Why Do We Write about Asia LIke This?

In the 22 January 2026 edition of the London Review of Books, to which a close friend got me a year’s subscription as a Christmas present, Tom Stevenson reviews three recent books dealing with Xi Jinping, le fameux dictateur chinois. I have not read any of the three books—The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Jospeh Torigian; The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan; and On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd—myself. Stevenson’s analyses of them seem evenhanded to me. I regret to say that he does not make The Red Emperor sound very good. From its title on down it comes across as a hurricane of Sinological clichés (“[t]he early party was merely a conquering army and ‘slave to the doctrines of a foreign ideology’”; “[i]n 1953, the year of Xi’s birth, many Chinese apparently ‘lived in a daze’ and ‘discontent ebbed and flowed’”). Why, one must ask, are we still writing about a rising great power like this?

            Stevenson himself, however, leaves a fair amount on the table as well. At the risk of indulging in a Sinological cliché of my own—and I am not even a Sinologist—I do not think he seems especially aware of the Confucian philosophical antecedents of “the written style of Chinese official documents,” which “is mildly contagious.” I have gotten polemical about the venerable “rectification of names” concept in the past, in my “Polemic on the Rectification of Names.” Yes; “Chinese leaders tend to be more than usually interested in the phraseological power of the state.” I hope Stevenson understands why this is. The review as written, though, treats it as a bit more of a curiosity than makes me entirely comfortable.

            As of this writing I have received one further issue of the Review, that of 5 February 2026. This one has a much shorter essay by Christopher Harding about the current Prime Minister of Japan, Takaichi Sanae. Harding’s writing about Japan is refreshingly non-exoticized; he makes it sound quite a bit like the Continental European countries whose social and economics problems Japan’s resemble, especially Italy. The similarities between Takaichi and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, he (in my view) correctly points out, make this comparison especially tempting at the moment, but there are shared longer-term features as well. Even so, at points Harding makes Japan sound a bit too much like a Western country with a very right-wing government; he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the idiosyncratically noxious features of Japan’s form of conservative nationalism, although, to his credit, he does mention them.

            I must admit that it strikes me as peculiar how ferociously Western writers struggle to write about East Asian politics in a credible way, a way that shows familiarity without applying too many coats of North American or Western European paint. I do not have a good explanation for this, even when I do it myself. Explanations have certainly been attempted over the years—Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism is one of the best-known and most convincing ones—but shouldn’t we have figured out some way out of this semantic bog by now? Then again, perhaps I’m expecting too much of an intellectual class—and I am, again, not exculpating myself here—that barely seems able to wrap its head around the moral problems faced by its own society, let alone other people’s. Much writing about “America” is just as putridly exotic or patly oversimplifying as anything about “China” or “Japan.”