Needless to say, the attribution of specific characteristics to animals isn't peculiar to China, and even there they had to compete with tigers and monkeys, horses and deer, in popular fear and/or devotion. It was the same in Irish and Welsh folklore, and what are presu-mably shamanistic cave paintings of animals are Europe's oldest surviving artistic representations.
You wouldn't expect Taiwan to feature very prominently in the fox-propitiating phenomenon as the animal isn't found in nature here. Kang, however, has found a couple of instances, even though the cult is associated largely with northern China. One of these, a modern-day cult "with ghostly features" called The Eighteen Lords, is mentioned as being described in a book called Resistance, Chaos and Control: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (University of Washington Press, 1994), but unfortunately no details are supplied.
One parallel not pursued is that with aliens in the US today. Both fox-spirits and Martians are arguably part-frightening and part-alluring. Sexual congress is a regular part of both myth clusters, and it can safely be assumed that in both cases the humans involved are rarely members of the educated elite. To have been possessed by a fox-demon or a green Martian is perhaps compensation, then, for not being a Confucian scholar or having a Harvard degree, and an attempt to increase your social standing through the kudos attaching to the reported experience.
Foxes were also associated with foreigners (both smelled), dishonest prison guards, beautiful prostitutes, and the sexually profligate generally -- all types that were less than wholly respectable, but were grudgingly tolerated nonetheless. With only scanty written sources to go on and the fox shrines themselves hidden away in hedges or the dusty corners of temples, Kang has done a good job in ferreting out her material.
There were nine-tailed Chinese fox-demons, just as in Europe the cat has nine lives (and is also associated with magic). But the West generally, with its foxy ladies and 20th century Hollywood conglomerates, can offer only relatively threadbare comparisons. Even so, it's interesting to speculate on whether there's any significance in the fact that when the English were mostly Christians and believed in spirits they hunted down the crafty old carnivore, whereas now that they are mostly unbelievers the pursuit with dogs of the acrid-smelling Reynard is, after many years of campaigning by animal-rights activists, finally in the British Isles actually against the law.
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