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This study was an initial qualitative exploration to (a) capture varied experiences of racial microaggressions directed at Chinese immigrant women before and during Covid and (b) investigate different forms and levels of microaggressions based on socioeconomic status, age, and other characteristics. Racial microaggressions were examined by interviewing 12 foreign‐born, Chinese immigrant women aged 23 to 80 years old, with most of the participants identified as middle class or above. Building upon previous scholarship on racial and gendered microaggressions, an analytical framework was developed using 12 major themes to identify and interpret discriminatory behaviors. Our main findings suggest that the research sample encountered more blatant hate incidents and expressed heightened concern over their physical safety in the post‐Covid period. Young women, compared to their older counterparts, were more inclined to report microaggression episodes and distinguish more subtle forms of discrimination. These findings could serve as preliminary evidence for future research.

The History of the World travels from East to West for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the Beginning (Hegel, 1956, p. 103).In 1721 Christian Wolff gave a lecture on Confucius at Halle...

Anti-Asian xenophobia and discriminatory acts against Asian Americans have increased significantly as the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread across the US. But connections between diseases, racis...

Yellow Peril ideology has long cast Chinese as cruel, deceitful, incompetent disease vectors. Many US elites now tie such notions to China’s response to Covid-19. Their racialized framing of the drive to condemn and sue China however exemplifies a Chinese idiom—“big thunder, little rain” (雷声大, 雨点小)—which means noisy, yet ineffective. There are empirical obstacles to convincing the world of Chinese responsibility for the pandemic, such as that the virus spread much more from Europe and the US than from China, many Western states failed against the virus, and pandemic-related agitation against China has resulted in many anti-Asian actions. The ongoing claims are thus unlikely to be convincing beyond the Anglosphere, but still spread racism and advance a US-led anti-China mobilization.

An insensitive poem published in 1935 sparked a wave of outrage among the Indies Chinese students in the Netherlands. Titled The yellow peril, it had started as an inside joke among Leiden’s Indologists, yet quickly aroused the fury of both moderates and radicals. Their anti-colonial activism flared up for months, attracting numerous allies and eventually taking hold in the Netherlands Indies. After the Indologists had apologized, the number of activists willing to push for more structural change dwindled. As such, this microhistory lays bare some broader dynamics of anti-racism. We argue that ethnic Chinese, who continue to be portrayed as an unobtrusive model minority, have a longer legacy of activism than they are usually given credit for. This is particularly relevant in the present, when Covid-induced Sinophobia, anti-Black racism, and a reassessment of the colonial past are inspiring new movements and forging new anti-racist solidarities.

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.

Deep into the novel, an inarticulate sense of unease in the psyche of Henry Park is explored being extremely disturbed, and an outcast. Trapped being in American-Korean identity, he has got his impression on his wife, Lilia beings ‘emotional alien’, ‘yellow peril: neo-American,’ ‘stranger/follower/traitor/spy’. In addition, she speaks of him being a ‘False speaker of Language’ because Henry looks listening to her attentively; following her executing language word by word like someone resembling a non-native speaker. In fact, the cultural differences between the Korean-American and the Native American bring tension around the ways the English language is used.

This article examines The Foreigner, the 2017 film adaptation of British novelist Stephen Leather’s The Chinaman (1992), starring the Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts film star Jackie Chan. The film reveals a cosmopolitical cinematic revision that foregrounds the contradictions and paradoxes of Yellow Peril, present when the film was made, during the time of Brexit in the United Kingdom. By investigating Chan’s screen persona, which has roots in Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts cinema, I focus on how the film derives and builds upon Chan’s transnational status as a cinema icon to critically engage with the conventional Yellow Peril narrative.

The aim of this article is a critical analysis of the changing landscape of American streaming and post-network television content offer in the context of Asians’ and Asian Americans’ representations. The focus of this analysis is primarily on the stereotypes — the mechanisms behind their construction and deconstruction, and their role in the shaping of the popular image of Asians and Asian Americans. The secondary goal is the attempt to show how the culturally constructed Other is constantly present in the common imagination of the TV and cinema audience, and how this construct influences production companies, audiences, and showrunners in the USA. The question of the postulated “change” in the representation of Asian and Asian Americans, and their visibility remains open for further debate. However, I have attempted to restrict it to the model example of two series over the past twenty years.

This article approaches 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 what happens in texts of different genres written by Filipino writers in Spanish, encompasses a social and political movement which departs from the traditional images of “writers with nostalgia for the Spanish colonial period” and opposed to modernity. Finally, it discusses how the exoticization of Asia and the yellow peril discourse are both based on the conception of China as a faraway country, and therefore they were subverted in the Philippines.

This article explores how racial prejudice in the West forms at least part of the ideational foundation in how the rise of China has been perceived, and how such racial prejudices to some extent in...

Why do Donald Trump and his supporters insist on using the term ‘The China Virus’ or its analogues to describe Covid-19? The article examines the use of a Gothicised language of invasion to represent the action of disease upon the body, and the political, colonial, or racist uses to which this has been put, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the formulation of the germ theory of disease. Most particularly, it examines the relationship between disease and ‘Yellow Peril’ racist discourse. The article closes with an analysis of the archetypal Yellow Peril novel, Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (1913).

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 governme...

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905 was a watershed moment for the presence of the Royal Navy in the Pacific. Although it allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its fleets in European waters, this strategy caused resentment due to the underlying fear of the ‘Yellow Peril’, especially in the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance presented some challenges to the received Edwardian racial hierarchy and the idea of British military supremacy. This article demonstrates how the ‘port town’ not only became a place of mediation where high-level international diplomacy mingled with the face-to-face experience of an alliance ‘in practice’, but also a space through which issues such as Otherness and imperial security were contested and explored.

Tras la Primera Guerra del Opio (1839-1842) el Imperio chino comenzó a abrirse a las potencias occidentales a través del sistema de Tratados Desiguales. A su vez, un elevado número de chinos emigraron del imperio a Occidente buscando oportunidades. Los cambios políticos y económicos que se estaban dando en Occidente entonces y estos dos fenómenos llevaron a que surgiese una nueva visión occidental de lo chino: el Peligro Amarillo. Esta imagen, a diferencia de las visiones positivas que se tenían anteriormente, proyectaba a China y sus diásporas como potencial amenaza para el orden racial, económico y político internacional que había establecido Occidente a comienzos del siglo XIX. El Peligro Amarillo fue la imagen hegemónica sobre China desde la segunda mitad del siglo XIX hasta las primeras décadas del XX. Este estudio explora sus orígenes, historia, bases ideológicas y atributos principales, difundidos a través de la política y la cultura de masas. Además, se discute qué relevancia puede tener esta imagen en la visión contemporánea de Occidente sobre China. After the First Opium War (1839-1942) the Chinese Empire began to open up to Western powers through the Unequal treaty system. At the same time, a large number of Chinese emigrated from the Empire to The West looking for opportunities. The political and economic changes that were taking place in the West at the moment and these two phenomena led to the emergence of a new western image of chineseness: The Yellow Peril. This image, in contrast to the positive views previously held, portrayed Chine and its diasporas as a potential threat to the international racial, economic and political order established by the West at the beginning of the 19th century. The Yellow Peril was the hegemonic image of China from the second half of the 19th century until the early decades of the 20th century. This research explores its origins, history, ideological basis and main attributes, which were spread through political discourses and the media culture. In addition, it discusses the importance that this image may have in the contemporary western view of China. Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Estudios de Asia Oriental

The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. By centering Asian/American affect and materiality – marginalized voices, narratives, and feelings of Asian/Americans as affective-performative texts, this essay attends to critique the historical continuum of racial discrimination against Asian/Americans (i.e., yellow peril) and advocate for social justice, equality, and inclusion in the U.S. Overall, I argue that Asian/American bodies are both physiologically and ideologically desensitized, dehumanized, and weaponized as the revival of yellow perils over the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about not only political, social, and economic disaster globally, but also rising hate and the exacerbation of social inequity. As the pandemic spread beyond China, hate crimes against Asians skyrocketed in the United States and internationally. Amidst growing xenophobia and a global health crisis, 2020 also marked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Memes that featured “Roof Koreans” started being shared during the protests, along with the already racist memes about COVID-19 that targeted Asians. In this essay, we critically analyze memes from the spring and summer of 2020 to examine how Asian/Americans are not only positioned and reproduced as the Hated Other (“Kung Flu”), but also how they function as Proxies of Hating (“Roof Koreans”) in service to white hegemony. Using critical discourse analysis, while also responding to Palumbo-Liu’s 1994 essay examining images of Korean Americans from the 1992 LA Uprising as proxies of white hegemony, we explore the symbolic connections between these memes and the pervasive narrative of Asian/Americans as both yellow peril and model minority.

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.

Equal opportunity is elusive to Japanese Americans in Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride (1987) due to explicit anti-Asian acts during the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States. As a re...

The emergence of COVID-19, or the Coronavirus, has sparked a wave of anti-Asian attacks around the world. The cultural logic that does not distinguish among Asian cultural and ethnic groups, as wel...

This study examines the character of racism as a social relation. As such, racism is continuously produced and modified, not only culturally and ideologically but also in social interaction. Understanding racism and its repercussions demands close investigation of all the processes involved. An instructive example is an incident that unfolded in the early 1910s in Broome, Western Australia. The exemption from immigration restriction of a Japanese doctor raised tempers at a time when the nationwide aspiration for a racially homogeneous society determined political and social attitudes, and ‘whiteness’ was a crucial element of Australianness. The possibility of admitting a Japanese professional to a town that was already suspected of race chaos fuelled debates about the question of ‘coloured labour’ and the ‘yellow peril’, while challenging the unambiguousness of class and race boundaries. The influence and wealth of some Japanese, the indispensable position of their compatriots in the pearling industry, and the skills and reputation of their doctor, supplemented with the distinct racial pride of the whole Japanese community, proved to massively impede and disrupt the unrestricted implementation of white supremacy.

How do understandings of China emerge in the U.S., where racial paradigms rooted in orientalism and Yellow Peril frameworks collide with newer discourses of China’s rise? And how does the presence ...

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...

Objectives The purpose of this project is to assess (1) presence of anger toward Asian Americans “taking jobs,” and (2) whether stereotypes, feelings of competitive threat, and principles of equality predict increased presence of anger. Methods We used an experimental list survey of 416 participants, which reduces social desirability effects compared to traditional surveys. Results Findings show feelings of group competition and threat were strong predictors of presence of anger toward Asian Americans taking jobs. This anger was not associated with stereotypes as suggested by past research. Conclusions This finding supports Blumer's Group Position Theory, which argues that racial animosity is rooted in concerns that out‐groups are vying for resources claimed by one's own group.

Joining recent scholarly efforts to free the study of the Yellow Peril from the conventional framework of Asian American and postcolonial studies, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the manifestations of this mutable racial discourse in twentieth-century Anglophone and Sinophone literatures. As a case in point, I focus on the Chinese dissident writer Wang Lixiong and his ‘racist’ appropriation of the Yellow Peril ideology in fin-de-siècle Anglo-American popular writings. By juxtaposing his canonical work China Tidal Wave, known in Chinese as Huang Huo (‘Yellow Peril’), with the Asian invasion fictions by Jack London and M. P. Shiel, I argue that instead of some kind of indisputable metaphysical truth, the Yellow Peril ideology manifested in these texts is merely a performative cultural practice that shifts its functions and allegiances according to the situated socio-political agenda of its practitioner. This performative nature is made explicit through my analyses of the changes of their paratexts as these texts travel across languages, leading to further reflections on theoretical concepts such as Occidentalism, the postcolonial palimpsest, Sinophone literature, and world literature.

While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

Yellow Peril and other anti-East Asian themes are a recurring but rarely acknowledged feature of the oeuvre of Robert A. Heinlein. Still revered by an overwhelmingly white, male and ideologically libertarian readership, the “Dean” of American Science Fiction made extensive use of threatening, hateful or contemptible images of East Asians in novels that appeared from the 1930s through the 1960s. The contradiction between Heinlein’s self-portrayal as broad minded and unbiased on issues of race and religion and the descriptions of East Asians as menacing and untrustworthy Others that suffuse his fiction has not been systematically investigated until now. Exposing Heinlein matters because he continues to enjoy a large readership and inspires other science fiction authors. The stereotyping expressed in novels like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the dehumanization expressed in novels like Starship Troopers continue to shape the social and political attitudes of non-East Asian Americans both in domestic race and ethnic relations and in international affairs.

Using the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic as a case study, this paper engages with debates on the assimilation of Asian Americans into the US mainstream. While a burgeoning scholarship holds that Asians are “entering into the dominant group” or becoming “White,” the prevalent practices of othering Asians and surging anti‐Asian discrimination since the pandemic outbreak present a challenge to the assimilation thesis. This paper explains how anger against China quickly expands to Asian American population more broadly. Our explanation focuses on different forms of othering practices, deep‐seated stereotypes of Asians, and the role of politicians and media in activating or exacerbating anti‐Asian hatred. Through this scrutiny, this paper augments the theses that Asian Americans are still treated as “forever foreigners” and race is still a prominent factor in the assimilation of Asians in the United States. This paper also sheds light on the limitations of current measures of assimilation. More broadly, the paper questions the notion of color‐blindness or post‐racial America.

In contrast to previous migratory waves to Hawai’i and California, the 189,000 Japanese in Brazil, who predominantly settled in Sao Paulo State, did so as families, not single men. Agricultural cooperatives backed by Japanese governmental and private interests further contributed to the stability of the Japanese colonies. Nevertheless, Yellow Peril fears were ever-present. The Constitutional Assembly of 1934 had already reduced Japanese immigration to an annual quota of 4,000. After Brazil severed ties with Japan, the immigrants faced punitive measures that included the prohibition to speak in public, publish, or teach their children in Japanese. Despite the real threat from German U-boats on the Atlantic coast and a German fifth column in the South, the Japanese immigrants disproportionately bore the brunt of anti-Axis sentiment in Brazil.

This chapter examines how Germany and China’s changed relationship after World War I and Germany’s forced decolonization affected representations of China in German opera through analysis of two operas. The first, Eugen d’Albert and M. Karlev’s Mister Wu (1930–1932), reconfigured the tropes of the Yellow Peril, reflecting the social upheavals experienced by Germany after the war and Germany’s new relationship with its former colonies. The second, Ernst Toch and Ferdinand Lion’s Der Facher (The Fan, 1927–1930), transported a Chinese fairy tale to present-day Shanghai. Modern China becomes an allegorical site whose similarities to Germany are a means of exploring Germany’s new postwar identity. However, this portrayal also subtly positioned Germany in a dominant role, anticipating post-World War II neocolonialism.

The pandemic has rearticulated racial discourses in unprecedented ways and at an accelerating pace. The resurgent protests of Black Lives Matter demand fundamental changes in the criminal (in)justice system and racial relations in the US beyond the Black–white dichotomy. In this paper, I argue that our current shared struggles require a new form of internationalism against the rapid right-wing turn of global hegemonies that does not draw lines between the simple binaries of “East vs. West,” “white vs. Black,” or “authoritarianism vs. democracy,” but in the interconnected fights against the militarized police state, neoliberal capitalist order, Han supremacy, and the continued impacts of Euro-American coloniality.

Cet article analyse le partage intergénérational de recettes de soupes familiales chez les Sino-Américains à partir d’enregistement audio et video de séances de cuisine. Trois thèmes principaux ressortent: 1) la construction de l’hygiène au cours de la préparation des repas, 2) l’interrogation de l’authenticité et de la “chinoisité” dans les pratiques d’alimentation, et, 3) la revendication du capital culturel comme élement identitaire d’un groupe marginal aux Etats-Unis à travers les connaissances intergénérationnelles de l’alimentation. Considérés ensemble, ces thèmes montrent comment les Sino-Américains sont aux prises avec une longue histoire de discrimination et, en même temps, repoussent les tendances à l’assimilation grâce à la préservation positive de leur affinité culturelle et dessinent des espaces pour les nouvelles générations. This paper examines Chinese Americans’ intergenerational sharing of important family soup recipes in audio/video-recorded cooking sessions. Three main themes emerged: 1) Construction of hygiene around Chinese meal preparation; 2) questioning the authenticity and Chineseness of particular food practices; and 3) claiming cultural capital as part of a marginalized identity group in the U.S. through intergenerational food knowledge. Taken together, these themes demonstrate how Chinese Americans wrestle with a long history of discrimination while simultaneously pushing back against assimiliationist tendencies through preserving positive cultural affinity and carving out spaces for newer generations.

A constituinte de 1934 apresentou uma série de restrições à entrada de imigrantes no Brasil, ganhando contornos maiores nos anos que seguiram ao "Estado Novo" getulista. Entremeado por discursos que perpassaram dimensões eugênicas, sanitaristas e até morais, a entrada de estrangeiros em solo nacional foi pauta dos debates da constituínte. Estava implicada a ideia de um “imigrante ideal” assim como o propósito de afastar aquele outro que se mostrava indigesto a um modelo de cidadão e sociedade que naquele contexto se empreendia constituir. A proposta desse artigo é apresentar a gênese desses discursos no contexto da transição da República Velha no âmbito da Constituinte de 1934, sobretudo quanto à questão do “Perigo Amarelo” em sua interface com panorama da política nacional e internacional que o Brasil se via emaranhado. &nbsp

From 1912 and for numerous decades, Sax Rohmer contributed to create, and recreate, an archvillain of tremendous vigour, Fu Manchu, whose routing lives, appallingly magnetic powers, subterranean connections made him a global star. In this paper I peruse this multi-faceted serial icon, formulaic and yet also changing over time, and see its presence and apparent disappearance from the cultural panorama of the Anglophone world. This multimedial serial figure has been let loose, like Frankenstein's creature, and its progeny may still be detected in film, cartoons and global popular culture.

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 St...

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 no...

Situated within comics and graphic life writing scholarship, this article examines the rhetoric of serially illustrating Chinese labour in David H.T. Wong’sEscape to Gold Mountain. It reads the alignment of dead, murdered, injured, and struggling Chinese labourers alongside Indigenous characters and Chinese North American trailblazers as part of the book’s commemorative impulse to memorialize these historical figures and relationships in the (trans)national imaginary. It also claims that the narrative’s rhetorical shifts, from satire to irony, melancholy to condemnation, all form an ethical appeal to the reader to remember and honour the lives and contributions of the Gold Mountain migrants when their presence in the visual and historical archive has been dehumanized by Yellow Peril discourses. However, the article concludes that Wong’s anti-racist memorial project also problematically reinvests in the model minority myth, indigenizes the figure of the Chinese labourer, and upholds a settler colonial relationship to the land.

[...]Mahbubani argues that the US–China clash is paradoxically both inevitable and avoidable, but it is ultimately up to both superpowers to employ measures in the coming decades to determine the outcome. [...]to the portrayal by several Western media outlets and prominent American politicians, Mahbubani argues that it is the US, rather than China, that remains the biggest global militaristic threat, pointing to the colossal annual increases of US military defense spending as well as its large nuclear stockpiles in comparison with those of China. While Mahbubani focuses largely on the hesitation of Chinese businessmen to open up to the US and other foreign investment, the four years of “America First” policies, trade war antagonisms, and hubristic sanctions have certainly damaged the still-fragile economic superpower coupling. [...]it is clear that Trump's relentless and racially charged sentiments towards China throughout the pandemic—disturbingly echoing colonial-era “Yellow Peril” discourse—has dangerously provoked Sinophobia among the US population.