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To early modern Europe, China emerged as an exemplary and controversial model of empire, by turns enlightened and despotic. Representations of virtue in British cultural production were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies and by a new environment that combined consumerism with didacticism. In such a climate, the public reception of China and places associated with China enabled the process of imagining and consolidating a number of ideas of virtue in literature, theater, and material culture. China’s empire, more than any other, appeared to superimpose conflicting systems of value, moral and monetary, with radical consequences for English traditions of honor, patriotism, piety, sentimentality, and temperance.1 As the increasing commercialization of British life upended traditional ideals of the private and public spheres, these contestations in notable instances coalesced with controversial and contradictory attitudes toward Chinese culture and commodities. How did the presence of the foreign “good” help to resolve moral crises and to articulate key forms of virtue whose efficacy and meanings were highly disputed in the changing economic milieu? As modern values were reconceptualized for a new era of overseas commerce , ideas of “China” exemplified fundamental contradictions of British consumer society by testing the changing boundaries between virtue and vice. A crucial vector linking virtue to vice was the fascination with spectacle: indeed , the sheer scope of Chinese civilization has continued to enthrall and unsettle Western audiences, and performance is a principal site of this persistent ambivalence. To illustrate the phenomenon of “performing China,” I begin by presenting three quite different instances of Chinese spectacle. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was an unprecedented televised event. Tens of thousands of live performers, including military personnel, helped enact consecutive scenes that showcased Chinese history and culture over the centuries. At one point, the world’s largest LED screen stretched i n t r o d u c t i o n China as Exemplar Eastern Spectacle and Western Discourses of Virtue 2 Performing China across the stadium floor in the shape of an ancient scroll as the choreographed movements of the dancers painted upon it supersized calligraphy and classical landscapes. Prime-time television commentators in the United States repeatedly found the pairing of the “most modern” and “most ancient” technologies a paradox with some cause for concern: it was an evening of extremes “both aweinspiring and perhaps a little intimidating.”2 Other reports deemed such tactical exhibitionism a long-standing rather than novel occurrence. According to one British article, “From the nation which brought you the 8,000 buried terracotta warriors of Xian in 210 BC and the 7,500-mile Long March in 1934, you would anticipate nothing less than a spectacle.”3 Indeed, the increased frequency of China’s state-sponsored displays of military and economic might in the few short years since the Beijing Olympics has made a familiar media event of enumerating the nation’s monumentality.4 In attempting to capture the sheer scale of these performances, the rhetoric of numerical hyperbole (“8,000” warriors, “7,500” miles) links in one transhistorical sweep an ancient with a modern theater of war. Taken together, the media commentaries suggest a temporal contradiction at the heart of the spectacle: China exhibits at once a progressive coming of age, a cycle of empire reincarnated (“you would anticipate nothing less”), and a marvelous coincidence of being always ancient yet hypermodern. The second instance of Eastern spectacle is found in a textual scene rather than a live event. The Western media’s discernible ambivalence over the 2008 Olympics ceremony is far from novel, and in fact reiterates a much earlier, protocapitalist moment when the vision of China’s epic history also held a special relevance to the changing global order. Evidence of this particular fascination with Chinese antiquity can be found, for example, in the Dialogues des Morts by the seventeenth-century polemicist François Fénelon, in which the author includes a staged confrontation between Socrates and Confucius. As the Greek sage observes, “Your nation appears to me to be a grand and beautiful spectacle from afar, but a highly dubious and equivocal one.”5 Indeed, what begins as a discussion of philosophical and pedagogical differences quickly turns into a diatribe against the reputed merits of Chinese civilization. When Confucius defends the singularity of his country’s manners, governance, and achievements in the arts and sciences, Socrates points to similar accomplishments by the Greeks, and he further claims that much of the ingenuity...

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