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Paper short abstract

The Shengjing Shibao was one of the main Japanese-owned newspapers in modern China. Its relations with different authorities highlight the incoherent character of press management, which reflected the lack of a unified foreign policy in imperial Japan.

Paper long abstract

After Russia’s defeat in the 1904–05 war with Japan, fostering a friendly press industry was one of the policies that Japanese authorities pursued in Northeast China to cultivate the national interest there. Japanese influence grew by means of subsidies and effective market strategies. By the late 1920s, however, the rise of Chinese nationalism became a serious challenge to Japan’s dominant position in that field. Following the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931, anti-Japanese voices were finally silenced under military occupation.

So far, scholars have investigated mainly how the press system functioned under control of the imperial army in the 1930s. This paper, instead, discusses press management in the years before the Incident, when readers still had a choice among competing newspapers. The primary focus is on the Shengjing Shibao, the largest Chinese-language daily circulating in the region. Archive documents show that Japanese diplomats acknowledged this newspaper company as a valuable resource for collecting intelligence and promoting a positive image of Japan. Previous studies centred on discourse analysis have emphasised the role of the Shengjing Shibao as a tool of imperialist aggression. The interplay between company executives and Japanese authorities, however, has received relatively little attention.

This paper argues that guidance from the Foreign Ministry was rather loose through most of the period considered, despite continuous funding. Furthermore, there was a lack of coordination between the general consulate in Fengtian and Japanese authorities based in Dairen-Ryojun, namely the government of the Kwantung Territory, the Kwantung Army and the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu). Although the latter became the majority stockholder of the Shengjing Shibao in 1925, under the influence of consul-general Yoshida Shigeru the newspaper adopted a tone that caused trouble to Mantetsu. As each imperial agency had its own press operations, they would often act independently and even conflict at times. Press management is therefore representative of the “four-headed politics” that Japan carried out in Manchuria as a reflection of its polycentric institutional system. The paper makes this point through additional examples that clarify the position of the Shengjing Shibao within the regional press network.