<p>Angela Carter suffuses her most experimental novel <i>The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman</i> with Chinese elements and references, even though she never visited China herself. As a literary element, the image of China is historically interwoven with the Gothic literary tradition to represent the Western idea of the Oriental Other. However, with the rise of postmodernism and the critique of Orientalism, this Orientalist image of China constructed by Eurocentrism is under continuous deconstruction. It will be argued that Carter is aware of both contemporary critical theories and her own writings, and her (re)representation of the Orient is not a mimicry of such tradition, but a parody of it that invites further critical reflection. Revisiting Carter’s “new-fangled” Orientalist writing about Japan, this essay takes seriously the metamorphosis of China in the novel, which should be understood as Carter’s yet again disillusioned desire for the “absolute otherness” and her playful subversion of Orientalist discourse.</p>