Tianzhang Yuanyue: Western Research on the Image of China (Volumes 1 and 2)

Author: Zhou Ning
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Features: This book studies the Western image of China in the general social imagination, constructing three types of utopianized Chinese images before the Enlightenment and three types of systematically ideologicalized Chinese images thereafter in the history of Chinese images spanning over seven centuries. It not only analyzes the meaning process of the formation and evolution of the Western image of China, revealing the universal, stable, and continuous cultural patterns that tend towards types or archetypes; but more importantly, it studies the image of China within the structure of Western modern spirit, exploring how the image of China, as the "other" of the Western modern self, participates in constructing the experience of Western modernity, and explaining the underlying motivations and intentional structures of the formation of the image of China.