This timely and highly coherent anthology features contributions to the project “Where the Rising Powers Meet,” which was convened from 2012 to 2015 at the University of Cambridge, funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant. Contributors include anthropologists, historians, geographers and Asian studies scholars, who extensively discussed key concepts, stakes and objectives, so that each chapter is in conversation with the others, while tackling substantively distinct trajectories of Chinese interactions and reception in far-flung parts of the world. Regardless of discipline and specific research project, each author explores the complex and diverse ways in which China's positioning as a “yellow peril” has evolved since the late 19th century, when the term first came into common usage, and through the 21st century. Each carefully considers the divergent content of “yellow peril” representations produced by varied histories and ideological, geographic, economic, social and demographic, and international relations contexts. The result is a rich and engaged series of mediations capturing a range of responses and relationships to China that track its emergence from abject weakness in the waning days of the Qing dynasty and the Republican era, isolationism and the polarized politics of the first half of communist rule, its reintegration into the world capitalist economy, and its current juggernaut status as ascendant world superpower. Foregrounding the reality that there are many “yellow perils,” the editors and contributors advance our general understanding of the slipperiness and inconsistency of ideological or representational politics, and the careful scrutiny and specificity necessary to unpack the power dynamics that they reflect. They confirm that such divisive propaganda projects flourish precisely because their flagrant contradictions and shifting claims proliferate without being sufficiently scrutinized for consistency and factual foundations.
Two anthropologists explore transnational manifestations of yellow peril formations. In “Yellow peril epidemics: the political ontology of degeneration and emergence,” Christos Lynteris compares representations of the 1894 global plague epidemic that originated in Hong Kong and the 2003 SARS epidemic. Lynteris observes that despite overlapping epidemiological fears and cultural representations, there was not continuity between the two outbreaks of yellow peril fears but that the first reflected late 19th-century perceptions of China's degeneration while the second stemmed from China's emergence as a world power. Magnus Fiskesjö's “Who's afraid of Confucius? Fear, encompassment, and the global debates over the Confucius Institutes” details Chinese attempts to conduct soft diplomacy starting in 2004 by placing the strategically named Confucius Institutes and classrooms in academic institutions around the world, providing teachers and teaching texts. Presently numbering about a thousand, some of these programmes display the trade-offs of accepting such seemingly benign pedagogical resources, as it has become clear that they permit only positive representations of China, revealing the hard political agendas disguised as educational and cultural exchange.
Working contrapuntally against the most developed area of yellow peril studies, which focus on North America, several articles explore trajectories of yellow peril representations in regions proximate to China. In his chapter, Franck Billé examines how Soviet influence has positioned China as an essentialized Other for Mongolians. As the white settler society most proximate to Asia, Australia's changing discourses of yellow peril threat reveal how targets and racial ideologies shift with changes in immigration flows and the realities of economic partnerships and development. David Walker's “Day of judgement: Australia and the rise of Asia” tracks the transfer of hostilities to rejected boat refugees from South-East and South Asia, while affluent Chinese and Japanese are now welcomed and integrated immigrants. Kevin Carrico describes the emergence of ethnic identity claims in Hong Kong that accompany campaigns to foster Hong Kong nationalism. His chapter discusses two approaches: efforts to ascribe racialized characteristics to invading “locust” swarms of new Chinese residents and tourists who diminish conditions for Hong Kongers, and political projects asserting a distinct civic identity for Hong Kongers based on culture, language and history, and political values.
The late 20th-century ascendance of Chinese international influence is explored through several articles tracking recent Chinese migrants and their economic activities. Historian Xiaojian Zhao discusses how influxes of Chinese workers and petty entrepreneurs in the 1990s helped to revive the textile industry in Prato, Italy, but also the backlash that ensued since 2009 as Chinese undertook larger scale and independently designed production. Romain Dittgen and Ross Anthony explore the heterogeneity of the Chinese population in South Africa, the largest in Africa with a long history dating to influxes of miners in the late 19th century. “Yellow, red, and black: fantasies about China and ‘the Chinese’ in contemporary South Africa” acknowledges the difficulty of identifying uniform yellow peril discourses because of the changing positioning of Chinese and because the most recent waves of migrants are predominantly major economic actors who pose the greatest competition, not so much to working class blacks and whites, but to the white business class. The anthropologist Yu Qiu offers perhaps the most insightful chapter with “’The Chinese are coming’: social dependence and entrepreneurial ethics in postcolonial Nigeria,” an ethnographic study of the Chinese-owned Vopa Company which operates several beverage factories managed by Chinese who supervise Nigerian workers. Chinese are positioned as oyibo, or white and mixed-race persons, with whom Nigerian workers expect to cultivate patron–client relations in practices dating to the British colonial era. Chinese noncompliance with these norms is counterbalanced against the realization by some Nigerians that Chinese instead provide advantages in the form of training in modern business strategies and networking.
Last but not least, historian Sören Urbansky traces how Chinese intellectuals and political leaders themselves have interpreted and deployed yellow peril discourses. In “Fears abroad, propaganda at home,” Urbansky concludes that during the Communist era, Chinese accused other countries of using yellow peril images to attack China in order to bolster international support.
As Urbansky's article reveals, yellow peril discourses can be turned toward many agendas. The sophistication and nuance applied in this collection of articles models the necessity of interdisciplinarity and historical context for the effective analysis of discourse. Despite the significant flaw of not covering Latin America, a major site of recently burgeoning Chinese migration and investment, this volume contributes significantly to scholarly and general audiences interested in contemporary China and its international relations, deployments of political ideologies that racialize differences, and the morphing properties of yellow peril discourses that render them hard to contradict, much less pin down and eliminate.
