Yellow Peril

Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror) was a color metaphor for race, namely the theory that East Asian peoples were a danger to the western world. In the words of the American historian John W. Dower: "the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color." Dower described "the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which had their origins in the wars between the ancient Greeks and Persians, and which the Yellow Peril theory later associated with East Asians.

The sinologist Leung Wing Fai wrote that: "The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow spectre), coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1890s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe, blends western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East". The American historian Gina Marchetti defined the Yellow Peril as being: "Rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasions of Europe, the Yellow Peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East".

Yellow Peril (disambiguation)

Yellow Peril is a racist phrase used to express Western fears about East Asian immigration, culture, and economic power.

Yellow Peril may also refer to:

Internet

Books

Film and TV

Music

Nicknames and slang terms

Yellow Peril (novel)

Yellow Peril (Chinese: 黃禍; pinyin: Huáng Huò) is a 1991 novel by Wang Lixiong, written in Chinese under the pseudonym Bao Mi (lit. "Secret"), about a civil war in the People's Republic of China that becomes a nuclear exchange and soon engulfs the world, causing World War III. It is notable for Wang Lixiong's politics, a Chinese dissident and outspoken activist, its publication following Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and its popularity due to bootleg distribution across China even when the book was banned by the Communist Party of China.

The book was published in 1991 by Mirror Books, a Chinese editor in Toronto, Canada, and soon became a best-seller.

Translation

References