The article explores some of the reasons for the apparent incommensurability of interpretative attitudes in the consumption of Chinese media products in the West. It also addresses the difficulties faced by existing audience theories in explicating cross-cultural media communication, especially as it applies to the cultural and political divide between China and the West, a phrase I use non-reductively as no more than an abbreviation. The focus of ‘politics of reception’ is on the different ‘horizons of expectation’ that inform that politics. I do so by a cross-cultural analysis of the reception of such ‘soft-power’ products as the films of Zhang Yimou; the reception in the West of China’s Confucius Institutes; and the Chinese intervention in the Kadeer incident in Australia. The article concludes with a theorization of the principles that inform the politics of Chinese and western critical and evaluative attitudes.