Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660-1760 (review)

From being admired to being denigrated, China has long been well known to have moved in the popular and literary imagination of England in the eighteenth century. In reality, even during the first phase of admiration, idealization was already mixed with abasement, and both were largely motivated by diverse domestic concerns. In her thought-provoking study of China in the popular and literary imagination of eighteenth-century England, Chi-ming Yang shows how it is via this ambiguous and ambivalent perception that China participated in the momentous self-refashioning of English material and immaterial culture in the early modern period.

Yang's book begins with three examples: first, the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games, which inspired both awe and controversy in the West with its spectacular juxtaposition of antiquity and modernity; second, a fictional encounter staged more than three hundred years back in time by the French polemical writer François Fénelon between Socrates and Confucius, which defended traditional European ideas of cultural excellence by attacking the high reputation of Chinese civilization propagated by Jesuit missionaries; and third, Daniel Defoe's depiction of an English country estate teetering on collapse under the aggregate weight of its much prized and over-abundantly collected porcelain objects named "china," which served as a warning about the dangerous dependence of Western wealth on importing and imported Eastern goods. The three examples are temporally and geographically disparate, but Yang's choice of them is deliberate. With Defoe, she gives a foretaste of her central concern. With Fénelon, she indicates the larger European context, and with the Beijing Olympics, she draws attention to the uncanny continuity of past and present in relation to the phenomenon that interests her.

After a wide-ranging discussion about the theoretical underpinnings of her project, Yang proceeds, in four chapters, to explore the multifaceted participation of China—or the ambiguously and ambivalently perceived Oriental alterity it embodied—in eighteenth-century English discourse on notions of virtue such as heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism. Anchoring Yang's exposition are four literary texts: Elkanah Settle's The Conquest of China, By the Tartars (1676), the Spectator papers of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the memoirs of a Frenchman who pretended for a number of years in London to be a native of Formosa (1764), and Arthur Murphy's tragedy The Orphan of China (1759). Before concluding her book, Yang returns in the epilogue to reflect on theory and on the persistent ambivalence today in the Western perception of China.

Through her carefully selected instances of China being involved in various contradictory ways in the conceptual and ideological transformation of eighteenth-century English society, Yang proposes a new paradigm of thinking for the study of the often dismissed phenomenon of chinoiserie. Instead of Said's idea of Orientalism, which encapsulates the Western image of the Other in the nineteenth century by ascribing backwardness, sensuality, despotism, effeminacy, and other negative qualities to the Islamic Middle East, Yang contends that there is a need for a different theory of early modern orientalism that "includes the vilification of the idolatrous other, [but] focuses more on the example's function of mediating between contested systems of value" (186). As "a structure of ambivalence resulting from the desire for East Indies markets and the encounter with their superior moral and economic examples" (25), Yang believes, her new theoretical framework "might more reflect globalization's conjunction of political and market forces working across nations through neoliberal rather than colonial or imperial conquest" (187-88).

As part of a notable recent wave of interdisciplinary studies about the involvement of China in the popular culture and literary life of England in the eighteenth century, Yang's book will help to broaden English literary scholarship. Though no longer widely read today, the kind of literary texts Yang discusses were far from...