Critical Survey

This Special Issue arises from the need to turn an increasingly evident fact, namely the ever more intense circulation of Chinese literature and culture within Western publishing, academic and mass media spheres, into a more rigorous field of inquiry, one capable of reading together both the benefits and the distortions that any cultural crossing necessarily brings with it. Its first aim, therefore, is to do so without collapsing the problem into a simple alternative between fidelity and betrayal, because what is at stake here is something more profound: the production of meaning that occurs when a text, an imagery, an aesthetic form or a symbolic constellation enters another regime of reading, another economy of attention, another grammar of recognisability. This Special Issue therefore takes as its object not China in the abstract, but the concrete interface between Chinese narratives and Western receptions: in other words, the filters, frames, expectations and interpretive codes that determine which aspects of a text come to the fore, which are neutralised, which are intensified until they harden into stereotype, and which, instead, succeed in generating ruptures, resistances and inventions. It is here that the notion of cultural translation reveals its full scope: to translate is not merely to move from one language to another, but to cross a threshold between worlds – one in which presuppositions shift, hierarchies of value are rearranged, aesthetic sensibilities are recalibrated, and even the very ways in which a work is recognised as ‘classic’, ‘modern’, ‘popular’, ‘minor’, ‘political’ or ‘spiritual’ are transformed.

This article takes ‘reconstructing Orientalism’ as the core perspective to explore the structural misreadings produced by the West in the process of translating and accepting Chinese classical literary works such as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Chu Ci, revealing the ideological and cultural discipline mechanisms behind them. By combining text close reading with cross-cultural discourse analysis, this article analyses the different translation paths of The Dream of the Red Chamber by Jolly and Hawkes, as well as the poetic reconstruction of Chu Ci by Legge and Waley, pointing out the problems of semantic concealment and narrative assimilation in cultural conversion. Finally, it is pointed out that achieving cultural dialogue and structural participation from multiple perspectives can help open up new paths and possibilities for the global understanding of Chinese classical literature.

The aim of this research is to explore how Western versions of The Orphan of Zhao and Farewell My Concubine transform Chinese storytelling. It argues that Western interpretations are shaped by translation, distribution, and selective exoticisation. Drawing on Orientalism and translation studies, the article shows how The Orphan of Zhao becomes a Western-style tragedy centred on the autonomous individual and resistance to tyranny, departing from Confucian relational values. Similarly, Farewell My Concubine is often read in the West as a queer melodrama and testimony of authoritarian violence, overlooking traditional theatrical and historical contexts. Through textual analysis and cross-cultural critique, the study shows that Western theories – including humanist tragedy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and liberal critiques of state power – both illuminate and limit understanding. It concludes that Sino-Western literary relations should be treated as a bidirectional dialogue, in which Chinese narratives challenge and enrich Western paradigms rather than serving as mere material.

At present, the formal shaping of contemporary Chinese realist novels is deeply influenced by the Marxist paradigm of literary analysis. Marxist literary theory operates across four dimensions: language, characterised by a passionate utopian impulse; narrative style, which transcends fixed value systems; social circles, in which character structures break beyond their original confines; and a dialectical narrative perspective that foregrounds historical complexity. These four factors construct the creative nature of the intertextual history of Chinese realist novels, and their form presents a social critical dimension. In the process of translation and introduction, although the language style, character structure, narrative style, and narrative perspective have undergone cultural adaptation under the Western literary system, the social critical dimension of the novel form has been preserved as a whole, forming a disembedded reconstruction of literary symbols.

Since Water Margin was introduced to Japan during the Edo period (1603–1867) by its first Japanese translator, Okajima Kanzan, it has established a profound connection with the era's popular literature. The integration of this classic with Japanese culture was multifaceted. To expand its audience and accommodate illiterate commoners, illustrated editions of Water Margin emerged. These editions evolved, from initial rough translations with simplistic drawings during early Edo, to the widespread, popular picture books of the mid-Edo period, and finally to the distinctive, Japanised versions of the late Edo period. Examining the progression of Water Margin picture books reveals the dynamics of its transmission, reception and transformation in Japan, highlighting deep cultural implications. The impact on Edo literature was significant, particularly in novel writing, spurring a wave of creative adaptations. This trend also facilitated the spread of Chinese vernacular literature in Japan.

This article constructs an interdisciplinary paradigm integrating Yi aesthetics, Western academic interpretations of Chinese aesthetics, and Chinese American diaspora narratives. It aims to fill gaps in Western scholarship regarding the mysticism of the I Ching, tracing the cross-cultural transformation of Zhou Yi hexagram symbols into poetic forms and exploring the underlying cultural-political logic. Taking The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston as the primary object of analysis, the study examines how the writer constructs poetic anti-colonialism and shapes ethnic identity discourse through the creative reinterpretation of Yi aesthetics’ three core dimensions: image-thinking, philosophy of change, and holistic thinking. This aesthetic practice fundamentally deconstructs Western Orientalist stereotypes, offers a localized theoretical model for Chinese literary studies, and opens new avenues for contemporary comparative literature and ethnic identity research.

New Portrait of a Female Knight, the final novel by Malaysian Chinese writer Lee Yung Ping, draws on traditional martial arts novels but transcends the typical ‘heroic dream’. This article examines the narrative's underlying metaphors related to Chinese identity, cultural memory and the imagination of the homeland, through the lens of narrative of revenge, a nomadic cartography and a projected ‘Cultural China Dream’. Using human geography theories, it shows how martial arts evoke an idealised ‘Chineseness’. In this story, linked to the author's diasporic Chinese identity, the central theme is the relinquishment of the notion of ‘arrival’. The novel acknowledges that the ‘homeland China’ can only be approached, never fully attained, deconstructing the traditional ‘root-seeking’ narrative in overseas Chinese literature.” This nuanced perspective deepens the exploration of the relationship between overseas Chinese and their homeland, offering a fresh understanding of the diasporic experience.

This article redefines Amy Tan's literary identity through a Western prism, focusing on her translingual practice that negotiates the cultural meaning across linguistic and ideological boundaries. It argues that Tan did not passively reflect Chinese culture in her English fiction but rather constructively re-created it through and against Western critical viewpoint. The study examines how Tan's cross-linguistic strategies constitute semantic interference, syntactic hybridity and code-switching, acts as cultural resistance. It also explores Western misinterpretations shaped by Orientalist bias which treat these strategies as questions of cultural authenticity rather than identity negotiation This study proves that Tan uses language in both The Joy Luck Club and The Hundred Secret Senses to challenge Western ideas of Chineseness and make writings as a location of intercultural dialogue. This article contributes to Sino-Western literary studies by showing how Tan's bilingual authorship crosses epistemological boundaries and uses translation to shape identity.

Wesley Chu, an American-born Chinese science fiction author, establishes criteria to propagate the traditional cultural values of China using futuristic narratives. In the Tao trilogy, he discusses the underlying innuendos of creative practice by employing the creative growth of the protagonist, and the destiny of the world's future, to reinterprete or re-represent Chinese culture as understood by Western readers. The analysis of Tao series has demonstrated that the concept of Tao is appropriately used to create its own magical world, not patching the symbols of cultures on a superficial level. Tao's fantasy narratives reveal the powerful emotional experiences of the Chinese diaspora, including identity anxiety, cultural nostalgia and defiant rage. The appropriation and grafting disrupts the Orientalist narrative, the Eastern cultural subjectivity and historical experience central, and forming a principled dialogue about cultural power, colonial memory and identity politicsand stretching the intellectual frontiers of the science fiction/fantasy genre and its Orientalist nomenclature to a substantial extent.

When Lao She's Teahouse moves from the Chinese stage to Broadway, something vital gets lost in translation. This article explores that shift, applying Adorno and Horkheimer's theories to show how the Western culture industry neutralises dissent; that is, to account for the bourgeois appropriation of the work. It is worth noting that the original drama's focus on twentieth-century class conflict is essentially flattened by the musical format, replaced by the kind of individual sentiment that sells tickets. So, by analysing this transition, I show how the political grit of the work is stripped away and repackaged as an exotic luxury. It is a classic case of how global markets can take non-Western radical literature and turn it into a harmless, consumable product.

In this article, we interpret the transformation processes of the Western literary reception of Chinese canonical classics revisited in Western visual texts. I question how converting traditional vernacular writing into global visual forms alters narrative logic, ethical orientation, and cultural value for Western consumption, bypassing medium-based technicalities. I examine the visual recoding of the Chinese canon to explain drastic ideological shifts in reading practices, framing the inquiry within a critique of Western-centred interpretive modes. My analysis focuses on how these masterpieces are stripped of their original cosmological, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian scaffolding in Ming and Qing novels, reinforcing Western-centric power structures. Through a literary-critical examination of case studies, this paper demonstrates the tense negotiation between preserving literary heritage and satisfying commodity fetishism in the visualisation of Chinese classics.

Lilian Lee's works have a unique narrative style and profound cultural connotations, making them an important sample for studying Hong Kong literature and providing reference value for social changes in the postcolonial context. This article points out that Lilian Lee's works are rooted in the Chinese literary tradition and deeply influenced by Hong Kong's colonial history, the awakening of local consciousness, and the development of cultural industry by examining the social and cultural background of her creations. This article further analyses the creative modes of ‘New Stories’ and ‘Strange Writing’, revealing how these creative modes innovate on the basis of inheriting the spirit of Chinese literature, thereby promoting the widespread acceptance of Lilian Lee's works. Finally, this article analyses the complexity and contradictions inherent in the construction of Hong Kong cultural identity in her novel creation, and continuously criticises and reflects on modern issues such as urban consumerism and human alienation in Hong Kong.