This book provides a conscientious and very helpful account of the topic named in its title. It will be welcomed particularly by teachers of twentieth-century Chinese history for its ample illustrations, since it provides reproductions of no fewer than forty-six political cartoons, almost one for every year of the span of time covered. These are drawn from over forty newspapers and periodicals published in the three countries under investigation, all of which are listed in the introduction together with useful circulation statistics and so forth. Nor have these sources merely been scanned for China-related images: copious well-nourished footnotes and an ample bibliography, including not only archives but also newsreels and films, attest to a wide reading in support of the analysis of this central body of data. So as a resource for future scholarship this book cannot be faulted for thoroughness.

The narrative is loosely but not slavishly chronological. Chapter 1, “The dragon throne in the dustbin: press reactions to the Xinhai Revolution” ranges more widely than the title suggests in setting the scene for future shifts and developments, but like its three successors is divided into separate sections on Britain, the USA and Switzerland, an approach that laudably avoids any tacit acceptance of the notion of an undifferentiated “West”. Chapter 2, “The 1920s, the Red Menace and anti-foreign agitation in China” covers the early Republican period, while chapter 3, “‘A terror which has been truly Asiatic’: The evolution of yellow peril imagery until 1945” shows how the advance of Japan diverted most negative stereotypes concerning East Asia away from China towards its enemy. Chapter 4, “The rise of the bamboo curtain: perceptions of the Communist victory in 1949” in a sense sets the stage for the next phase of depicting China during the early years of the People's Republic. Each chapter is concluded by contrastive remarks identifying differences and commonalities between the national presses, and the whole study is followed by a conclusion reviewing the totality of the evidence brought to light. The final paragraph will probably come as no surprise to anyone who reads the papers about China even today: although along the way we may have met with a fair number of pig-tailed coolies and mandarins (and up to 1945 explicitly simian Japanese), the cartoonists favourite depiction of China is of a dragon – always a gift to the imaginative artist.

But there are quite a few surprises as well: E.H. Shepard (1879–1976) is mainly remembered – if at all, in a post-Disney age – for his exquisite depictions of the denizens of Kenneth Grahame's Riverbank and A.A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood, yet p. 218 reveals that he could also turn his hand to creating a very realistic tiger with the face of Stalin superimposed upon it. Such delights, however, should not blind us to the undoubted fact that probably in all three countries surveyed (I hesitate to be too categorical about Switzerland) the ordinary consumer of newsprint was not encouraged to think very much about China at all, nor indeed very often, save perhaps during the ever darkening days of the 1930s, and then only as part of a deepening international mood of crisis. The general level of concern for China (as opposed to concern for the publishing nation's interests in China) is succinctly satirized by Israel Epstein in a parody of a 1930s report he gives in Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 35, to illustrate the dictum: “The reporting was mainly about how what was happening in China affected foreigners”.

Against this, we should perhaps also remember that China was not only encountered somewhat briefly at the breakfast table but also in the chapel and at Sunday school. Viewed from the vantage of press coverage Ariane Knüsel draws a distinction (p. 53, cf. pp. 65–7 on Switzerland) between an America much influenced by missionary opinion and a Britain where merchant and diplomatic views were more to the fore. Yet missionaries here just as much as elsewhere were very active in getting their views of China across through their own publications, which saw a very wide circulation. A brief survey of these reveals plenty of stock images of China – Great Walls, pagodas, even fishing cormorants, an image that goes back to shortly after the time of Marco Polo. But though the occasional missionary, such as the American Hampden Coit DuBose, employs dragon imagery, it was perhaps too threatening for those whose calling predisposed them to a degree of optimism about the prospects for converting China, and so another type of imagery tends to serve in spreading the news about their efforts there. All this is not to deny the value of the research contained in the volume under review, but simply to point out that the title of the book makes no claim to being a comprehensive study of China's image in America, Britain or Switzerland as a whole. What it does, however, is done extremely competently: it sets a good standard, and future researchers in this area would do well to pay due attention to its findings.