Chinas Unlimited - 9780824826802

Mr. Wu the laundryman, the evil Fu Manchu, the sex maniac, the opium addict, the docile immigrant. These stereotypes applied to Chinese people stretch back to the Victorian era, yet resurface with regularity in today's British newspapers and other media. In recent years, headlines have located and exaggerated Chinese origins for many of the ills of our globalized society: influenza viruses, stock market downturns, and most recently foot and mouth disease have all been attributed with reckless alacrity to 'the Chinese'. In the expression 'Asian contagion', economic depression is now linked to the old suspicion of foreigners importing and spreading disease. Behind such facile cliches lurks the spectre of racist-inspired suspicion and fear of the stranger, which has marked the way white people have perceived and represented the Chinese since the nineteenth century.
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 multiple ways of seeing and being Chinese, Chinas Unlimited analyses Chinese literary and cultural texts, such as the writer Duoduo's story 'Going Home', television soap serials and Asian MTV, as well as popular cultural representations of the Chinese including the songs of George Formby and the British pantomime. Recent Internet representations of China and Chineseness are also examined.