Katana VentraIP

Yellow Peril

The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace and the Yellow Specter) is a racist color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia[a] as an existential danger to the Western world.[2]

For other uses, see Yellow Peril (disambiguation).

The concept of the Yellow Peril derives from a "core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers",[3] which developed during the 19th century as Western imperialist expansion adduced East Asians as the 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.[6] 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 an 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."[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. 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.[9][10]

Xenophobia and racism[edit]

Germany and Russia[edit]

From 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm used Yellow Peril ideology to portray Imperial Germany as defender of the West against conquest from the East.[49]: 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.[50] 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:

Sexual fears[edit]

Background[edit]

The core of Yellow Peril ideology is the White man's fear of seduction by the Oriental nonwhite Other; either the sexual voracity of the Dragon Lady and the Lotus Blossom stereotypes, or the sexual voracity of the Seducer.[8]: 3  Racist revulsion towards miscegenation—interracial sexual intercourse—by the fear of mixed-race children as a physical, cultural, and existential threat to Whiteness proper.[81]: 159  In Queer theory, the term Oriental connotes contradictory sexual associations according to the nationality. A person can be perceived as Japanese and kinky, or as Filipino and available. Sometimes, Oriental could be sexless.[121]

The Infernal War (La Guerre infernale, 1908), by , illustrated by Albert Robida, is a science fiction story that depicts a War as a fight among the empires of the White man, which distraction allows China to invade Russia, and Japan to invade the U.S. In support of Yellow Peril racism, Robida's illustrations depict the cruelties and tortures that Asians inflict upon the White man, Russian and American.[9]

Pierre Giffard

In "Under the Ban of Li Shoon" (1916) and "Li Shoon's Deadliest Mission" (1916), introduced the villain Li Shoon, a "tall and stout" man with "a round, moon-like yellow face" with "bulging eyebrows" above "sunken eyes". Personally, Li Shoon is "an amazing compound of evil" and intellect, which makes him "a wonder at everything wicked" and "a marvel of satanic cunning."[133]

H. Irving Hancock

The Peril of the Pacific (1916), by , describes a fantastical, 1920 Japanese invasion of the U.S. mainland realized by an alliance between treasonous Japanese-Americans and the Imperial Japanese Navy. The racist language of J. Allan Dunn's narrative communicates the irrational, Yellow Peril fear of and about Japanese-American citizens in California, who were exempt from arbitrary deportation by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.[134]

J. Allan Dunn

"" (1910), by Jack London, set between 1976 and 1987, shows China conquering and colonizing neighboring countries. In self-defense, the Western World retaliate with biological warfare. Western armies and navies kill the Chinese refugees at the border, and punitive expeditions kill the survivors in China. London describes this war of extermination as necessary to the white settler colonialism of China, in accordance with "the democratic American program".[135]

The Unparalleled Invasion

In "" (1926), by H. P. Lovecraft, the protagonist white-man is allowed to see the future of planet Earth, and sees "yellow men" triumphantly dancing among the ruins of the White man's world. In "The Horror at Red Hook" (1927), features Red Hook, New York, as a place were "slant-eyed immigrants practice nameless rites in honor of heathen gods by the light of the moon."[136]

He

Yellow Peril, Collection of British Novels 1895–1913, in 7 vols., edited by Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Tokyo: Edition Synapse.  978-4-86166-031-3

ISBN

Yellow Peril, Collection of Historical Sources, in 5 vols., edited by Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Tokyo: Edition Synapse.  978-4-86166-033-7

ISBN

Baron Suematsu in Europe during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05): His Battle with Yellow Peril, by Matsumura Masayoshi, translated by Ian Ruxton (lulu.com, 2011)

Dickinson, Edward Ross (2002). "Sex, Masculinity, and the 'Yellow Peril': Christian von Ehrenfels' Program for a Revision of the European Sexual Order, 1902–1910". . 25 (2): 255–284. doi:10.2307/1432992. JSTOR 1432992. PMID 20373550.

German Studies Review

Klein, Thoralf (2015), , EGO - European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, retrieved: March 17, 2021 (pdf).

The "Yellow Peril"

Palmer, James The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia, New York: Basic Books, 2009,  0465022073.

ISBN

Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats.  978-1781681237

ISBN

Shim, Doobo. "From yellow peril through model minority to renewed yellow peril." Journal of Communication Inquiry 22.4 (1998): 385–409, in US

online

A Statement on Yellow

by Krystle Doromal

From Yellow Peril to Yellow Fever The Representation of Asians from Anna May Wong to Lucy Liu

Yellowface! Racist Anti-Asian Stereotypes

"," Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York; London: New York University Press, 2003).

Introduction

by John W. Dower

Yellow Promise/Yellow Peril: Foreign Postcards of the Russo-Japanese War

Archived 29 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine by Jack London, climaxing in the total genocide of the Chinese.

"The Unparalleled Invasion"

by Mark Schreiber

A Footnote on the Yellow Peril

in Chinese.

Yellow Peril, Collection of British Novels 1895–1913

Old Yellow Peril Propaganda

by Lynden Barber

Unsettling echoes of yesterday, when the yellow peril hysteria began

by Catherine Chung

The Yellow Peril and the American Dream

by John W. Dower

The Yellow Peril

French comic's 'Yellow Peril' cover upsets Chinese paper

by Edwin Poon

"'The Awakening of China': Western Concepts of China in the Early 20th Century"

by Ellen Wu

Is the Yellow Peril Dead?

Archived 2 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine by Tim Yang

The Malleable Yet Undying Nature of the Yellow Peril

The Yellow Peril: Chinese-Americans in American Fiction 1850–1940 by William F. Wu