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China Watching: Perspectives from Europe, Japan and the United States , Robert Ash, David Shambaugh and Seiichiro Takagi . London and New York: Routledge, 2007. x + 261 pp. £20.99; $43.95 ISBN 978-0-415-41397-4.

Enlightenment? The final chapter takes on what Davies calls a ‘‘poetics of inquiry,’’ or, a certain attitudinal (taidu)/ dispositional (xintai) sensibility that is ‘‘interwoven with a traditional penchant for self-cultivation’’ (p. 192). Why this poetics, rather than any other, seems altogether arbitrary. She concludes: ‘‘What is ... clear is that for all its internecine disagreements, contemporary Chinese critical inquiry as a whole shares a general investment in a notion of translinguistic emotional mediacy that it holds sufficiently stable to serve as a mode of emotional epistemology in tandem with cognitive rationalism’’ (p. 240). Nothing of the sort is clear at all, at least not to this reader. To be sure, the intensity of the arguments over the relationship between theory and China are impressive, and Davies’s book does a good job of conveying the passions over the issue. Many of her individual discussions of Wang Hui, Wang Yuanhua, Chen Pingyuan, Zhu Xueqin and others are genuinely insightful, and helpful in disentangling what can otherwise seem to be relatively arcane and parochial concerns. And yet, the exclusive linguistic-culturally-derived totalization into which Davies stuffs the debates remains unsatisfying. It exceptionalizes China in precisely the insular ways for which Davies critiques Sinophone writers. Why are political/ ideological differences within Chinese intellectual writing and between certain intellectuals (Chinese or not) be ascribed to linguistic and cultural factors? Is it really a matter of Anglophone self-reflexivity vs. Sinophone preoccupation with positivism, inflected by inferiority and ‘‘self-cultivation’’ (pp. 159, 192)? The seeming arbitrariness of Davies’s examples makes it impossible to confirm or disconfirm her systematizing move. Indeed, it just makes one sceptical of this kind of approach and wish that Davies’s formidable skills had been more fruitfully directed.