Hong Fang’s study on the relationship between Tianjin-based Ta Kung Pao(L’Impartial)and the evolution of Chinese higher education in the early 20th century encourages us to think about higher education as both a product and shaper of Chinese modernity.Hong believes the field of higher education history has been focused too narrowly on universities and official charters to the neglect of its connections to broader society.As a way of addressing this weakness,she emphasizes that higher education and the modern press developed in tandem and mutually influenced one another and that it is fruitful to study instances when the two overlapped and interacted.As the intellectual’s newspaper par excellence,Ta Kung Pao,founded in 1902 and published through the Republican period,offers an ideal case for the study of this subject.
