Exploring Ethnocultural Encounters in Early Modern China

Beyond Sinocentrism: Ethnocultural Others in Early Modern China by Huili Zheng offers the first sustained study of how early modern Chinese literature imagined and negotiated encounters with ethnocultural others. Focusing on fictional narratives from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries, the book examines how Chinese literati used imaginative writing to engage a rapidly changing world—revealing not only cultural confidence, but also anxiety, curiosity, and critique.

Rather than treating imperial China as culturally isolated or uniformly inward-looking, Beyond Sinocentrism demonstrates how literary texts from the late Ming through the late Qing periods articulated complex and often ambivalent attitudes toward the foreign. Drawing on literary analysis, global history, postcolonial theory, and cultural anthropology, the book reveals a dynamic interplay between Sinocentric worldviews and openness to global knowledge.

How Did Early Modern Chinese Fiction Construct the “Other”?

The book begins by situating its inquiry within broader questions of identity formation. As Zheng shows, representations of ethnocultural others are inseparable from processes of self-definition. Fictional encounters with foreigners become a means through which authors reflect on what it means to be Chinese in an increasingly interconnected world.

This concern runs across the texts examined in the volume, each of which stages encounters with alterity in distinct literary and historical contexts.

How Do Oceanic Narratives in Liaohai Danzhonglu, Taiwan Waiji, and Shuihu Houzhuan Decenter China?

Chapter 2, “Decentering China: Oceanic Imaginaries in Liaohai Danzhonglu, Taiwan Waiji, and Shuihu Houzhuan,” examines narratives that imagine China’s relationship to maritime space and overseas worlds. By reading these texts together, Zheng highlights how oceanic settings complicate traditional Sinocentric geographies.

Rather than positioning China as the unquestioned center of the world, these works gesture toward a more expansive and fluid understanding of space, movement, and cultural encounter, suggesting alternative ways of imagining Eurasian connectivity.

What Role Does the Body Play in Imagining Cultural Difference in Yesou puyan?

In Chapter 3, “Eroticizing the Other: Body and Boundary in Yesou puyan,” Zheng turns to the body as a key site of cultural encounter. Eroticization becomes a way of marking difference, but also of negotiating boundaries between self and other.

The chapter shows how desire, fascination, and transgression coexist with moral and cultural anxieties, revealing the ambivalence that characterizes fictional engagements with ethnocultural difference in early modern Chinese literature.

How Does Jinghua yuan Negotiate Confucian Authority and Cultural Relativism?

Chapter 4, “Between Confucian Dominance and Cultural Relativism: Text and the World in Jinghua yuan,” examines how one of the period’s most important novels negotiates moral authority while engaging a broader world of ideas and values.

Zheng demonstrates how Jinghua yuan reflects tensions between Confucian norms and openness to cultural difference, offering a nuanced vision of China’s relationship to the world that resists simple categorization.

How Are Global Encounters Reframed in San zhou youji?

Chapter 5, “China, Africa, and the West: ‘Translating’ How I Found Livingstone in San zhou youji,” shifts attention to questions of translation and cross-cultural mediation. This chapter explores how foreign narratives are reworked within Chinese literary contexts.

Rather than passive reception, translation emerges as an active and creative process through which global knowledge is reframed and made meaningful within Chinese intellectual traditions.

What Does Haishang chentianying Reveal About Hybrid Identity and Modernity?

The final chapter, “Being Chinese and Being Modern: Envisioning a Hybrid Cultural Identity in Haishang chentianying,” addresses questions of modernity and cultural hybridity in the late Qing period. Zheng examines how fiction grapples with the pressures of modernization, envisioning identities that are neither wholly traditional nor simply Westernized.

The chapter underscores the unsettled and experimental nature of cultural identity in the nineteenth century, as writers sought to reconcile inherited frameworks with emerging global realities.

Beyond Sinocentrism: Ethnocultural Others in Early Modern China by Huili Zheng

Rethinking China and the World Through Fiction

Taken together, the chapters of Beyond Sinocentrism offer a powerful corrective to both Sinocentric and Eurocentric paradigms. By focusing on fictional narratives rather than official histories alone, the book reveals how early modern Chinese writers used literature as a space to negotiate identity, power, and global belonging.

As Junjie Luo of Gettysburg College observes, the book “thoughtfully explores how fictional narratives from the late Ming through the late Qing periods reflect Chinese perceptions of their relationship with the broader world,” making it “a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in deepening their understanding of Chinese literature and culture during the early modern era.”

For scholars of Chinese literature, history, and world literature, Beyond Sinocentrism provides a rigorous and illuminating account of how early modern Chinese narratives imagined ethnocultural others—and, in doing so, reimagined China’s place in a globalizing world.