Imperfect Paradise : The Image of the US on Chinese TV

For the last decade or so, one of the hot academic topics in the West has been socalled Orientalism. Put most briefly, this intellectual movement initiated by Edward Said is a selfcritique on the part of some Western intellectuals of the institutionalized style of dealing with, "restructuring and having authority over the Orient." Given the fact that the world history of the past four hundred years is basically a story of Western military conquest and trade expansion, Orientalism certainly provides an important perspective in crosscultural studies in the sense that it forces us to reexamine the Western episteme toward the East by laying bare the power relationship that has always existed between the dominating and the dominated.