From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film by Naomi Greene (review)

From the worldwide popular figures of Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Kung Fu Panda, and Mulan to famed film classics such as Broken Blossoms, The Good Earth, Shanghai Express, The Manchurian Candidate, and Kundun, Naomi Greene’s From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film is a thorough and brilliant study that pivots toward one central question: how has China been perceived and portrayed in American films from the silent era to this day? The author, thereby, navigates a wide range of significant symptomatic works, figures, and moments involved in the formation of Hollywood’s view of China and treats the subject carefully with academic rigor, keenness, and compassion.

Recent years have seen an expanding scholarship that facilitates and furthers our understanding of the images of China populating America (and other nations), bourgeoning and propelled by ever-important Sino-American relations, massive migration, and global interactions. Greene demonstrates remarkable erudition and familiarity with her case studies, primary sources, and critical readings in the field such as Edward W. Said’s foundational work Orientalism (1979) and Gina Marchetti’s Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993). This monograph nonetheless stands out as a truly comprehensive, in-depth inquiry into the intersections of film and history, China and the West, one that, as Greene posits in the opening remark, “explores the historical arc of American film representations of China from the point of view of the tensions between the self and the other, or broader still, those between America and China” (p. 16). From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda is thus informed by a fundamentally historiographical framework, that is, how to read and write about American film history from the vantage point of its varied portrayals and interactions with the racial and national other. How did Hollywood’s perceptions and attitudes toward China and the Chinese, moreover, reveal about the American innermost self? Finally, how were such images shaped by, and in turn how did they shape, the broader social, political, and historical landscape in which they were made? Greene explores these issues from a historical angle with which she is most adept; prior to this piece, she has published a series of essential works on European film and history.¹ This latest project further proves Greene as a veteran film historian and an excellent comparatist who alternates and brings together the East and West, and traces the trajectory of Hollywood’s representation of China with great ease and compelling detail.

The book comprises six chapters ordered in chronological fashion. In my opinion, it is a fruitful film archaeology project that excavates and chronicles American cinematic appropriation of China corresponding to the shifting social, political, and cultural impulses across different eras. In the first chapter, Greene introduces and maps out the very important role China has played in American history as well as in Hollywood film. The convoluted, century-long relationship is often characterized and complicated by a rather mixed and conflicting sense of fear and fascination. Greene, then, conceptualizes this bifurcated vision of the Chinese otherness as “the pendulum,” which “swing[s] from intensely positive images of China to those that are relentlessly negative” (p. 3). Thus the main thesis of the book can be easily discerned as Greene has clearly pronounced: “like historical documents, films mirror the dramatic shifts of the pendulum, the opposing constellations of images, that have marked the United States’ relationship to China” (p. 10). By innovatively invoking the pendulum trope, the monograph brings vividly to life the vital, unique ways in which China has occupied the American mind-set. The remainder of the book is, in one way or another, devoted to attesting and elaborating the viability of this metaphor in Hollywood production. However, upon closer...