and magazines should serve as an essential and effective tool in communicating political ideas. The magazine New Youth became an important way to show his thought in the New Culture Movement, and his articles spread the ideas to the youth in that period. He believed that newspapers did not only act as a historical record, but was also a means to "shape the course of history." Press as a weapon in revolution: Liang also thought that the press was an "effective weapon in the service of a nationalist uprising". In Liang's words, the newspaper is a “revolution of ink, not a revolution of blood.” He wrote, "so a newspaper regards the government the way a father or elder brother regards a son or younger brother — teaching him when he does not understand, and reprimanding him when he gets something wrong." Undoubtedly, his attempt to unify and dominate a fast-growing and highly competitive press market has set the tone for the first generation of newspaper historians of the May Fourth Movement. Newspaper as an educational program: Liang was well aware that the newspaper could serve as an "educational program", and said, "the newspaper gathers virtually all the thoughts and expressions of the nation and systematically introduces them to the citizenry, it being irrelevant whether they are important or not, concise or not, radical or not. The press, therefore, can contain, reject, produce, as well as destroy, everything." For example, Liang wrote a well known essay during his most radical period titled "The Young China" and published it in his newspaper Qing Yi Bao () on February 2, 1900. The essay established the concept of the nation-state and argued that the young revolutionaries were the holders of the future of China. This essay was influential on the Chinese political culture during the May Fourth Movement in the 1920s. Weak press: However, Liang thought that the press in China at that time was quite weak, not only due to lack of financial resources and to conventional social prejudices, but also because "the social atmosphere was not free enough to encourage more readers and there was a lack of roads and highways that made it hard to distribute newspapers". Liang felt that the prevalent newspapers of the time were "no more than a mass commodity". He criticized that those newspapers "failed to have the slightest influence upon the nation as a society". Literary