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]