Fw: H-ASIA: "Yellow hordes" query - response

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2011 12:10 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: "Yellow hordes" query - response

> H-ASIA
> April 24, 2011
>
> Response re: 'yellow hordes' query
> ************************************************************************
> From: Nicholas Clifford <clifford@middlebury.edu>
>
> Following on to Ian Welch's posting:
>
> Of course there was a good deal of plain old fashioned racism at work,
> even
> when the term "Yellow Peril" was not used, and as Ian Welch points out,
> the
> US by no means had a corner on the market (think of the famous Fu Manchu,
> a
> British creation). The Australian travel writer Mary Gaunt is another
> example. Elizabeth Bird Bishop, in her book on the Yangtze Valley,
> dismissed
> the term "Yellow Peril," turning it into "Yellow Hope," though she looked
> ahead, rather wistfully, to a Christianized China. Yet the American Eliza
> Scidmore remarked, at the turn of the last century, that since Japan's
> crushing defeat of China in 1895, no one could any longer take seriously
> the
> "Yellow Peril" (presumably in her eyes, whatever else the Japanese were,
> yellow was not it). The British anthropologist E.B. Tylor never used the
> term (I think) but in 1871 wrote that "few would dispute that the
> following
> races are arranged rightly in order of culture: Australian, Tahitian,
> Aztec,
> Chinese, Italian" (no prize for guessing who comes out No. 1). And, of
> course, as Frank Dikötter has pointed out (The Discourse of Race in Modern
> China, Stanford University Press, 1992), Chinese intellectuals were
> themselves by no means immune to the temptations of race thinking.
>
> Both in Australia and the UK, as well as the US, there were those whose
> fear of the Chinese came less from their "yellowness" than from their
> observations that the Chinese would work harder, demand far less in the
> way of pay, accept a lower standard of living, etc., and thus do in the
> westerners through their admirable (if that's what they were) qualities.
> How much has this changed today? Earlier this year I heard a lecture by a
> visiting scholar from Beijing who remarked how utterly incomprehensible
> Chinese found the recent labor troubles in France, with their demands for
> shorter hours and an earlier retirement age; many Chinese today, he
> remarked, want to work harder and longer.
>
> There was a mention earlier in this thread of the famous German picture
> of the Archangel Michael (a German, presumably) rallying Europe against
> the Yellow Peril, though the Wikipedia article in which it appears says
> that the Kaiser's target was an expanding Japan. Is that right? I always
> thought it was the Boxers who were the villains here.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voelker_Europas.jpg
>
> Nicholas Clifford
> Middlebury College
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