Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness. By Gregory B. Lee. [London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. xi +121 pp. £65.00. ISBN 0-7007-1492-8.]

Extract

Gregory Lee's latest book addresses representations of Chineseness in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the United Kingdom as well as in China and Hong Kong. Each of its four chapters singles out texts – from “high” literature, government documents, news and entertainment media – to point out the dangers of generalizing about culture, language or race. Lee observes that while the “scientific racism” of earlier days has been discredited, racist stereotypes of Chineseness abound to this day.

Chapter one begins with an explanation of the author's interest in Chinese and his career to date. This would have combined well with chapter four, subtitled “A short (hi)story of a Liverpool hybridity,” which contains scattered musings on the Liverpool Chinatown Lee knew as a child, where a lifelong fascination was sparked by a notebook left by his Chinese grandfather. Critical distance is by no means a “shibboleth” (p. 82), but Lee's lengthy justification of the autobiographical parts of his book is unnecessary. Still, the expression of his personal feeling, on the first day of each academic year, of “disappoint[ing] the eager European students as they see a white man walk into the room” (p. 83) is questionable. For all its autobiographical hues, as part of the scholarly treatise that his book aims to be, this entails the danger of unwarranted generalization.