.
In Europe, you had institutions, churches or universities which kept
books for long periods of time, but restricted access. [Scholars in
Europe] shared their books and kept in touch with one another; and they
publicized and shared their learning on a private basis or through publications.
So there was much more of a republic of letters in the West than there
was in China. This difference in China can probably be traced back to
the importance of these books for families and the prestige of their
ownership, as well as distrust of outside readers. A common saying went,
“It is stupid to loan books, and it is also stupid to return them,”
as books were regarded as valuable family property, right up until the
20th-century.
that’s: Are there still other differences between the
social histories of Chinese and European books?
JM: In the West, movable type printing, as introduced by Gutenberg,
quickly became the preferred standard. But in China, that didn’t
happen, primarily because printing books would have required multiple
copies of approximately 52,000 Chinese characters; the expense and inconvenience
was too great.
That said, movable type was, at times, employed by wealthy persons or
government offices, but used only briefly. Then, in the latter half
of the18th-century, the Chinese government famously used this kind of
printing to stock a few libraries with books that would become accessible
to all scholars. But movable type printing was never widely used, even
after Westerners “introduced” it in the mid-19th-century;
woodblock printing remained cheaper. In fact, woodblock printing was
replaced first by lithography and only in the first three decades of
the past century by movable type.
that’s: Yet in your book, you mention that scribal work
and woodblock printing continues to be used in China.
JM: That’s right, even right up until the 1980s. I saw certain libraries in China where people were still being paid to make manuscript copies of books by hand. The libraries didn’t have the money for the technology – a photocopy machine or a microfilm camera – but they did have paper, brush, ink, and labor. Such cheap scribal labor impeded the technical upgrading to more modern kinds of printing.
that’s: Often when people think of literature, they also
think of literacy. Is this analogy relevant in the Chinese context?
JM: Yes, but in a different way from the West. One can recognize a
Chinese character, but not know its meaning in a new context and especially
in a different field of knowledge, such as religion. So official literacy
rates in China indicate less than in the modern West. Also, literacy
in China has been more divorced from the spoken word than in post-1600
Europe. Until less than a century ago, Chinese tended to prize the literate
language over the vernacular. A highly literate elite, scattered over
a vast empire, could communicate with written characters that, when
read aloud, they could not understand. While some of this written language
entered into the vernacular, much of the vernacular never entered the
written language. Even today in southern regions many oral expressions
still cannot be expressed in character form. So no one answer is possible.
A Social History of the Chinese Book is available at www.hkupress.org