Chi-ming Yang's Performing China describes the shifting and contested notions of virtue attached to English understandings of China between the Restoration and the Seven Years' War. One of its great merits is to distinguish between different conceptions of virtue—heroic, sincere, pious, moderate, sensible, patriotic—and examine how in the English literature of the period China became a key exemplar for “importing” and reworking these concepts. The book is organized around the twinned theoretical frameworks of performance and spectacle, an astute choice for the age of Handel and fireworks. The chapters each focus on a particular example of performance—Elkanah Settle's Conquest of China (1676), George Psalmanazar's Description of Formosa (1704) and his other works and antics in the early eighteenth century, the genre of Oriental tales, and Arthur Murphy's The Orphan of China (1759). Much of the content is familiar ground and the coverage is admittedly not comprehensive, but Yang's observations are smart and fresh. Indeed, one senses a turning point in the field as concepts like mediation, conversion, exemplariness, and translation increasingly replace the old saws of Orientalist “discourse” pioneered over thirty years ago by Edward Said.

For example, in the interesting second chapter, the Formosan imposter Psalmanazar is strikingly analyzed as an experimental performer on East–West conversion, even going so far as to having him “deconstruct” its possibility. Yang uses this well-chosen example to add complexity to David Porter's model of a shift from the scholarly to the aesthetic. There are limits here, however. I would have liked to come away with a clearer understanding of why in the 1670s and 1680s Londoners from Boyle to Pepys had actual Ming loyalist “Formosan” printed calendars in their library courtesy of the East India Company and Zheng Jing (Shen Fuzong actually translated one), and then how a generation later Psalmanazar could invent a Formosan language and get all of fashionable London to suspend disbelief. Articulating this in relation to the Qing invasion of Taiwan in 1683 would also help, given the themes of chapter 1. Conversely, on the eighteenth-century side, the newly explicit dimension of virtuality and play in all this seems to have been most apparent to Jonathan Swift, who, as Robert Markley has suggested, should be a core part of the story and who thanks to Bishop Berkley had rather complex ideas about the nature of perception.

Despite their novel application in relation to the subject matter, the book's structuring concepts come off a bit ready-made. More attention to the complexity of fashion systems at key moments would be helpful, like the rather amazing portrait of Mary Ann Yates as Mandane in The Orphan of China reproduced in color on the dust jacket and discussed in chapter 4. Performance too often merely means “constructed,” while spectacle seems rather simplistically equated with the capitalist imaginary. An appraisal of Guy Debord's theory of spectacle and the Maoism of the soixante-huitards should probably have made an appearance next to the Beijing Olympics in the preface along with a reference to Eric Hayot's study of Tel Quel. This could help clear up the recurring slippage inherited from Said's original focus on the nineteenth century between theories of capitalist mediation and more psychological or discursive gestures toward Orientalist “imagined spectacle.” More current theoretical concepts like “self-orientializing” need more attention, as do critiques of contemporary artistic impresarios like Zhang Yimou, who has more sophisticated ideas about orientalism, globalization, and spectacle than Yang credits to him.

Yang vacillates on whether she wants to argue that eighteenth-century spectacle was a joint venture (“transcultural production of knowledge,” 196) or more of an “imaginative slate” (31). At times, when writing about “the commercialization of Eastern idolatry as bourgeois spectacle” (144), the bourgeois seems to merely refer to the English. Some of this persistent Eurocentrism comes out of the question of how strongly she wishes to tie her analysis to J. G. A. Pocock's investigations of virtue alluded to in the subtitle. Even Pocock's work (including the voluminous assessment of Gibbon) could have been used to more effectively contrast the precommercial values of civic humanism with the new values of the global eighteenth century. Closer attention to the Dutch writer Johan Nieuhoff, whom Yang writes interestingly about in terms of “heathen” self-torture, as well as some mention of the remarkable story of Sir Hans Sloane publishing Engelbert Kaempher's manuscripts on Japan would have shown that the English understood China and Japan as having dynamic urban and commercial societies before Adam Smith and Hegel described them as relatively immobile.

Consulting some Chinese and Japanese sources or greater use of secondary sources would also enhance this more global picture. Edward Said emphasized contrapuntal readings when trying to unravel Orientalist discourse. When writing about the Orphan of China, it helps to read and make reference to Ji Junxiang's play Orphan of Zhou (remade in 2010 as a film by Chen Kaige). This reader wants to think comparatively about plays like Kong Shangren's Taohua shan (1699) or Chikamatsu's Coxinga (1715) when considering Settle performing the Ming-Qing transition. Cao Xueqin's famous dictum that “real becomes not-real when the unreal's real” belongs in discussions of eighteenth-century spectacle as does his novel. Yang cites Laura Hostetler's work on the Qing but does not seem to have absorbed the comparative dimensions between French, Russian, and Qing absolutist, imperial/colonial, and especially ethnographic projects. A similar point could be raised about Yang's use of Kenneth Pomeranz on luxury. Still, one imagines that those in Qing China or Tokugawa Japan who understood the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a kind of meng (dream) or “floating world” composed of commodity spectacles, novelistic reflection, and theatrical performances would think Yang has shown a productive conceptual direction for new scholarship on English writers in this period to take. For raising these important and clearly relevant and persistent issues, she deserves a wide readership.