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Why the ‘Yellow Peril’ Took Hold

Sino Despatch 28 min read
Why the ‘Yellow Peril’ Took Hold

On 26 September 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote from his hunting lodge at Rominten to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II. The development of the Far East, he said, and “especially its danger to Europe and our Christian Faith”, had been on his mind since the spring. He had turned his thoughts into a sketch, worked it up with “a first class draughtsman” and had it engraved “for public use”. The engraving showed “the Powers of Europe represented by their respective Genii called together by the Arch-Angel Michael, — sent from Heaven, — to unite in resisting the inroad of Buddhism, heathenism and barbarism for the Defence of the Cross.” The draughtsman was the history painter Hermann Knackfuss, and the picture, captioned Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter (“Peoples of Europe, guard your most sacred possessions”), became the best-known image of the “Yellow Peril”.

The fear it expressed was already strong, and over the next thirty years it grew stronger, shaping immigration law on three continents and selling newspapers and novels by the million. Our earlier article on the long history of the Yellow Peril tells the story of the laws, the riots and the stereotype’s later career. This one asks a narrower question: why did the fear take such a hold in the 19th and early 20th centuries? The answer is not a single cause but several pressures arriving at once, beginning with how little most Westerners actually knew about China and Japan. The coolie trade and labour competition, fears about China’s population, the race science of the day, the Boxer summer, Japan’s defeat of Russia, and the popular press and the politicians who used it all played their part. This article also looks at how Chinese and Japanese saw the scare, and at how modern travel and communication changed the picture.

A continent known at second hand

The first thing to grasp is how far away East Asia was. When the Pacific Mail steamer Colorado opened the first regular transpacific service in January 1867, it took 23 days to reach Yokohama from San Francisco and another week to reach Hong Kong. There was no telegraph cable across the Pacific until 1903. For almost all of the century the great majority of Europeans, Americans and Australians never saw China or Japan, never met anyone from there, and could not read a word of either language.

What they did know came through a few narrow channels. Traders and consuls lived mostly in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Canton, in foreign enclaves with their own clubs, courts and newspapers. (Our piece on Old Shanghai and the International Settlement describes how separate that world was.) Missionaries went further inland, but there were not many of them. According to the figures reported to the missionary conferences, there were 473 Protestant missionaries in China in 1877 and 1,296 in 1890. China then had something like 400 million people. The missionaries also wrote for supporters at home who were being asked for money, so their accounts dwelt on idolatry, poverty and the need for conversion.

The most widely read of these writers was Arthur Henderson Smith, an American who spent 54 years in China. His Chinese Characteristics, first written for the North-China Daily News and published in Shanghai in 1890, explained the Chinese through chapters such as “The Disregard of Time” and “The Absence of Nerves”. It was shrewd and often affectionate, but it turned a vast and varied population into a single national type. One study found it remained the most widely read book on China in English until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth in 1931. (For a broader survey of the people who interpreted China for British readers, see the British writers who explain China.)

Popular images were often formed by people who had never been near the place. Sax Rohmer, the creator of Dr Fu Manchu, presented himself as an authority on London’s small Chinese quarter in Limehouse. As Philip French noted in his review of Christopher Frayling’s study The Yellow Peril, Rohmer never visited China at all. Bret Harte’s comic poem “Plain Language from Truthful James”, printed in the Overland Monthly in September 1870, was reprinted within days in dozens of papers across the United States and became known everywhere as “The Heathen Chinee”. Harte meant it partly as a joke at the expense of anti-Chinese miners, but readers took its refrain about “ways that are dark” and “tricks that are vain” at face value, and it probably shaped the popular American image of the Chinese more than any other piece of writing of its time.

Where knowledge was thin, rumour filled the gap. The language barrier meant that Chinese communities in the West could rarely answer back in print, and their customs, from the queue to the district associations that ran Chinatowns, were open to any interpretation. When a visitor to a New York saloon claimed that a Chinese grocery sold cats and rats, the journalist Wong Chin Foo offered a $500 reward to anyone who could prove that Chinese people ate them. No one claimed it, but most rumours went unchallenged. A people known mainly through missionary reports, sailors’ stories and comic verse could easily be imagined as a single, faceless mass.

Cheap labour after slavery

The most concrete pressure was labour. Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1833, and other powers followed over the next half century. Plantation and mine owners looked for new workers, and one answer was indentured labour from India and China. Chinese labourers were shipped from Amoy (Xiamen) to Cuba from 1847, and later in much larger numbers from Portuguese Macau. Some 215,000 people left Macau between 1851 and 1874, mainly for Cuba and Peru. Many had been tricked or kidnapped by brokers, and conditions at sea were notorious: one estimate puts average mortality on ships to Cuba at 15.2 per cent between 1847 and 1859. English speakers called them “coolies”.

The trade gave the word its meaning in Western minds: a worker who was not quite free and would accept almost any wage. In 1854 Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune compared the Chinese arriving in California to the Africans who had survived the Middle Passage. Most Chinese who went to California and Australia were in fact free migrants, many paying their way on credit, but that distinction was rarely made. White workers saw them as the tool of employers who wanted to drive down wages, and in some places that is exactly how employers used them. In 1870 a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, broke a strike by bringing in 75 Chinese workers. At Rock Springs in Wyoming Territory, the Union Pacific had hired Chinese miners who were willing to work for less, and on 2 September 1885 white miners attacked the Chinese quarter and killed at least 28 men.

The fear spread wherever Chinese and white workers met. In 1904, after the Boer War, the British government allowed the Transvaal gold mines to import about 63,000 indentured Chinese labourers. On 26 March 1904 a crowd of about 80,000 gathered in Hyde Park to protest against what opponents called “Chinese slavery”, and the issue helped the Liberals win the 1906 general election. Because the workers were Chinese, the economic argument against indentured labour and the racial one became hard to separate, and each strengthened the other.

Timing mattered too. The depression that began in 1873 hit the American West soon after the transcontinental railway was finished and thousands of Chinese railway workers had been released onto the labour market. In San Francisco, an Irish-born drayman named Denis Kearney began speaking at open-air meetings on the “sandlot” near City Hall in 1877. At first, according to his biographers, he urged workers to be “thrifty and industrious like the Chinese”. Within a year he was ending every speech with the words “and whatever happens, the Chinese must go!” His Workingmen’s Party of California won 51 of the 152 delegates to the state’s constitutional convention of 1878–79, which wrote anti-Chinese provisions into the new constitution. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending the immigration of Chinese labourers for ten years.

The numbers involved were small. The census of 1880 counted 105,465 Chinese in the United States, about 0.2 per cent of the population, roughly 70 per cent of them in California. That is part of the explanation, not a contradiction. The Chinese were concentrated in a few places, mostly men of working age, and highly visible in trades such as mining, laundries and cigar-making. Elsewhere they were known mainly through the press, which had every reason to make them sound numerous.

Four hundred millions

Behind the local quarrels lay a larger fear about numbers. Western writers routinely gave China’s population as “four hundred millions”, which dwarfed every European nation. If even a small fraction emigrated, the argument ran, they could swamp the thinly settled white colonies of the Pacific; if China modernised, it could challenge the world.

The most influential statement of this fear came from an unexpected source. Charles Henry Pearson was an Oxford-educated English historian who had emigrated to Australia and served as Victoria’s minister of education. In National Life and Character: A Forecast, published in 1893, he predicted that the “higher races” were reaching the limits of their expansion, while the populations of Asia and Africa would keep growing. “The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant,” he wrote, “when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the European.” Pearson was not calling for war; he wrote in a tone of melancholy about a change he thought inevitable. But the book was widely read. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Pearson to praise it, and in August 1901 Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, quoted this passage at length in the debate on the Immigration Restriction Bill.

Some of the most alarming predictions came from those who knew China best. Sir Robert Hart, the Ulsterman who ran China’s Imperial Maritime Customs for nearly half a century, was trapped in the siege of the Peking legations in 1900. In an essay reprinted in These from the Land of Sinim (1901), he wrote: “In fifty years’ time there will be millions of Boxers in serried ranks and war’s panoply at the call of the Chinese Government: there is not the slightest doubt of that!” Hart was not hostile to China; he thought it would be “acting within its right”. But from the best-informed foreigner in Peking, such a forecast carried great weight.

Jack London, reporting on the Russo-Japanese War from Manchuria in 1904, put the same arithmetic into a sentence that summed up the era’s thinking. The Chinese, he wrote in an essay titled “The Yellow Peril”, were “the perfect type of industry”, but held back by a government that suppressed new ideas. The danger would come if Japan, newly modernised, took over their “management”: “The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management.” Six years later he published “The Unparalleled Invasion”, a story in which the Western powers destroy China’s population with germ warfare.

A science of race

These fears made sense to contemporaries partly because the science of the day seemed to support them. After Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), writers such as Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864, applied the idea of a struggle for existence to whole societies and races. By the 1890s educated people commonly spoke of history as a competition between races in which the stronger would prevail. Anthropologists sorted humanity into colour-coded groups and ranked them, and few people doubted that such rankings were real.

Social Darwinism did not automatically produce the Yellow Peril; in many ways it made Europeans complacent. What made it frightening was the suspicion that the struggle might not go the expected way. The Chinese were thought to be able to live on less, work longer and breed faster, which in Darwinian terms could look like an advantage. The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels argued that the “yellow race” was winning the struggle by sheer numbers. Pearson worried that the white nations, with their falling birth rates and growing welfare states, had become “stationary”. The fear was in part a fear of decadence at home projected onto a rival abroad.

The same ideas were used to justify restriction. In the Australian House of Representatives on 26 September 1901, Barton said that “the doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.” He went on: “Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.” This was a mainstream position at the time, not an extreme one. The Immigration Restriction Act passed that year used a dictation test in any European language, chosen by the officer, to keep out applicants without naming any race in the law.

The race theories also gathered very different peoples, Chinese and Japanese, merchants, scholars and labourers, into a single “yellow” or “Mongolian” race. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s 1894 poem “Pan-Mongolism” imagined Asian armies overrunning a Russia that had failed its Christian mission. Lumping people together made it easy to imagine that they would act together.

Opium, rebellion and the Boxer summer

In the 18th century European philosophers had admired China as a rational, well-ordered empire. By the 1840s Britain had fought a war to force open China’s markets, above all to the opium that British India exported. (Our article on the opium trade and the first Opium War covers that story.) A second war followed between 1856 and 1860, ending with British and French troops in Peking and the burning of the Summer Palace (see the Second Opium War). The wars persuaded many Westerners that China was weak.

Western readers also learned of upheavals on an enormous scale. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people by most estimates, more than any war in Europe up to that time. To readers who knew little else about China, such numbers suggested a country where life was cheap and violence could erupt on a vast scale.

The Boxer crisis of 1900 brought all of this together. The Boxers, a rural movement in north China, attacked missionaries and Chinese Christians, and in June the Qing court backed them and declared war on the foreign powers. The legations in Peking were besieged from 20 June to 14 August. (For the Boxers themselves, see the two faces of the Boxer Rebellion and the last years of the dragon.) For several weeks there was no reliable news from inside, and the gap was filled with rumour. On 16 July the Daily Mail published a report from Shanghai that the legations had fallen and every foreigner had been massacred. The next day The Times, accepting the report, printed long obituaries of the British minister Sir Claude MacDonald, Sir Robert Hart and its own correspondent, George Ernest Morrison. A memorial service was planned at St Paul’s Cathedral. All three men were alive, and Morrison later read his own obituary. On 2 August the Attorney General was asked in the Commons whether editors would be prosecuted for publishing “unfounded news concerning the situation in Peking”. None were.

The false massacre shows how the fear worked. For millions of readers, the Boxer summer was their first sustained news about China, and it was a story of besieged Europeans, murdered missionaries and a mob beyond reason. The phrase “yellow peril” itself became common in English in these weeks: Frayling traces its first use in a British newspaper to the London Daily News of 21 July 1900, which described the Boxer rising as “the yellow peril in its most serious form”. On 27 July, at Bremerhaven, Kaiser Wilhelm sent off his troops for China with the “Hun speech”, telling them that no quarter would be given and no prisoners taken. The allied armies that relieved the legations went on to loot Peking and send punitive expeditions into the countryside.

Japan’s sudden rise

If China frightened Westerners by its size, Japan frightened them by its speed. In 1853 American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry had pressed it to open its ports; within a generation of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan had a modern army and navy, railways, factories and a constitution. In 1894–95 it defeated China in a war over Korea. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on 17 April 1895, gave Japan Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula, until Russia, Germany and France forced it to return Liaodong a few days later. In this context the Kaiser wrote to the tsar in April 1895 that “the great task of the future for Russia” was “to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow race”. The Knackfuss picture followed that autumn. Wilhelm’s purpose was partly strategic: Russia busy in Asia would be less of a threat to Germany in Europe. (Russia’s push into Manchuria in these years is part of the story of how Harbin was built.)

The decisive shock came in 1904–05. Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in February 1904, took the port in January 1905 and won the great land battle of Mukden in March. On 27–28 May 1905, at Tsushima, the Japanese navy destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway round the world to meet it. It was the first time in the modern era that an Asian power had beaten a European great power in a major war. For believers in a hierarchy of races the result was hard to absorb. The British, allied with Japan since 1902, took it calmly; others saw the start of the reversal Pearson had predicted.

On the American Pacific coast, the fear moved from Chinese labour to Japanese power. Japanese immigration was itself small: the census found 24,326 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States in 1900. But on 23 February 1905, with the war still going on, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page headline, “The Japanese Invasion, the Problem of the Hour”, and warned that once the war was over, the “brown stream” of immigration would become a “raging torrent”. In May delegates from 67 organisations formed what became the Asiatic Exclusion League. In 1906 the San Francisco school board ordered Japanese children into a separate “Oriental” school. At the time, as a later federal commission noted, there were only 93 Japanese pupils in the city’s schools, 25 of them born in the United States. The order caused a diplomatic crisis with Tokyo and led to the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907–08, under which Japan stopped issuing passports to labourers bound for the United States.

Writers began to imagine a war across the Pacific. Homer Lea’s The Valor of Ignorance (1909) described a Japanese invasion of the American West Coast in military detail. In California the politics of land took over: the Alien Land Law of 1913 barred “aliens ineligible to citizenship”, in practice mainly the Japanese, from buying farmland. Fear of Japan’s armies abroad and resentment of Japanese farmers at home fed each other.

Newspapers, novels and the market for fear

None of this would have spread so far without the new mass media. By the 1890s cheap daily papers and illustrated weeklies reached millions of readers and competed hard for attention. Wars, massacres and the exotic sold, and a foreign people about whom readers knew nothing, and who could not easily reply, was an ideal subject.

Fiction built on the headlines. Invasion stories were already popular, and Asia became a favourite enemy. In Australia the labour journalist William Lane serialised White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 in 1887, and novels such as The Yellow Wave (1895) imagined an Asian invasion of the “empty north”. In Britain M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898), first serialised as The Empress of the Earth, pitted a scheming Dr Yen How against Europe just as the European powers were seizing ports in China. In 1913 Sax Rohmer introduced Dr Fu Manchu, described by his pursuer Nayland Smith as having “all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect”: “the yellow peril incarnate in one man”. Fu Manchu was a huge commercial success, and the site has looked at him separately in how Fu Manchu taught Westerners to fear China.

Not everyone was persuaded. “To-day,” Jack London admitted in 1904, “far more voices are engaged in denying the yellow peril than in prophesying it.” The French novelist Anatole France turned the idea round, arguing that the real danger came from European empires in Asia. In 1904 the British writer Demetrius Boulger dismissed the whole idea as “the bogey of the yellow peril”. Gladstone in 1890 criticised Australian laws that penalised Chinese immigrants for their industry and thrift. But scepticism did not make headlines in the way massacres and invasions did, and for many readers the fiction and the news ran together.

Politicians who found it useful

The fear also served particular interests. Kearney turned it into a political career. In 1900, the year of San Francisco’s first large anti-Japanese protest, Mayor James D. Phelan declared that “the Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.” Twenty years later, seeking re-election to the US Senate, he campaigned under the slogan “Keep California White”. In California both main parties and the Populists adopted anti-Japanese planks in 1900, and in 1910 the Republicans, Democrats and Socialists all did so, which tells its own story about where the votes were.

In the British dominions the issue helped define new nations. Australian federation in 1901 was built partly on the promise of a “White Australia”, supported by both Barton’s Protectionists and the Labor Party. In New Zealand Richard Seddon, the long-serving Liberal prime minister, made opposition to Chinese immigration a theme from his first political speeches. In Canada, the 1885 head tax on Chinese immigrants was raised from $50 to $100 in 1900 and to $500 in 1903. On 7 September 1907 a parade and rally organised by the Asiatic Exclusion League in Vancouver turned into a riot against Chinatown and the Japanese quarter.

For the Kaiser, the Yellow Peril was an instrument of foreign policy: Russia absorbed in Asia, with Germany cast as Europe’s defender, suited Berlin. Heinz Gollwitzer’s Die gelbe Gefahr: Geschichte eines Schlagworts (“The Yellow Peril: History of a Slogan”, 1962) remains the standard study of how the phrase travelled through European politics. In each case the fear existed independently of the politicians, but they gave it organisation and a platform.

How it looked from China and Japan

The people at whom the fear was aimed were not silent. Huang Zunxian, the Qing consul-general in San Francisco from 1882 to 1885, wrote a long poem, “Zhu ke pian” (逐客篇, “Expulsion of the Immigrants”), lamenting the Exclusion Act and the weakness of the Chinese state that could not protect its people abroad. In New York, Wong Chin Foo founded a weekly paper, The Chinese American, in 1883, organised Chinese voters and in 1887 published “Why Am I a Heathen?” in the North American Review, turning the missionary gaze back on the West. In 1905, when the United States sought to renew the exclusion treaty, merchants in Shanghai led by Zeng Shaoqing organised a boycott of American goods that spread through the treaty ports and overseas Chinese communities. For many Chinese reformers the lesson was that a weak country’s people would be despised everywhere. (On the other side of the same coin, see our piece on China’s own fear of “foreign devils”.)

In Japan the response was sharper, because Japan had done everything the West said a modern nation should do and was still classed among the “yellow” peoples. The army doctor and novelist Mori Ōgai lectured on the Yellow Peril in 1903 and published his summary, Kōkaron kōgai (黄禍論梗概), the following year, introducing the European debate to Japanese readers. The art historian Okakura Kakuzō wrote in The Awakening of Japan (1904) that “the glory of the West is the humiliation of Asia”, and spoke of a “White Disaster”. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Japan proposed a clause on racial equality for the League of Nations Covenant. It won 11 of 17 votes in the commission, but President Wilson ruled that it needed unanimity, and Australia’s Billy Hughes was among its strongest opponents. When the US Congress moved to exclude Japanese immigrants altogether in 1924, the Japanese ambassador Hanihara Masanao warned of “grave consequences” for relations. Senators took the phrase as a threat, and the bill passed easily.

What came afterwards

The US Immigration Act of 1924, barring all “aliens ineligible to citizenship”, marked the high point of legal exclusion. Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 had already ended nearly all Chinese immigration. Australia’s dictation test remained in force until 1958. In Japan the 1924 law was widely seen as an insult.

The Second World War reshaped the fear. When Japan became the enemy, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast were removed and interned under Executive Order 9066 of February 1942. China, now an ally, saw the Chinese Exclusion Act repealed in 1943, although only a token quota of 105 a year was allowed. The United States abolished its racial quotas in 1965, and Australia abandoned the last of the White Australia policy in 1973. The phrase “Yellow Peril” fell out of respectable use after the war, although, as our longer history shows, many of its images resurfaced in Cold War and later debates.

How travel and communication changed the picture

One reason the old fear lost its grip is that the conditions that fed it have largely disappeared. The ignorance that allowed a few novelists and newspaper editors to define China and Japan for millions of readers is hard to sustain when those millions can go and look for themselves.

Travel is the most obvious change. A journey that took the Colorado three weeks in 1867 now takes about half a day. The Boeing 747 entered service with Pan Am in January 1970, and the jumbo jet made long-haul flights affordable for ordinary travellers. Tourism now runs in both directions on a scale that would have been unimaginable a century ago. According to the China Tourism Academy, mainland Chinese made 155 million outbound trips in 2019, before the pandemic. Japan recorded 42.68 million foreign visitor arrivals in 2025, a record, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization. China’s National Immigration Administration recorded 64.9 million border crossings by foreign nationals in 2024, including 20.1 million visa-free entries, after it extended visa-free entry to travellers from many European and other countries.

Education has had a similar effect. In the 1870s the Qing government sent 120 boys to study in New England under the Chinese Educational Mission, and the experiment was ended in 1881. Today the numbers are of a different order. According to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report, 265,919 students from China were enrolled at American colleges and universities in 2024/25. The Higher Education Statistics Agency counted 149,885 students from mainland China at British universities in 2023/24. Western students in turn study Chinese and Japanese, teach English in Asia or spend a year abroad there, and many families on both sides now know someone who has lived in the other country.

Settled communities have changed the picture at home. In 1880 most Americans outside California had never met a Chinese person. Pew Research Center now estimates that more than five million people in the United States identify as Chinese. The 2021 census counted 445,619 people of Chinese ethnicity in England and Wales, and Japanese and Chinese restaurants, businesses and professionals are part of ordinary life in every Western city. A Chinese neighbour, colleague or doctor is far harder to imagine as part of a faceless horde than a figure glimpsed in a cartoon.

Business and trade have created a different kind of contact. Since the 1970s, very large numbers of Western managers, engineers, buyers and lawyers have worked with Chinese and Japanese counterparts, first during Japan’s export boom and then in China’s reform era, and many have lived in Tokyo, Shanghai or Shenzhen for years. Trade has produced its own tensions, but it has also made the other side familiar, as customers, suppliers and partners rather than as abstractions. Chinese and Japanese companies, in turn, now employ Western staff, and their products are part of everyday life in the West.

Communication has changed even faster. The telegraph of 1900 carried terse messages that could be misread or invented, as the false Peking massacre showed. Television brought moving pictures. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were transmitted to the United States by Syncom 3, the first geostationary communications satellite, giving many Americans their first live images of modern Japan. Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 was planned with American television audiences in mind, and viewers saw Peking’s streets and people for themselves. The internet has gone much further. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported 1.108 billion internet users in the country at the end of 2024. Through video sites, travel vloggers and social media, Western viewers can now watch ordinary daily life in Chongqing or Osaka, from street food to commuter trains, posted by the people who live there. In January 2025, when a ban on TikTok seemed imminent in the United States, large numbers of Americans briefly joined the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and found themselves swapping recipes, jokes and complaints about rent with Chinese users; Reuters reported more than half a million new arrivals within days.

Language, once the hardest barrier of all, has become much lower. Machine translation, which barely worked a generation ago, now translates text, speech and photographed signs on an ordinary phone. Google added 110 new languages to its Translate service in 2024, bringing the total to more than 240. Video calls let families separated by an ocean see each other every day, something the Chinese labourers of the 1870s, separated from their wives for decades by exclusion laws, could never have imagined.

None of this has removed rivalry between states, and political and economic tensions between the West and China in particular remain real. But the specific conditions that made the Yellow Peril so powerful, a near-total lack of first-hand contact, a reliance on a few biased intermediaries and an inability to check what the newspapers said, no longer apply. It is much harder to believe in a faceless, uniform mass when anyone can watch, talk to and travel among the people concerned.

Why the fear was so strong

Few Westerners knew China or Japan at first hand, and those who did often had reasons to exaggerate. Chinese workers arrived in white settler societies, in the wake of the coolie trade, just as those societies were fighting over wages. China’s population was so large that even sober writers like Pearson and Hart predicted its rise, and the race science of the age framed history as a struggle between races. The Boxer summer seemed to confirm that China was dangerous, and Japan’s defeat of Russia that an Asian nation could beat a European power. Cheap newspapers and novels turned these anxieties into entertainment, and politicians found them useful. Each factor alone might have produced a passing scare. Arriving together, they produced a fear that lasted half a century.

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