1. Since Edward Said published his influential Orientalism in 1978Google Scholar, there have been a number of excellent studies of the “feminization” of indigenous men in the colonies. See for example Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Maculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).Google Scholar On China, however, there is none.

2. She, Lao, “Er Ma” (“The Two Mas”), in Ji, Shu and Yi, Shu (eds.), Lao She xiaoshuo quanji (Complete Stories by Lao She), Vol. 2 (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1993), pp. 1–250.Google Scholar Unless otherwise stated, I will use the English translation by Huang, Kenny K. and Finkelstein, David, The Two Mas (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1984).Google Scholar I will cite it as “Huang translation” henceforth.

3. Hu Shi made this call in 1929. For a discussion of this and the controversy which surrounded it, see his 1935 essay “Chongfen shijiehua yu quanpan xihua” (“Total globalization and wholesale Westernization”), Hu Shi wencun (Collected Works of Hu Shi), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Taipei: Yuandong tushu, 1971), pp. 541–44.Google Scholar

4. Since 1938 renamed School of Oriental and African Studies.

5. In fact, after his return from Europe and Singapore, Lao She did not go back to live in Beijing until the People's Republic was established. Many of his short stories in this period do have non-Beijing settings. See discussion in Wang, David, “Lao She's wartime fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1989), pp. 197–218.Google Scholar

6. Yongyi, Song, Lao She yu Zhongguo wenhua guannian (Lao She and Chinese Culture),(Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1988), p. 20.Google Scholar

7. Kiernan, V. G., The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 164.Google Scholar

8. May, J. P., “The Chinese in Britain, 1860–1914,” in Holmes, Colin (ed.). Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), p. 113.Google Scholar

9. Burke, Thomas, “The Chink and the child,” in Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (London: Grant Richards Limited, 1920 reprint).Google Scholar The book was extremely popular, having by 1920 reached its seventh reprint since it was first published in 1916.

10. Bickers, Robert, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949 (ManchesterManchester University Press, 1999), p. 44.Google Scholar

11. Ibid. Bickers gives an excellent summary and analysis of the significant works which shaped British ideas of the Chinese in chapter 4 of his book, pp. 22–66.

12. Quote in ibid. p. 43.

13. The literature on Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu is immense. As well as films and stories inspired by this image, there are literally thousands of items such as restaurants, toys and games with this name. There are also numerous web-sites devoted to this icon. One of the best is probably “The page of Fu Manchu” (http://www.njin.net/~knapp/NewsOfFu.htm).

14. Bickers, , Britain in China, p. 23.Google Scholar

15. Chun, Ma Liang et al. (eds.), Zhongguo wenxue dacidian (Dictionary of Chinese Literature), Vol. 2 (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1991), p. 44.Google Scholar

16. For example, Fitzgerald, John, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) p. 126.Google Scholar

17. Hsia, C. T., A History of Modern Chinese Fiction: 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 171–72.Google Scholar

18. Mingguang, Li, “Chen Daoming shuo ‘Er Ma’”Google Scholar (“Chen Daoming on the Two Mas”), Renmin ribao (People's Daily), 23 02 1999.Google Scholar

19. Yu, Ouyang, Moon Over Melbourne: Poems (Upper Ferntree Gull: Papyrus Publishing, 1997), p. 16.Google Scholar

20. See discussion in Hodge, Bob and Louie, Kam, The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 143–172.Google Scholar

21. A more detailed exposition of this concept can be found in Louie, Kam and Edwards, Louise, “Chinese masculinity: theorizing wen and wu” East Asian History, No. 8 (1994) pp. 135–148.Google Scholar

22. Such ethnocentric classifications of the world are not limited to the Chinese, but for our purposes, they are important for understanding the application of wen-wu in racial terms.

23. Lun Yu, XIX:22.Google Scholar This translation is by Lau, D. C., Confucius: The Analects (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 156.Google Scholar

24. The Chinese is “Wen wang yi wen zhi, Wu wang yi wu gong,” cited in Gujin Hanyu chengyu cidian (Dictionary of Classical and Modern Chinese Idioms) (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986), p. 176.Google Scholar

25. See discussion in Louie, Kam, “The macho eunuch: the politics of masculinity in Jia Pingwa's ‘Human Extremities’,” Modern China, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 163–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Lun Yu, XIX: 13.Google Scholar D. C. Lau translates this as “when a student finds that he can more than cope with his studies, then he takes office,” p. 155.Google Scholar

27. See discussion of this principle in Brownell, Susan, Training the Body for China (Chiacago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 192.Google Scholar

28. Mann, Susan, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) p. 17.Google Scholar

29. Ko, Dorothy, “The written word and the bound foot: a history of the courtesan's aura,” Widmer, Ellen and Chang, Kang-I Sun (eds.), Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 80.Google Scholar

30. Wang, David Der-wei, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 131.Google Scholar

31. Xun, Lu, “Kung I-chi,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), pp. 19–24.Google Scholar

32. For information on the lives of these writers, see McDougall, Bonnie and Louie, Kam, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (London: Hurst, 1997).Google Scholar

33. Tse-tsung, Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 45–47.Google Scholar

34. See Louie, Kam, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), pp. 1–16.Google Scholar

35. Hsun, Lu, “An incident,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, pp. 42–44.Google Scholar

36. Xiaqiu, Zhao and Qingrui, Zeng, Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi (History of Modern Chinese Fiction), Vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1985), p. 290.Google Scholar

37. Wang, , Fictional Realism, p. 126.Google Scholar

38. Lee, Leo Oufan, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 265.

40. Liu, Lydia H., “Invention and intervention: the making of a female tradition in modern Chinese literature,” in Widmer, Ellen and Wang, David Der-wei (eds.). From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 194–220.Google Scholar

41. Youwei, Kang, Datong shu (The Great Commonwealth) (Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1956).Google Scholar

42. Thompson, Laurence G., “Ta-t'ung Shu and the Communist Manifesto: some comparisons,” in Lo, Jung-pang (ed.), K'ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), p. 79.Google Scholar

43. Xun, Lu, “My views on chastity,” in Lu Xun: Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 20.Google Scholar

44. A good illustration is found in Xun, Lu, “The New Year's Sacrifice,” Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, pp. 125–143.Google Scholar

45. There were very few Chinese in England in the 1920s and 1930s in any case, with the maximum number around 2,000. Parker, David, Through Chinese Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), p. 55.Google Scholar

46. Interestingly, Mrs Winter in the novel observes that they are from the same class (Huang translation, p. 270)Google Scholar, demonstrating by the remark her belief that educated, relatively well-off Chinese men are the same as British women of her background.

47. Suyin, Han, The Crippled Tree (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965)Google Scholar. While this novel may not be a factual account of the difficulties faced by a Chinese man married to a white woman in a period of social unrest in China, it does illustrate the added hardships brought on by racial and linguistic difference. I am not arguing that “mixed marriages” were disasters. Indeed, for many, Chinese men “won the reputation of making good husbands to women of more races than any other men could” (Kiernan, , The Lords of Human Kind), p. 164Google Scholar. Such findings make the fictional constructions of Chinese men being potential rapists and drug addicts even more poignant.

48. For information on Sai Jinhua's life and some of the literary works about her, see Lee, Lily Xiao Hong, Stefanowska, A. D. and Ho, Clara Wing-chung (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644–1911 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 182–84.Google Scholar

49. Parker, , Through Chinese Eyes, pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

50. Huang translation, p. 263.Google Scholar

51. Lao She himself later claimed that in the novel, “none showed any humanity.” Quoted in Xiaqiu, Zhao and Qingrui, Zeng, History of Modern Chinese Fiction, p. 290.Google Scholar

52. “Race” and “ethnicity” are often used interchangeably. For the sake of convenience, I use “ethnic” as meaning belonging to a minority group within a wider cultural (national) population. Like “race,” its use as discourse is important here, and not whether it has an objective referent.

53. See the table of major occupations of Chinese in England between 1901 and 1931 in Parker, , Through Chinese Eyes, p. 55.Google Scholar

54. See in particular the long and bitter indictment on pp. 12–13.

55. She, Lao, p. 12Google Scholar. I have used my own more literal translation here instead of Huang's.

56. Although Lao She does not mention this icon in the novel, Sax Rohmer's popular Fu Manchu stories were published in Britain around this time. As well as the many websites indicated above, a more scholarly treatment of the Fu Manchu phenomenon can be found in Clegg, Jenny, Fu Manchu and The “Yellow Peril”: the Making of a Racist Myth (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1994).Google Scholar

57. Huang translation, p. 297.Google Scholar

58. “Ugly Chinaman” and “Commie Bastard” probably do more justice to the intended connotations of these names.

59. She, Lao, p. 192.Google Scholar

60. Rong, Zou, “Geming jun,”Google Scholar cited in Vohra, Ranbir, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Ibid. p. 9.

62. She, Lao, Beneath the Red Flag (trans. Cohn, Don J.) (Beijing: Panda Books, 1982).Google Scholar

63. Huang translation, p. 159.Google Scholar

64. Ibid. p. 81.

65. For wu masculinity, this link was actively denied, so that intricate teasing has to be performed to make it explicit. See Louie, Kam, “Sexuality, masculinity and politics in the Yingxiong: the case of the Sanguo hero Guan Yu,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1999), pp. 835–859.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. Ibid. p. 250.

67. The European image of the Chinese was not a static one. However, it reached its most Orientalist depths in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As well as the discussion in Robert Bickers mentioned above, see the changing perceptions described in Dawson, Raymong, The Chinese Chameleon: an Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and Mackerras, Colin, Western Images of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

68. I quote here, with thanks, one of the many perceptive comments by the anonymous China Quarterly readers, “The two Mas are running a ‘curio’ shop. ‘Curio’ was a belittling term for Chinese-produced cultural artefacts which treaty port Westerners collected. The ‘curio’ was the acceptable face of Chinese culture which was otherwise denigrated. Not only are the Mas therefore selling Chinese culture, but they're not even selling it very well.”

69. She, Lao, p. 242Google Scholar. I have used my own more literal translation here.

70. Wright, Mary C., The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).Google Scholar

71. By the 1980s, even Confucius has been constructed as a business guru. See Louie, Kam, “Sage, teacher, businessman: Confucius as a model male,” in Hua, Shiping (ed.), Chinese Political Culture (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, forthcoming).Google Scholar

72. Indeed, David Wang quite astutely refers to him as “even more a dupe than the two Mas.” Wang, , Fictional Realism, p. 131.Google Scholar

73. Huiyan, Wang and Qingchang, Su, Lao She pingzhuan (A Critical Biography of Lao She) (Shijiazhuang: Huashanwenyi chubanshe, 1985), p. 56.Google Scholar

74. She, Lao, “Wo zenyang xie Er Ma” (How I wrote The Two Mas”)Google Scholar, quoted in ibid.