At a time of China's meteoric rise as a world superpower, there is a resurgence of interest in Sinophobia across academic disciplines, as evidenced by several recent publications, ranging from John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats's historical survey, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014) to Christopher Frayling's monograph of cultural studies, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014). In the midst of this boom of Sinophobia studies, Franck Billé’s eponymous book, Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity, comes as a timely intervention and presents a fresh look from a unique perspective.

Unlike most studies that focus on Western hostility toward the Chinese, Billé’s book examines such sentiments among the Mongols, who are traditionally victims or targets of Western racism themselves. Most surprisingly, as Billé’s research shows, Mongols often tend “to identify with Western ideals and to reject Asian models, aligning themselves with the West to the extent of appropriating the term ‘yellow peril’ with all its stereotypes and connotations, to refer to China” (p. 56). The pernicious cultural myth of the “Yellow Peril” portrays a doomsday image of Mongoloid hordes invading the West, commanded by their tyrannical leaders, real or fictional, the ilk of Genghis Khan and Fu Manchu. The historical irony that the Mongols now recycle the term for their own benefit is not lost on Billé, whose book cover sports a sketch of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, with his iconic beard, wagging pigtail, and feline claws. Such an irony, in fact, sets the stage for Billé’s insightful interpretation of the Mongolian brand of Sinophobia.

In his studious unpacking of multilayered anti-China sentiments in Mongolia, Billé creatively applies theoretical tools of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and other disciplines. His central argument is that Mongolian modernity is contingent on the excision of the excess of Asianness located within, that the hatred for the Chinese qua Asians is part of the process of abjection, and that the symbolic violence against the image of the Chinese is really a form of violence directed at the Mongols themselves (p. 66). Drawing upon the psychoanalytic conceptualization, a la Kristeva and Žižek, of the abject as the excessive, inassimilable, and indigestible Otherness within the self, Billé convincingly interprets the Mongolian anti-China attitude as an expression of desire for unambiguous and absolute demarcation, part and parcel of the Mongolian search for a modern identity that began after the socialist revolution in 1921.

One obvious pitfall of studying sentiments and feelings, as Billé acknowledges, is that they are not defined through facts and statements. Vocal utterances of native informants, ordinarily a goldmine for anthropology, have become a precarious minefield where ethnographers must tread with care. Here Billé’s book shines as a work of anthropology as he tries to give voice to what “goes without saying,” paying attention to nonvocalized utterances such as gestures, nods, gazes, winks, and smiles, focusing especially on what Mauss has called the corporeal techniques. In the Mongolian stereotypes of the Chinese speaking in a singsong voice and walking in an unmanly shuffling gait, Billé finds not only a regurgitation of Western racism but also a form of bodily technique “learned through socialization but felt to be a cultural feature, if not a natural, biological quality” (p. 155). Thus, on the somatic, nonverbal level, the ethnographer detects anxieties and emotions underpinning a cognitive dissonance among the Mongols he studied, a state of unnerving coexistence of incompatible sets of beliefs.

The only quibble one might have with such an excellent work as Billé’s would be to ask for the almost impossible. But for the sake of the argument, allow me to raise two points. First, one wonders how Sinophobia plays out in Inner Mongolia, a region under Chinese rule but apparently retaining ethno-cultural ties to Mongolia. Since Billé has spent time in both Mongolias, he might be in a unique position to shed some light on how further nuanced the Mongol attitude toward the Chinese is. Second, the fact that Sinophobia is caused more by domestic concerns than by an outright hostility toward the Other is not unique to Mongolia. Looking back at the long history of anti-Chinese frenzy raging now and then in the West, we often find that the real causes were also domestic issues, such as labor relations and economic crises. Therefore, a more engaged discussion of Sinophobia in the West, rather than simply dismissing it as racism, might create a better frame of reference for the Mongolian situation.

In sum, as tensions between China and its neighbors continue to boil, a well-researched and cogently argued book like Billé’s should be most welcome news for all concerned.