In this well-researched study on the subject of sympathy, modernity, and Chinese pain, Eric Hayot attempts to locate China's place in the history of sympathy and suffering through a detailed examination of “Chinese pain” as a condition conceived by the West. Hayot's argument is based on the premise that the “relationship between sympathy and humanity makes a difference to the history of Western thought,” and he thus attempts to trace and recognize the range of ways in which a Western perspective that was oriented around China helped to establish the centrality of the West to the history it writes (p. 8). This is what the author has termed as an “ecliptic” relationship between China and the West (pp. 11–12). In putting forward this framework, Hayot has deployed a novel approach to take up the challenge of using this relationship in an effort to engage with the wider debates on and about Asian modernity or modernities.

Given the innovativeness of Hayot's framework, his work fits into the scholarship of an already well-established field of comparative literary studies that has attempted to understand and locate China's relationship to the West. Moreover, it endeavours to engage with the broader scholarship that has sought to examine and capture the importance of emotions, the body, punishments, and medicine as examples of the ways in which pain is represented, understood, and refracted. In this regard, the introduction sets out how the concept of pain in itself cannot be reduced to the language that is used to describe it or how one thinks about the dynamic relationships between pain, language, and Chineseness.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the evocation of sympathetic pain in relation to the image of a Chinese person is captured through a dynamic interaction between English writing and Chinese images (p. 84). Through an examination of George Henry Mason's two illustrative books, The Costume of China (1800) and The Punishments of China (1801), this chapter seeks to establish the performative and epistemological conventions on which Mason's work operated, and it is through this relationship that one can place its coherence, which may at first have appeared to be incompatible and even contradictory in its competing forms of interests, as a total expression of their ideological and literary positions (p. 92). Sympathetic exchanges generated by the interaction between the reader of Mason's books and the people it represented were thus thought of within a framework of a moral literal exchange of goods between England and China.

Chapter 3, “The Chinese Body in Pain,” focuses on one particularly benevolent expression of interaction in the relationship between sympathetic and economic exchanges in China: the life and missionary work of Peter Parker, the first director of a Western missionary hospital. In an attempt to demonstrate how the language and subjective expression of pain is captured in representational mode vis-à-vis the body (e.g. tumour), Hayot has argued that it is not only the actual representation of such pain that is significant, whether its origins can be corporeally or metaphorically identified, it is also the subjective expression of it that legitimates this pain. Moreover, it is not merely the expression of this pain that legitimates it but also its representation that captures the movement between perceptual evidence and its subjective representation, in what Hayot has termed as “pain's cultural aesthetic” (p. 122). Following on ideas and representations of the body, the next chapter, “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures,” thus focuses on a discussion of Chinese labour and coolies, as Hayot demonstrates how the corporeality of a coolie's body in relation to pain is represented through an analysis of how physical suffering is an extension of that expression.

Chapter 5 focuses on an expression of methodology as understood in Chinese history and cultural work of China in the West out of conventional notions of influence, authenticity, and origin. Hayot uses this chapter as a means to get at a single modernist perception of a Chinese relation to physical pain. Through a close reading of Bertrand Russell, the chapter attempts to demonstrate how the use of biography can be seen as the effect of an ideological divide – between the foreign and native – as he traces the metonymic connections between China, philosophy, humanity, illness, and pain. Russell's philosophy and ideas of China and Chinese pain were not only shaped by his personal experiences but those philosophical questions of perception, language, and human nature were also affected by some relation to Chineseness (p. 203). However, that relation to Chineseness is neither neutral nor devoid of value judgement, but rather it is conceptualized and framed in Russell's thought as part of a more fluid framework.

The next chapter, “Ideologies of the Anaesthetic,” links up well with the earlier chapter on representations and images of judicial punishments and punitive practices. In this chapter, Hayot draws upon the example of Georges Bataille's interest in a photograph of the death of a Chinaman by a thousand cuts as evidence of the representation of physical violence on a Chinese body (p. 224). In particular, Hayot focuses on how violence is perpetrated on the body of the Chinese, forcing that body to mediate its own pain (p. 226). Bataille's reading of this image is further analysed in the context of how the body of the tortured is deployed as a representation for political use. Through his analysis of this photograph, Hayot shows how the representation of a tortured body, which has been subjected to pain, can be thus understood as an expansion of the notion of pain in relation to the body rather than a diminishing of the actual experience of pain itself.

Finally, by way of offering a conclusion, the final chapter attempts to place his collection of examples from the earlier chapters into three additional references in order to demonstrate and restore the representational complexities in the relationship between reality and representation vis-à-vis the process of sympathetic exchange (p. 269).

Drawing upon a range of materials, The Hypothetical Mandarin is an inspiring work for scholars and students in comparative literary studies. Whilst Hayot's work does not privilege the literary, visual, or philosophical aspects and will thus no doubt also be of interest to those working in cogent fields such as the history of emotions, comparative philosophy, visual studies, and socio-cultural studies, it is unfortunately still heavily embedded in a language and discourse that would perhaps alienate a wider readership of those without some knowledge of literary studies or those with a limited knowledge of China and Chinese literature. Despite this, his proposal of the concept of the “ecliptic,” which emphasizes the relationship of perspectives as an analytical lens, speaks to the underlying strength of his work because it offers a nuanced approach to understanding how ideas of pain, sympathy, and modernity were refracted through the lens of “China” in different mediums and across time. In attempting to demonstrate how the “ecliptic” functions, Hayot has shown the importance of examples to the formation of ideas, in which such ideas are then refracted vis-à-vis such examples. In short, it is precisely through this ecliptical relationship between ideas and examples that has informed us as to how “China” and the “Chinese” have entered into the imagination (whether authentic or metaphorical) of a Western consciousness as a form of condition that cannot be neatly bounded but is comprised of intersecting relationships.

Although the brevity of this review cannot possibly do justice to the nuanced analysis and depth of Hayot's work, it is worth emphasizing here that amongst the many strengths of this ambitious book is one that encourages scholars in Chinese and comparative literature to engage in a wider discussion about what and who is “Chinese” both from within and without; so as to arrive at a deeper understanding that is not only capable of crossing disciplinary and temporal boundaries but also encourages scholars to draw similarities that move beyond existing paradigms of understanding how concepts of modernity (and modernisms) are framed in reference to China and the Chinese.