| During the national enlightenment exploring in modern China,the popularization of knowledge for Chinese people started an institutionalized constructive period after the establishment of the Nanjing National Government in 1927.The change of printing technology and flourishing publishing industries have provided the crucial impetus for knowledge popularization.The Nationalist government took publishing industries as vital tools of social governance while to achieve political purposes of the state-building procedure,as well as disciplining the people through national language planning,common knowledge production,public library construction,and reading campaigns.Meanwhile,intellectuals’ vision on social transformation and revolutionary movement carried out the mass enlightenment as a mass mobilization.They mobilized and organized the masses under the productive power of printing to arouse the revolutionary power of the people.This paper will take what printing and publishing industries achieved in knowledge popularization from 1927 to 1937 as clues to explore the popularization practice in ways of knowledge production,circulation,and reception.This paper begins with sorting out the discourse changes of the concepts of "mass" since the late Qing Dynasty and tries to solve why the mass popularization of knowledge became a problematical arena for the state power and intellectuals to explore the way out of Chinese society in the 1930s.Through the historical investigation of popularization,the path of "going to the masses" turns from literary practice to enlightenment text practice.At the level of symbolic production of knowledge,this paper focuses on how printing technology and publishing industries had a decisive impact on part of the process of the popularization of language and writing in the 1930s.The innovation of printing technology and the impulse of creating printing language reveal the logic of the operation of printing modernity.In the mid-1930s,the state’s push to create tools for language production demonstrated the necessary role that unified language planning and mass production played in the modernization process of language popularization and literacy.At the same time,printing power is also a powerful weapon for revolutionary intellectuals to popularize new characters and mobilize revolutionary education.In the field of knowledge production,the government,intellectuals,and publishing industries are committed to making common sense that people could recognize as a citizen for the Republican state.With the imminent national salvation war,the production of common sense has become an important means of war mobilization for the state.When the spread of common knowledge has become basic parts of knowledge circulation,books were able to be delivered to the grassroots of the society by nationwide public library services.With the improvement of the education system and library administrative policy,"books going to the people" not only created a public cultural life for the people but also entered the national grass-roots governance and local administrative affairs.Here,printing imparts the physical form of knowledge,and the commercial tentacles of the publishing industry gradually shape knowledge to the public.The last part of this paper examines how the public,as readers,has been shaped by the state,the knowledge authorities,and the publishing industry to shape reading practice.Reading links one’s life path to national and social development through mass reading promotion activities,readers’ clubs,and reading guidance.Through the popular practice in the above links,the public’s intellectual life has gradually been politicized.In general,the popularization of knowledge promoted by printing and publishing in the 1930s laid the foundation for China’s modernization in the 20th century.It not only lies in the political exploration of intellectuals "going to the masses" in the 20th century,but also built infrastructrues for the construction of the People’s Republic after 1949 in a unique way. |
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