Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

Province 1865–1911, stressed the urban character of late Qing gentry.¹³ Hao Chang stressed the urban character of the politically active intellectuals of the 1890s, such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who left their Cantonese hometowns and undertook most of their reformist activities in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chang also argued that the urban-based activism of the 1890s marked the birth of a new social group—the Chinese intelligentsia.¹⁴ In the preface to the second edition of Reform and Revolution, Joseph Esherick pointed out that the most important characteristic of the 1911 revolution was its urban nature, and he pointed to the rise of an urban gentry class that was involved in new commercial and industrial activities.¹⁵ While the earlier works addressed the “urban nature” of social upheavals, more recent studies since the 1990s directly focus on the city as a specific space. In Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945, Leo Ou-fan Lee highlighted the interaction between Shanghai's urban environment and the rise of China's literary Modernism and a modernist writers’ group as a cultural community.¹⁶ In a later essay, Lee further argued that Shanghai, not Beijing, was the birthplace of China's modernity because of its developed commercial print media.¹⁷

Urban studies of modern China are integrated into the discussion of a Chinese “public sphere” because the presumably equal and open-to-all space and politically oriented public opinion can supposedly only be found in modern Chinese cities.¹⁸ Thus, this current work bridges the academic interest in late Qing reform and the newly rising interest in Chinese urban history, and it further discusses the possibility of an autonomous Chinese urban cultural space by illuminating Zheng's life and career. Jürgen Habermas conceptualized the three stages for the transformation of the public sphere: from the “town” to “the public sphere in the political realm” via “public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies).”¹⁹ If this pattern is applied to the Chinese context, then modern commercial development provided the conditions for the first stage, and the rise of commercial newspapers like the Shenbao marked a formation of the intermediary “world of letters,” in which Zheng Guanying played