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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]

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]

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]

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]

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.