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impressive breadth of material and give the reader a feel for the range and depth of connections between China and New Zealand over 160 years. However, with their book directed at a popular rather than a scholarly audience, citations are sparse – on occasion a little too sparse (e.g. death statistics, 187). The authors also donot engage criticallywith current scholarship ormake any particularly new historical claims. Instead, as the authors do state, the book primarily summarises and synthesises existing scholarship. Existing material has been enhanced bymaking good use of the digitised newspapers available through the National Library ofNewZealand’s ‘PapersPast’website, butnewspapers and other primary sources are not meaningfully questioned or interrogated. The most disappointing aspect of White Ghosts, Yellow Peril is its central thesis: that China and New Zealand have been ‘in many ways opposites’ (2), ‘spinning in opposite orbits’ (95). The authors use historical materials to emphasise the differences between the two countries and their peoples. This opposition is laboured and trite, and is in stark contrast to the sophisticated analysis of Kuo’s Making Chinese Australia. Where Kuo delves deep into the complexities of Australia’s transnational Chinese communities, drawing out nuanced understandings of how Australia was part of shaping them into something new, Eldred-Grigg and Zeng simply reinforce prevailing nineteenth-century western attitudes that through their supposed difference, Chinese were largely incapable of understanding and sharing western values.