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Since 1890, the growth of Eastern nations’ power was perceived as an imminent threat by broad sectors of American society, articulated under the concept of the ‘yellow peril’. This paper examines the positions of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) on this notion between 1904 and 1908, a period marked by increasing diplomatic tensions between Japan and the United States. Through an analysis of the SPA press and the minutes of its conventions, the study identifies how the party comprehensively addressed the three main meanings of this concept: economic competition from Asian immigrants, the industrialization of the East, and the rise of Japan as an imperialist power. These aspects were of great importance for shaping the SPA’s positions on imperialism, colonial policy, and inter-imperialist war. On the one hand, the anti-immigration sentiment within the SPA undermined any potential for bonds of friendship and internationalism with Japan and also affected its critique of colonial policy, which focused on the competition from native workers. On the other hand, Japan’s modernization and rise as an imperialist power rendered imperialism no longer a viable strategy for American capitalists, ultimately contributing to the collapse of capitalism due to its failure to find new markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the various ways in which pacificists and socialists in France responded to the 'yellow peril' from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) to the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). I identify and examine four different attitudes they developed towards the 'yellow peril'. On the one hand, some pacificists and socialists perceived it as a reality and used it as a means of exposing the problems of expansionism but differed on their views of what Asia would become for the West: whereas pacifists like Paul d'Estournelles de Constant invoked Asia as a potential existential threat, certain socialists welcomed 'yellow' workers as future comrades. On the other hand, there were people who viewed the 'yellow peril' as a myth or some sort of ideological smokescreen. Roughly speaking, they fell into two groups: socialists who treated it as a set of false ideas created to justify Tsarist imperialism, which practically led them to embrace Japanese imperialism, and revolutionary syndicalists who, opposing capitalist exploitation and expansionism in general, dismissed it as part of bourgeois ideology. Thus, I ultimately argue that the 'yellow peril' was less of an imperialist ideology consisting of negative racial stereotypes about East Asians than a versatile concept that was used against as well as for racial stereotyping and expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the persistent association between China and the apocalypse in Western political thought. Using the 1979 film The China Syndrome as a starting point, it examines how China is depicted as the specter of global catastrophe: as a society unable to recover from its own nineteenth-century collapse, and the post-apocalyptic form assumed by Europe itself. Through the writings of John Stuart Mill and Niall Ferguson, the paper highlights how the trope of "apocalyptic China" has evolved with shifts in global power, reflecting Western anxieties about its own decline and the perceived inevitability of China's rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the racialization of Asians in Australia through the dialectic of the “yellow peril” and “model minority”. It uses the specific historical case study of People’s Republic of China nationals in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) who were ultimately given permanent residence. Through analysis of archival sources and Australia’s print media in this period (1989–1993), the article identifies how the Tiananmen Chinese were at once characterized as educated, hard-working and worthy additions to the Australian nation (model minority), while also appearing as a threat to the order and integrity of the immigration system (yellow peril). The article draws on Asian American theorist Colleen Lye’s argument about the economistic character of Asian racial form. By using her framework, I suggest the value of deepening engagements with Asian American studies in examining the racialization of Asians in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese restaurants in the US are symbolic "canaries in the coalmine," indicating widespread anti-Asian hate by attracting negative reactions from the American community but also inspiring love and resistance from the Asian American community. This study examines the relationship between the number of American Chinese restaurant closures, lowered revenue, and the incidence of anti-Asian American hate crimes in the US during the 2019–2022 period. During the pandemic, many American Chinese restaurants lost revenue or closed down. The findings of this study suggest that hatred directed at Chinese American restaurants historically and because of COVID-19 correlates with the incidence of anti-Asian hate crimes. Chinese Americans and Asian Americans are fighting back against this xenophobia via social media campaigns urging consumers to support Chinese restaurants and Chinatowns economically and socially. The vacillating reception of Chinese restaurants in the US shows how culture and consumption are intimately interrelated with society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pandemics and food consumption have long been racialised against non-Western peoples. Yellow Peril tropes of Chinese as disease vectors and consumers of 'weird' wildlife, such as bats, were conjoined again with COVID-19. US politicians and media have especially deployed these themes to blame Chinese for the pandemic, alongside tropes of Chinese as cruel, deceitful incompetents, thus serving a wider mobilisation against China that fuels a new Cold War and anti-Asian attacks. Wildlife consumption as a spur to COVID's Wuhan outbreak is, however, an unverified supposition. Many societies consume wildlife, but it was uncommon in China and mostly shunned by the time of COVID-19's onset. Meanwhile, significant US wildlife consumption continues. Yellow Peril racialisation of the pandemic and demonisation of China also continue, both despite and because of Western politicians' COVID-19 failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the nineteenth century, texts and discourses around the world abounded with fear and contempt for Chinese immigrants, specifically contract workers. This outpouring is remembered as talk of a "Yellow Peril." Charles Pearson introduced the theme (though not its best-known phrase) to the English-speaking world in 1893, with the publication of a bleak manifesto he'd written about the West's future as he saw it. The present article examines Pearson's views and the intellectual debates regarding them. A century ago, the international supply of Chinese workers contributed little to China's prosperity. Today, as a center of consumer goods supply, China contributes to the prosperity of the Western capitalist world while continuing its own rapid economic growth. For this reason, today's apprehension about China is based on the fear of the emergence of a communist regime as a superpower. In this respect, the current fear of China differs from the "Yellow Peril" discourse of the past. Nevertheless, the discourse may have influenced today's concerns and apprehensions about China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the settlement of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic immigrants in Australia in 1788 by Great Britain, the Australia Colony was formed. The discovery of gold mine in Australia in 1850s had irreversibly changed the economic, social and political dynamics of the island/continent. During the process named as the Gold Rush, the influx of Chinese immigrants to Australia to find job and Japan's completion of economic and military modernization determined Australia's foreign policy in Asia- Pacific. The threat perception shaped around the basic argument that Japan would emerge as a power in Asia-Pacific and that Australia would be invaded by Asian societies, which had been named as the Yellow Peril. In this study, Australia's foreign policy from 1850 to 1914 on Asia-Pacific, in particular Asia, is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In COVID-19's first months, US politicians and media forecast that a contrast between Chinese deception and incapability and Western success against the pandemic might fatally sink internal confidence in China's party-state. They also predicted that it would diminish China externally, as it came to be seen as endangering the world by spreading biological pollution. A "China's Chernobyl" prediction became the latest "China collapse" wish-fulfillment. This speculation rests on two contradictory yet co-existing Yellow Peril tropes: "deceit and incompetence" and "world domination." However, no empirical basis exists for either notion: China prevailed against the pandemic and lacks the capacity for global hegemony. "China's Chernobyl" is most relevant then as a wish that creates a belief, that China should and could collapse. That in turn bolsters the US-led mobilization to counter China as a "strong competitor" and frames China as the common enemy, thereby promoting Western transnational and US internal cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As African communities start to assert a more visible presence in Chinese cities and vice versa, highly racialized discourses have appeared online with regards to a new Yellow Peril in Africa and correspondingly, an unprecedented Black Peril in China. On one hand, such malicious sentiments manifest in unofficial realms that stand in stark contrast with the official rhetoric of South--South Cooperation championed by the Chinese and African states. On the other hand, cultural production, especially fictional narratives, has emerged as another unofficial realm that seeks to humanize China--Africa relations from different angles. This article focuses on Mukuka Chipanta's A Casualty of Power, a novel with a unique focus on Chinese involvement in Zambia's mining industry. Based on contemporary incidents of interracial conflicts between African mine workers and their Chinese supervisors, the novel offers a multiplicity of critical perspectives and background stories concerning the role of Chinese migrants in Zambian society. Engaging China--Africa cultural production with the conceptual framework of the Global South, I point out the novel's achievements as well as limits in its humanization efforts and argue that these limits demonstrate the need to break away from narrow definitions of "the Global South Novel" determined by value positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Philippine texts in Spanish written by two generations of ilustrados, which evidence the birth and consolidation of a pan-Asian sentiment and the development of a discourse of resistance to Spain and the United States by the identification with China between 1880 and 1930. It shows that texts of different genres written in Spanish by Filipino authors reflect a social and political movement that departs from the traditional images of writers with nostalgia for the Spanish colonial period who are opposed to modernity. Finally, it discusses how the exoticization of Asia and the discourse of "yellow peril" are both based on the conception of China as a distant country, and therefore were subverted in the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern scholarship has drawn hasty and numerous parallels between the Yellow Peril discourses of the 19th- and 20th-century plagues and the recent racialization of infectious disease in the 21st-century. While highlighting these similarities is politically useful against Sinophobic epidemic narratives, Michel Foucault argues that truly understanding the past's continuity in the present requires a more rigorous genealogical approach. Employing this premise in a comparative analysis, this work demonstrates a critical discontinuity in the epidemic imaginary that framed the Chinese as pathogenic. Consequently, those seeking to prevent future disease racialization must understand modern Sinophobia as fundamentally distinct from that of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several years there have been a number of racially-tinged incidents in South Africa involving 'the Chinese.' Simultaneously, the love affair between Chinese and South African government leaders has expanded to include local Chinese community leaders and local ANC officials. Based on ongoing research on Chinese communities in South Africa I examine these conflicting phenomena and explore the various ways in which the three main ethnic Chinese communities – Chinese South African, Taiwanese South African, and mainland Chinese migrant – and other South Africans respond to these often conflicting social and political messages. I argue that China's global ascendance and South Africa's increasing national-level dependence on China encourages some actors (both Chinese and non-Chinese) to opportunistically wield the China card while other non-Chinese South Africans respond with fear and racism, invoking Yellow Peril narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asians, despite their positioning as a "model minority," have not been immune from the consequences of the heightened racist and nationalist rhetoric witnessed lately in the United States. However, such sentiments about the South Asian immigrant community are not new, as they are reflective of a "yellow peril" discourse. This study analyzes South Asian Americans' responses to a TIME Magazine column complaining about their influx into Edison, New Jersey. It first explores the racial formation that the model minority myth, in dialectical relationship with the yellow peril discourse, has produced among South Asians. Through this analysis, this study critically analyzes how South Asian Americans' discourses both reinforce and challenge their racialized status positions and identities as the model minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using contemporary science fiction as a barometer, we can see the African imaginary to be seemingly preoccupied with the idea of China and with forecasting various dystopian scenarios regarding the future of China–Africa relations. Yet, through an examination of three short stories from Southern Africa – Tendai Huchu's 'The Sale' (2013), Abigail Godsell's 'Taal' (2009) and Mandisi Nkomo's 'Heresy' (2013) – I explore a complex relationship whose participants are intimately aligned: China and Africa have an historical connection that asks us to take seriously the practice and potential of political friendship. Through a close reading of these short stories, it becomes possible to consider how the relationship need not result in Chinese neocolonialism and exploitation. Working with the conceptual framework of political friendship, I illustrate how these short stories cumulatively serve to unravel easy distinctions between the friend and the enemy, thereby intimating that, in the future, southern Africa can benefit from approaching China as both friend and enemy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Print media has had a profound impact on shaping conservative ideology, political practice, and racial boundary making. While scholarship on US conservatism contributes important elements of its economic, political, and social philosophy by highlighting the role of racialization within the black/white binary, little attention has been historically paid to other forms of racialization within US conservatism. Through a discourse analysis of National Review from 1955 to 1975, I offer a corrective by examining how racial tropes are used to reinforce the conservative political project of anti-communism. These racialized tropes highlight how National Review characterized East Asian nations as uncivilized and savage, and thus poised for communist exploitation. I explain how yellow peril discourse was linked to communist infiltration amongst US conservative writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically interrogates East Asian academics' positional identities in UK universities, internationalisation and diversification against the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework. Contemporary UK policy promoting racial equality and diversity is often over-generalised, while the critical race theory-based literature has focused on hegemonic notions of 'white privilege'. Neither discourse provides an adequate, comparative perspective of power relations within diverse racial and ethnic groups. In advancing this perspective, the article compares the experiences of two groups of East Asian academics working in UK universities. One group is foreign-born but has strong British identities following their English élite education. The other group came to the UK for postgraduate studies and/or chose to work in Britain. The paper changes the picture of a static, black and white perspective in the BME policy and CRT literature by offering a dynamic, fluid discourse involving East Asian academics' narratives of their positional identities and choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese are often said to 'self-segregate' in Africa. Chinese ethnocentricity is typically offered as an explanation for the putative non-interaction. Meanwhile Chinese are not compared to other non-indigenous people in Africa, implying unique Chinese self-isolation. Due to China's semi-peripheral dynamics however, the contemporary Chinese presence in Africa cannot be generalized into a single category. Based on surveys, interviews, and documents, we examine the varied presence of Chinese in Africa, including residential patterns acquisition of local African languages, and socialization patterns, and draw distinctions between Chinese expatriates and Chinese migrants. Factors affecting Chinese adaptation include local political environment, recentness of migration, language barriers, and corporate policies to mitigate crime and conflict. We argue that most Chinese in Africa are not self-isolated and not more isolated in Africa than are other Asian migrants and whites there. Claims of Chinese self-isolation reflect a longstanding, global Yellow Peril discourse that persists despite discrediting evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia and China rapidly restore communication after the Cold War, but the Chinese immigration issue is also widely exaggerated and even described as 'Yellow Peril again' in Russia. The so-called Yellow Peril is not only a Russian object perception but also a cross-generational conflict between Russia and China. Furthermore, it will be related to the subsequent development of the Russian Far East and Siberia. The Chinese immigration constitutes psychological and survival non-traditional security impacts on Russia and also forms some kind of social competition with Russians. It is vital for Russia to cooperate with its eastern neighbor to accelerate the development of the Russian Far East and Siberia, but national security and social stability are the prerequisites for cooperation. Nevertheless, it is more significant to rebuild self-confidence of the Russians in the Russian Far East and acknowledge that the East will not be a threat to Russia. As long as Russia realizes that it can enjoy unlimited possibilities in the East, the non-traditional security impacts caused by the Chinese immigration will automatically alleviate and even disappear. Today, most Russians are trapped in the dilemma of welcoming or refusing the Chinese immigrants; however, cultural exchange still has some effects and at least causes Russians to begin to positively treat the Chinese immigration and consider whether to accept China and cooperate with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renshaw examines in comparative terms two of the most virulent manifestations of racial prejudice in early twentieth-century British society. The language of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the Edwardian period and the years preceding the First World War, the similarities and differences in the ways that these two forms of prejudice were articulated, and the overlap between them are analysed. Five strands of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese sentiment and action are discussed. The first examines how international manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia, suspicions aimed at Jews and Chinese as transnational diasporic communities, and perceptions of these minorities, through Russian pogroms, the Boxer Rebellion in China and the post-Boer War economic situation in South Africa, were framed in narratives of victimhood and aggression. Second, the transnational and colonial circuits of racialized discourse and the relationship between periphery and metropole are considered, as are divergences in the articulation of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese prejudice. The third strand investigates the use of the language of ‘invasion’, used by both the political right and the left in discussing Jewish and Chinese immigration and economic activity in Britain, with Chinese employment in British industries (in this period particularly as sailors on British ships) framed in the context of a demographic ‘Asiatic’ takeover of European societies. The fourth strand looks at the intersection of racial prejudice and sexual and social angst, the visceral association of immigrant groups with dirt and disease, and the sexual threat that racist and antisemitic literature attributed to Jews and Chinese. Finally, physical manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the period and the racial violence that occurred in Cardiff and Tredegar in 1911 will be described and placed in context. The article positions Edwardian antisemitism and Sinophobia as a transitory stage in the evolution of British racism: a bridge between the separate domestic and colonial forms of prejudice present in late Victorian discourse, and the new manifestations of racism located in British cities and ports, but aimed at non-white minorities, that emerged in the interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the nineteenth century, ''faraway'' societies were perceived as community-based and traditional. At the same time, nationalist and/or racialist doctrines were developed against a background of colonial expansion. Older conceptions of the ''Orient'' as a world of tradition and despotism were also revived. It was during this period that the stereotype of a supposed ''lack of individuality'' amongst the Japanese was formed. Japan's victories over China and Russia in 1894-1895 and 1904-1905 saw theories on the Yellow Peril flourish. Culturalist theories subsequently underlined the community dimension of Japanese society and were soon joined by discourses on the crisis of the Western subject. The Japanese have also played a part in reinforcing this cliché. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a 2011 national survey, I argue that while US conservatives feel somewhat cooler toward the East Asian democracies than US liberals do, they feel much cooler toward China. Greater average conservative than liberal prejudice lingers, cooling attitudes toward the "Yellow Peril" of all Asian countries, but communism is a larger source of ideological differences over China. For cultural, social, economic, and political reasons, conservatives feel substantially cooler than liberals toward both communist countries in general and "Red China" in particular. I conclude by suggesting that with gerrymandering and ongoing ideological sorting, these ideological differences over China on Main Street may come to play a greater role in the making of US China policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on the ''Yellow Peril'' looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America's "backyard." It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a parallel between the ‘yellow peril’ imagery of pollution and danger used to characterize China historically and that found in contemporary media accounts representing Chinese-made consumer goods in the USA. A survey of newspaper reporting on two key events involving Chinese imports (pet food and toys) reveals that in both eras, cases of ‘yellow peril’ involve narratives of domesticity threatened by potentially contaminating contact with an essentialized China. The paper demonstrates how the global movement of goods serves as a powerful bearer of racializing categories in the terrain of American consumerism and domesticity. Media narratives about consumer welfare and the threatened American consumer provide the moral anchor for a larger story about US national interest and ‘proper’ capitalism in the context of China's ‘rise’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The model minority stereotype is viewed as the most influential and pervasive stereotype for Asian Americans today. In this article, the author argues that this seemingly positive stereotype, the model minority, is inseparable from the yellow peril, a negative stereotype, when Asian Americans are stereotypically represented in mainstream media texts. The model minority–yellow peril dialectic is explicated with the concepts of racial triangulation and the ambivalence of stereotypes. Racial meanings for Asian Americans cannot be discussed without considering both local and global contexts. The author explores historical, political, and economic contexts of both the United States and Asia in which the two stereotypes were produced and reproduced, and examines how the dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril operates in a Hollywood film, Rising Sun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]