Laikwan Pang's The Art of Cloning brings new interdisciplinary analysis to a popular and scholarly topic: the art of China's Communist revolution and particularly the creative products of the Cultural Revolution era (1966–1976). It confronts the numerous contradictions of the ten years of turmoil – individual vs. collective, uniformity vs. diversity, and freedom vs. constraint – by offering the metaphor of mimesis, which “brings the cultural, the social, and the political together in the Cultural Revolution context” (p. 13). By emphasizing a dialectic between the model and the copy – two central forms in political culture – Pang demonstrates how art and reality enlivened each other.

The Art of Cloning is divided into two parts: “Arts, politics, and economics” and “A culture of models and copies.” The first of two chapters in the former examines the role of aesthetics, coining the term “Maoist romanticism” to describe the synthesis of realism and romanticism. The second chapter contextualizes the economy of cultural production through the example of literature; it also suggests that the cultural commodity was able “to both carry the vertical revolutionary demand and facilitate horizontal community formation” (p. 74). Part two turns to case studies of mimesis in the Mao era: the culture of the model and the copy (chapter three), the barefoot doctor as a study of gender (chapter four), Cantonese revolutionary opera (chapter five), ballet and its visual and material reproductions (chapter six), and Mao and the intellectual as a sublime model and an abhorred enemy (chapters seven and eight). Throughout, Pang's work is richly sourced, including theory, history, art, literature and film. It is brought to life with grassroots material, including diaries, interviews and memoirs. The Art of Cloning will be useful to advanced students and scholars in and beyond the Chinese studies field, and particularly of interest to those working on comparative revolution, cultural production and propaganda.

Two of the innovations of the book deserve highlighting. Firstly, though many have written on the model in Maoist China, Pang's differentiation between the “model” (mofan) as a real individual and a “model” (yangban) as a fictional representation is illuminating and thought-provoking. Others gloss “model” with mofan and yangban together, but tracing them to their origins in life and in art supports the dialectic that underscores Pang's argument, leading us also to rethink the model operas (yangbanxi), the attainability of models, and the ways in which the revolutionary subject was formed (p. 94). A second major contribution is Pang's discussion of revolutionary regional operas, specifically Cantonese opera. Though the study of the locally created Storm in the Countryside (Shanxiang fengyun lu), its banning in 1967, and later attempts to transplant the official model works, Pang's examination – grounded in revealing linguistic analysis (p. 146) and interviews with original directors, composers and musicians – demonstrates the importance of studying the Cultural Revolution in localities. Furthermore, by juxtaposing Cantonese opera in Guangzhou with its counterpart in Hong Kong, Pang sheds new light on the meaning of tradition and modernity in art and music.

The Art of Cloning crosses multiple disciplines, and readers will be drawn to the vividness of empirical detail, which ranges from the local Cantonese example to new information about Japanese and Albanian influences on the introduction of ballet. The use of theory in the book, while making some examples more explicable to those outside the China field, is sometimes heavy – not only used to support the argument, but as part of the argument, like chapter seven, “Mao as Doxa” (pp. 199–209). But here the use of Chinese terms might be equally helpful, as in Daniel Leese's Mao Cult (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and its analysis of the “cult of the individual” (geren chongbai vs. geren mixin). Indeed, some of the book's best takeaways come with Pang's glossing of Chinese words we often take for granted: wendou vs. wudou for “verbal battles vs. fought battles” (p. 5), yiyuanhua for “integration” (p. 9), yangban and mofan (pp. 84 and 91), and the very meaning of culture, or wenhua, itself (p. 16).

Pang asserts that her work “adopts a more unstable dialectical approach,” in contrast to new books that focus on “history” (p. 21). However, recent research in history and sociology would complicate her cases. For example, the practice of yikusitian was not always received in the way it was intended; real-life mofan benefitted from extra resources that made their achievements as unattainable as fictional yangban; and the category for intellectual (zhishifenzi), as Eddy U has shown, was itself a creation of the Mao era. An additional note on history: while the chapter on the model distinguished between innovation in 1966-68 and reassertion of state control from 1969, Pang does not periodize this way throughout; phases of the Mao cult are not differentiated and the whole of 1965–1979 is termed “extremely volatile” (p. 38). Culture and history should still be read together, in the spirit of the dialectic that the book proposes.