China

Abstract

As one of the world's oldest civilizations, China has a long, rich history in the use of media to communicate, including the inventions of paper and printing. China was the birthplace of an early version of the newspaper, as government news sheets, known as tipao , were disseminated among Han Dynasty court officials in the second and third centuries A.D. and later printed during the Tang Dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries. But popular journalism in the form of the modern newspaper, which circulates news to a broader mass audience, came relatively late to China, compared to Europe and elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, European missionaries and other foreigners imported the modern newspaper to several major Chinese cities, where notable examples such as the British-owned Shen-bao in Shanghai flourished. This foreign involvement reflected the influence of outsiders on journalism developments in China, a pattern that would repeat itself