Western presence in China continues to distinguish itself as an important topic in the field of China studies. Historians have relied on a rich set of analytical concepts – imperialism, semi-colonialism, Orientalism and colonial modernity – to explore Sino-Western interactions in and outside China. Debates in the field have mainly focused on war, diplomacy, rituals, national identity, state response, cultural modernism, science and technology. Even social histories of everyday life tend to not question the dominant norms of heterosexual privilege. David E. Mungello's latest book, Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz, finally brings our attention to an underexplored yet no less interesting side of Western interest in China: queer sexuality and sensuality.

Drawing on two main types of sources – published works and information provided by acquaintances of seven of the 23 men who form the subjects of this study – Mungello argues that “it was the widely accepted hatred of their same-sex attraction that drove them to flee their homelands and go to China, either physically or intellectually” (p. 137). Mungello's narrative centres on the lives and writings of Joseph Shedel (1856–1943), Ferdinand Karsch-Haack (1853–1936), Edmund Backhouse (1873–1944), Victor Segalen (1878–1919), George Solié de Morant (1879–1955), Harold Witter Bynner (1881–1968), Harold Acton (1904–1994), Vincenz Hundhausen (1878–1955), Rewi Alley (1897–1987), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), David Kidd (1926–1996), George N. Kates (1895–1990), Arthur Waley (1888–1966), Glen William Baxter (1914–1998), Howard Wechsler (1942–1986), Marston Edwin Anderson (1951–1992), W. H. Auden (1907–1973), Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986), Johannes Jacobus Maria De Groot (1854–1921), G. Lowes Dickenson (1862–1932) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). Apart from these modern figures, the author devotes one free-standing chapter to the controversies surrounding the same-sex friendships of the Jesuit missionaries Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) and Matteo Ripa (1682–1746). According to Mungello, these European and American “queers” sought refuge, in physical and intellectual terms, in China (“the Land of Oz”) for a variety of reasons: from avoiding the social ostracism in their own country (chapter one) to being attracted to the boy-actors of Peking opera (chapter two); and from establishing friendships with native Chinese men in late imperial (chapter three) and modern times (chapter four) to treating China as either an object of scholarly pursuit (chapter five) or a source of imagination and creative inspiration (chapter six).

Apart from the fact that all of the names listed above are men, several elements of the book may puzzle a potentially interested reader. Given the limitation of space, this review can only highlight some of the most problematic ones. First, given the political sensitivity and importance of its subject, the book offers a surprisingly impressionistic picture of the historical setting for the development of gender and sexual expressions in both China and Euro-America. Throughout the book, the author claims that homosexuality was relatively tolerated in Chinese society until the ascendancy of the Maoist regime in 1949, when “tolerance gave way to a long homophobic nightmare” (p. 5). This review is not the place for going into detail about the long-standing debates on attitudes toward non-normative genders and sexualities in Chinese history. However, it is worth pointing out that a recent cohort of scholars has offered a much more nuanced account of the historical transformation of the meanings of same-sex desire (both male and female) in modern China: notably, Tze-lan D. Sang's The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Wenqing Kang's Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950 (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), Fran Martin's Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Culture and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2010), Giovanni Vitiello's The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), among others. It is unclear why the author has decided to either leave out most of these sources in his bibliography or, when some of these works are referenced, engage with the richness of their historical details on a minimal basis. One of the central themes to have emerged from this wave of revisionist scholarship is that the intellectual, cultural, social and political trends of the Republican period (1911–1949) cultivated a parallel tendency to both increase the stigmatization of homoeroticism and offer alternative spaces for queer expression. This challenges the author's straightforward interpretation of the year 1949 as a pivotal turning point from tolerance to homophobia in China.

Equally alarming is the absence of in-depth historical contextualization of homosexuality in Europe or America, especially since most of the subjects that form the basis of this study spent most of their life there rather than in China (Hundhausen is a notable exception). In his discussion of David Kidd, for instance, Mungello explains Kidd's escape to China as a result of retreating from the triumphalist culture in America after the Second World War: “Post-World War II American culture was triumphant, hypermasculine, and not very interested in foreign cultures, except to teach them the American way of life and to nurture them as allies in the Cold War” (p. 69). Mungello's characterization of post-war American culture is not entirely incorrect, but the problem emerges from his reliance on this flattened understanding of the period to explain the decision among certain American men, such as Kidd, to turn to China: “Men with same-sex attraction were marginalized in that triumphant culture, and this may explain why some of them swam against the tide by turning to China” (p. 69). One wonders how the classic studies of Alan Bérubé (Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, Free Press, 1990) and John D'Emilio (Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, University of Chicago Press, 1983) fit into the picture. These studies establish the late 1940s and 1950s as an important episode during which the American gay and lesbian movement established its roots and would subsequently emerge in full force in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, the author's tendency to generalize and speculate based on a limited measure of evidence is a problem that plagues the book. The nature of the sources that are available to constitute a solid evidence of queer experience is an understandable problem for historians, and for that, the author is strongest when his claims are substantiated by a wealthier source base in the last two chapters of the book. A quick example will suffice to demonstrate the weakness of the typical ground on which Mungello speculates the queerness of his subjects: with respect to Arthur Waley's sexuality, Mungello remarks that “[t]he second woman in Waley's life involved an equally bizarre relationship which overlapped with the first relationship by thirty-three years. In fact, both relationships were variations on Waley's pattern of seeking female companionship rather than romance. Together they support the conjecture that Waley was a latent homosexual” (p. 82). The logic behind this conjecture remains utterly opaque to this reviewer. Perhaps a finer theoretical distinction between homosociality and homosexuality would help rectify the problem of empirical evidence. Here, as is the case for the study of Jesuits' same-sex friendships, the literature on homoromance without a gay identity by such historians as George Chauncey, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Anthony Rotundo might be a useful model.