China’s Intelligentsia in the Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries

Intelligentsia has been a widely used term in the studies of history and society to describe intellectual, academic, educational and publishing circles. Zhang Qing analyses the formation of Chinese intelligentsia in the context of modern China, more specifically the late Qing dynasty and Republic of China, and addresses topics such as the expansion of newspaper distributions, the relationship between newspapers and academia, the impact of newspapers on society, the change of readers’ expressions and scholars’ social mobility. The emergence of the intelligentsia and other circles in the early twentieth century is an epitome of the drastic changes in Chinese society at the time, indicative both of a new state-society relation and of Chinese scholars’ efforts to find new roles and identities for themselves after bidding farewell to imperial examinations. The author shows how both the emergence of new-type publications and new roles in academia had a profound influence on modern China. The formation of the intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a key to grasping modern Chinese history, but also a mirror for examining the future society.