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  • Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China by Zhijian Tao
  • Joe Sample (bio)
Zhijian Tao. Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China. Berlin: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. 233 pp. Paperback $73.95, isbn 978-3-03911-812-0.

The frontispiece in Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China illustrates a critical conundrum that is very much a part of all efforts to understand and represent other peoples from other places. The frontispiece shows a Chinese long (龍) in front of a mirror. The image reflected in the mirror, however, looks nothing like the 龍 and, in fact, it is a mean-spirited caricature of a 龍 that originally appeared in an issue of Punch in 1860. According to Tao Zhijian, the dragon in the mirror is representative of “the popular Victorian conception of China and the Chinese: slant-eyed, pigtailed, malicious, cowardly” (p. 184). The frontispiece embodies a complex cross-cultural problem: a 龍 is not a dragon but without a sustained cross-cultural dialogue, which Tao calls for in the conclusion, the 龍 and the dragon will continue to be viewed as one and the same. And if that is the case, then the “dragonization of China” (pp. 21, 213) in the West is bound to continue.

The arguments found in Drawing the Dragon are not flawed but the depth of the problem inherent in “drawing the dragon,” or depicting Chinese social and cultural institutions responsibly, is also not quite realized. Tao looks at English-language texts in which Western writers, including Leibniz, Hegel, Goldsmith, Coleridge, and De Quincey, among others, made an effort to interpret things Chinese, or they employed the idea of China for their own rhetorical purposes. “China,” in these latter instances, typically serves only as a mirror or a backdrop [End Page 126] for the writer to address concerns much closer to home. Tao looks at the works through a lens of Orientalism, and, in doing so, he repeatedly, though not systematically, shows that there are indeed familiar colonizing schemes and tropes in Western representations of China and the Chinese. Dennis Porter’s essay “Orientalism and Its Problems” (1993) served as the ideological exigence for writing Drawing the Dragon: that is, according to Tao, Porter proposes examining the “feasibility of a textual dialogue between Western and non-Western cultures” (p. 26) as a means to come up with alternative critical paradigms to the ones offered by Edward Said in Orientalism. Tao sees his work as starting that dialogue, but he takes a rather aggressive stance in defense of Said and uses Porter as something of a rhetorical straw man in the process.

Drawing the Dragon might be seen as trying to wedge its way into conversations found in works such as Harold Isaacs’s Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (1958), Raymond Dawson’s The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), Jonathon Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (1998), and David Porter’s Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (2001). But Drawing the Dragon will not achieve the permanence of these other studies. For one, Tao conflates the informal and rhetorical use of the idea of China and the formal or professional academic study of China. The process of cultural translation is deemed “a disastrous one” (p. 20). In addition, the chapters have a cobbled-together feel and the larger argument in the introduction and conclusion does not emerge or carry through well in the individual chapters. Tao limits his study to “influential thinkers and men of letters,” and he focuses on individuals “from the eighteenth century to the Opium Wars,” justifying the inclusion of Mandeville and Derrida as a “historical lead” and an intellectual and historical “prospect” (p. 52), respectively. The lack of a strong conceptual framework is evidenced in the stumbling justification that “an exhaustive treatment” of the subject would require “the examination of an indefinite amount of texts” (p. 51). If there is an indefinite number of potential texts one will never be able to produce an exhaustive study.

Tao approaches the subject of each chapter from a sociohistorical perspective, and the individuals under investigation are...

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