Shuqin CUI, Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. xxvi + 304 pp., with filmog- raphy. ISBN: 0824825322 (hbk). Price: £29.95. Women Through the Lens is the first book-length study on the representation of women in Chinese cinema — an important but long overdue subject of scholarly inquiry. Spanning almost a century of Chinese cinema (1905–1999), the book examines screen images of women created by both male and female directors from different generations, and presents a rather comprehensive picture of how Chinese cinema has developed around the axis of “nation” and has generated corresponding ways in engendering “nation- al” agendas. The book offers admirable close readings of eight Chinese films from different generations of directors — within the contexts of both Chinese history and Western theory — while raising many important questions throughout its chapters. As Kirk Denton writes on its jacket, the book “is a feminist study, but one that takes a wisely skeptical attitude toward the appli- cation of Western feminist assumptions to the Chinese cultural context.” When analyzing a non-Western text, a “skeptical attitude” toward the application of Western theories is indeed requisite. Li Xiaojiang, a native Chinese feminist whom Cui cites, has unabashedly expressed her “skeptical attitude” toward feminisms other than the Marxist one. As for Cui herself, who grew up in communist China and received her academic training in the West, a “skeptical attitude” can either lead to dilemmas or to endless justifications. Her book falls into the former scenario: when writing in English, it is impossible for her not to refer to Western theory, but a perfect “equilibrium” between Western theory and Chinese texts is never easy. In her “Introduction,” for instance, she questions whether “all third world texts” are, as Fredric Jameson proposes, “necessarily political allegories” (p. xxi); but when analyzing Chinese film texts, she keeps her reading with- in the gender–nation framework, without exploring other possibilities. Considering that the Western feminist scholar E. Ann Kaplan argues against Jameson’s statement by using Hu Mei’s Army Nurse, one wonders why Cui does not make a reference to Kaplan at this point (the author refers to Kaplan’s earlier article “Problematizing Cross-cultural Analysis” but not the latter’s later essay titled “Traveling White Theorists: The Case of China,” in Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 135–53 (London: Routledge, 1997), which argues against Jameson’s statement). Book Reviews 495