Yellow Peril

The Yellow Peril is a racist color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world.
The concept of the Yellow Peril developed during the 19th century as Western imperialist expansion adduced East Asians as the Yellow Peril. In the late 19th century, the Russian sociologist Jacques Novicow coined the term in the essay "Le Péril Jaune", which Kaiser Wilhelm II used to encourage the European empires to invade, conquer, and colonize China. To that end, using the Yellow Peril ideology, the Kaiser portrayed the Japanese and the Asian victory against the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War as an Asian racial threat to white Western Europe, and also exposes China and Japan as an alliance to conquer, subjugate, and enslave the Western world.
The sinologist Wing-Fai Leung explained the origins of the term and the racialist ideology: "The phrase yellow peril... 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 academic Gina Marchetti identified the psycho-cultural fear of East Asians as "rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongol 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"; hence, to oppose Japanese imperial militarism, the West expanded the Yellow Peril ideology to include the Japanese people. Moreover, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, writers developed the Yellow Peril literary topos into codified, racialist motifs of narration, especially in stories and novels of ethnic conflict in the genres of invasion literature, adventure fiction, and science fiction.

Origins

Europe was used to "peril". Before 1700, according to Edward Said:

Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the “Ottoman peril” lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events.

Although the term "Yellow Peril" originated in French and German in the 1890s, the cultural stereotypes of the Yellow Peril originated in the 1870s when Chinese workers legally immigrated to Australia, Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand. Their work ethic provoked a backlash against Chinese communities, for agreeing to work for lower wages than did the local white populations. In 1870, the French Orientalist and historian Ernest Renan warned Europeans of Eastern danger to the Western world; yet Renan had meant not China but the Russian Empire, a country and nation whom the West perceived as more Asiatic than European.

United States

In 1854, the famous editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley published "Chinese Immigration to California." This editorial demanded the exclusion of Chinese workers and people from the new state of California. Without using the term "yellow peril," Greeley compared the arriving "coolies" to the African slaves who survived the Middle Passage. He praised the few Christians among the arriving Chinese and continued:
In 1870s California, despite the Burlingame Treaty allowing legal migration of unskilled laborers from China, the native white working-class demanded that the U.S. government cease the immigration of "filthy yellow hordes" of Chinese people who took jobs from native-born white-Americans, especially during an economic depression. In Los Angeles, Yellow Peril racism provoked the Chinese massacre of 1871, wherein 500 white men lynched 20 Chinese men in the Chinatown ghetto. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the leader of the Workingmen's Party of California, the demagogue Denis Kearney, successfully applied Yellow Peril ideology to his politics against the press, capitalists, politicians, and Chinese workers, and concluded his speeches with the epilogue: "and whatever happens, the Chinese must go!"
The Chinese people also were specifically subjected to moralistic panics about their use of opium, and how their use made opium popular among white people. The mainstream press misrepresented Asian peoples as culturally subversive, whose way of life would diminish republicanism in the U.S.; hence, racist political pressure compelled the U.S. government to legislate the Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained the effective immigration-law until 1943. The act was the first U.S. immigration law to target a specific ethnicity or nationality. Moreover, following the example of Kaiser Wilhelm II's use of the term in 1895, the popular press in the U.S. adopted the phrase "yellow peril" to identify Japan as a military threat, and to warn against emigrants from Asia.

Imperial Germany

The Yellow Peril ideology gave concrete form to the anti-East Asian racism of Europe, especially Germany and Russia. In central Europe, the Orientalist and diplomat Max von Brandt advised Kaiser Wilhelm II that Imperial Germany had colonial interests to pursue in China. Hence, the Kaiser in 1897 used the phrase die Gelbe Gefahr to specifically encourage Imperial German interests and justify European colonialism in China.
In 1895, Germany, France, and Russia staged the Triple Intervention to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which concluded the First Sino-Japanese War, in order to compel Imperial Japan to surrender their Chinese colonies to the Europeans; that geopolitical gambit became an underlying cause of the Russo-Japanese War. The Kaiser justified the Triple Intervention to the Japanese empire with racialist calls-to-arms against nonexistent geopolitical dangers of the yellow race against the white race of Western Europe.
To justify European cultural hegemony, the Kaiser used the allegorical lithograph Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions, by Hermann Knackfuss, to communicate his geopolitics to other European monarchs. The lithograph depicts Germany as the leader of Europe, personified as a "prehistoric warrior-goddesses being led by the Archangel Michael against the 'yellow peril' from the East", which is represented by "dark cloud of smoke which rests an eerily calm Buddha, wreathed in flame". Politically, the Knackfuss lithograph allowed Kaiser Wilhelm II to believe he prophesied the imminent race war that would decide global hegemony in the 20th century.

Imperial Russia

In the late 19th century, with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, the Qing dynasty China recovered the eastern portion of the Ili River basin, which Russia had occupied for a decade, since the Dungan Revolt. In that time, the mass communications media of the West misrepresented China as an ascendant military power, and applied Yellow Peril ideology to evoke racist fears that China would conquer Western colonies, such as Australia.
Imperial Russian writers, notably symbolists, expressed fears of a "second Tatar yoke" or a "Mongolian wave" following the lines of "Yellow Peril". Vladimir Solovyov combined Japan and China into supposed "Pan-Mongolians" who would conquer Russia and Europe. A similar idea and fear was expressed by Dmitry Merezhkovskii in Zheltolitsye pozitivisty in 1895 and Griadushchii Kham in 1906.
The works of explorer Vladimir K. Arsenev also illustrated the ideology of Yellow Peril in Tsarist Russia. The fear continued into the Soviet era where it contributed to the Soviet internal deportation of Koreans. In a 1928 report to the Dalkrai Bureau, Arsenev stated "Our colonization is a type of weak wedge on the edge of the primordial land of the yellow peoples." In the earlier 1914 monograph The Chinese in the Ussuri Region, Arsenev characterized people of three East Asian nationalities as a singular 'yellow peril', criticizing immigration to Russia and presenting the Ussuri region as a buffer against "onslaught".

Canada

The Chinese head tax was a fixed fee charged to each Chinese person entering Canada. The head tax was first levied after the Canadian parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 and was meant to discourage Chinese people from entering Canada after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The tax was abolished by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which outright prevented all Chinese immigration except for that of business people, clergy, educators, students, and some others.

Boxer Rebellion

In 1900, the anticolonial Boxer Rebellion reinforced the racist stereotypes of East Asians as a Yellow Peril to white people. The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists was an anticolonial martial arts organization who blamed the problems of China on the presence of Western colonies in China proper. The Boxers sought to save China by killing Westerners in China and Chinese Christians or Westernized people. In the early summer of 1900, Prince Zaiyi allowed the Boxers into Beijing to kill Westerners and Chinese Christians in siege to the foreign legations. Afterward, Qing Commander-in-Chief Ronglu and Yikuang, resisted and expelled the Boxers from Beijing after days of fighting.

Western perception

Most of the victims of the Boxer Rebellion were Chinese Christians, In response to the massacre, United Kingdom, the United States, and Imperial Japan, Imperial France, Imperial Russia, and Imperial Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy formed the Eight-Nation Alliance and dispatched an international military expeditionary force to end the Siege of the International Legations in Beijing.
File:Members of the Wuwei Corps or Kansu Braves Avax News 00004284.webp|thumb|right|Yellow Peril xenophobia arose from the armed revolt of the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists to expel all Westerners from China, during the Boxer Rebellion
The Russian press presented the Boxer Rebellion in racialist and religious terms as a cultural war between White Holy Russia and Yellow Pagan China. The press further supported the Yellow Peril apocalypse with quotations from the Sinophobic poems of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.
In the Western world, news of Boxer atrocities against Westerners in China provoked Yellow Peril racism in Europe and North America, where the Chinese' rebellion was perceived as a race war between the yellow race and the white race. In that vein, The Economist magazine warned in 1905:

The history of the Boxer movement contains abundant warnings, as to the necessity of an attitude of constant vigilance, on the part of the European Powers, when there are any symptoms that a wave of nationalism is about to sweep over the Celestial Empire.