China has been credited with producing some types of imperial court news-sheets in the Han (206 BC- AD 220) and the Tang (618-907) dynasties.
However, the newspaper in its modern sense, distributed publicly and regularly, did not appear in China until the 19th century. The first, launched in 1822, was a Portuguese-language weekly in Macao.
The launching of Shen Bao, by a British businessman in 1872, was significant because it heralded the development of of commercial newspapers.
More importantly, it was the first modern newspaper with the Chinese deciding the editorial content. The paper changed hands a few times and was run by a group of pro-Japanese collaborators during the Second World War.
The longest-running Chinese language newspaper in Old China, Shen Bao, documented the political, military, economic, cultural and social affairs for 78 years until its closure in May 1949.
The earliest daily set up by Chinese was born in 1873, in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei Province, even though it was closed down not long after.
By 1901, there were some 125 newspapers in China, with an estimated combined circulation of no more than 100,000, according to Fang Hanqi, professor emeritus of journalism at Renmin University of China, who is best known for his studies of the 20th century history of Chinese media.
After the downfall of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the newspaper business flourished and in 1921, there were 1,124 papers. Between 1927, after the Kuomintang secured its rule, and 1949, the number of weeklies, dailies and other papers was about 1,000.
After New China was founded in 1949, the country's news media went through restructuring with a system dominated by the newspapers of the Chinese Communist Party committees at national and regional levels.
As society and the economy developed, there were 1,274 newspapers in 1960.
When Deng Xiaoping initiated reforms and opening up in 1978, there were 764 newspapers in China, according to a research team with the Institute of Media Research, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The combined annual circulation of the newspapers was 13.1 billion in 1978, an average of 53,000 copies per paper every day, according to National Bureau of Statistics.
(China Daily 05/31/2006 page1)
