Chinese language periodicals goes back to the Spring and Autumn Annals, and traces through more than a thousand years of tipao, including Kaiyuan Za Bao and the Peking Gazette.
One of the reasons is that newspapers did not exist in China, Japan, and Korea until these countries opened to Western influences.
There were certainly forerunners of newsprint also in the indigenous tradition, like the famous Peking Gazette (Jingpao) which is often claimed to be oldest newspaper of the world.
We find numerous little articles in Western papers on the Jingbao, usually from secondary or tertiary sources; they do not take into account that this gazette had limited circulation and that it just contained edicts and decrees – thus it does not fit the modern definition of newspaper.
The British Bible Society imported a cylinder printer in 1847, China's first powered printing machine.
[5] In the 1860s, William Dill Gamble, from Ramelton, Ireland, working at American Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai, applied electrotype technology to the problem of Chinese typography to create "Meihua type."