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[...]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.

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.

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

This article maps the rise and dissemination of Yellow Peril fears in the United States between about 1980 and 1993 and seeks to explain them. Anti-communism had been an animating force in Ronald Reagan's career, but shortly after he left office an opinion poll revealed that Japan had replaced the Soviet Union as the greatest perceived threat to the US. While economic anxieties contributed to the resurgence of Yellow Peril sentiments, this article emphasizes the vital parts played by other phenomena, notably Reagan's economic policies, partisan politics, a media war, and the ending of the Cold War. The Yellow Peril scare was widely criticized, and by the early 1990s the controversy had invaded popular culture. Ronald Reagan is frequently applauded for restoring American self-confidence after the “malaise” of the Carter years, but the apprehensions discussed here suggest that he enjoyed only limited success in this respect.

This article narrates the development of a set of ideas and provocative imagery about population growth and movement that has shaped the way people think about world politics. It represented humanity in terms of populations that could and should be controlled to prevent degeneration and preserve civilization. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this discursive tradition supported a series of political projects that aimed to either exclude those deemed able to subsist on less and reproduce more or regulate reproduction worldwide. Conceiving of the world in terms of populations – rather than nation-states – led people to think of new ways in which it might be divided, unsettling diplomatic alignments and alliances. But it also contributed to critiques of state sovereignty, since population problems were said to affect everyone and require a united response. This intellectual history helps illuminate some of the local and parochial reasons why people began to ‘think globally’.

Since Edward Said's influential formulation, scholars in a variety of disciplines have unpacked orientalism in its various incarnations. Within American studies, theories of orientalism have been used to understand more fully both the relationship of the United States to Asia during the “Pacific century” and the history of racial formation and racism with regard to Asian Americans. One of the prevailing tendencies has been to posit the Oriental as that which is marginalized and excluded, as either the exotic Other or the yellow peril. Both Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East and Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism do much to refocus this discussion, using contexts that demonstrate how Asia and Asian Americans were not just treated as, to use Alexander Saxton's phrase, “the indispensable enemy,” but rather held, both politically and culturally, within a much more paradoxical “embrace.”

The Russian conquest of Siberia was not only a remarkable event in world history like the conquest of the New World by the Western European nations, but also a decisive step in Russia's empire-building. Through territorial enlargement the empire became multiethnic. This process resembled the expansion of the white settlers in North America. Like North America, Siberia represented an “open frontier.” Harsh nature and the encounter between the white settlers and the “savages” formed the identity of the frontier. From the perspective of modern cultural anthropology the frontier also shaped reflections on the self and the other. There existed, however, a decisive difference to the American frontier: Siberia became a meeting ground for Russian and Asian cultures. Whereas the American frontier—except in the encounter with Mexico—remained isolated, Russians early came in contact with Asian nations. From the early emergence of a modern state in Russia during the era of Enlightenment, Russia came into manifold contacts with “civilized” Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) and with “uncivilized” Asians, i.e. the tribes of Siberia. At the junction between Europe and Asia, Russia as a Eurasian empire was the sole country in Europe which was so near to Asia. It was therefore logical that Russia felt a kind of mission toward Asia and required the role of a mediator between Europe and Asia.

The description provided by John Foster Fraser, a British journalist wandering through Siberia and Manchuria in the autumn of 1901, is of Khabarovsk, a town of some fifteen thousand people. Such scenes were not peculiar to Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, but could be witnessed in other towns throughout the Russian Far East such as Chita, Blagoveshchensk, Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii, and Vladivostok. Who were these ‘weak, withered-faced’ Chinese that one was likely to encounter? What were they doing within the boundaries of the Russian Empire? What were the attitudes of the Russian population towards the Chinese and what policies did the provincial and central authorities adopt with respect to them?