Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness (Chinese Worlds)

Mr. Wu the laundryman, the evil Fu Manchu, the sex maniac, the opium addict, the docile immigrant worker: These stereotypes applied to Chinese people stretch back to the Victorian era, yet resurface with regularity in today's media. In China itself the way the Chinese perceive and project themselves and their ethnicity has also evolved over recent years, with discordant and unofficial voices challenging normative ideas of Chinese identity. In order to understand the numerous ways of seeing and being Chinese, Chinas Unlimited analyzes Chinese literary and cultural texts, television soap serials, Asian MTV, as well as popular cultural representations of the Chinese.

"In Lee's book we have wonderfully grounded accounts of how both the Chinese at home and abroad and Westerners sought to represent China since the last century and how conceptions of what it meant to be Chinese--what Lee calls Chineseness--have been installed in contemporary consciousness." -- Harry Harootunian, New York University