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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.

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.

This essay argues that Anglo-American memories of Japan’s victory in Singapore in 1942, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill labeled Britain’s “darkest moment” in World War II, soon would underpin the domino logic within u.s. Cold War strategy. For both American and British policymakers, Japan’s war machine had fused together in interconnected insecurity the bastions of Euro-American colonial power. In Southeast Asia, it had imposed the condition that one state’s vulnerabilities impinged upon the stability of its neighbor. This vision of Southeast Asia’s interconnected insecurity was central to the domino logic within u.s. Cold War policy. u.s. policymakers’ preoccupation with containing communism in Vietnam arose significantly from how Japan had torn into Southeast Asia from Indochina. After World War II, u.s. and British policymakers perceived Southeast Asian insecurity through both the prism of Japanese imperialism and their fears of an older “Yellow Peril"—China and Southeast Asia’s Chinese diaspora. Indeed, u.s. and British officials anticipated, as well as echoed and confirmed, each other’s suspicions that China and its diaspora would collaborate to reprise Japan’s campaign.

For the past decade, confronting the reality of China’s gradual and peaceful rising, certain American politicians, army men, and scholars have been vigorously preaching the “China Threat Doctrine.” This doctrine seems with some certainty and innovation. However, through the historical mirrors, it is not hard to discern that such doctrine is nothing but a current “variant” under contemporary situations of the once clamorous “Yellow Peril Doctrine” fabricated and preached by Russian Tsar and German Emperor in the nineteenth century. Both the past and the current version of such doctrines share the same DNA in distorting the historical mainstream of Sino-foreign interactions for the past thousands of years, as well as in playing certain political legerdemain. The characteristics of such legerdemain are endeavoring to spiritually and publicly mobilize people for invasive activities and aggressions against China with alarming and sensational descriptions. Based on China’s extreme suffering under colonialist powers’ suppression and plunder since the 1840 “Opium War,” this article discloses that “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine” are essentially slogans of colonialism and imperialism. Furthermore, based on the historical facts of Sino-foreign economic interactions for the past thousands of years and the jurisprudential principles therein, this article discloses that “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine” have severely deviated from historical truth. Lastly, this article reminds all decent people both domestic and abroad not to take a casual attitude on the practical outcome of “Yellow Peril Doctrine” and “China Threat Doctrine.” On the contrary, people shall be aware of and prepare for the danger in times of peace and shall not act as cat’s paws for American hegemonists.

With the Chinese presence on the African continent being perceived and portrayed as a new global phenomenon there has been a concomitant, albeit sporadic and nuanced, emergence of an aversion to things Chinese, gradually permeating popular consciousness. In a postcolonial world these anti-Sinitic or Sino-phobic sentiments are crudely reminiscent of the late nineteenth century colonial cries of the “yellow peril”, which culminated in acts of exclusion and extreme prohibition that singled out and targeted the Chinese in the various colonies across the Atlantic and Pacific including South Africa. This article, however, proposes to trace the genesis of some of anti-Sinicism to a pre-industrial period by considering developments in colonial Southern Africa. It will show how in the early Dutch settler and British colonial periods at the Cape, when the number of Chinese present in the region was miniscule, negative feelings towards the Chinese as the “other” were already apparent and evident in the reactions to them prior to the arrival of the large numbers which came to America, Australasia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

The extensive literature concerning America's exclusion of Asians has emphasized primarily the domestic contexts for restricting trans-Pacific migrations. Fears of a “Yellow Peril” invasion and conquest were used to justify the earliest American attempts to limit the entry of races and nationalities deemed too different and incompatible to integrate and participate on equal terms in a republic dominated by European arrivals and their descendants. Asian American Studies scholars in particular have mined the rich vein of documents delineating the formative legacy of anti-Asian laws, ideologies, and institutions shaping the still deeply troubled patrolling of American borders today. Less attention has turned to the influence of foreign policy considerations and their role in carving out categories of migrants exempted from exclusionary laws. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 made exceptions for merchants, merchant family members, students and teachers, diplomats, and tourists.

Australia, with the exception of its indigenous peoples, is a land of recent migrants. Our national anthem proclaims that, 'For those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share.' However, this has never been an unconditional offer. Immigration laws in Australia have often disclosed a 'deeply xenophobic hostility' toward foreigners. Fear of the yellow peril, the supposed hordes of Chinese, 'bent on overrunning White Australia and destroying its way of life forever', prompted racially discriminatory immigration restrictions as early as 1855. One of the first statutes passed after Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901(Cth), which introduced the dictation test by which the White Australia policy was implemented.

This chapter examines the problems faced by modern Japan through the life and perspective of one of the prewar period's leading intellectuals. In understanding the formation of Anesaki Masaharu's thought, it is important to recognize the decisive influence of his birth family's relationship to Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism and the imperial house. Anesaki supported the League of Nations, which passed a resolution supporting the Treaty of Versailles system, and he supported the minponshugi movement for democratic ideals advocated by Yoshino Sakuzō. Anesaki's experience of the West began with his critique of Western civilization triggered by the "yellow peril" polemic encountered in Germany, passed through the period of establishing the particularity of Japan's religious emperor-institution state in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, continued with introducing the particularity of Japan to the West, and culminated in self-confidence through defining Japan as the intermediary between Eastern and Western civilizations.Keywords: anesaki masaharu; Jōdo Shinshū; treaty of versailles; yellow peril; Yoshino Sakuzō

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Australians were possessed by two obsessions - the fear of the ‘yellow peril’ and the desire for a white society. The fear of the so-called yellow peril found expression in science and politics as well as in innumerable invasion novels depicting the swamping of the self-proclaimed European outpost in the Pacific by imagined Asiatic hordes. The programme of a white society was reasoned scientifically and found political supporters, not least in the labour movement. Moreover, it was conveyed by a medium that was even more popular than pulp fiction: the commodity racism that propagated the consumption of white sugar. White sugar was a very special commodity. Refined white and produced white, it comprised white labourers, dearer sweetness, protection from the world market and the gaining of intra-continental acceptance through subsidies. Both invasion novels and sugar consumption were aimed at the entire society.

This chapter analyses the roots of racial notions in Japanese foreign policy and examines the effects of European 'Yellow Peril' propaganda on and in Japan. It discusses the following questions: How, if at all, did Japan react to this kind of propaganda? How did Japanese foreign policy change as a consequence of it? Race played an important role in the Pacific War, and not much attention has been paid to the emergence of racial notions in Japanese foreign policy. There were warning voices, in Japan, pointing out the character of the idea of a 'clash of races' as a self-fulfilling prophecy . Until the Russo- Japanese War, leaders of the Asian independence movements still had applauded Japan's successes, but soon thereafter, Japan was harshly criticized as becoming a colonialist power herself and as becoming the 'public enemy' (kōteki) of Asia. Keywords: clash of races; European yellow peril propaganda; Japanese foreign policy; Russo-Japanese War

In the late nineteenth century, the tide of European dominance seemed to be receding as the alleged superiority of the white male Christian came under challenge. One component of the European imperialist worldview was a perceived link between Christianity and civilisation, and Nitobe sought to overturn that perception as well. The lessons of bushido that Repington was urging on his countrymen were seconded by the anonymously written Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1905). Japanese intellectuals, unconnected to the government, did much the same on their own and found a willing audience among their British counterparts. The appeal of the bushido concept was especially strong among Indian nationalists, and as it grew in strength, anti-Japanese conspiracy theories began to take hold in Britain. Keywords: Britain; British empire; bushido; Christianity; civilisation