Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 396 p.*

Zhou Kai-wing is a fellow of the University of Illinois, a specialist in the history and culture of late Ming and Qing societies, which have attracted particular attention from sinologists in recent years. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is trying to understand the essence of subsequent changes in China. Two interpretations are fighting here. According to the first one, the Minsk and Qing societies are considered as stagnant, and all the changes that have taken place in them are considered as introduced from the outside, since the ground for them was not prepared. According to the second interpretation, within the traditional Chinese society, you can find everything necessary for its modernization, which is carried out by the state.-

* Zhou Kai-win. Book publishing, culture and power in Early Modern China. Stanford: Ed. Stanford University Press, 2004, 396 p.

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it would go on by itself, without the intervention of Western ideas and technologies. Most Chinese scientists working in the West are supporters of the second concept.

The author of the reviewed book seeks to show the competitiveness of Chinese society and reproaches Western historians for their tendency to consider "failure", i.e., inability to develop, a characteristic feature of the past of "non-Western" regions-India, China, the Muslim world and Africa. He sees this approach as a defect of postcolonial consciousness, for which "failure" is only the fate of" the Other " in contrast to the success and completeness of the Modern West. Zhou Kai-win's opponent is the Chinese-born American sinologist Huang Ray, author of a popular work on Minsk history with the significant title " A Year without Meaning. The Ming Dynasty in decline " ¹, in which the years of the end of the Ming are treated as a "chronicle of insolvency".

It is one of the tasks of Zhou Kai - win's book to find out how legitimate this is. In his opinion, Minsk society seems backward if we consider it using such terms as "bourgeoisie", "capitalism", "class struggle", "modernization", "individualism". If you do without them, you can get a completely different picture of the development of the same society. We need to look for new ways to see the historical originality of the Minsk civilization. This was the author's way of analyzing the history of the Minsk book, or rather, the commercial publishing house of Confucian literature from 1550 to 1650.

Zhou Kai-win argues with the thesis of leading cultural and book scholars (M. McLuhan, L. Fevre, A.-J. Martin), according to which the main reason for the survivability of the woodcut printing method in China is the peculiarities of hieroglyphic writing. The French cultural critic and sociologist R. Chartier, the author of the special issue of the Late Imperial China magazine, is an absolute authority for him {"Late Imperial China"), devoted to the history of bookmaking in China, in an editorial to which he called for a dialogue between historians of China and Europe. Such a dialogue is impossible until Western historians learn about Eastern printing. Zhou Kai-win was one of the authors of this issue. В его статье "Writing for Success: Printing, Examinations and Intellectual Change in Late Ming China" ("Writing for Success: Printing, Exams, and Intellectual Change in Late Ming China") sets out many of the ideas that were later developed in the peer-reviewed book.

Zhou Kai-win made the main subject of his research not book publishing itself, but those layers of Chinese society that were involved in the process of book production. He calls them shishan ("scholars and merchants") and sees them as the result of the interaction of representatives of the educated class with people engaged in the production and trade of books and paper. Using this term allows the author to explore the Chinese book culture in such a fashionable social aspect. He sees the formation of a new class as an important factor in the development of Confucian thought at the end of the Ming dynasty. Another term that is important for Zhou Kai-win is gong, which means " to make something (text, picture) available to the public through printing." This term is associated with the concept of gonglun - " public opinion formed through the press." The author intends to tell how a new class of people with access to mass media forms public opinion and influences the government and the dynamics of social development.

Li Zhi (1527-1602), a writer, author of poems, dramas, numerous essays, commentaries on "River Backwaters" and classics, as well as one of the first authors of bestsellers, became a significant figure among the Minsk figures for the concept of Zhou Kai-win. Li Zhi is important for Zhou Kai-win as a writer involved in publishing, who played a huge role in the late Minsk printing industry. His free-thinking and radical ideas are for Zhou Kai-win evidence of the beginning of modernization of Chinese society.

If the author of the book under review were to confine himself to debunking Eurocentrism in the interpretation of Chinese cultural history, this would be quite sufficient to create a theoretical basis for his conscientious source study. But the scientist did not stop there. He drew on the latest achievements of cultural studies: the concepts of "field" by P. Bourdieu ² and "paratext"

¹ Huang Ray. A Year of No Significance: the Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

² Bourdieu P. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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Zh. Genette ³. The "field" is a universal connection in various social practices: there is a field of struggle, a field of cultural production, a literary field, an economic field, a linguistic field, etc. The number of fields can increase as new forces create new configurations of practices - the field of education, art, etc. they create social trajectories that cross multiple fields. Representatives of Shishan, belonging to two fields at once - economic and political-change the configuration between them. The exam field is unique for China. "Paratext" means everything that relates to the physical existence of a text: titles, tables of contents, prefaces, postscripts, fonts, illustrations, comments and intertextual links, etc.

The book has five chapters, and the narrative is structured in such a way that the author moves from private issues of the book business to problems of politics and ideology.

In the first chapter, "The cost of production and the price of books," Zhou Kai-win analyzed many Chinese and European sources and found that the price of books, even high-quality commercial publications, was low in Minsk China, and the purchasing power of the population allowed to buy books.

The second chapter, "The Chinese Book and later Minsk Printing," is devoted, as the author defines it, to"the economics of printing technology." In fact, it deals with woodcuts and movable type - the central theme of Zhou Kai-win's struggle against Eurocentrism. Woodcut printing was not replaced in China by a movable type because it had advantages over it, which compensated for its obvious, from the point of view of a European, disadvantages. Movable type has been used in China since the 11th century, but not as the main method of printing. The publisher's choice of a particular printing method was determined by finances and business calculations, not by culture and aesthetics. Woodcut was easier and cheaper to print text and images, and provided easy insertion of comments and punctuation. The woodcut corresponded to the traditional "paratext" of a Chinese book. It is wrong to think, Zhou Kai-win insists, that woodcuts stopped in Europe immediately after Gutenberg's invention. It's just that there the process of choosing between woodcuts and typesetting took much less time.

The woodcut method was the most economically advantageous for China. The initial costs required to start a publishing business are insignificant, and you don't need to have a lot of workers to do it. Any member of the academic class could become a publisher, so in China, the border between a small private owner and a well-established commercial book publishing is almost indistinguishable. The Chinese publisher invested mainly in carving the board. Paper was purchased as needed. After selling a part of the print run, the publisher could invest in a new print run. This way, the risk of losing money due to an unsold part of the print run was minimized.

The obvious convenience of woodcut printing could not completely divert the attention of Chinese publishers from the use of movable type, its share in the number of books produced in late imperial China is constantly increasing. Mobile typeface was used by publishers with large resources, but only a few small private owners could afford it. The biggest projects of this kind were supported by the state.

Zhou Kai-win's economic analysis is very interesting, but it raises doubts: why did Europe abandon such a profitable technology? For the same reasons that woodcut was profitable in China, it would have been profitable in Europe, adjusted for the cost of paper and labor. This means that the primacy of economics in choosing the main printing method is not obvious. Only woodcut could preserve the usual type of book for a Chinese. When it became clear at the end of the 19th century that woodcut printing could not meet the increased demand for printed products, of the many printing methods that Chinese publishers tried to master with the help of Europeans, lithography won as a technique that allows reproducing the traditional type of text: handwriting, the location of comments on the page. The text typed "in European style" was objected to by the Chinese intelligentsia, and only after passing the stage of lithographic publication, China was able to switch to a mobile font.

Chinese and European book critics have been arguing for decades about the advantages of movable type and woodcuts in China, and the possibility of their influence on Gutenberg's invention. Since

³ Genette G. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Since K. K. Flug ⁴ summarized all aspects of discussions about movable type in China, scholars have started to use many new terms, but they have not come to an agreement. The issue of China's or the West's priority in print technology is so politicized that its solution has gone beyond book science itself.

The next three chapters - "The Process of commodification of Works, Examinations, and Publishing"," Paratext: Commentary, Ideology, and Politics", and" Public Authorities, Literary Criticism, and Organizational Power " - focus on state exams as China's most important social, cultural, political, and ideological institution ("field").).

The late Ming intelligentsia was involved in the publishing industry through the examination process and all that went with it. Travel expenses, housing, and textbooks were expensive, so examinees were forced to work, often in the field of book publishing, as authors, editors, compilers, and critics. In publishing, there were still people who failed to pass state exams. So the shishan class was formed. Questions of self-identification of its representatives are especially occupied by Zhou Kai-win. The main task of the average Shishan representative was to take a stable position in several "fields" at the same time - in the economic, political and, if possible, also in the cultural one. As the latter two were consolidated, a person usually sought to hide the memory of his first" field " - the economic one. The author provides a lot of biobibliographical information about different personalities, drawing the trajectories of their movement in the "fields". It is extremely interesting to read this, but the question always torments me: is the concept of "fields" so necessary in order to tell about who, how and what earned their living?

Comments on classics (the main type of printed material that serves the needs of examinees, i.e. "paratext") in the context of late Minsk culture has a greater impact on public and political thought than the text itself. Zhou Kai-win focused on analyzing the commentaries on the Si Shu (Quatrains) as "part of the general boom in commercial book publishing at the end of the Ming" (p.163) and the state's attempts to control the quantity and quality of such publications.

Based on the examination "field" and its influence on politics and power, Zhou Kai-win analyzes the reasons for the emergence of numerous literary societies and schools at the end of the Ming. Members of literary groups in the civil service set standards for styles and genres that became "state-owned"for a while. Zhou Kai-win compiled eight tables in which he calculates and compares various aspects of the life, career, and creative work of the most prominent Minsk authors who came from Shishan and from influential court groups: the average age of obtaining an academic degree, the number of years lived after that, and the distribution of publications by genre. This method is extremely time-consuming, but the conclusions from it are not entirely clear, since eight authors are too few for a representative sociological sample.

Zhou Kai-win believes that he was able to show how large and diverse the impact of commercial book publishing on the Minsk society was, although the mobile font was not used as the main one. From the point of view of an open-minded reader, the Chinese book culture does not need such a desperate defense, so what the author considers to be a virtue, if not a flaw, then a methodological flaw, a bias in journalism. While condemning the Eurocentric approach to the study of Chinese printing, Zhou Kai-win himself is extremely passionate about the latest European cultural theories, which sometimes make it difficult to understand his ideas. The book shows that an Easterner working as an orientalist in the West cannot help but be ambivalent. The facts collected by him and presented in the text of the book, in tables and appendices, are sometimes unique and worthy of close attention of book historians and specialists in the culture and ideology of late imperial China.

⁴ Flug K. K. History of the Chinese printed book of the Sung era. 10th-13th centuries Moscow: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1959.

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