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Historically, Asians have been defined by a range of negative and positive images that include the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, and the model minority. However, the negative images have been slowly and robustly replaced with ones that portray Asian Americans as high achievers, smart, and a model – especially when compared to other students of color. For many Asian American students, ‘smartness’ as a cultural practice and an imposed attribute has become synonymous with whiteness – impacting their academic, social, cultural, and language identities. Utilizing reflexive ethnography, I share what I name ‘cultural wealth as smartness’ as a Vietnamese refugee student growing up in a predominantly white community and the cultural capital gained and lost as a result. This article provides a counter-narrative to the Asian American experience and the deficit assumptions imposed upon immigrant families in the US.

Focusing on Guy Maddin's 2002 film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, this essay argues that by rejecting Hollywood's iconic images of Dracula in favor of a silent, montage-heavy ballet performance film, Maddin calls attention to the exclusion of Dracula's own perspective from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. As a result, Maddin makes parallels between Dracula's otherness and a multicultural Canada attempting to navigate American media influence. In addition, Maddin's casting of a member of Canada's largest minority group as Dracula allows the film to investigate identity constructions of Asian-Canadians, founded on the nation's relationship to its indigenous populations and molded by American categorizations such as ‘yellow peril’. Through the film's embrace of silent film esthetics, Maddin denies not only Dracula but also the entire Canadian cast a voice, probing the definition of settler colonials who must contend with the lingering ramifications of British colonialism, their complicity in indigeno...

While important scholarship exists on the television representations of Asian American identities, research in the UK has been focused on African Caribbean and South Asian identities. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to televisual representations of British Chinese identities, despite the British Chinese constituting one of the larger and fastest growing ethnic minority groups within contemporary Britain.\ud \ud Informed by an understanding of the complexity of the term ‘British Chinese’, this article explores the representation of British Chinese identities in British television drama. Despite the long-standing absence and invisibility of such identities in British television, as perceived within the popular imagination in Britain and British Chinese discourses, the article finds that a larger number of British Chinese actors have found notable employment in British television than is commonly acknowledged or remembered within the popular imagination.\ud \ud The article draws on a database that deploys a range of research, including archive research at the BFI Reuben Library, to map the presence of British Chinese actors in British television drama since 1945. Through this historiographic focus, the article identifies some of the most significant trends in representations of British Chinese identities in British television drama. It then illustrates and provides more specific texture to these broader patterns through the close textual analysis of a case study, the BBC1 flagship series Sherlock (2010-present). It concludes by reflecting on the contemporary period, which has seen an influx of British Chinese actors in British television drama as well as high-profile diversity campaigning within Britain.

China’s adherence to peaceful development bears on the influence of its cultural traditions, the needs of practical interests, the binding of the market mechanism and the restrictions of international rules. Nevertheless, it’s not an easy road. China must overcome all those challenges, may it be domestic or foreign, subjective or objective, short-term or long term. Some require China to carry out adaption, reform or even revolution by itself, some go beyond the self-adaption of behaviors and institutions, requiring international coordination and banishing other countries’ doubts so as to obtain the understanding, approval and support of the international society and still some are not simply challenges to China but also challenges to many countries or even the whole world as a “community of shared future”, requiring China and other countries to work together and cooperate sincerely in their response. This chapter mainly examines the embodiment and source of these challenges. Possible ways and assumptions about how to respond to them will be explored in the next chapter.

China has long been present in Western science fiction, but largely through notions of Orientalism and depictions as the 'Yellow Peril'. However, with China's new ascendancy and modernization over the last 15 years, along with its investment and collaboration with Hollywood in particular, contemporary film in general, and contemporary science fiction in particular, has embraced this new China in ways hitherto unseen before. This essay examines three contemporary western/American science fiction films which each represent and construct China in slightly different ways, and in ways which reveal the West, and Hollywood's reappraisal of the relationship with China and its emerging 'Soft Power.'.

This study examines the evolution of yellow peril tropes in a subset of US political discourse by conducting a close textual analysis of Mitt Romney’s rhetoric during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. I argue that Romney revised yellow peril tropes of the Chinese as immoral, ruthless scapegoats to construct China as an economic yellow peril. In turn, the threat posed by this peril is augmented by Romney’s use of anti-communist tropes, which draw upon deeply entrenched Cold War fears to position the United States and China as adversaries. This project provides insight into the functions of anti-China appeals in U.S. presidential campaign discourse.

In September, 2014, Charisma Magazine--which describes itself as "a trusted source of news, teaching and inspiration to help spread the gospel of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit" and which has been a central identifying institution within Christian conservatism in the United States since 1975--posted on its CharismaNews section an opinion piece titled "Why I Am Absolutely Islamaphobic" [sic], by Gary Cass. (1) He urged that all Muslim-Americans either should be deported--using the acronym D.A.M.N. or Deport All Muslims Now--or should be forced to undergo sterilization. Charisma's author exhorted Christians to a modern-day Crusade, to "trust in God, then obtain gun(s)." After considerable backlash from subscribers and readers, Charisma removed the post on September 7, 2014, but never printed a retraction or apology. This example of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam discourse is recent; it represents a segment of conservative discourse today. Clearly, the first speechact about Muslims and Islam by a leading U.S. religious conservative was of an entirely different character. Within a week of the attacks on September xi, 2001, President George W. Bush--a professed born-again Christian, who flanked himself with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington--officially framed a distinction between terrorism and Islam. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," the president said; "Islam is peace." (2) But, that early and official act of moral leadership would meet stiff resistance by a segment of the religious conservative establishment. Bush-family friend, the prominent evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for example, immediately pushed back: "I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion," he said. (3) Other evangelical leaders expressed similar opposition to the official White House identity of Islam. Jerry Falwell, for example, in a prominent interview on 60 Minutes, said "I think Mohammed was a terrorist," adding, "He was a violent man, a man of war." (4) By the mid-point of the post-9/11 decade, this securitization of Islam among U.S. conservatives was in full expansion in social media and the blogosphere and in the organization of grassroots organizations. Conservative Catholic deacon Robert Spencer, for example, was positioned as director of the newly created blog, Jihad Watch--a project of the well-known conservative culture warrior, David Horowitz. Jihad Watch's sole function was to oppose the more progressive "politically correct" narrative regarding Islam with a distinctly politically incorrect or counternarrative. Conservative grassroots organizations also emerged expressly to counter the more progressive "Islam is peace" narrative. One such organization, ACT! for America, would eventually become larger than even the American Israel Political Affairs Committee. The organization's founder, Brigitte Gabriel, was a naturalized U.S. Evangelical with Lebanese Maronite roots, who had been affiliated with Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Speaking at the unofficial Intelligence Summit in Washington, DC, on February 19,2006, Gabriel said, "America and the West are doomed to failure in this war unless they stand up and identify the real enemy, Islam," (5) and elsewhere characterized "Every practicing Muslim," as "a radical Muslim." (6) In the area of religious fiction, popular conservative Christian novelists advanced a blend of the counternarrative and apocalypticism. Joel Richardson found a sustained niche audience that helped him attain bestselling status with books such as Antichrist: Islam's Awaited Messiah (Wine Press Publishing, 2006), The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Nature of the Beast (WND Books, 2009), and--once more--the Mideast Beast: The Case for an Islamic Antichrist (WND Books, 2012). In about 2009, this popular discourse about the danger of Islam took a much more irrational turn. In what we might call the "Green Scare"--following this historical-colored convention of the Red Scare and Yellow Peril over perceived threats from the East--a more conspiratorial and paranoid threat narrative emerged. …

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Asian Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by the rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a "collective self," or Asian Canadian identity, through which to challenge the representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist state policies as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Canadian Internment, and the Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, the field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating the nation-state as the primary interlocutor of the Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of "strategic essentialism" (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as the field increasingly becomes drawn into the academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that the focus on domestic identity politics, and the promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs the risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot "shake up the systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures" (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on the Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Asian Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how the construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to "think about the formation of the Canadian state through imperialism and colonialism" and to see Asian Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a "diasporic perspective" can highlight the links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a diasporic perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where the Opium Wars "had disrupted the local economy [and] provid[ed] much of the push for emigration" (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via the coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after the Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm can productively complicate the history of Asian Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in the Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to the benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes the perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Asian Canadian identity. Lai argues that the tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to the pressures of "state incorporation" currently informing Asian Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to "recirculate the logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms" (23). This logic becomes all the more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, the 2010 Maclean's article entitled "Too Asian" suggests that "the trope of the 'yellow peril'" has been reinvigorated in the national imaginary (Lai 17). …

This paper focuses on how Japan was represented in the most popular Belgian comics at a particular period in time, right after the Second World War and just before the image of Japan as an economic superpower (that exported many commodities to Europe or the USA) became widespread from the 1960s on. Within the field of European comics, Belgian comics played a crucial role in the decades after the war with major artists such as Herge, Franquin, Jacobs, Vandersteen and many others. Moreover, the Belgian comics industry attracted many artists from other countries and exported her products to various countries (especially France). The comics published in dailies, journals and albums formed at that time an important means of entertainment for the youngsters (television started only in the 1950s in Belgium). Furthermore, the Belgian comics culture is interesting since it involves two different traditions: a French language one and a Dutch language one. In various stories, published between 1945 and 1960, we find representations of Japan. On the whole, two basic approaches of the Japanese Otherness stand out: - the “Yellow Peril”, strongly referring to the last World War (for instance Jacobs' Blake et Mortimer , Le Secret de l’espadon , Hubinon & Troisfontaines , Charlier's Buck Danny , Les Japs attaquent ). Usually these comics were drawn in a more realistic style. - the “touristic ancient or exotic Japan” without any reference to WWII (for instance Vandersteen Suske en Wiske , De Stemmenrover , Will & Ros y Tif et Tondu , Le Fantome du samourai ). Usually comics of this approach combine adventure and humour. The first kind of comics is typically for the comics produced in the first years after war, while the second kind is rather typical for the late 1950s. So, even in this brief period of 15 years already an important shift of the image of Japan is noticeable, from a belligerent enemy to an exotic and touristically interesting culture. The paper will offer a more detailed analysis of some examples and formulates some possible explanations for this shift.

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril, Japanese martial arts posed a threat to western martial arts of boxing and wrestling. The efficiency and effectiveness of Japanese jiu-jitsu, as introduced to Americans in the early twentieth century, challenged preconceived notions of the superiority of western martial arts and therefore American constructions of race and masculinity. As Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. nation wrestled with the Japanese and jiu-jitsu, they responded in various ways to this new menace. The jiu-jitsu threat was ultimately subjugated by simultaneously exoticizing, feminizing, and appropriating aspects of it in order to reassert the dominance of western martial arts, the white race and American masculinity.

This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siecle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including so-called ‘yellow peril’ narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration.

In this essay, I take the recent publication of several texts examining the historical and contemporary phenomena of Sinophobia, Orientalism, and Sinologism as an opening for theorizing underlying and related issues including pervasive anti-China biases in Western journalism and China’s position therein. In addition to illustrating how the concepts of Orientalism arise from Western historical and epistemological foundations, I theorize what I call a “new yellow journalism” that has grown in tandem with “China’s rise” and the threat this indicates to many Western observers, and how this threat and others like it have been met in the age of “new imperialism.” I compare this new phenomenon with its historical antecedents, “yellow journalism” and America’s emergence as a imperialism power with the Spanish-American War (1898), and note several key insights offered by recent critical analyses of that period, which together suggest a confluence of different players, including policymakers, new media business models, and what I describe as a type of public “corporatism” in which citizens, particularly Americans, function effectively as shareholders in maintaining hegemonic if not imperialist power.

This article examines the work of a forgotten novelist, Anne Duffield, whose early novels set in China merit re-examination. Utilizing but also subverting the romance novel formula and alert to the utopian appeal of entertainment, Duffield’s The Lacquer Couch and Lantern-Light create a dream of China that invites intercultural connection, friendship and understanding. As China in the 1920s was rocked by anti-foreigner violence, the vision of these two novels was an appealing and hopeful alternative to the resurgent fears of malevolent fiends reminiscent of an earlier ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse. In addition, Duffield’s China, though romanticized, is also a modern and cosmopolitan one—an important counter to a tendency to imagine China as antiquated and entombed in the past.

The Yellow Peril! … The peace of the world is at stake.—Sax Rohmer 1913, The Insidious Dr. Fu ManchuOur inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril.—The 14th Dalai Lama 2011, 75, Beyond Religion: Ethics for the Whole WorldThis essay is concerned with the contemporary convergence of Western and Eastern metaphysical paradigms as witnessed in and expressed through detective fiction written by Western writers, but with settings in, and influenced by, historically Buddhist cultures of East and Southeast Asia. The essay argues that the traditional Western detective fiction novel is symptomatic of a scientific-materialist mindset that has reached an existential dead end with its loss of faith in the possibility of self-transcendence, a mindset that has become trapped in a deterministic world in which evil and violence, perpetually arising, inducing guilt, require perpetual dissipation and solution. In their various manners, each of the three novelists discussed in the essay puts forward the Buddhistical...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries China’s Qing dynasty was falling, the Australian colonies were united as a Federation, and New Zealand was beginning to assert its own national ...

In this book, University of Texas professor of history Madeline Y. Hsu states that her aim is to trace events in international politics and fiscal considerations as forces which propelled shifts in...

Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War led to the incorporation of Korea into the Japanese empire. Japan’s growing power in East Asia coupled with the start of the Chinese Revolution in 1911 destabilized the region. Europeans and Americans feared that Japan and China might unite and threaten European and American strategic and commercial interests in the region. Proud of their economic and military achievements, Japanese leaders resented racist “Yellow Peril” rhetoric in Europe and exclusionary immigration policies in the United States. Hoping that international exchanges between business leaders would reduce tensions, Shibusawa Eiichi participated in several goodwill missions abroad after his retirement from most business positions in the early 1900s.

In 1906, a South African newspaper published a picture of a Chinese man's scalp. An investigation revealed that traditional braids were regularly taken from executed Chinese prisoners and sold to high-ranking colonial officials as curiosities for their private collections. How is one to understand such an event? Drawing on newspapers, photographs, and illustrations of the Chinese queue from the 1600s, as well as the official investigation into the scalping incident and the ensuing press coverage, this article reflects on the intersectionality embodied by the Chinese braid. It will examine the Chinese hairstyle as a social signifier, both in China and throughout the English-speaking world. While the scalping incident seems highly unusual, placing it within a wider social history of hair, Yellow Peril discourse, human trophyism, and the commodification of bodies reveals how colonial power was always relational and always contestable.

This paper examines the oscillations of Western stereotypes regarding the Chinese. The research uses a multidisciplinary approach by combining agenealogical study of the character of Fu Manchu with recent fieldwork in Taiwan among Western expatriates. The combination of these studiesreveal an insight regarding the staging of whiteness from the global scale of international relations down to micro performances of quotidian expatriate life.A particular focus is on how expatriates make use of spatial configurations to accentuate their fantasies of superiority. The paper identifies the universalismof such Western performances as a parochial cultural element and embraces a method of conducting fieldwork without denying the subjectivity of the ethnographer, Bu çalışma Çinlilere yönelik Batılı stereotiplerinin dalgalanışını inceliyor. Araştırma çok disiplinli bir yöntem kullanarak Fu Manchu karakterinin tarihi gelişimini Tayvan da yapılmış güncel saha çalıştırmasıyla paralel olarak inceliyor. Bu iki incelemenin birleşimi, uluslar arası ilişkiler arenasından gündelik hayatın mikro-performanslarına kadar beyazlığın nasıl oynandığı konusunda yeni bir anlayış sunuyor. Araştırmanın önemli bir vurgu noktası Tayvan da yaşayan Batılıların üstünlük fantezilerini gerçekleştirmek için ürettikleri alansal konfigürasyonlar üzerine. Araştırmabu Batılı performansların evrensellik iddalarını dargörüşlü bir kültürel öğe olarak algılayıp, araştırmacının sübjektifliğini red etmeyen bir saha çalışması yöntemi benimsiyor

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 chapter 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 after early 1942.

In 1915, O. A. C. Lund directed his first Universal release, Just Jim (1915), "a thrilling four reeler" with Harry Carey in the title role. After serving a prison term for smuggling, Jim goes to a "hop joint" where a "rich Chinese mandarin" offers him a chance to make "big money smuggling in Chinese." Jim refuses, declaring that he has gone straight, but returns to the "old game" after he is "shanghaied" by Chinese smugglers. Ultimately, Jim circumvents the smuggling ring (Moving Picture World, 14 August 1915, 1227). By linking opium dens with cross-border flows of Chinese laborers, whose entry into the United States had been prohibited by the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the film encouraged a racialized perception of Chinese communities as both vice-ridden and detrimental to the interests of the white working class. More importantly, by spanning the Pacific Northwest down to the southwest borderlands, the production indicated to filmgoers that the so-called "Chinese Problem" and the opium scourge was a continental phenomenon linked to what Erika Lee refers to as global flows of Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas ("The Yellow Peril" 537).Just Jim was not unique in using border zones as a narrative setting to dramatize the perceived nexus between the Chinese diaspora and the opium epidemic to highlight the alleged threat of Asian peoples on a transnational scale. In the early twentieth century, the US film industry produced a cycle of films set in North American border regions, which were symptomatic of widespread fears surrounding addiction to smoking opium and the perception of the Chinese as an incursion. As Erica Lee argues, although "the U.S., Canada, and Mexico were structured by their own unique systems of race relations and hierarchies as well as colonial legacies," the three nations "defined the Chinese as a threatening invasion," and categorized Chinese immigrants as dangerous, immoral, and unassimilable ("Orientalisms in the Americas" 238-389).Indeed, the rise and subsequent fall of a particular film cycle depend upon its ability to exploit the audience's perceived desires by drawing from current events, trends, and the financial and/or critical viability of similar film productions. As such, the study of a particular film cycle can help shed light on social anxieties and contemporary politics within a discreet time frame (Kleine 5). Motion pictures that tackled such hard-hitting social issues as drug addiction and smuggling demonstrated the cinema's active engagement with the broad goals of the Progressive Era, which roughly spanned the 1890s through the end of the First World War. Although progressivism was a movement marked by tremendous diversity, the spirit of reform and the perceived need to impose order for the betterment of the United States and its citizens generally defined this period (Diner; Flanagan; Wiebe).In keeping with this objective, reformers clamored for the eradication of both opiate usage and of the opium trading networks that appeared to facilitate the clandestine entry of excluded Chinese laborers via Canada and Mexico. Given the topicality of Chinese immigrant and opium smuggling, the film industry produced motion pictures dealing with these interrelated subjects. Specifically, the filmic borderland settings, as spaces of intercultural contact and collision, offer a unique representational framework to comprehend contiguous patterns of racial exclusion toward Chinese immigrant communities in the early twentieth century. This film cycle underscored perceived anxieties about the porosity of borderlands, thereby accelerating the desire for stricter enforcement along the perimeters that surround the United States. The ongoing practice of smuggling in excluded Chinese workers, as well as the unlawful entry of other unsanctioned migrants, via the leaky borders that the United States shares with both Canada and Mexico would eventually culminate with the establishment of the US border patrol in 1924. …

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.

The active movement of the Russian Empire to the East for three centuries and its colossal success led to the need for some Russian thinkers and publicists to analyze this unique phenomenon as part of the general European colonial ‘movement’ to the East. The problem became more relevant than ever after the Sino-Japanese war (1894–1895), when the expansion of Russia to the East intensified, and all the world powers started to formulate their interests in China. Conflicts with and around China among these countries became widespread. Here the Russian press played a great role, accompanying and commenting on each step made by Russian diplomats and military. The discussions gradually highlighted two different problems. These were the ideas of ‘yellow peril’ and ‘Russia’s special mission in the East’.

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.

Before Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu became household names, San Francisco-born detective Mr. Wang and his rival Jugatai, the Manchu head of the Secret Society of Federated Asia, entertained young British readers in the early twentieth century. This article examines these under-explored characters, created by the prolific military officer-turned-writer Charles Gilson. It explores how Gilson developed a fictional formula that appealed to young readers and made slight variations to it in order to keep those readers interested. The characters of Mr. Wang and his nemesis Jugatai are also examined in terms of the conventions of the adventure story; in particular, the classic detective story stereotypes of the Chinese and fears of the yellow peril are subject to analysis. It is seen that Gilson created Mr. Wang as a respected character possessing many positive traits. However, to some extent, Mr. Wang is also a mouthpiece to support Western involvement in China, while Jugatai is an evil plotter destined to fail because of the superiority of the British. Therefore, although Gilson pushed some boundaries in detective fiction by featuring a Chinese detective more than a decade before the creation of Charlie Chan, he still conformed to certain formulaic plotlines of the boy’s adventure story genre.

John F. Coales was a remarkable contributor to the field of control engineering with a wide scope of activities in the profession until his death in 1999 at the age of 92. Following his undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge, he devoted his engineering talents to radio direction finding and radar while working for various agencies of the British government. This work was instrumental in the defense of Great Britain during World War II. At the end of the war, he was employed in British engineering industries and in 1953 accepted an offer from the Engineering Department of Cambridge University to create and head a graduate teaching and research program in advanced automatic control systems. His career included many honors and leadership positions such as a term as president of the IEE. An oral history of John Coales may be found in the IEEE Global History Network [1].

Mayer is the Chair in American Studies at Leibniz University, and her book is a timely entry into the opening field of Yellow Peril studies, with other recent texts on the subject including John Ku...

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.

Present study critically investigates the cinematic depiction of leading Chinese masculine figures in Hollywood film productions, with a specific focus on how the positioning of white female characters romantically involved with Chinese martial arts fighters serves to construct Chinese masculinity. In noted films such as The Tuxedo (2002), Kiss of the Dragon (2001), and Dragon: Bruce Lee Story (1993), Chinese martial arts fighters not only managed to fight off white antagonists but also succeeded in winning the ‘heart’ of white heroines. Drawing on Gestner's theoretical assertion that white women's falling for a man of color signifies the invasive movement of a new masculine discourse into the space traditionally bounded by the ideal of white masculinity, and grounded on Hall's conception of articulation, my critical examination of these three film texts revealed how the privileged cultural and racial position of whiteness was reformulated and rejustified via the strategic dramatic construction of romanti...

The subject of this paper is how the Associated Press used propaganda in the United States in order to sway the public sentiment regarding Yellow Peril and the effects on public opinions when the popular media chose whether to follow or reject the popular prejudices of the time. During the years 1888 to 1905, the diplomatic relations between the Western powers and the Far East showed signs of increasing equality and interdependence between the East and West, which unsettled many Westerners. Since Westerners had limited access to knowledge about Asia, they created an image that Asia, with is vast population, would join together in making a powerful military unit, and this force would be a substantial threat to ?Christian civilization.? These unrealistic fears caused the West to witness an outpouring of books, articles and editorial commentary concerning the impending danger to Western-white-Christian civilization from the growing power of the Oriental peoples. The slogan `Yellow Peril` not only expressed the Western fears of Asia initiating physical war against the US or Europe, but also fears that Asian immigrants to the United States were stealing American jobs.

Andrew explores the first appearances of boy detectives as assistants to adult professional detectives in the Harmsworths’ boys’ story papers of the 1890s and early 1900s. Examining the Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee series, the chapter considers how the adult master detectives’ civilisation of their boy assistants addresses and assuages anxieties about internal and external threats to the British Empire. Andrew links the representation of Nelson Lee’s street-urchin assistant, Nipper, to the emergence of the concept of adolescence and anxieties surrounding the threat of the “delinquent” adolescent and the “blind-alley” labourer. The chapter also explores how the Anglicisation of Sexton’s Blake’s Chinese boy assistant, We-wee, responds to the threat of the foreigner and, specifically, the “yellow peril” in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion.

Modern New Zealand was a product of British imperial expansion of which China was a major objective. Access to the China trade was an important reason for British settlement. The first exports were sealskins to China and tea and gold miners from China made important contributions to nineteenth century New Zealand. The early period also established two concepts of China which continue to today. One is the ‘Golden Fleece’, the huge market which will make rich any foreigner who captures but a small part of it, and the other is the ‘Yellow Peril’ where size and alien culture are perceived as a threat. Despite early promise, trade with China languished until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 began a transformation.

El Zarathustra de Nietzsche ha ejercido una gran influencia en la literatura, al haber consagrado un tipo de épica que podríamos llamar profética, en la que el héroe es un sabio que expone sus doctrinas y visiones de futuro. Entre las obras inspiradas por la obra maestra literaria de Nietzsche, destaca Jonas (1900), del belga Iwan Gilkin, que presenta a un nuevo Jonás que se dirige a la Nueva Nínive moderna para alertarla del «peligro amarillo» económico. El mito de Jonás se actualiza con gran intensidad emocional gracias a la vehemencia del versículo bíblico. Un amplio recurso a la ironía introduce una interesante ambigüedad en esta obra de Gilkin. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has exerted a great influence in literature, having consecrated a type of epics that could be named prophetic, where the hero is a wise man who presents his doctrines and his visions of the future. One the works inspired by Nietzsche’s literary masterpiece is Jonas (1900), by Belgian Iwan Gilkin, where a new Jonah warns a New Nineveh against the economic “yellow danger”. The myth of Jonah is updated with an intense emotional effect thanks to the vehemence of the biblical verse. A broad recourse to irony introduces an interesting ambiguity in this work by Gilkin. Le Zarathoustra de Nietzsche a exercé une grande influence sur la littérature, en consacrant un type d’épopée qu’on pourrait appeler prophétique, dans laquelle le héros est un sage qui expose ses doctrines et ses visions de l’avenir. Parmi les ouvrages inspirés par le chef d’oeuvre littéraire de Nietzsche, on peut mentionner Jonas (1900), du Belge Iwan Gilkin. Celui-ci présente un nouveau Jonas qui s’adresse à la Nouvelle Ninive moderne pour l’avertir du « péril jaune » économique. Le mythe de Jonas est mis à jour avec une grande intensité émotionnelle grâce à la véhémence du verset de style biblique. Un ample recours à l’ironie introduit une intéressante ambiguïté dans cet ouvrage de Gilkin.

It was for a planned future section of his war museum entitled “Storia dell’avvenirismo – Precursori della Futurologia” (“The History of Futurism – The Forerunners of Futurology) that in 1957 Diego de Henriquez, ex-soldier and passionate collector, bought fifteen of Albert Robida’s original sketches for Pierre Giffard’s La Guerre infernale (1908) from a bookstand in Rome. Of these original illustrations (today at the Civico Museo di guerra per la pace “Diego de Henriquez” of the City of Trieste), eight are reproduced in Law, Justice and Codification in Qing China. Accompanying and drawing on their publication, this essay critically assesses Giffard and Robida’s work, outlining precedents and coeval trends as regards the representation of Chinese tortures and the Yellow Peril in early science fiction and Western public discourse. La Guerre infernale is an early work of science fiction which offers, today, a graphic example of the collective imagery of coeval times related to future wars and technologies, Chinese punishments and atrocities, and fears of the Yellow Peril. By 1908, the theme of Chinese torture, and the topos of Oriental cruelty was not unprecedented in Robida’s work, nor was it an isolated case in popular French and Western publications. Be that as it may (and perhaps precisely because it taps into broader cultural currents), the clash, in La Guerre infernale, between ethnic stereotypes, which informed the representation of Oriental brutality and sadism, and visions of a future driven by technological progress, offers a unique vantage point from which to observe and critically assess Sino-Western cultural relationships at the dawn of the Twentieth century (or at the end of a “long” Nineteenth century).

The cliched 1930–1950 Western cinematic images of Shanghai as a fascinating den of iniquity, and, in contrast, as a beacon of modernity, were merged in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As a result, a new standard emerged in science fiction films for the representation of future urban conglomerates: the Asianized metropolis. The standard set by this film, of a dark dystopian city, populated by creatures of all races and genetic codes, will be adopted in most of the representations of future cities in non-Asian cinema. This article traces the representation of Shanghai in Western cinema from its earliest days (1932– Shanghai Express) through Blade Runner (1982) to the present (2013– Her). Shanghai, already in the early 1930s, sported extremely daring examples of modern architecture and, at the same time, in non-Asian cinema, was represented as a city of sin and depravity. This dualistic representation became the standard image of the future Asianized city, where its debauchery was often complemented by modernity; therefore, it is all the more seedy. Moreover, it is Asianized, the “Yellow Peril” incarnated in a new, much more subtle, much more dangerous way. As such, it is deserving of destruction, like Sodom and Gomorrah.