The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou

Product Description By examining how the Middle Kingdom has been portrayed by foreigners and the Chinese themselves, this volume advances a new perspective in our reading and interpretation of the Chinese past by placing these producers and presenters of China in the spotlight. The chapters probe how these figures produced or presented the country, cross-examining their backgrounds and circumstances. Their gaze upon the Middle Kingdom was dictated by religious and political conviction, but also particularly by the consumers of that gaze. Like invisible hands, producers and consumers of China continue to constrain representations of the country, looming larger than the literary, artistic or journalistic works they produce. This volume also addresses scholars of Europe and America who have overlooked what Western writers on China reveal about their own contexts which is indeed often more than they reveal about their ostensible subject. As such, the Middle Kingdom serves as a convenient mirror to reflect European and American anxieties and ambitions. About the Author Zheng Yangwen is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Educated at Oberlin College (BA 1995) and the University of Cambridge (King s College, MPhil 1997 and PhD 2001), she taught at the University of Pennsylvania (2002 04) and the National University of Singapore (2004 06) before joining Manchester. She is the author of The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which has been translated into Italian and Korean, and China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Brill, 2011). She is also the editor of Negotiating Asymmetry: China s Place in Asia (with Anthony Reid), The Body in Asia (with Bryan S. Turner), Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity (with Charles J-H. Macdonald), and The Cold War in Asia: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (with Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi). An editorial board member of Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, she is currently preparing Choreographing and Dancing the Communist Revolution for publication in 2014.