The remarkable degree of convergence of Chinese and Western critical discourses over the last three decades makes us all the more aware of continuing differences in their predominant modes of thought. This complex and fascinating issue is tackled head-on by Gloria Davies in her ambitious work Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry.

As her title indicates, Davies takes “patriotic worrying” or youhuan as the common denominator in contemporary Chinese critical thought. This tendency, she argues, colors Sinophone adaptations of Western theory, which undermine the latter's “preference for decidedly nonessentialist, nonfoundationalist, and nonnationalistic formulations” (p. 29). Instead, Chinese critical inquiry replaces discursive self-reflexivity with linguistic certitude and tends to instrumentalize even the most antipositivist Western theory and enlist it in the teleological project of national and cultural perfection.

Davies begins by outlining the problematic of youhuan, contrasting it with the concerns of self-reflexive Euro-American theory and highlighting its nativist strains and ambivalence about imported ideas. The following chapter analyzes two contemporary Chinese critical debates, the liberals versus the New Leftists and the humanists versus the “postists,” finding a positivist bent even among those who employ postmodernist vocabularies. The third chapter divides Sinophone critical inquiry into three “discursive realms” (yujing)—thought (sixiang), scholarship (xueshu), and party theory (dangde sixiang lilun)—and further explores how Western theory is instrumentalized and made to serve the imperative of empowering a reified China, though the latter goal may be defined in quite divergent ways. The penultimate chapter critiques the lingering legacy of dialectical materialism in Chinese discourse, finding that intellectuals of all stripes tend to replicate the scientist rhetoric of the party and its tendency to define a “correct” line of thinking and “conceive of Chinese thought as a process of dialectical progression … toward the telos of a perfected knowledge system,” even when rejecting the particular formulas of the party (p. 148). The final chapter outlines a Chinese “poetics of inquiry” in which intellectuals are guided by moral emotions and a long-standing legacy of self-cultivation that takes intellectual inquiry as a spiritual force with which to guide the people. A rhetorical “zest” (quwei)—including elements of irony, humor, and satire—is called “crucial to the ongoing renewal of the Chinese language” (p. 219) because of its deconstructive potential.

The various strands of Chinese critical discourse addressed by Davies will be familiar to Anglophone scholars of contemporary China, but never before have they—and their differences with Western critical thought—been so systematically elaborated, making this book a groundbreaking contribution not just to Chinese cultural studies, but also to comparative global theory in general. Still, the project shows the limitations of its own “discursive realm” and thus invites further scholarship in this area.

One limitation comes from the way in which “critical inquiry” is framed. While ranging over a broad array of Chinese critical practices, the comparatively autonomous self-reflexivity of Western criticism tends to be represented by a narrowly defined lineage: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and, especially, Derrida; for Davies, Euro-American “theory” is best exemplified by poststructuralism (pp. 106–7). Davies insists that Derrida is cited not as representative but “for contrastive effect, as an example of a highly self-reflexive style whose influence remains negligible in Sinophone critical discourse” (p. 21), but the effect often still boils down to the implicit lesson that Chinese criticism is insufficiently deconstructive.

Alternative lineages of Western theory, such as Frankfurt School critical theory, could of course be considered representative as well, but that school is marred by its association with Marxism, which is “clearly what China does not need” (p. 176)—this despite lengthy engagement with the arguments of China's New Left. Indeed, Davies finds that the teleology of Hegelian or dialectical thinking corrupts modes of Chinese critical inquiry, ranging from official party theory to the New Left to even neo-Confucianists and making it a main barrier to the kind of self-reflexivity valued in Western poststructuralism.

This exercise in comparative theory occasionally implies its own teleology, however, in which China inevitably comes up short in a game of catch-up with the more advanced West. For instance, if we distinguish “between a contemporary (postmodern) idiom of self-reflexive theorizing … and an older idiom of [dialectical] political critique” (p. 174), do we not then imply a teleology in which Chinese thinkers need to drop the “older” way of thinking in favor of our more “contemporary” way? In another passage, Rorty's account of positivist “reason” as a ladder that can be thrown down after democracies are constructed, contrasted with Chinese intellectuals' necessity of “constructing the democracy they have yet to enjoy” also implies a unilinear development model (p. 202).

Such distinctions, of course, indicate historical differences in geopolitical power, and the sort of “productive conversations” (p. 241) that Davies hopes to promote promise to become ever more lively as China occupies an increasingly central role in the global political and cultural economy.