Introduction: Seeing and Being Seen from Chinese Angles

Abstract

Shaw and his contemporaries have been observed from Chinese angles. Shaw is not considered alone, but as one of the many foreign experts visiting China. Since the early twentieth century, Shaw has been seen from multiple Chinese angles to authenticate cultural movements in China, and to create cultural currency that has widespread cultural, social, and political repercussions. To understand the complex, and very often subtle, mechanisms behind these repercussions, comparisons will be made to the ways in which Shaw’s major contemporaries saw China, and were seen from various Chinese angles, to create desirable images of China. There exists a nebula of forces shaping how the Chinese see and would like to be seen by the world, and how they projected these onto literary works.