Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: The work is a fascinating studying of how one culture misunderstands and bends another's reality to its own dreams, fantasies, etc. Compare to 'Prisoners of Shangrila'. Now if somebody could write a study of China's awesome misunderstanding of the West, we'd be on to some communication. Note: For reviewer Zhu Yuan Zhang, the reason /Chan/ appears in the title of the book is that that is the old transliteration of the Mongol /Qan/ (< [Turkic] Qaghan) or 'Emperor'. Chinggis Khan, Qinghis Qan, etc. It was the Mongol Empire which first smashed both China and Kievan Rus' to create a Eurasian empire. You can figure out the rest.
Rating: 
Summary: Book provides much needed historical perspective
Review: This book shows us that for hundreds of years, Western attitudes about China have ranged everywhere from awe, to disgust and commercial exploitation.This book helped me put present day news reports into context, because after all these centuries, the West still views China with a mixture of awe, and disgust, and as a vast area to be commercially exploited. If you are interested in how the West views China, this is a well-written book that is quick to read. The author is objective and open-minded about this very sensitive subject.
Rating:
Summary: A curious fish
Review: ~
This is an odd book, one of those curious fish that escape the nets of genre. Is is history? Sort of. Literary Criticism? Perhaps. Cultural anthropology? In a way. It's well worth reading, but it's not an entirely successful book. In a way Spence's great virtue is his downfall here. He's too generous and open a reader, too ready to take the Western traders, soldiers, missionaries, and men of letters on their own terms. He'll follow them anywhere -- and the result is a rather unfocused phantasmagoria, a bewildering palimpsest of Chinas. One of Spence's main points is that the Chinas in Western minds have no necessary connection to each other, or to the "real" China -- and it's a point well-taken -- but the result is a diffuse and slightly out-of-focus book. It's history in the strict sense, when it intriguingly evaluates Marco Polo's credibility. It's history in the 19th Century vein (that's praise, in my book) when it presents the tragedy of an isolated missionary's wife betrayed to an unmerited violent death in the Boxer rebellion. It's cultural anthropology when it evaluates Mark Twain's simultaneous racism and anti-racism. It's pure literary criticism as it meditates on Kafka, Malraux, and Borges. It's very good in each mode. But the different modes don't really inform and enrich each other. The book remains a collection of disparate pieces, each very good of its own kind, but it never reaches the higher unity that we look for (maybe unfairly, maybe unwisely) in a cross-disciplinary book. Still it is a great read, and its sheer variety (and the display of Spence's remarkable virtuosity) is entrancing. It may be disorienting, but it's never boring. Anyone whose fate makes them one of that other species of curious fish -- those who swim in between the East and West, being wholly of neither the one nor the other -- will want to read it.
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