New Fiction as a Medium of Public Opinion: The Utopian/Dystopian Imagination in Revolutionary Periodicals in Late Qing China

Abstract

Invented by Liang Qichao, New Fiction (xin xiaoshuo) was considered a political instrument for delivering a Chinese print-based modernity. Most of these novels were primarily published in late Qing’s journals and newspapers. With reference to Rudolf Wagner’s concept of the Chinese public sphere, this chapter demonstrates that New Fiction served to form of public opinion. This chapter selects the topical issue of China’s partition (1903–1904) to investigate the way in which three revolutionary periodicals—the Jiangsu Journal, Study Abroad and Translation Magazine, and The Alarming News from Russia—were involved in public articulation. By demonstrating New Fiction’s prediction of either a prosperous, utopian future or a dystopian China as a form of criticism of the Qing court, this chapter will shed light on the utopian and dystopian imaginations in revolutionary periodicals and their contribution to popularizing a sense of a new China at the turn of the twentieth century in the Chinese public sphere.