Journalism in East Asia. Toh Lam Seng. Tokyo: Sairyu Sha, 2010. 292 pp.
JMCQ readers may not know that an American-owned Chinese newspaper is one of the three “Forefathers of Japanese Press” and also one of the recognized ancestors of the modern press in China. Toh Lam Seng, a guest professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University, brings us a sense of freshness and originality by pointing out those historical relevancies between journalism in East Asia and its U.S. counterpart.
Toh’s book, written in Japanese, starts with solid research on the Chinese and Foreign Gazette, a Chinese newspaper established by Daniel Jerome MacGowan in Ningpo, China, in 1854, and continued by Elias B. Inslee in 1858, both missionaries of the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The Gazette was translated into Japanese and edited by Bansyoshirabesyo, a Japanese institute for the study of Western learning.
At first attracted by the Japanese revisions, Toh spent more than ten years unearthing the Chinese originals scattered in libraries in Britain, Japan, and China, and even some transcripts kept by a few Japanese individuals. With these source materials, Toh undertook a meticulous examination of the newspaper, which had previously remained hazy in academia of Chinese journalism history. Toh’s research has inspired admiration and respect among young students and scholars.
Toh finds the editorial policy of the Gazette relatively outspoken and diversified regarding aloof U.S. attitudes toward Pacific issues of the time. MacGowan and Inslee frequently attacked local corruption and social problems in Ningpo, and exposed wrongdoings by “bad foreigners,” such as Portuguese involvement in illegal trade of Chinese labor. Such news obviously won the heart of the local community, and the Gazette could be said to have earned Chinese readers’ trust to a certain degree. However, while dealing with issues concerning U.S. national interests in China, the Gazette showed a double standard by applauding the British Opium War, which led to a disastrous end for China. This double standard is illustrated by the Gazette’s high moral standards on the one hand and competing “national interests” on the other.
According to Toh, this “double standard” legacy of the Gazette was fully inherited and developed in Japan. The second half of his book follows historical threads to demonstrate how recent press performance over the past ten years still manifest the double standard and service to national interests, including the coverage of Hong Kong’s return to China, the Sino-Japan relations, and the East Asian region. Chapters 3 and 4 take several significant media events as examples to show that Japanese press has been practicing a “uniformity of opinions” for the “national interests” during and after the Sino-Japanese War. In October 1940, for example, the military government of Japan set up the Wang Jingwei puppet regime in Nanjing and established a new press system aimed to “wake up” the people and “guide” the public to serve their country “peacefully”—i.e., to stop fighting the Japanese. Opinions should be “created, forward-looking, and uniformed,” according to this press principle, which is still observed and practiced by the Japanese press in their news reports about Sino-Japanese relations today.
The Chinese press, although originating from the same source, takes quite a different route. From the very beginning, Chinese journalists and scholars became aware of the negative influences placed by foreign press opinions on diplomacy. They took it as their responsibility to own newspapers and to write as the spokesmen of the Chinese people. Toh’s chapters 5 and 6 highlight this sense of duty among Chinese media, revealed by Wang Tao, who published the first successful independent newspaper in 1874, and by the Hong Kong media’s collective acclaim for its return to China in 1997.
As a Chinese scholar, I accept this viewpoint, since we can perceive this tradition continuing today in the voluntary self-discipline of Chinese journalists, and in the Chinese government’s growing emphasis on the media’s role in international politics. However, I cannot help wondering why Toh did not employ his “double standard” criticism on the Chinese press, but instead framed Chinese journalism surprisingly positively. He does not actually include the current mainland China press in his examination of American journalists’ historical influences. A Chinese descendant, Toh seems a little too prudent in his comments on this issue. That, regrettably, leaves a hole in this research about journalism in East Asia, where mainland China increasingly becomes the spotlight on the world’s stage. Chinese media are not too different from the Japanese media in the sense that “uniformity of opinions” for national interests is a widely accepted practice.
In sharp contrast, Toh, a Singaporean who studied and taught journalism in Japan for over thirty years, unhesitatingly adopts a more critical view of the Japanese media. Through textual analysis on the coverage of recent visits by President Barack Obama to China and Japan, Japanese media are described as conspirators with the Japanese government and special-interest groups regarding coverage of the United States and China as G2 leaders, and on the possibility of the G2 overwhelming the U.S.-Japan Alliance. By this cynical criticism on Japanese media’s unconditional service to “national interests,” Toh makes explorations into the interplays of media and international politics, which has remained his focus as a prolific guest commentator for Lianhe Zaobao, a highly regarded Chinese newspaper in Asia.
Although the chapters of Toh’s book are somewhat loosely knitted together because of the large span in time and space, this book stands out as an unprecedented interpretation of the East Asian press as an interactive whole not only in the past but also at present. It deserves the recommendation on the cover from Arase Yutaka, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University, as a “pyramid of the pioneering studies on East Asian media.” It’s a great pity that this book is currently available only in Japanese.
YUE FENG
University of International Business
and Economics, Beijing