China's meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural
footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet.
Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations
of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged
through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded
anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media
treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs
connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too,
continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people
are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively
hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays
offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril
discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions
worldwide.Building on the richly detailed historical studies
already published in the context of the United States and Europe,
contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy,
Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China
itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews,
the collection supplements and often challenges superficial
journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and
political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find,
constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties,
spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the
emergence of the term "Yellow Peril" in such disparate contexts
cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to
revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used
in reference to a single country like China, is therefore
inherently fractured and multiple. The term "Yellow Peril" may feel
unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and
historical breadth of this collection-experiences of Chinese
migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of
the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global
reverberations of China's economic rise-offers a unique overview of
the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in
today's world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to
Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly
relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic
communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia.
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