“While it once considered itself to be the center of the world, now China is making itself into the center that actually contains the world” (p. 1). This sentence in the introduction to Bianca Bosker's Original Copies briefly raises the fear that the book will fall in with the predilection for “China bashing” that is all too common in Western media, politics, and everyday conversation when the discussion turns to fake designer goods, pirated DVDs, or infringement on intellectual property rights. Instead, the book provides a deeply probing and thoroughly researched analysis of such fascinating topics as the status of the copy and the fake, duplication, reproduction, import, and other complex conceptual issues raised by the paradoxical phrase that is the title of the book.

In my graduate seminar on Chinese urbanism and ruralism at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, I have often found it difficult to make students appreciate the culture of the copy. I explain to them that the capitals of successive dynasties were not designed individually through invention, but were given shape by the duplication of a template, allegedly fallen from heaven in remote antiquity and preserved in the Kaogong ji (Record of inspecting public works) of the Spring and Autumn period. I point out that the word “architect” did not exist in China until the 1920s, when people such as the great Liang Sicheng made their way to the University of Pennsylvania to get degrees in architecture and urban planning, and that before that time there were only master builders who followed pattern books to make buildings. Even imperial architecture involved duplication and import, such as the replicas of Mongolian nomadic tents built in the grounds of Khubilai Khan's palace city. I try, with questionable success, to discuss the compelling, eye-opening notion that Buddhist scriptures gain in value and power every time they are copied or recited. I mention that I buy authentic antique furniture in China in part because it is much more affordable than the exquisitely made replicas. But in these fumbling attempts to explain deeply rooted philosophical assumptions about the status of the copy in China, I have always lacked a solid, comprehensive text that might assist students in grasping these ideas. I am overwhelmingly pleased to say that, with Bosker's Original Copies, I—or we—have that text.

In addition to providing fundamental explanations of the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of the culture of the copy in China, Bosker offers a powerful description of the historical and contemporary predilection for the “imitative appropriation of the alien” (p. 4) and discusses the sources of the idea that “strength and power [are] earned by replicating the alien” (p. 32). She writes that “the ability to assemble the alien and arrange the world according to his own will legitimizes the ruler, who is so powerful he can ‘move mountains’ (or houses or landmarks, as the case may be in the present day), and alter the order of the cosmos as he sees fit” (p. 32). Bosker persuasively argues that the reproduction of the alien in the Chinese context is related not only to desire, but also to power.

In her discussion of themed living communities, the central subject matter of her book, Bosker offers a fascinating, in-depth look into new Chinese lifestyles, new notions of self and identity, and unprecedented forms of real estate development. Original photographs effectively illustrate and develop the ideas discussed in the text. Her extensive interviews with residents and developers of these new communities, as well as her photographs, demonstrate the extent of first-hand research Bosker has undertaken in preparation for the book.

Jia Zhangke set his film The World (Shijie, 2005) in a theme park that allows the visiting “archi-tourist” to see the world without leaving Beijing. The themed communities studied by Bosker allow residents of China's cities not only to roam foreign-built environments, such as Thames Town, Venice Water Town, New Amsterdam, or Orange County, but to live inside of them and to experience them as a resident. The environments chosen for replication are those that “over the centuries have evolved an instantly readable, tourist-destination identity. . . . Many of these enclaves are not generic suburban tract homes but ‘slices of an alien world’ that reproduce the distinctive features of the original travel destination experience” (p. 109). According to Bosker, these communities have become prevalent and successful because they satisfy the desire of China's nouveaux riches “for an escape from the restrictions of a China walled in by centuries of subsistence economy, the iron rice bowl, and Maoist isolationism” (p. 109).

Even readers who have little interest in the themed living environments that Bosker studies—or even in architecture or urbanism at all—may find themselves engrossed by her renewed engagement with the culture of the copy and the notion of the simulacrum, notably in chapter 2, “The Fascination with Faux: Philosophical and Theoretical Drivers of Architectural Reproduction in China.” This renewed engagement with reproduction and the simulacrum not only extends the body of pertinent Western literature by critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, and Fredric Jameson, but it also significantly broadens, updates, and globalizes our understanding of these subjects.