East and West: The Cross-Cultural Shaw

China is the most populous country and possesses the world's second largest economy. Since the death of Mao in 1976 its communist government has increasingly embraced economic liberalization, fueling its wealth and increased urbanization. Bernard Shaw visited the country in 1933, and four years later sent a letter to Wang Tjo-ling—a famous stage and film director—saying, "Up, China. Nothing can stop you in the Eastern world. Go ahead with your plays—only don't do mine." Shaw was right about China's imminent ascension, although he probably could not have guessed its extent, nor that it would transcend the East. China, however, did not heed his advice to ignore his plays, and that is the topic, at least in part, of Kay Li's new book, Bernard Shaw's Bridges to Chinese Culture, which is part of Palgrave Macmillan's Shaw and His Contemporaries series, edited by Nelson O'Ceallaigh and Peter Gahan.

The book is divided into two parts, with ten chapters (including the introduction). The perspicacious reader will notice the word "angle" in each of the heading titles: Part 1, "Shaw and His Contemporaries: The Chinese Angle" and Part 2, "The Contemporaries of Shaw's Works: Chinese Angles as Multifocal." The word "angle" points to the central thesis of the book, set forth in chapter 1 (the introduction). The Chinese have a unique way of looking at things—the "Chinese angle"—and so of course Shaw is perceived differently in China than he is in the West. At the same time, Li argues, Shaw's work is endowed with a universality that transcends cultural differences. Shaw has had a profound influence on the Chinese precisely because he is adapted, without sacrificing what is particularly Shavian, to the localities and particularities of the Chinese experience.

Li contrasts Chinese and Western art. Western art employs linear perspective and draws the eye to a vanishing point while Chinese scroll paintings generally extend to ten feet or more, thus "there is no single vantage point from where the entire picture on a scroll can be seen" (6). The book is fundamentally concerned with cross-cultural relations between China and the West, celebrating a multifocal perspective and cultural differences while at the same time appreciating what is universal in the human experience.

In chapter 2, "Seeing China: Shaw and His Contemporaries," we learn of the varying perspectives on China found among Shaw's contemporaries and how Shaw navigated them. For instance, Sidney Webb thought the Chinese "self-indulgent and indolent" (28) while G. Lowes Dickinson used China as a foil to contrast against Western corruption. Li argues that Shaw's most Chinese character—Confucius in Back to Methuselah—was more influenced by sinologist Arthur Waley than by Webb or any other interpreter of his time. The chapter presents fascinating discussion of how Ezra Pound and others appropriated and adapted Chinese poetry and philosophy, thereby deeply influencing modernism.

Chapter 3, "Shaw and the Last Chinese Emperor, Henry Pu-yi Aisin-Gioro," looks at the relationship of Pu-yi and his British tutor Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston in the light of Saint Joan, with the relation of Joan and the Dauphin reversed. Unlike the play, it was the emperor who possessed the Shavian drive toward the superman while the tutor was more timid and old-fashioned. The chapter concludes that while supermen make interesting literary figures, in real life greater compromise is necessary (after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 Pu-yi found himself in a reeducation camp).

The second part of the chapter looks at the radical changes in Chinese theatrical and literary culture that followed the dissolution of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Dickens and Shaw, and Western realism generally, played a significant role shaping the new artistic canon. This topic is continued in chapter 4, "Mrs. Warren's Profession and Transnational Chinese Feminism." Here we learn that "Nora Plays" like A Doll's House and Mrs...