Yellow Peril
[4][5] In the late 19th century, the Russian sociologist Jacques Novikow coined the term in the essay "Le Péril Jaune" ("The Yellow Peril", 1897), which Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) used to encourage the European empires to invade, conquer, and colonize China.
"[7] The academic Gina Marchetti identified the psycho-cultural fear of East Asians as "rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongol invasions of Europe [1236–1291], the Yellow Peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped, by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East";[8]: 2 hence, to oppose Japanese imperial militarism, the West expanded the Yellow Peril ideology to include the Japanese people.
The lithograph depicts Germany as the leader of Europe,[11][16] personified as a "prehistoric warrior-goddesses being led by the Archangel Michael against the 'yellow peril' from the East", which is represented by "dark cloud of smoke [upon] which rests an eerily calm Buddha, wreathed in flame".
In 1870s California, despite the Burlingame Treaty (1868) allowing legal migration of unskilled laborers from China, the native white working-class demanded that the U.S. government cease the immigration of "filthy yellow hordes" of Chinese people who took jobs from native-born white-Americans, especially during an economic depression.
[23] As in the case of Irish-Catholic immigrants, the popular press misrepresented Asian peoples as culturally subversive, whose way of life would diminish republicanism in the U.S.; hence, racist political pressure compelled the U.S. government to legislate the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which remained the effective immigration-law until 1943.
[25] In the late 19th century, with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) China recovered the eastern portion of the Ili River basin (Zhetysu), which Russia had occupied for a decade, since the Dungan Revolt.
Annoyed by Foreign Office censorship, the Kaiser published the unexpurgated Hun Speech, which "evoked images of a Crusade and considered the current crisis [the Boxer Rebellion] to amount to a war between Occident and Orient."
"[36]: 284 From contemporary Western observers, German, Russian, and Japanese troops received the greatest criticism for their ruthlessness and willingness to wantonly execute Chinese of all ages and backgrounds, sometimes by burning and killing entire village populations.
[48]: 263 The gist of von Ehrenfels's nihilistic racism was that Asian conquest of the West equaled white racial annihilation; Continental Europe subjugated by a genetically superior Sino–Japanese army consequent to a race war that the Western world would fail to thwart or win.
[48]: 262 To end what he perceived as the threat of the Yellow Peril to the Western world, von Ehrenfels proposed white racial unity among the nations of the West, in order to jointly prosecute a preemptive war of ethnic conflicts to conquer Asia, before it became militarily infeasible.
It depicts the nations of Europe, personified as heroic, but vulnerable, female figures guarded by the Archangel Michael, gazing apprehensively towards a dark cloud of smoke in the East, in which rests an eerily calm Buddha, wreathed in flame ...
[11] Asian geopolitical dominance of the world is "the prospect, placed before the uninstructed reading public, is a revival of the Hun and Mongol terrors, and the names of Attila and Genghis are set out in the largest type to create feelings of apprehension.
In 1911, "The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem" an article distributed around the Home Office, warned of "a vast and convulsive Armageddon to determine who is to be the master of the world, the white or yellow man."
[54][58] According to historian Anne Witchard, many Londoners believed the British Chinese community, including Triad gangsters, "were abducting young English women to sell into white slavery", a fate "worse than death" in Western popular culture.
[59] This anti-Chinese moral panic derived in part from the social reality that British women were becoming more financially independent by way of war-production jobs, which allowed them (among other things) greater sexual freedom, a cultural threat to Britain's patriarchal society.
[74] Eugenicists used the Yellow Peril to misrepresent the U.S. as an exclusively WASP nation threatened by miscegenation with the Asian Other by expressing their racism with biological language (infection, disease, decay) and imagery of penetration (wounds and sores) of the white body.
[81]: 165–166 The wartime zeitgeist and the geopolitics of the U.S. government presumed that defeat of the Imperial Japan would be followed by postwar China developing into a capitalist economy under the strongman leadership of the Christian Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party).
: A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1887), the journalist and labor leader William Lane said that a horde of Chinese people legally arrived in Australia and overran white society and monopolized the industries for exploiting the natural resources of the Australian "empty north".
[90] In the 1890s, that moralistic theme was the anti-Chinese message of the feminist and labor organizer Rose Summerfield who voiced the white woman's sexual fear of the Yellow Peril, by warning society of the Chinese man's unnaturally lustful gaze upon the pulchritude of Australian women.
[98] In the early 20th century, in 1904, the French journalist René Pinon reported that the Yellow Peril were a cultural, geopolitical, and existential threat to white civilization in the Western world: The "Yellow Peril" has entered already into the imagination of the people, just as represented in the famous drawing [Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions,1895] of the Emperor Wilhelm II: In a setting of conflagration and carnage, Japanese and Chinese hordes spread out over all Europe, crushing under their feet the ruins of our capital cities and destroying our civilizations, grown anemic due to the enjoyment of luxuries, and corrupted by the vanity of spirit.
[112] To that end, the CUP considered allying Turkey with Japan in a geopolitical effort to unite the peoples of the Eastern world to fight a racial war of extermination against the White colonial empires of the West.
[113]: 53–54 Fear of the Yellow Peril occurs against the Chinese communities of Turkey, usually as political retaliation against the PRC government's repressions and human-rights abuses against the Muslim Uighur people in the Xinjiang province of China.
[115]: 107 The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress then passed a resolution declaring: That this meeting, consisting of all classes of citizens of London, emphatically protests against the action of the Government in granting permission to import into South Africa indentured Chinese labor under conditions of slavery, and calls upon them to protect this new colony from the greed of capitalists and the Empire from degradation.
[8]: 113–116 The cultural contrast of the representations of Suzie Wong and Kay O'Neill imply that to win the love of a white man, a Western woman should emulate the sexually passive prostitute rather than an independent career-woman.
[8]: 116 As an Oriental stereotype, the submissive Lotus -Blossom (Wong) "proudly displays signs of a beating, to her fellow hookers, and uses it as evidence that her man loves her", which further increases Lomax's white savior desire to rescue Suzy.
[8]: 117 In contrast to the British and Chinese mistreatment (emotional and physical) of Wong, the white savior Lomax idealizes her as a child–woman, and saves her with the Lotus Blossom social identity, a sexually passive woman who is psychologically submissive to paternalism.
[127]: 11 The Chinese gangster Fu Manchu is a mad scientist intent upon conquering the world, but is continually foiled by the British policeman Sir Denis Nayland Smith and his companion Dr. Petrie, in thirteen novels (1913–59), by Sax Rohmer.
[137] Fu Manchu is "[Sax] Rohmer's concoction of cunning Asian villainy [that] connects with the irrational fears of proliferation and incursion: Racist myths often carried by the water imagery of flood, deluge, the tidal waves of immigrants, rivers of blood.
Hero Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) discovers that the Mandarin is an English actor, Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who was hired by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) as a cover for his own criminal activities.
According to director Shane Black and screenwriter Drew Pearce, making the Mandarin an impostor avoided Yellow Peril stereotyping while modernizing it with a message about the use of fear by the military industrial complex.
