The choice: More austerity with anti-China Sinophobic militarism led by US, or open trade and exchange with China?
Peter Klevius etymology tutorial: 'Bloomberg', btw, is a Swedish name 'Blomberg' where 'blom' (blomma) means flower and 'berg' means, yes, berg but in its original meaning as rock or mountain. Always remember that English is an illegitimate child of old Swedish/old Nordic - often misleadingly called "old Norse" although there was no Norway or Norwegian language back in the Viking era and beyond. Peter Klevius grew up in an old Swedish speaking environment which makes him able to (almost) read Beowulf without translation. Peter Klevius also happens to master the oldest European language (Basque and Kartvelian do not have equally many really old words still in daily use) Finnish which has some more than 200 proto-Uralic words still in use, compared to proto-Indoeuropean that has almost only artificially made proto-words. Finnish, like most non IE or Semitic languages, also lacks the stupid (religious?) third person sex segregation. It's simply 'hän' no matter of sex! Do also note that the rest of the Finnish language is just a mess of loanwords and distorted by Agricola's transcription in the 16th century. However, the lazy Agricola made it exremely easy to spell Finnish because it's now spelled exactly as its written - i.e. as far you can get from the spelling mess of the Swedish creole language called English. Also check out e.g. Livonian and Saami.
UK isn't "threatened"
by China! Quite the contrary! So why increase defense spending while
Brits suffer from austerity?! And the more militaristic UK turns, the
more it puts its own people on the target of attacks or disastrous
military recklessness.
UK leadership ought to clean out racist and populist anti-China policies.
US
produces disturbing trade stoppers and dangerous militarism while China
produces stability and the best research and products the world begs
for now and even more so in the future when China's better quality
becomes equally obvious as it already is for the islamist Saudi dictator
and others.
Modern capitalist China has nothing to do with Maos
naive backyard steel furnaces. And the word Communism is now basically
what Western countries would call 'fairness' and 'redistribution' among
themselves. So the demonizing erroneous Western use of the word is
extremely misleading and goes all the way back to US anti-Communism
propaganda after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire.
Victims of US anti-Communism propaganda include an enormous amount of
famous people from entertainers to scientists etc. (John Lennon was one
of them). And when it comes to China hate just look up US' and UK's
unbelievable behavior during and after the s.c. Opium Wars. Against this
light it's reassuring that China didn't feel a militant revenge was
necessary but instead started the belt-and-road initiative, which ought
to be compared to US continuing military-and-nukes policy - now even
exacerbated by its 1971 dollar crime soon coming home to roost..
US continuous dollar theft is the reason behind world inflation.
Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde - US split personality exports printed money and
sells militarism that it has produced with stolen money and sell for
real money.
In effect NATO countries pay the double sum for soon
outdated military tech while functioning as US' nuke deterrence far from
US' own borders.
US is therefore now the only country in the
world that can print and export money to keep its trade balance. But
that system leads to inflation which US exports with the dollar.
When US 1971 robbed the whole world by not respecting the financial global "rules based order" it paved the way
Who
is really the "assertive", "authoritarian" one today who has forced the
rest of the world to work for it while calling it "the international
rules based order"?
It's not the dollar fall, but the fact that
China's research and production quality inevitably outperforms US no
matter how many trade obstruction laws US produces.
$-freeloader
(since 1971) US' militarism and smear campaign against China has created
the most misleading and dangerous image of modern China - and the
culprit US paints itself as the global savior (with nukes*).
And politicians blindfolded follow the criminal US towards the inevitable cliff edge.
Assertive
Penny Mordaunt is using the anti-China (and therefore anti-prosperity)
card in politics when in fact China is the solution while US definitely
is the biggest threat to UK. US' stated militaristic and financial
ambitions and assertive trade behavior present systemic challenges to
the global community.
Penny Mordaunt: The current Government has been too soft on China, prioritising economic relations over national security.
Peter
Klevius: Is China attacking UK?! I tought it was Saudi educated and
supported islamists who have constituted the biggest threat to åepåle in
UK. And is it really the best option to be hostile against a super
power that is nowhere near as militant and financially and in trading
criminal behavior globally.
And is it really wise to side with
the certain loser US which will not in any sense aid UK when it's in
trouble, not to mention the undeniable fact that the effects of US
dollar theft 1971 is the very reason why US deliberately and
methodically has forced the West into pure insanity - crowned with the
spreading of new s.c. low yield nukes all over Europe and East Asia -
including the only neutral and nuke free Nordic countries Sweden and
Finland.
How hard is it to get that ALL main global problems of today are signed US.
China is the most reliable ally in economy and finance - US and its supporting politicians are the worst!
US
militarism and warmongering against China is paid by Westerners who
aren't even asked if they think a war against China is better than trade
with China.
Sweden and Finland choose US nukes instead of Human Rights - without asking the Swedish and Finnish people!
Sweden
and Finland have promised to intensify anti-terrorism measures and to
deport individuals considered terrorists by Turkey - incl. members of
parliament.
Peter Klevius asks you to consider this in the light
of US' and UK's strange and irrational behavior against Chinese Hong
Kong, and dangerous, criminal and costly militaristic build up against
China/Taiwan.
Sinophobia rooted in 'The Yellow Peril'
The
Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror and the Yellow Specter) is a
racial colour-metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast
Asia as "an existential danger to the Western world". As a
psycho-cultural menace from the Eastern world, fear of the Yellow Peril
is racial, not national, a fear derived not from concern with a specific
source of danger or from any one people or country, but from a vaguely
ominous, existential fear of the faceless, nameless hordes of yellow
people. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is fear of the
Oriental, non-white Other, a racialist fantasy presented in the book The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop
Stoddard.
The racist ideology of the Yellow Peril derives from a
"core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and
beings who possessed special powers", which developed during the 19th
century as Western imperialist expansion adduced East Asians as the
Yellow Peril. 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. To that
end, using the Yellow Peril ideology, the Kaiser portrayed the Japanese
and the Asian victory against the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905) as an Asian racial threat to white Western Europe, and also
exposes China and Japan as in alliance to conquer, subjugate, and
enslave the Western world.
The sinologist Wing-Fai Leung
explained the origins of the term and the racialist ideology: "The
phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow specter) ...
blends Western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien Other, and
the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and
enslaved by the East." 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", hence, to oppose Japanese imperial
militarism, the West expanded the Yellow Peril ideology to include the
Japanese people. Moreover, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries,
writers developed the Yellow Peril literary topos into codified,
racialist motifs of narration, especially in stories and novels of
ethnic conflict in the genres of invasion literature, adventure fiction,
and science fiction.
In 1854, as editor of the New-York Tribune,
Horace Greeley published "Chinese Immigration to California" an
editorial opinion supporting the popular demand for the exclusion of
Chinese workers and people from California. Without using the term
"yellow peril," Greeley compared the arriving coolies to the African
slaves who survived the Middle Passage. He praised the few Christians
among the arriving Chinese and continued:
The Yellow Peril: Chinese men worked for wages lower than those a white man would accept.
But of the remainder, what can be said? They are for the most part an
industrious people, forbearing and patient of injury, quiet and
peaceable in their habits; say this and you have said all good that can
be said of them. They are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all
conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations;
lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute
of the basest order; the first words of English that they learn are
terms of obscenity or profanity, and beyond this they care to learn no
more.
— New York Daily Tribune, Chinese Immigration to California, 29 September 1854, p. 4.[29]
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.[3]
In
Los Angeles, Yellow Peril racism provoked the Chinese Massacre of 1871,
wherein 500 white men lynched 20 Chinese men in the Chinatown ghetto.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the leader of the Workingmen's Party of
California, the demagogue Denis Kearney, successfully applied Yellow
Peril ideology to his politics against the press, capitalists,
politicians, and Chinese workers,[30] and concluded his speeches with
the epilogue: "and whatever happens, the Chinese must go!"[31][32]: 349
The Chinese people also were specifically subjected to moralistic
panics about their use of opium, and how their use made opium popular
among white people.[33] 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.[3] Moreover, following the example of Kaiser
Wilhelm II's use of the term in 1895, the popular press in the U.S.
adopted the phrase "yellow peril" to identify Japan as a military
threat, and to describe the many emigrants from Asia.[34]
Boxer Rebellion
Main article: Boxer Rebellion
In
1900, the anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion (August 1899 – September 1901)
reinforced the racist stereotypes of East Asians as a Yellow Peril to
white people. The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (called
the Boxers in the West) was an anti-colonial martial-arts organization
who blamed the problems of China on the presence of Western colonies in
China proper. The Boxers sought to save China by killing Westerners in
China and Chinese Christian or Westernized people.[35]: 350 In the
early summer of 1900, Prince Zaiyi allowed the Boxers into Beijing to
kill Westerners and Chinese Christians in siege to the foreign
legations.[35]: 78–79 Afterwards, Ronglu, Qing Commander-in-Chief and
Yikuang (Prince Qing), resisted and expelled the Boxers from Beijing
after days of fighting.
Western perception
Most of the victims
of the Boxer Rebellion were Chinese Christians, but the massacres of
Chinese people were of no interest to the Western world, which demanded
Asian blood to avenge the Westerners in China killed by the Boxers.[36]
In response, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Imperial Japan,
Imperial France, Imperial Russia, and Imperial Germany, Austria–Hungary
and Italy formed the Eight-Nation Alliance and dispatched an
international military expeditionary force to end the Siege of the
International Legations in Beijing.[citation needed]
Yellow Peril
xenophobia arose from the armed revolt of the Society of the Righteous
and Harmonious Fists (the Boxers) to expel all Westerners from China,
during the Boxer Rebellion (August 1899 – September 1901)
The
Russian press presented the Boxer Rebellion in racialist and religious
terms as a cultural war between White Holy Russia and Yellow Pagan
China. The press further supported the Yellow Peril apocalypse with
quotations from the Sinophobic poems of the philosopher Vladimir
Solovyov.[37]: 664 Likewise, in the press, the aristocracy demanded
action against the Asian threat. Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy
urged Imperial Russia and other European monarchies to jointly partition
China and to end the Yellow Peril to Christendom.[37]: 664–665 Hence,
on 3 July 1900, in response to the Boxer Rebellion, Russia expelled the
Chinese community (5,000 people) from Blagoveshchensk. From 4 to 8 July,
the Tsarist police, Cossack cavalry, and local vigilantes killed
thousands of Chinese people at the Amur River.[38]
In the Western
world, news of Boxer atrocities against Westerners in China provoked
Yellow Peril racism in Europe and North America, where the Chinese'
rebellion was perceived as a race war between the yellow race and the
white race. In that vein, The Economist magazine warned in 1905:
The history of the Boxer movement contains abundant warnings, as to the
necessity of an attitude of constant vigilance, on the part of the
European Powers, when there are any symptoms that a wave of nationalism
is about to sweep over the Celestial Empire.[36]
Sixty-one years
later, in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Red Guard
shouting “Kill!, Kill!, Kill!” attacked the British embassy and beat the
diplomats. A diplomat remarked that the Boxers had used the same
chant.[36]
Colonial vengeance
Kaiser Wilhelm II used Yellow Peril
ideology as geopolitical justification for Imperial German and European
imperialism in China.
China: The Cake of Kings and ... of Emperors:
An angry Mandarin bureaucrat watches Queen Victoria (British Empire),
Kaiser Wilhelm II (German Empire), Tsar Nicholas II (Russian Empire),
Marianne (Third French Republic), and a Samurai (Empire of Japan)
discuss their partitioning of China into colonies.[39]
On 27 July
1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the racist Hunnenrede (Hun speech)
exhorting his soldiers to barbarism and that Imperial German soldiers
depart Europe for China and suppress the Boxer Rebellion by acting like
"Huns" and committing atrocities against the Chinese (Boxer and
civilian):[18]: 203
When you come before the enemy, you must
defeat him, pardon will not be given, prisoners will not be taken!
Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword! Just as a
thousand years ago the Huns, under their King Attila, made a name for
themselves with their ferocity, which tradition still recalls; so may
the name of Germany become known in China in such a way that no Chinaman
will ever dare look a German in the eye, even with a squint![18]: 14
Fearful
of harm to the public image of Imperial Germany, the Auswärtiges Amt
(Foreign Office) published a redacted version of the Hun Speech that was
expurgated of the exhortation to racist barbarism. 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."
However, that "elaborate accompanying music, and the new ideology of the
Yellow Peril stood in no relation to the actual possibilities and
results" of geopolitical policy based upon racist
misperception.[40]: 96
Exhortation to barbarism
The Kaiser
ordered the expedition-commander, Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee, to
behave barbarously because the Chinese were "by nature, cowardly, like a
dog, but also deceitful".[40]: 99 In that time, the Kaiser's best
friend, Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, wrote to another friend that the
Kaiser wanted to raze Beijing and kill the populace to avenge the murder
of Baron Clemens von Ketteler, Imperial Germany's minister to
China.[18]: 13 Only the Eight-Nation Alliance's refusal of barbarism to
resolve the siege of the legations saved the Chinese populace of
Beijing from the massacre recommended by Imperial Germany.[18]: 13 In
August 1900, an international military force of Russian, Japanese,
British, French, and American soldiers captured Beijing before the
German force had arrived at the city.[40]: 107
Praxis of barbarism
The
eight-nation alliance sacked Beijing in vengeance for the Boxer
Rebellion; the magnitude of the rape, pillaging and burning indicated "a
sense that the Chinese were less than human" to the Western
powers.[35]: 286 About the sacking of the city, an Australian in China
stated: "The future of the Chinese is a fearful problem. Look at the
frightful sights one sees in the streets of Peking ... See the filthy,
tattered rags they wrap around them. Smell them as they pass. Hear of
their nameless immorality. Witness their shameless indecency, and
picture them among your own people — Ugh! It makes you
shudder!"[35]: 350
British admiral Roger Keyes recalled: "Every
Chinaman ... was treated as a Boxer, by the Russian and French troops,
and the slaughter of men, women, and children, in retaliation, was
revolting".[35]: 284 The American missionary Luella Miner reported that
"the conduct of the Russian soldiers is atrocious, the French are not
much better, and the Japanese are looting and burning without mercy.
Women and girls, by the hundreds, have committed suicide to escape a
worse fate at the hands of Russian and Japanese brutes."[35]: 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.[41] The Americans and
British paid General Yuan Shikai and his army (the Right Division) to
help the Eight Nation Alliance suppress the Boxers. Yuan Shikai's forces
killed tens of thousands of people in their anti-Boxer campaign in
Zhili Province and Shandong after the Alliance captured Beijing.[42] The
British journalist George Lynch said that "there are things that I must
not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to
show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over
savagery".[35]: 285
The expedition of German Field Marshal
Waldersee arrived in China on 27 September 1900, after the military
defeat of the Boxer Rebellion by the Eight Nation Alliance, yet he
launched 75 punitive raids into northern China to search for and destroy
the remaining Boxers. The German soldiers killed more peasants than
Boxer guerrillas because by autumn 1900, the Society of the Righteous
and Harmonious Fists (the Boxers) had posed no threat.[40]: 109 On 19
November 1900, at the Reichstag, the German Social Democrat politician
August Bebel criticised the Kaiser's attack upon China as shameful to
Germany:
No, this is no crusade, no holy war; it is a very
ordinary war of conquest ... A campaign of revenge as barbaric as has
never been seen in the last centuries, and not often at all in History
... not even with the Huns, not even with the Vandals ... That is not a
match for what the German and other troops of foreign powers, together
with the Japanese troops, have done in China.[40]: 97
Cultural fear
In
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Houston Stewart
Chamberlain provided racialist ideology for Nazi Germany (1933–1945).
The
political praxis of Yellow Peril racism calls for apolitical racial
unity among the White peoples of the world. To resolve a contemporary
problem (economic, social, political) the racialist politician calls for
White unity against the non-white Other who threatens Western
civilization from distant Asia. Despite the Western powers' military
defeat of the anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion, Yellow Peril fear of
Chinese nationalism became a cultural factor among white people: That
"the Chinese race" mean to invade, vanquish, and subjugate Christian
civilization in the Western world.[43]
In July 1900, the Völkisch
movement intellectual Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the "Evangelist of
Race", gave his racialist perspective of the cultural meaning of the
Boer War (1899–1902) in relation to the cultural meaning of the Boxer
Rebellion: "One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal
for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other, for all sorts
of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us
white men, and threatens destruction."[44] In the book The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Chamberlain provided the racist
ideology for Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movements of the early 20th
century, which greatly influenced the Racial policy of Nazi Germany.[45]
Racial annihilation
The Darwinian threat
The
Yellow Peril racialism of the Austrian philosopher Christian von
Ehrenfels proposed that the Western world and the Eastern world were in a
Darwinian racial struggle for domination of the planet, which the
yellow race was winning.[46]: 258 That the Chinese were an inferior
race of people whose Oriental culture lacked "all potentialities ...
determination, initiative, productivity, invention, and organizational
talent" supposedly innate to the white cultures of the West.[46]: 263
Nonetheless, despite having dehumanized the Chinese into an essentialist
stereotype of physically listless and mindless Asians, von Ehrenfels's
cultural cognitive dissonance allowed praising Japan as a first-rate
imperial military power whose inevitable conquest of continental China
would produce improved breeds of Chinese people. That the Japanese'
selective breeding with "genetically superior" Chinese women would
engender a race of "healthy, sly, cunning coolies", because the Chinese
are virtuosi of sexual reproduction.[46]: 263 The gist of von
Ehrenfels's nihilistic racism was that Asian conquest of the West
equalled 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.[46]: 263
Polygamous patriarchy
To
resolve the population imbalance between the Eastern and the West in
favor of White people, von Ehrenfels proposed radical changes to the
mores (social and sexual norms) of the Christian West. Eliminating
monogamy as a hindrance to global white-supremacy, for limiting a
genetically superior White man to father children with only one woman;
because polygamy gives the yellow race greater reproductive advantage,
for permitting a genetically superior Asian man to father children with
many women.[46]: 258–261 Therefore, the state would control human
sexuality through polygamy, to ensure the continual procreation of
genetically and numerically superior populations of White people.
In
such a patriarchal society, only high-status White men of known genetic
reliability would have the legal right to reproduce, with the number of
reproductive wives he can afford, and so ensure that only the “social
winners” reproduce, within their racial caste.[46]: 261–262 Despite
such radical social engineering of men's sexual behavior, White women
remained monogamous by law; their lives dedicated to the breeding
functions of wife and mother.[46]: 261–262 The fertile women would
reside and live their daily lives in communal barracks, where they
collectively rear their many children. To fulfill her reproductive
obligations to the state, each woman is assigned a husband only for
reproductive sexual intercourse.[46]: 261–262 Ehrenfels's social
engineering for worldwide White supremacy eliminates romantic love
(marriage) from sexual intercourse, and thus reduces man–woman sexual
relations to a transaction of mechanistic reproduction.[46]: 262
Race war
To
end 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. Then establish a worldwide
racial hierarchy organized as an hereditary caste system, headed by the
White race in each conquered country of Asia.[46]: 264 That an
oligarchy of the Aryan White people would form, populate, and lead the
racial castes of the ruling class, the military forces, and the
intelligentsia; and that in each conquered country, the Yellow and the
Black races would be slaves, the economic base of the worldwide racial
hierarchy.[46]: 264
The Aryan society that von Ehrenfels
proposed in the early 20th century, would be in the far future of the
Western world, realized after defeating the Yellow Peril and the other
races for control of the Earth, because "the Aryan will only respond to
the imperative of sexual reform when the waves of the Mongolian tide are
lapping around his neck".[46]: 263 As a racialist, von Ehrenfels
characterized the Japanese military victory in the Russo-Japanese War
(1905) as an Asian victory against the white peoples of the Christian
West, a cultural failure which indicated "the absolute necessity of a
radical, sexual reform for the continued existence of the Western races
of man ... [The matter of White racial survival] has been raised from
the level of discussion to the level of a scientifically proven
fact".[46]: 263
Sublimated anti-Semitism
In Sex, Masculinity,
and the 'Yellow Peril': Christian von Ehrenfels' Program for a Revision
of the European Sexual Order, 1902–1910 (2002), the historian Edward
Ross Dickinson said that von Ehrenfels always used metaphors of deadly
water to express Yellow Peril racism — a flood of Chinese people upon
the West; a Chinese torrent of mud drowning Europe; the Japanese are a
polluting liquid — because white Europeans would be unaware and
unresponsive to the demographic threat until the waves of Asians reached
their necks.[46]: 271 As a man of his time, von Ehrenfels likely
suffered the same sexual anxieties about his masculinity that were
suffered by his right-wing contemporaries, whose racialist works the
historian Klaus Theweleit examined, and noted that only von Ehrenfels
psychologically projected his sexual self-doubt into Yellow Peril
racism, rather than the usual cultural hatreds of Judeo-Bolshevism, then
the variety of anti-Semitism popular in Germany during the early 20th
century.[46]: 271
Theweleit also noted that, during the European
interwar period (1918–1939), the racialist works of the Freikorps
mercenaries featured deadly-water metaphors when the only available
peacetime enemies were "The Jews" and "The Communists", whose cultural
and political existence threatened the manichean worldview of right-wing
Europeans.[46]: 271 As such, the psychologically insecure Freikorps
fetishized masculinity and were keen to prove themselves "hard men"
through the political violence of terrorism against Jews and Communists;
thus, the deadly-water defense mechanism against the adult emotional
intimacy (romantic love, eroticism, sexual intercourse) and consequent
domesticity that naturally occur between men and women.[46]: 271
Xenophobia
Germany and Russia
From
1895, Kaiser Wilhelm used Yellow Peril ideology to portray Imperial
Germany as defender of the West against conquest from the
East.[47]: 210 In pursuing Weltpolitik policies meant to establish
Germany as the dominant empire, the Kaiser manipulated his own
government officials, public opinion, and other monarchs.[48] In a
letter to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Kaiser said: "It is clearly
the great task of the future for Russia to cultivate the Asian
continent, and defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow
Race".[17]: 31 In The Bloody White Baron (2009), the historian James
Palmer explains the 19th-century socio-cultural background from which
Yellow Peril ideology originated and flourished:
The 1890s
had spawned in the West the specter of the "Yellow Peril", the rise to
world dominance of the Asian peoples. The evidence cited was Asian
population growth, immigration to the West (America and Australia in
particular), and increased Chinese settlement along the Russian border.
These demographic and political fears were accompanied by a vague and
ominous dread of the mysterious powers supposedly possessed by the
initiates of Eastern religions. There is a striking German picture of
the 1890s, depicting the dream that inspired Kaiser Wilhelm II to coin
the term "Yellow Peril", that shows the union of these ideas. 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 ...
Combined with this was a sense of the
slow sinking of the Abendland, the "Evening Land" of the West. This
would be put most powerfully, by thinkers such as Oswald Spengler in The
Decline of the West (1918) and the Prussian philosopher Moeller van den
Bruck, a Russophone obsessed with the coming rise of the East. Both
called for Germany to join the "young nations" of Asia through the
adoption of such supposedly Asiatic practices as collectivism, "inner
barbarism", and despotic leadership. The identification of Russia with
Asia would eventually overwhelm such sympathies, instead leading to a
more-or-less straightforward association of Germany with the values of
"The West", against the "Asiatic barbarism" of Russia. That was most
obvious during the Nazi era [1933–1945], when virtually every piece of
anti–Russian propaganda talked of the "Asiatic millions" or "Mongolian
hordes", which threatened to over-run Europe, but the identification of
the Russians as Asian, especially as Mongolian, continued well into the
Cold War era [1917–1991].[17]: 30–31
The European collective
memory of the Yellow Peril includes the Mongols' display of the severed
head of Duke Henry II of Silesia, in Legnica.
As his cousin,
Kaiser Wilhelm knew that Tsar Nicholas shared his anti-Asian racism and
believed he could persuade the Tsar to abrogate the Franco-Russian
Alliance (1894) and then to form a German–Russian alliance against
Britain.[49]: 120–123 In manipulative pursuit of Imperial German
Weltpolitik "Wilhelm II's deliberate use of the 'yellow peril' slogan
was more than a personal idiosyncrasy, and fitted into the general
pattern of German foreign policy under his reign, i.e. to encourage
Russia's Far Eastern adventures, and later to sow discord, between the
United States and Japan. Not the substance, but only the form, of
Wilhelm II's 'yellow peril' propaganda disturbed the official policy of
the Wilhelmstrasse."[50]
Mongols in Europe
In the 19th
century, the racial and cultural stereotypes of Yellow Peril ideology
colored German perceptions of Russia as a nation more Asiatic that
European.[17]: 31 The European folk memory of the 13th-century Mongol
invasion of Europe made the word Mongol a cultural synonym for the
"Asian culture of cruelty and insatiable appetite for conquest", which
was especially personified by Genghis Khan, leader of the Orda, the
Mongol Horde.[17]: 57–58
Despite that justifying historical
background, Yellow Peril racism was not universally accepted in the
societies of Europe. French intellectual Anatole France said that Yellow
Peril ideology was to be expected from a racist man such as the Kaiser.
Inverting the racist premise of Asian invasion, France showed that
European imperialism in Asia and Africa indicated that the European
White Peril was the true threat to the world.[11] In his essay "The
Bogey of the Yellow Peril" (1904), the British journalist Demetrius
Charles Boulger said the Yellow Peril was racist hysteria for popular
consumption.[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. The reader
is assured, in the most positive manner, that this is the doing of the
enterprising nation of Japan".[51]: 225 Throughout the successful
imperial intrigues facilitated by Germany's Yellow Peril ideology, the
Kaiser's true geopolitical target was Britain.[51]: 225
United Kingdom
Though
Chinese civilisation was admired in 18th-century Britain, by the 19th
century, the Opium Wars led to the creation of racialist stereotypes of
the Chinese among the British public, who cast the Chinese "as a
threatening, expansionist foe" and a corrupt and depraved people.[52]
Still, there were exceptions to popular racism of the Yellow Peril. In
May 1890, William Ewart Gladstone criticized anti-Chinese immigration
laws in Australia for penalizing their virtues of hard work (diligence,
thrift and integrity), instead of penalizing their vices (gambling and
opium smoking).[53]: 25
Cultural temper
In 1904, in a meeting
about the Russo–Japanese War, King Edward VII heard the Kaiser complain
that the Yellow Peril is "the greatest peril menacing ... Christendom
and European civilization. If the Russians went on giving ground, the
yellow race would, in twenty years time, be in Moscow and Posen".[54]
The Kaiser criticized the British for siding with Japan against Russia,
and said that "race treason" was the motive. King Edward said he "could
not see it. The Japanese were an intelligent, brave and chivalrous
nation, quite as civilized as the Europeans, from whom they only
differed by the pigmentation of their skin".[54]
Unlike the Kaiser of
Germany, King Edward VII of the United Kingdom did not see the Japanese
as the Yellow Peril in the Russo–Japanese War. (1904–05)
The
first British usage of the Yellow Peril phrase was in the Daily News (21
July 1900) report describing the Boxer Rebellion as "the yellow peril
in its most serious form".[52] In that time, British Sinophobia, the
fear of Chinese people, did not include all Asians, because Britain had
sided with Japan during the Russo–Japanese War, whilst France and
Germany supported Russia;[55]: 91 whereas the reports of Captain
William Pakenham "tended to depict Russia as his enemy, not just
Japan".[55]: 91
About pervasive Sinophobia in Western culture,
in The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia (2014),
historian Christopher Frayling noted:
In the early decades of
the 20th century, Britain buzzed with Sinophobia. Respectable
middle-class magazines, tabloids and comics, alike, spread stories of
ruthless Chinese ambitions to destroy the West. The Chinese
master-criminal (with his "crafty yellow face twisted by a thin-lipped
grin", dreaming of world domination) had become a staple of children's
publications. 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." After the First World War, cinemas,
theater, novels, and newspapers broadcast visions of the "Yellow Peril"
machinating to corrupt white society. In March 1929, the chargé
d'affaires, at London's Chinese legation, complained that no fewer than
five plays, showing in the West End, depicted Chinese people in "a
vicious and objectionable form".[56]
Moralistic panic
The
Limehouse district in London (which had a large Chinese element) was
portrayed in the British popular imagination as a center of moral
depravity and vice, i.e. sexual prostitution, opium smoking, and
gambling.[52][56] 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.[57] In 1914, at the start
of the First World War, the Defense of the Realm Act was amended to
include the smoking of opium as proof of "moral depravity" that merited
deportation, a legalistic pretext for deporting members of the Chinese
community to China.[57] That anti-Chinese moral panic derived in part
from the social reality that British women were financially independent
by way of war-production jobs, which allowed them (among other things)
sexual freedom, a cultural threat to Britain's patriarchal society.[58]
Witchard noted that stories of "working-class girls consorting with
“Chinamen” in Limehouse" and "debutantes leading officers astray in Soho
drinking dens" contributed to the anti-Chinese moral panic.[58]
United States
19th century
In
the U.S., Yellow Peril xenophobia was legalized with the Page Act of
1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Geary Act of 1892. The
Chinese Exclusion Act replaced the Burlingame Treaty (1868), which had
encouraged Chinese migration, and provided that "citizens of the United
States in China, of every religious persuasion, and Chinese subjects, in
the United States, shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience, and shall
be exempt from all disability or persecution, on account of their
religious faith or worship, in either country", withholding only the
right of naturalized citizenship.
In the Western U.S., the
frequency with which racists lynched Chinese people originated the
phrase, "Having a Chinaman's chance in Hell", meaning "no chance at all"
of surviving a false accusation.[59] In Tombstone, Arizona, sheriff
Johnny Behan[60] and mayor John Clum[61] organized the "Anti-Chinese
League" in 1880,[62][63] which was reorganized into the "Anti-Chinese
Secret Society of Cochise County" in 1886.[64] In 1880, the Yellow Peril
pogrom of Denver featured the lynching of a Chinese man and the
destruction of the local Chinatown ghetto.[59] In 1885, the Rock Springs
massacre of 28 miners destroyed a Wyoming Chinese community.[65] In
Washington Territory, Yellow Peril fear provoked the Attack on Squak
Valley Chinese laborers, 1885; the arson of the Seattle Chinatown; and
the Tacoma riot of 1885, by which the local white inhabitants expelled
the Chinese community from their towns.[65] In Seattle, the Knights of
Labor expelled 200 Chinese people with the Seattle riot of 1886. In
Oregon, 34 Chinese gold miners were ambushed, robbed, and killed in the
Hells Canyon Massacre (1887). Moreover, concerning the experience of
being Chinese in the 19th-century U.S., in the essay "A Chinese View of
the Statue of Liberty" (1885), Sauum Song Bo said:
Seeing
that the heading is an appeal to American citizens, to their love of
country and liberty, I feel my countrymen, and myself, are honored in
being thus appealed to, as citizens in the cause of liberty. But the
word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is a land of
liberty for men of all nations, except the Chinese. I consider it an
insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute towards building, in
this land, a pedestal for a statue of liberty. That statue represents
Liberty holding a torch, which lights the passage of those of all
nations who come into this country. But are Chinese allowed to come? As
for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men
of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about
everywhere free from insults, abuse, assaults, wrongs and injuries from
which men of other nationalities are free?[66]
20th century
To
contain the Yellow Peril, the Immigration Act of 1917 established the
Asiatic Barred Zone from which the U.S. admitted no immigrants.
Under
nativist political pressure, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an
Asian Barred Zone of countries from which immigration to the U.S. was
forbidden. The Cable Act of 1922 (Married Women's Independent
Nationality Act) guaranteed citizenship to independent women unless they
were married to a nonwhite alien ineligible for naturalization.[67]
Asian men and women were excluded from American citizenship.[68][69]
In
practice, the Cable Act of 1922 reversed some racial exclusions, and
granted independent woman citizenship exclusively to women married to
white men. Analogously, the Cable Act allowed the government to revoke
the citizenship of an American white woman married an Asian man. The law
was formally challenged before the Supreme Court, with the case of
Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), whereby a Japanese–American man
tried to demonstrate that the Japanese people are a white race eligible
for naturalized American citizenship. The Court ruled that the Japanese
are not white people; two years later, the National Origins Quota of
1924 specifically excluded the Japanese from entering the US and from
American citizenship.
The religious racialism of The Yellow Peril
(1911, 3rd ed.), by G. G. Rupert, proposed that Russia would unite the
Oriental races to invade, conquer, and subjugate Christian civilization
in the Western world.
The eugenic racialism proposed in The Rising
Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard,
presents either China or Japan as uniting the Oriental races to invade,
conquer, and subjugate the white civilizations of the Western world.
Ethnic national character
To
"preserve the ideal of American homogeneity", the Emergency Quota Act
of 1921 (numeric limits) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (fewer southern
and eastern Europeans) restricted admission to the United States
according to the skin color and the race of the immigrant.[70] In
practice, the Emergency Quota Act used outdated census data to determine
the number of colored immigrants to admit to the U.S. To protect WASP
ethnic supremacy (social, economic, political) in the 20th century, the
Immigration Act of 1924 used the twenty-year-old census of 1890, because
its 19th-century demographic-group percentages favored more admissions
of WASP immigrants from western and northern Europe, and fewer
admissions of colored immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern
Europe.[71]
To ensure that the immigration of colored peoples did
not change the WASP national character of the United States, the
National Origins Formula (1921–1965) meant to maintain the status quo
percentages of "ethnic populations" in lesser proportion to the existing
white populations; thus, the yearly quota allowed only 150,000 People
of Color into the U.S.A. In the event, the national-origins Formula was
voided and repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965.[72]
Eugenic apocalypse
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.[73]: 237–238 In The
Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident (1911), the end time evangelist G.
G. Rupert said that Russia would unite the colored races to facilitate
the Oriental invasion, conquest, and subjugation of the West; said white
supremacy is in the Christian eschatology of verse 16:12 in the Book of
Revelation: "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great
Euphrates River, and it dried up so that the kings from the east could
march their armies toward the west without hindrance".[74] As an
Old-Testament Christian, Rupert believed the racialist doctrine of
British Israelism, and said that the Yellow Peril from China, India,
Japan, and Korea, were attacking Britain and the US, but that the
Christian God himself would halt the Asian conquest of the Western
world.[75]
In The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World-Supremacy (1920), the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard said that either
China or Japan would unite the colored peoples of Asia and lead them to
destroy white supremacy in the Western world, and that the Asian
conquest of the world began with the Japanese victory in the
Russo–Japanese War (1905). As a white supremacist, Stoddard presented
his racism with Biblical language and catastrophic imagery depicting a
rising tide of colored people meaning to invade, conquer, and subjugate
the white race.[76]
Political opposition
In that cultural
vein, the phrase "yellow peril" was common editorial usage in the
newspapers of publisher William Randolph Hearst.[77] In the 1930s,
Hearst's newspapers conducted a campaign of vilification (personal and
political) against Elaine Black, an American Communist, whom he
denounced as a libertine "Tiger Woman" for her interracial cohabitation
with the Japanese-American Communist Karl Yoneda.[78] In 1931,
interracial marriage was illegal in California, but, in 1935, Black and
Yoneda married in Seattle, Washington, where such marriages were
legal.[78]
Socially acceptable Asian
In the 1930s, Yellow
Peril stereotypes were common to US culture, exemplified by the
cinematic versions of the Asian detectives Charlie Chan (Warner Oland)
and Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre), originally literary detectives in novels and
comic strips. White actors portrayed the Asian men and made the
fictional characters socially acceptable in mainstream American cinema,
especially when the villains were secret agents of Imperial
Japan.[79]: 159
American proponents of the Japanese Yellow Peril
were the military-industrial interests of the China Lobby (right-wing
intellectuals, businessmen, Christian missionaries) who advocated
financing and supporting the warlord Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a
Methodist convert whom they represented as the Christian Chinese savior
of China, then embroiled in the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937,
1946–1950). After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the China Lobby
successfully pressured the U.S. government to aid Chiang Kai-shek's
faction. The news media's reportage (print, radio, cinema) of the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) favored China, which politically
facilitated the American financing and equipping of the anticommunist
Kuomintang, the Chiang Kai-shek faction in the civil war against the
Communist faction led by Mao Tse-tung.[79]: 159
Pragmatic racialism
In
1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt
administration formally declared China an ally of the U.S., and the news
media modified their use of Yellow Peril ideology to include China to
the West, criticizing contemporary anti-Chinese laws as
counterproductive to the war effort against Imperial
Japan.[79]: 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).
In his relations
with the American government and his China Lobby sponsors, Chiang
requested the repeal of American anti-Chinese laws; to achieve the
repeals, Chiang threatened to exclude the American business community
from the "China Market", the economic fantasy that the China Lobby
promised to the American business community.[79]: 171–172 In 1943, the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed, but, because the National
Origins Act of 1924 was contemporary law, the repeal was a symbolic
gesture of American solidarity with the people of China.
Science
fiction writer William F. Wu said that American adventure, crime, and
detective pulp magazines in the 1930s had many Yellow Peril characters,
loosely based on Fu Manchu; although "most [Yellow Peril characters]
were of Chinese descent", the geopolitics of the time led white people
to see Japan as a threat to the United States. In The Yellow Peril:
Chinese Americans in American fiction, 1850–1940 (1982), Wu said that
fear of Asians dates from the European Middle Ages, from the
13th-century Mongol invasion of Europe. Most Europeans had never seen an
Asian man or woman, and the great differences in language, custom, and
physique accounted for European paranoia about the nonwhite peoples from
the Eastern world.[80]
21st century
The American academic
Frank H. Wu said that anti-Chinese sentiment incited by people such as
Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel is recycling anti-Asian hatred from the
19th century into a "new Yellow Peril" that is common to White populist
politics that do not distinguish between Asian foreigners and
Asian-American U.S. citizens.[81] That American cultural anxiety about
the geopolitical ascent of the People's Republic of China originates in
the fact that, for the first time in centuries, the Western world, led
by the U.S., is challenged by a people whom Westerners viewed as
culturally backward and racially inferior only a generation earlier.[82]
That the U.S. perceives China as "the enemy", because their economic
success voids the myth of white supremacy upon which the West claims
cultural superiority over the East.[83] Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic
has facilitated and increased the occurrence of xenophobia and
anti-Chinese racism, which the academic Chantal Chung said has "deep
roots in yellow peril ideology".[84]
Australia
The White Australia
policy arose from the growth of anti-Asian (particularly Chinese)
sentiments that peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Pictured: The Melbourne Punch (c. May 1888)
In the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, fear of the Yellow Peril was a cultural feature of
the white peoples who sought to establish a country and a society in
the Australian continent. The racialist fear of the nonwhite Asian Other
was a thematic preoccupation common to invasion literature novels, such
as The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia
(1895), The Colored Conquest (1904), The Awakening to China (1909), and
the Fools' Harvest (1939). Such fantasy literature featured an Asian
invasion of "the empty north" of Australia, which was populated by the
Aboriginal Australians, the nonwhite, native Other with whom the white
emigrants competed for living space.[85] In the novel White or Yellow?: 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
to Australia and overran white society and monopolized the industries
for exploiting the natural resources of the Australian "empty
north".[85]
The Yellow Peril was used to justify the White Australia
Policy, which excluded dark-skinned Melanesians from immigration to
Australia.
White nation
As Australian invasion literature of
the 19th-century, the future history novel White or Yellow? (1887)
presents William Lane's nationalist racialism and left-wing politics
that portrayed Australia under threat by the Yellow Peril. In the near
future, British capitalists manipulate the Australian legal system and
then legislate the mass immigration of Chinese workers to Australia,
regardless of the socioeconomic consequences to White Australian
society. Consequent to the British manipulation of Australia's economy,
the resulting social conflicts (racial, financial, cultural, sexual)
escalate into a race war for control of Australia.
The Yellow
Peril racism in the narrative of the novel White or Yellow? justifies
White Australians' killing Chinese workers as a defensive, existential
response for control of Australia.[53]: 26–27 Lang's story of White
racial replacement appeals to the fears that labor and trade union
leaders exploited to oppose the legal immigration of Chinese workers,
whom they misrepresented as racial, economic, and moral threats to White
Australia. That Asian libertinism threatens White Christian
civilization, which theme Lang represents with miscegenation (mixing of
the races). The fear of racial replacement was presented as an
apolitical call to White racial unity in among Australians.[53]: 24
Culturally,
Yellow Peril invasion novels expressed themes of the White man's sexual
fear of the supposed voracious sexuality of Asian men and women. The
stories feature Western women in sexual peril, usually rape-by-seduction
facilitated with the sensual and moral release of smoked opium.[85] In
the patriarchal world of invasion literature, interracial sexual
relations were "a fate worse than death" for a white woman, afterwards,
she was a sexual untouchable to white men.[85] 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.[53]: 24
Racial equality thwarted
In
1901, the Australian federal government adopted the White Australia
policy that had been informally initiated with the Immigration
Restriction Act 1901, which generally excluded Asians, but in particular
excluded the Chinese and the Melanesian peoples. Historian C. E. W.
Bean said that the White Australia policy was "a vehement effort to
maintain a high, Western standard of economy, society, and culture
(necessitating, at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the
rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples)" from Australia.[86] In 1913,
appealing to the irrational fear of the Yellow Peril, the film Australia
Calls (1913) depicted a "Mongolian" invasion of Australia, which
eventually is defeated by ordinary Australians with underground,
political resistance and guerrilla warfare, and not by the army of the
Australian federal government.[87]
In 1919, at the Paris Peace
Conference (28 June 1919), supported by Britain and the U.S., Australian
Prime Minister Billy Hughes vehemently opposed Imperial Japan's request
for the inclusion of the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the
Covenant of the League of Nations (13 February 1919):
The
equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations,
the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to
all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just
treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in
fact, on account of their race or nationality.[88]
Aware that the
British delegation opposed the racial equality clause in Article 21 of
the Covenant, conference chairman U.S. President Woodrow Wilson acted to
prevent de jure racial equality among the nations of the world, with
his unilateral requirement of a unanimous vote by the countries in the
League of Nations. On 11 April 1919, most countries in the conference
voted to include the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the
Covenant of the League of Nations; only the British and American
delegations opposed the racial equality clause. Moreover, to maintain
the White Australia policy, the Australian government sided with Britain
and voted against Japan's formal request that the Racial Equality
Proposal be included to Article 21 of the covenant of the League of
Nations; that defeat in international relations greatly influenced
Imperial Japan to militarily confront the Western world.[89]
France
Colonial empire
In
the late 19th century, French imperialist politicians invoked the Péril
jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low
birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries.[90] From that
racist claim arose an artificial, cultural fear among the French
population that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France, which
could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French
women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual
flood of immigrants from Asia.[90] From that racialist perspective, the
French press sided with Imperial Russia during the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), by representing the Russians as heroes defending the white
race against the Japanese Yellow Peril.[91]
French postcard captioned
"Make way for the yellows" shows Japanese imperialism running over four
great nations of Europe—Russia, Britain, France, and Germany
French Indochina: In the oriental French Empire, the country and people of Vietnam were renamed French Indochina. (1913)
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.
Hence, little by little, there emerges the idea that even if a day must
come (and that day does not seem near) the European peoples will cease
to be their own enemies and even economic rivals, there will be a
struggle ahead to face and there will rise a new peril, the yellow man.
The civilized world has always organized itself before and against a
common adversary: for the Roman world, it was the barbarian; for the
Christian world, it was Islam; for the world of tomorrow, it may well be
the yellow man. And so we have the reappearance of this necessary
concept, without which peoples do not know themselves, just as the "Me"
only takes conscience of itself in opposition to the "non-Me": The
Enemy.[32]: 124
Despite the claimed Christian idealism of the
civilizing mission, from the start of colonization in 1858, the French
exploited the natural resources of Vietnam as inexhaustible and the
Vietnamese people as beasts of burden.[92]: 67–68 In the aftermath of
the Second World War, the First Indochina War (1946–1954) justified
recolonization of Vietnam as a defense of the white West against the
péril jaune — specifically that the Communist Party of Vietnam were
puppets of the People's Republic of China, which is part of the
"international communist conspiracy" to conquer the world.[93]
Therefore, French anticommunism utilized orientalism to dehumanize the
Vietnamese into "the nonwhite Other"; which yellow-peril racism allowed
atrocities against Viet Minh prisoners of war during la sale guerre
("dirty war").[92]: 74 In that time, yellow-peril racism remained one
of the ideological bases for the existence of French Indochina, thus the
French news media's racialist misrepresentations of Viet Minh
guerrillas being part of the innombrables masses jaunes (innumerable
yellow hordes); being one of many vagues hurlantes (roaring waves) of
masses fanatisées (fanatical hordes).[94]
Contemporary France
In
Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the
Parisian Vietnamese Community (1991) Gisèle Luce Bousquet said that the
péril jaune, which traditionally colored French perceptions of Asians,
especially of Vietnamese people, remains a cultural prejudice of
contemporary France;[95] hence the French perceive and resent the
Vietnamese people of France as academic overachievers who take jobs from
"native French" people.[95]
In 2015, the cover of the January
issue of Fluide Glacial magazine featured a cartoon, Yellow Peril: Is it
Already Too Late?, which depicts a Chinese-occupied Paris where a sad
Frenchman is pulling a rickshaw, transporting a Chinese man, in 19th c.
French colonial uniform, accompanied by a barely dressed, blonde French
woman.[96][97] The editor of Fluide Glacial, Yan Lindingre, defended the
magazine cover and the subject as satire and mockery of French fears of
China's economic threat to France.[97] In an editorial addressing the
Chinese government's complaint, Lindingre said, "I have just ordered an
extra billion copies printed, and will send them to you via chartered
flight. This will help us balance our trade deficit, and give you a good
laugh".[97]
Italy
In the 20th century, from their
perspective, as nonwhite nations in a world order dominated by the white
nations, the geopolitics of Ethiopia–Japan relations allowed Imperial
Japan and Ethiopia to avoid imperialist European colonization of their
countries and nations. Before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
(1934–1936), Imperial Japan had given diplomatic and military support to
Ethiopia against invasion by Fascist Italy, which implied military
assistance. In response to that Asian anti-imperialism, Benito Mussolini
ordered a Yellow Peril propaganda campaign by the Italian press, which
represented Imperial Japan as the military, cultural, and existential
threat to the Western world, by way of the dangerous "yellow race–black
race" alliance meant to unite Asians and Africans against the white
people of the world.[98]
In 1935, Mussolini warned of the
Japanese Yellow Peril, specifically the racial threat of Asia and Africa
uniting against Europe.[98] In the summer of 1935, the National Fascist
Party (1922–43) often staged anti–Japanese political protests
throughout Italy.[99] Nonetheless, as right-wing imperial powers, Japan
and Italy pragmatically agreed to disagree; in exchange for Italian
diplomatic recognition of Manchukuo (1932–45), the Japanese puppet state
in China, Imperial Japan would not aid Ethiopia against Italian
invasion and so Italy would end the anti–Japanese Yellow Peril
propaganda in the national press of Italy.[99]
Mexico
Two men in
sombreros riding in a donkey-cart with a line of feet sticking out the
back. They are riding down a dirt street away from the camera, with a
line of buildings on the right. Dated 15 May 1911.
In Revolutionary
Mexico (1910–20) a wagonload of Asian corpses is en route to a common
grave after fear of the Yellow Peril fear provoked a three-day massacre
(11–15 May 1911) of 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese) in the
city of Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico.
During the Mexican
Revolution (1910–20), Chinese-Mexicans were subjected to racist abuse,
like before the revolt, for not being Christians, specifically Roman
Catholic, for not being racially Mexican, and for not soldiering and
fighting in the Revolution against the thirty-five-year dictatorship
(1876–1911) of General Porfirio Díaz.[100]: 44
The notable
atrocity against Asian people was the three-day Torreón massacre (13–15
May 1911) in northern Mexico, wherein the military forces of Francisco
I. Madero killed 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese), because
they were deemed a cultural threat to the Mexican way of life. The
massacre of Chinese- and Japanese-Mexicans at the city of Torreón,
Coahuila, was not the only such atrocity perpetrated in the Revolution.
Elsewhere, in 1913, after the Constitutional Army captured the city of
Tamasopo, San Luis Potosí state, the soldiers and the town-folk expelled
the Chinese community by sacking and burning the Chinatown.[100]: 44
During
and after the Mexican Revolution, the Roman Catholic prejudices of
Yellow Peril ideology facilitated racial discrimination and violence
against Chinese Mexicans, usually for "stealing jobs" from native
Mexicans. Anti–Chinese nativist propaganda misrepresented the Chinese
people as unhygienic, prone to immorality (miscegenation, gambling,
opium-smoking) and spreading diseases that would biologically corrupt
and degenerate La Raza (the Mexican race) and generally undermining the
Mexican patriarchy.[101]
Moreover, from the racialist
perspective, besides stealing work from Mexican men, Chinese men were
stealing Mexican women from the native Mexican men who were away
fighting the Revolution to overthrow and expel the dictator Porfirio
Díaz and his foreign sponsors from Mexico.[102] In the 1930s,
approximately 70 per cent of the Chinese and the Chinese–Mexican
population was expelled from the Mexican United States by the
bureaucratic ethnic culling of the Mexican population.[103]
Turkey
In
1908, at the end of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) the Young Turk
Revolution ascended the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power,
which the 1913 Ottoman coup d'état reinforced with the Raid on the
Sublime Porte. In admiration and emulation that the modernization of
Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868) was realised without the
Japanese people losing their national identity, the CUP intended to
modernize Turkey into the "Japan of the Near East".[104] 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.[105]: 54–55 Politically, the cultural, nationalist, and
geopolitical affinities of Turkey and Japan were possible because, in
Turkish culture, the "yellow" color of "Eastern gold" symbolizes the
innate moral superiority of the East over the West.[105]: 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.[106] At an anti–PRC political protest in
Istanbul, a South Korean woman tourist faced violence, despite
identifying herself: "I am not Chinese, I am Korean".[106] In response
that Yellow Peril racism in Turkey, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the
extreme right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, rhetorically asked: "How
does one distinguish, between Chinese and Koreans? Both have slanted
eyes".[106]
South Africa
The Randlord's (mine owners') exploitive
employment of Chinese labor contributed to the Liberal Party victory in
the 1906 elections. (Punch magazine, 1903)
In 1904, after the
conclusion of the Second Boer War, the Unionist Government of the
Britain authorized the immigration to South Africa of approximately
63,000 Chinese laborers to work the gold mines in the Witwatersrand
basin.
On 26 March 1904, approximately 80,000 people attended a
social protest against the use of Chinese laborers in the Transvaal held
in Hyde Park, London, to publicize the exploitation of Chinese South
Africans.[107]: 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.[108]
The mass
immigration of indentured Chinese laborers to mine South African gold
for wages lower than acceptable to the native white men, contributed to
the 1906 electoral loss of the financially conservative British Unionist
government that then governed South Africa.[107]: 103
After
1910, most Chinese miners were repatriated to China because of the great
opposition to them, as "colored people" in white South Africa,
analogous to anti-Chinese laws in the US during the early 20th
century.[109][110] In the event, despite the racial violence between
white South African miners and Chinese miners, the Unionist government
achieved the economic recovery of South Africa after the Second Boer War
by rendering the gold mines of the Witwatersrand Basin the most
productive in the world.[107]: 103
New Zealand
In the late
19th and the early 20th centuries, populist Prime Minister Richard
Seddon compared the Chinese people to monkeys, and so used the Yellow
Peril to promote racialist politics in New Zealand. In 1879, in his
first political speech, Seddon said that New Zealand did not wish her
shores "deluged with Asiatic Tartars. I would sooner address white men
than these Chinese. You can't talk to them, you can't reason with them.
All you can get from them is 'No savvy'".[111]
Moreover, in 1905,
in the city of Wellington, the white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered
Joe Kum Yung, an old Chinese man, in protest against Asian immigration
to New Zealand. Laws promulgated to limit Chinese immigration included a
heavy poll tax, introduced in 1881 and lowered in 1937, after Imperial
Japan's invasion and occupation of China. In 1944, the poll tax was
abolished, and the New Zealand government formally apologized to the
Chinese populace of New Zealand.
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