Whenever I go to the library of our university, I always go to the shelfs for books that have just arrived. One day, I found standing on the shelf a book titled "Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: A Route to hermeneutics and Open Poetics", written by Ming Dong Gu. I was immediately attracted to it. It is a unique book, thoughfully conceived and well written, coming out just in time. This book represents a breakthrough, I think, in the field of comparative study of Chinese and Western poetics, a field which is very active in the past ten years. It is of such a high level, I can only admire the author's accomplishment. Certainly, this book represents the highest level reached in the study of Chinese and Western comparative poetics in the last ten years. In many aspects, I have to describe what the book has accomplished as a breakthrough in the dialogues between Chinese and Western poetics. The topics this book writes about are obviously difficult: hermeneutics, semiotics, Chinese language, philosophy, poetry, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, Eco, and so on. The author handles these difficult topics brilliantly, in his unique way, and in an easy-to-understand language. He not only delves into some important areas such as the Book of Changes, Buddhism and traditional Chinese literary theory, but also explores the philosophical basis of Chinese reading and writing clearly and artfully. Among scholars of comparative poetics, he is the first one to be able to relate the Dao with cross-cultural theory of reading and writing. Nowdays, many scholars in the field of sinology and comparative literature of Chinese and Western literatures have doubts about the compatibility for comparative studies of Chinese and Western literatures. This book gives us an optimist view. It convincingly demonstrates that Chinese and Western literatures have a common ground in hermeneutics and literary openness. There are many points I very much like in the book. For example, he made a fascinating distinction between Yi "meaning" and Yi "significance". It seems that a distinction between Yi and Yi makes no sense for people speaking in English. Even for scholars speaking in native Chinese, they are not always sensitive enough to consider their differences. Yet this author explains the two concepts in terms of You "being" and Wu "nonbeing" in a clear and brilliant way and makes sense of some fundamentals in Chinese theories of reading, writing and philosophy: The book is written with highest scholarship and deep insight. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Chinese literature, comparative literature, and comparative thought.