Discussion Groups / British English / January 2008

The following is part of my master's thesis. Can you help me
correct my language? The format needn't correcting. Thank you so much.

    1.4 A Brief Survey of Images of China in British Literature

........(some parts are omitted here)
      In the 19th century and early 20th century, China was mainly
considered as a country of backwardness and stagnation and the images
of China created by British writers were generally unfavorable. Sax
Rohmer wrote his Fu Manchu series, in which the Chinese people were
devils. His evil Chinese characters enhanced the conception of “yellow
peril” in Europe. However, Bertrand Russell, hoping to find the
essence from the long-history China, visited China in 1920 and sang
praise of Chinese civilization greatly in his famous book The Problem
of China. W. S. Maugham described China from many aspects and the
images of China are multi-faceted and they will be discussed in detail
in the following part of this thesis.

  On the whole, British writers never ceased to write about China and
the images of china are different from writer to writer. The images of
China, as said by Raymond Dawson in The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis
of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization, are like a color-
changing chameleon. China in the British writers’ eyes “has at one
time or another been thought to be rich and poor, advanced and
backward, wise and stupid, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, honest
and deceitful---there is no end to the list of contradictory qualities
which have been attributed to her.” The British writers create the
images of China mainly according to their constantly changing needs
and desires.