What’s in a Column? Unofficial Histories and News

In the rapidly changing landscape of early twentieth-century China, the newspaper Shibao (1904–1939) played a significant role in reshaping the way information was recorded and disseminated. This paper takes Shibao as a case study to delve into the emergence of the Chinese newspaper and investigative journalism, aiming to explain the functions and distinctive features of newspaper columns within the context of a new information order in the evolving political press. The study begins by tracing the evolution of the newspaper column, examining its intricate relationship with historical and informative genres dating back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD). Specifically, the paper focuses on the transition of collected jottings of unofficial histories (biji) into newspaper columns. Through this lens, this paper reveals the evolution of news as a medium that built upon pre-modern traditions of personal first-hand experience, as exemplified in the biji genre. It shows how, by converting informal jottings into newspaper columns that claimed credibility based on personal experience, the press embraced ancient Chinese practices of writing unofficial histories, whose veracity was confirmed not by cited textual sources but by the authors’ personal accounts of what they heard, saw, felt, and even imagined.