In the preface by the editor, the scope of cultural China is specified as Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, and various Chinese diasporas including Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe. Wu proposes researching cultural China as discourse from cross-disciplinary and multicultural perspectives—a glocalization perspective. Wu embraces the diverse points of views of the papers, and tries to apply two notions—discursive appropriation and discursive reinvention—to the chapters. The volume contains twelve chapters divided into three parts on the basis of different research foci.

Part 1 includes four chapters concerned with conflict, or crisis management and discourse struggle in cultural China. In Ch. 1, “Official discourse of a ‘well-off society’: Constructing an economic state and political legitimacy,” Bei Cai reports on an investigation of the official discourse of “xiaokang society” (well-off society), an aim set by the Chinese government to be achieved by the year 2020. He views xiaokang discourse as a rhetorical construct, taken by the Communist Party of China to resolve tension and recreate the political legitimacy. What is implied here is the author's criticism of the Chinese political system.

In Ch. 2, “Dances with discursive ghosts: Ideology of the body in contemporary Chinese cinema from Unrequited Love to Big Shot's Funeral,” Shihui Mao chooses six Chinese films produced from 1980 to 2001 as texts for analysis. The author examines different strategies adopted by the films' directors to construct their individual cinematic narratives and the meaning of the body under various constraining ideologies—the ghosts—and confirms their significance in creating “cultural plurality and political tolerance” (48). In Ch. 3, “A woman warrior or a forgotten concubine? Verbal construction of a feminist politician in Taiwan,” Sai-hua Kuo analyzes the conflict management and verbal construction of Lu Hsiu-lien, the first female vice president of Taiwan and concludes that, “although the roles and status of women in Taiwan have been significantly transformed in the modernization process, the symbolic aspects of the traditional gender system in modern Taiwan are still robust” (4).

In Ch. 4, “The SARS case report as a genre: How it figures in anti-SARS social practice,” Hailong Tian tries to “highlight the indispensable role the case report played in the governmental management of the SARS crisis” (71). Using a good combination of the systemic functional-linguistics theory, Tian explores the generic stages of the SARS report and compares such reports with those published in Canadian newspapers.

Part 2 includes five chapters dealing with the hybridization and diversity of cultural China discourses. In Ch. 5, “Patterns of global-local fusion in Chinese Internet advertising,” Doreen D. Wu explores the strategies of using language and visual appeals in Chinese Internet advertising by collecting 110 automobile banner advertisements as samples of study from three major Chinese websites. The research finds that there is a “weak globalization but strong localization” pattern in those advertisements, which the author thinks is a fine example of discourse reinvention in the process of glocalization. In Ch. 6, “Children's television programs in China: Discourse of success and modernity,” Kara Chan & Fanny Chan study a typical week of children's programs and find that the major themes in these programs include a combination of the traditional glorification of collective success and the modern western values of the legitimization of competition as a means for success, which reflects the hybridized strategies adopted by Chinese government towards the production of children's programs in the process of modernity.

In Ch. 7, “Confucianism and utilitarianism in Jiang-Clinton rhetoric,” D. Ray Heisey examines selected public rhetorical statements by President Jiang and President Clinton in the course of their 1997–1998 summit meetings to show how their statements correspond to the elements of Confucian and Utilitarian cultures, respectively. Heisey made meaningful efforts in marking the steps in the speech when each is trying to adapt to the values of the other. This reveals the nature of such diplomatic communication when leaders make gestures to reach and cross while standing on their firm footing. In Ch. 8, “East is East and West is West? Values and styles of communication in foreign-invested enterprises in China,” Sim Liang investigates cross-cultural interactions in foreign-invested enterprises in China. Liang discovers that Chinese staff still maintain their collectivist tradition and confirms the prevalent views that “significant differences still exist between Chinese and Western communication styles” (159). Despite these differences, the author also discusses the similarities—for example, the values of honesty and equality—shared by the two cultures, and predicts the change that may take place in the traditional values along the way to globalization.

In Ch. 9, “News coverage on Soong Meiling's death across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan,” Changfeng Chen & Jiani Zhang try to explore the similarity and diversity of the media's ideologies and operations in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through an analysis of the coverage of the death of Soong Meiling. Based on the belief that social environment can influence media's ideology, the authors come to the conclusion that the Beijing Youth Daily in Mainland China shows “political prudence” (182), while the United Daily News in Taiwan “displays the feature of freely developed media” and the Mingpao of Hong Kong demonstrates “the ideology of press freedom and market-driven media practice” (183).

Part 3 includes three chapters dealing with the issues of discourse and identity. In Ch. 10, “Discourse and cultural identity: Towards a global identity for Hong Kong,” Anthony Fung discusses the current status and nature of Hong Kong identity based on some interviews with the local people. In arguing that “local people's conception of a strong global capitalist culture is a strong component of Hong Kong identity” (193), the author highlights the opposition between the national values and those of the local, and applauds the incorporation of western/global culture into Hong Kong identity formation as a way of resisting and displacing nationalistic discourse.

In Ch. 11, “Analyzing Chinese identity today: New insights into identity rankings of young adults in urban China,” Shutian Zhang & Steve Kulich relate value study to identity-ranking theory in a questionnaire survey distributed to twenty- to thirty-year-old urban college students and white-collar adults. The finding about the persistence of traditional identities and the rise of modern identities coupled with the prominence of hybrid identities show trends in the cultural formation of the young people. In Ch. 12, “The mediated Chinese individual globality,” Xiaohui Pan conducts a survey in five cities in China with the purpose of investigating the relationship between the mass media and individual globality. The study identifies a causal relationship between electronic media, especially the Internet, and individual globality that contains cultural, political, social, and consumption realms. The findings, as Pan suggests, “bear important implications for the explanation of how audiences are caught up in the interplay between globalization impact and the evolving media system in China” (241).

In the epilogue, Shi-xu comments (with an endorsement) on the perspectives of all of the studies and reaffirms their theoretical importance in dealing with China in a discourse-oriented fashion. He then suggests a new paradigm of Chinese discourse studies (CDS) and proposes six principles in application of such a framework, which embraces a multiculturalist stance and a culturally and globally minded approach in the study of Chinese discourses.

Overall, this volume has stepped beyond the “common but mistaken representationalist view that linguistic communication is a mere vehicle of meaning or information” (244), and has adopted a hybrid way to understand cultural China by exploring the intricate cultural meanings and patterns of the official as well as the individual discourses. The various subjects approached from interdisciplinary perspectives can also bring fresh insights for further studies of cultural China discourses in the globalizing age. In addition, abundant background information about cultural China is interspersed in the chapters to facilitate the understanding of the Western readers who have little or even no knowledge of China. This may make the reading informative as well as thought-provoking. Therefore, the book can be viewed as a timely and welcome initiative for Western academia to get a more holistic view about the contemporary Chinese mind and behavior.

It should be noted, however, that some authors are still constrained by a somewhat ethnocentric mindset, which leads to biased positions in a few chapters, where authors try to elevate Western ideology and depreciate oriental values, or confirm one variation of discourses as represented by Taiwan or Hong Kong and downplay other variations as represented by Mainland China. As to the research methodology, content analysis serves as the predominant approach to speeches, interviews, and news items. While it is a most direct and convenient approach, the acclaimed approach “discourse analysis” can in the future incorporate more sociofriendly linguistic theories as frameworks of analysis.

It seems inevitable that a book like this—when read by people from Mainland China—will be bound to stimulate some complicated feelings due to the different discourses used in different parts of “Greater China.” In this sense, it is invaluable “original data” for future research in this area. With more efforts of the scholars in this promising field, it can be predicated that some more penetrating analysis will emerge in the near future.