Review: In search of the Chinese Common Reader. Usable Knowledge and Wondrous Ignorance in the Age of Global Science, Joan Judge (York University Toronto)

I remember doing a module on twentieth century China in year 10 at high school and noted the strong emphasis that my teacher placed on how the state strongly influenced what people read and thought. The primary sources that we were given were taken from the book ‘Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ and mostly detailed the literature and posters that the state gave for the people to read.[1] Further, we were not encouraged to think about questions such as whether ordinary Chinese people chose to read the literature they were given. Instead, we were taught that we must assume that people thought and read what was in line with the state because most of our sources come from the state.

Doing a module last semester titled ‘Migrant South Asia’ helped me to challenge this assumption that I was brought up with at school which was that the non-state actors had no agency. I learned to realise that the subaltern can indeed speak! However, up until last Friday I did not quite know if or how this might apply to China.

It was for these reasons that I found Joan Judge’s talk at the Global History Seminar last Friday quite fascinating. She discussed the various ways in which historians can try and enter the minds of the Chinese common readers and what was ‘common knowledge’ at the time. According to Judge, there are three main sources that historians can use to do so.

The first is by looking at books as objects which historians can use to understand the materiality of texts. Often these books were just cheap, string bound books which were used for gaining generic information. For instance, many of these were manuals for how to manage a household or how to write a good letter. In particular, her discussion of the uses of 萬寶全書 by ordinary people was very interesting because they claimed to contain a comprehensive assortment of ‘treasures’ that ordinary Chinese people could use. Everything they needed was supposedly in this one book.

Secondly, historians can look at the information in the books themselves to try and understand what interested the Chinese common reader. There were a wide range of interests that ordinary Chinese people had, such as how to get off opium and how to prevent cholera. It seems that the Chinese common reader sought out important information that could relate to their lives. For instance, some books instruct merchants on how to detect fake currency when dealing with foreign traders. What we see in these manuals are drawings of real foreign coins, which merchants could then use as a guide to check if the coin they received from the foreign trader matched up with the picture in the book. Interestingly, we can also see that some of these merchant manuals show little knowledge of foreign languages because the texts on the coins in the manuals make no sense. In fact, some of the drawings of coins have just squiggles in place of actual writing! Moreover, there seems to be little knowledge of foreignness because they simply referred to all foreign languages as ‘ghost speak’. Everything that was outside was seen as being ‘other’ and ‘strange’ to the Chinese common reader.

And finally, we can analyse the physical space where reading material was consumed. Most of the Chinese common readers got their reading material from book stands which were in the open in public spaces. Here, Chinese common readers would pay to stand and read a book at the stand. If they wished to rent or buy the book, they could also do so. I also really liked the point about why Chinese common readers chose to read books at book stalls rather than in libraries, even though one could read a book for free at a library whereas one had to pay to read a book at a book stall. Often there would be a complex procedure to get admittance into libraries of signing documents. It was far more convenient for Chinese common readers to pick up a book that they found interesting on the street and pay a small fee to read it. The image presented by Judge was that books were accessible and people could, and did, read books regularly. People read on the street, standing or sitting, and it this was part of Chinese culture at the time.

I especially liked the third section of Judge’s talk because it particularly links the idea of agency to the Chinese common reader. They could choose to read whatever and whenever they wanted; it was not a case of the state deciding what people should read. This is a truly transnational approach because ordinary people outside of the state could think as they pleased based on what they decided to read at the book stalls. I also think that because there was such a wide range of literature available to the Chinese common reader, they had a large amount of choice in what they decided to read. They would pick things that were interesting or relevant to them, regardless of what the state might have thought as being important for the common reader.

[1] Lincoln Cushing and Ann Tompkins, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (San Fransisco, 2007).