The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace, and the Yellow Specter) 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" ("The Yellow Peril", 1897), which Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) 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 (1904–1905) 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 racist ideology: "The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow specter)... 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 [1236–1291], 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";
Origins
Etymology
Europe was used to "peril". Before 1700, according to Edward Said:<blockquote> 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.</blockquote>
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 (1721–1917), a country and nation whom the West perceived as more Asiatic than European.
Historical precedent, the Steppe Empires
Long before the modern concept of the Yellow Peril emerged in the late nineteenth century, European cultural memory had already developed a long‑standing image of threatening “eastern hordes” based on encounters with steppe nomadic empires. The invasions of the Huns in Late Antiquity and the Mongol–Tatar expansion in the thirteenth century created enduring narratives of sudden, overwhelming incursions from Inner Asia. Medieval and early modern chronicles frequently depicted these groups as apocalyptic forces or civilizational threats, shaping a durable mental template of danger associated with the Eurasian steppe.
In Western Europe, the memory of Attila’s Huns became an archetype of destructive “eastern” invaders, often revived in later political rhetoric. The Mongol invasions of Eastern and Central Europe in 1241–1242 reinforced these perceptions; contemporary sources described the Mongols as an existential menace, and the term “Tatar” became a generalized label for hostile peoples from the steppe. These historical experiences contributed to a cultural framework in which later Asian powers could be imagined as collective threats.
When Japan’s rise and Chinese migration in the nineteenth century prompted new anxieties in Europe and North America, these older tropes of steppe invasions were reactivated. The Yellow Peril discourse drew implicitly on this deep reservoir of historical fears, reframing modern Asian societies through the lens of earlier narratives about nomadic conquerors from the East.
Different variations of the idea in the Western world
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 (1868) 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. 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 (1882), which remained the effective immigration-law until 1943. 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
thumb|right|[[Kaiser Wilhelm II used the allegorical lithograph Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions (1895), by Hermann Knackfuss, to promote Yellow Peril ideology as geopolitical justification for European colonialism in China.]]
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 (The Yellow Peril) 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 (17 April 1895), which concluded the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 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 (1904–05). 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. 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 [upon] 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. 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 ("Yellow-Faced Positivists") in 1895 and Griadushchii Kham ("The Coming Boor") in 1906. 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 (Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese) as a singular 'yellow peril', criticizing immigration to Russia and presenting the Ussuri region as a buffer against "onslaught".
Boxer Rebellion
In 1900, the anticolonial Boxer Rebellion (August 1899 – September 1901) reinforced the racist stereotypes of East Asians as a Yellow Peril to white people. The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (called the Boxers in the West) 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.]]
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.
thumb|right|Yellow Peril xenophobia arose from the armed revolt of the [[Boxer movement|Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the Boxers) to expel all Westerners from China, during the Boxer Rebellion (August 1899 – September 1901)]]
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: <blockquote>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.]]
On 27 July 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the racist Hunnenrede (Hun speech) exhorting his soldiers to barbarism and that Imperial German soldiers depart Europe for China and suppress the Boxer Rebellion by acting like "Huns" and committing atrocities against the Chinese (Boxer and civilian):
To suppress the Boxers, the Kaiser demanded a policy of extreme brutality. Outraged by the murder of a German diplomat and viewing the Chinese as "cowardly" and "deceitful"—he ordered Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee to act barbarously. The Americans and British paid General Yuan Shikai and his army (the Right Division) to help the Eight Nation Alliance suppress the Boxers. Yuan's forces killed tens of thousands of people in their anti-Boxer campaign in Zhili Province and Shandong after the Alliance captured Beijing. The British journalist George Lynch said that "there are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery".
In July 1900, the Völkisch movement intellectual Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the "Evangelist of Race", gave his racialist perspective of the cultural meaning of the Boer War (1899–1902) in relation to the cultural meaning of the Boxer Rebellion: "One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other, for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men, and threatens destruction." In the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Chamberlain provided the racist ideology for Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, which greatly influenced the racial policy of Nazi Germany.
Racial annihilation
The Darwinian threat
Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels argued that the Western world and the Eastern world were in a Darwinian racial struggle for domination of the planet, which the yellow race was winning. He said the Chinese were an inferior race and lacked "all potentialities... determination, initiative, productivity, invention, and organizational talent" he said were innate in the white cultures of the West. Nonetheless, he praised Japan as a first-rate military power whose inevitable conquest of continental China would produce improved breeds of Chinese people. He warned that Asian conquest of the West equaled white racial annihilation. In pursuing Weltpolitik policies meant to establish Germany as the dominant empire, the Kaiser manipulated his own government officials, public opinion, and other monarchs. In a letter to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Kaiser said: "It is clearly the great task of the future for Russia to cultivate the Asian continent, and defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race". In manipulative pursuit of Imperial German Weltpolitik "Wilhelm II's deliberate use of the 'yellow peril' slogan was more than a personal idiosyncrasy, and fitted into the general pattern of German foreign policy under his reign, i.e. to encourage Russia's Far Eastern adventures, and later to sow discord, between the United States and Japan. Not the substance, but only the form, of Wilhelm II's 'yellow peril' propaganda disturbed the official policy of the Wilhelmstrasse."
Mongols in Europe
In the 19th century, the racial and cultural stereotypes of Yellow Peril ideology colored German perceptions of Russia as a nation more Asiatic than European. Throughout the successful imperial intrigues facilitated by Germany's Yellow Peril ideology, the Kaiser's true geopolitical target was Britain. Still, there were exceptions to popular racism of the Yellow Peril. In May 1890, William Ewart Gladstone criticized anti-Chinese immigration laws in Australia for penalizing their virtues of hard work (diligence, thrift and integrity), instead of penalizing their vices (gambling and opium smoking). The Kaiser criticized the British for siding with Japan against Russia, and said that "race treason" was the motive. King Edward said he "could not see it. The Japanese were an intelligent, brave and chivalrous nation, quite as civilized as the Europeans, from whom they only differed by the pigmentation of their skin". whereas the reports of Captain William Pakenham "tended to depict Russia as his enemy, not just Japan's".
Moralistic panic
The Limehouse district in London (which had a large Chinese element) was portrayed in the British popular imagination as a center of moral depravity and vice, i.e. sexual prostitution, opium smoking, and gambling. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, the Defense of the Realm Act was amended to include the smoking of opium as proof of "moral depravity" that merited deportation, a legal pretext for deporting members of the Chinese community to China. Witchard noted that stories of "working-class girls consorting with "Chinamen" in Limehouse" and "debutantes leading officers astray in Soho drinking dens" contributed to the anti-Chinese moral panic.
In Tombstone, Arizona, sheriff Johnny Behan and mayor John Clum organized the "Anti-Chinese League" in 1880, which was reorganized into the "Anti-Chinese Secret Society of Cochise County" in 1886. In 1880, the Yellow Peril pogrom of Denver featured the lynching of a Chinese man and the destruction of Denver's Chinatown ghetto. In 1885, the Rock Springs massacre of 28 miners destroyed a Wyoming Chinese community. In Washington Territory, Yellow Peril fear provoked the Attack on Squak Valley Chinese laborers, 1885; the arson of the Seattle Chinatown; and the Tacoma riot of 1885, by which the local white inhabitants expelled the Chinese community from their towns.
20th century
thumb|upright=1.35|To contain the Yellow Peril, the Immigration Act of 1917 established the Asiatic Barred Zone from which the U.S. admitted no immigrants.
Under nativist political pressure, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an Asian Barred Zone of countries from which immigration to the U.S. was forbidden. The Cable Act of 1922 (Married Women's Independent Nationality Act) guaranteed citizenship to independent women unless they were married to a nonwhite alien ineligible for naturalization. Asian men and women were excluded from American citizenship except for natural born citizens.
In practice, the Cable Act of 1922 reversed some racial exclusions, and granted independent woman citizenship exclusively to women married to white men. Analogously, the Cable Act allowed the government to revoke the citizenship of an American white woman married an Asian man. The law was formally challenged before the Supreme Court, with the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), whereby a Japanese American man tried to demonstrate that the Japanese people are a white race eligible for naturalized American citizenship. The Court ruled that the Japanese are not white people; two years later, the National Origins Quota of 1924 specifically excluded the Japanese from entering the US and from American citizenship.
Ethnic national character
thumb|upright|The religious racialism of The Yellow Peril (1911, 3rd ed.), by [[G. G. Rupert, proposed that Russia would unite the Oriental races to invade, conquer, and subjugate Christian civilization in the Western world.]]
To "preserve the ideal of American homogeneity", the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (numeric limits) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (fewer southern and eastern Europeans) restricted admission to the United States according to the skin color and the race of the immigrant. In practice, the Emergency Quota Act used outdated census data to determine the number of colored immigrants to admit to the U.S. To protect WASP ethnic supremacy (social, economic, political) in the 20th century, the Immigration Act of 1924 used the twenty-year-old census of 1890, because its 19th-century demographic-group percentages favored more admissions of WASP immigrants from western and northern Europe, and fewer admissions of colored immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. In The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident (1911), the end time evangelist G. G. Rupert said that Russia would unite the colored races to facilitate the Oriental invasion, conquest, and subjugation of the West; said white supremacy is in the Christian eschatology of verse 16:12 in the Book of Revelation: "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great Euphrates River, and it dried up so that the kings from the east could march their armies toward the west without hindrance". As an Old-Testament Christian, Rupert believed the racialist doctrine of British Israelism, and said that the Yellow Peril from China, India, Japan, and Korea, were attacking Britain and the US, but that the Christian God himself would halt the Asian conquest of the Western world.
In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard said that either China or Japan would unite the colored peoples of Asia and lead them to destroy white supremacy in the Western world, and that the Asian conquest of the world began with the Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War (1905). As a white supremacist, Stoddard presented his racism with Biblical language and catastrophic imagery depicting a rising tide of colored people meaning to invade, conquer, and subjugate the white race.
Political opposition
In that cultural vein, the phrase "yellow peril" was common editorial usage in the newspapers of publisher William Randolph Hearst. In the 1930s, Hearst's newspapers conducted a campaign of vilification (personal and political) against Elaine Black, an American communist, whom he denounced as a libertine "Tiger Woman" for her interracial cohabitation with the Japanese American communist Karl Yoneda. In 1931, interracial marriage was illegal in California, but, in 1935, Black and Yoneda married in Seattle, Washington, where such marriages were legal.
American proponents of the Japanese Yellow Peril were the military-industrial interests of the China Lobby (right-wing intellectuals, businessmen, Christian missionaries) who advocated financing and supporting the warlord Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a Methodist convert whom they represented as the Christian Chinese savior of China, then embroiled in the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937, 1946–1950). After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the China Lobby successfully pressured the U.S. government to aid Chiang Kai-shek's faction. The news media's reportage (print, radio, cinema) of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) favored China, which politically facilitated the American financing and equipping of the anticommunist Kuomintang, the Chiang Kai-shek faction in the civil war against the Communist faction led by Mao Tse-tung. To the administration she was a sign of hope, representing the success of the US cultural exchange with China, her father having been converted to Christianity by a US missionary, and became a symbol of the US-Chinese alliance against Japan. Her popularity amongst the US population, drawing crowds of up to 30,000 on her 1943 nationwide speaking tour, changed the image of Chinese women.
Madame Chiang was a symbol of the modern Chinese population and changed the US perception of China. She showed the potential for modernising China to become a democratic nation.
21st century
The American academic Frank H. Wu said that anti-Chinese sentiment incited by people such as Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel is recycling anti-Asian hatred from the 19th century into a "new Yellow Peril" that is common to White populist politics that do not distinguish between Asian foreigners and Asian American U.S. citizens. That American cultural anxiety about the geopolitical ascent of the People's Republic of China originates in the fact that, the West, led by the U.S., is challenged by a people whom Westerners viewed as culturally backward and racially inferior only a generation earlier. That the U.S. perceives China as "the enemy", because their economic success voids the myth of white supremacy upon which the West claims cultural superiority over the East. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated and increased the occurrence of xenophobia and anti-Chinese racism, which the academic Chantal Chung said has "deep roots in yellow peril ideology". Additionally, Chinese American scientists have been attacked via their removal from research institutions in the United States (Siu & Chun, 2020, p. 429). The targeted investigations on Chinese scientists were due to America's fear that "China was using the TTP and other funding programs to acquire intellectual property via U.S.-based scientists" (Siu & Chun, 2020, p. 429). As a result, "many Chinese American scientists have been removed from their tenured positions, often without due process or even an opportunity to respond to the allegations" (Siu & Chun, 2020, p. 429).
Australia
thumb|The [[White Australia policy arose from the growth of anti-Asian (particularly Chinese) sentiments that peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pictured: The Melbourne Punch (c. May 1888)]]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fear of the Yellow Peril was a cultural feature of the white peoples who sought to establish a country and a society in the Australian continent. The racialist fear of the nonwhite Asian Other was a thematic preoccupation common to invasion literature novels, such as The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895), The Colored Conquest (1904), The Awakening to China (1909), and the Fools' Harvest (1939). Such fantasy literature featured an Asian invasion of "the empty north" of Australia, which was populated by the Aboriginal Australians, the nonwhite, native Other with whom the white emigrants competed for living space. In the novel White or Yellow?: A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1887), the journalist and labor leader William Lane said that a horde of Chinese people legally arrived in Australia and overran white society and monopolized the industries for exploiting the natural resources of the Australian "empty north".
Culturally, Yellow Peril invasion novels expressed themes of the white man's sexual fear of the supposed voracious sexuality of Asian men and women. The stories feature Western women in sexual peril, usually rape-by-seduction facilitated with the sensual and moral release of smoked opium. In 1913, appealing to the irrational fear of the Yellow Peril, the film Australia Calls (1913) depicted a "Mongolian" invasion of Australia, which eventually is defeated by ordinary Australians with underground, political resistance and guerrilla warfare, and not by the army of the Australian federal government.
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes vehemently opposed the Japanese delegation's request for the inclusion of the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the Covenant of the League of Nations:
Hughes stated in response to the proposal that "ninety-five out of one hundred Australians rejected the very idea of equality"; he had entered politics as a trade unionist and, like the majority of the white Australian population, was strongly opposed to Asian immigration into Australia. Hughes believed that accepting the clause would mean the end of the White Australia policy and wrote: "No Gov't could live for a day in Australia if it tampered with a White Australia." Though UK officials in the British delegation (which Australia was a part of) found the proposal compatible with Britain's stance of nominal equality for all British subjects as a principle for maintaining imperial unity, they ultimately succumbed to pressure from politicians in Britain's dominions, including Hughes, and signalled their opposition to the clause.
Though conference chairman, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was indifferent to the clause, he eventually sided with the British delegation and stipulated that a unilateral requirement of a unanimous vote by the countries in the League of Nations was required for the clause to be included. On 11 April 1919, after protracted and heated debate, a final vote was called; from a quorum of 17, the proposal secured 11 votes in favor, with no delegate from any nation voting no, though there were 6 abstentions, including all 4 from the British and American delegations; it did not pass.
France
thumb|right|French postcard captioned "Make way for the yellows" shows Japanese imperialism running over four great nations of Europe—Russia, Britain, France, and Germany
Colonial empire
In the late 19th century, French imperialist politicians invoked the Péril jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries. From that racist claim arose an artificial, cultural fear among the French population that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France, which could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia.
thumb|right|French Indochina: In the oriental French Empire, the country and people of Vietnam were renamed French Indochina. (1913)
In the early 20th century, in 1904, the French journalist René Pinon reported that the Yellow Peril were a cultural, geopolitical, and existential threat to white civilization in the Western world:
Yellow Peril: The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth–Smythe (1978), by Richard Jaccoma, is a pastiche of the Fu Manchu novels. Set in the 1930s, the story is a distillation of the Dragon Lady seductress stereotype and of the ruthless Mongols who threaten the West. The first-person narrative is by Sir John Weymouth–Smythe, an antihero who is a lecher and a prude, continually torn between sensual desire and Victorian prudery. The plot is the quest for the Spear of Destiny, a relic with supernatural power, which gives the possessor control of the world. Throughout the story, Weymouth–Smythe spends much time battling the villain, Chou en Shu, for possession of the Spear of Destiny. Thematic developments reveal that true villain are but the (Nazi). ostensible allies of Weymouth–Smythe. The Nazis leaders is Clara Schicksal, a Teutonic blonde woman who sacrifices Myanma boys to ancient German gods, whilst fellating them; later, in punishment, Weymouth–Symthe sodomizes Clara.
The Yellow Peril (1989), by Bao Mi (Wang Lixiong) presents a civil war in the People's Republic of China that escalates to internal nuclear warfare, which then escalates into the Third World War. Published after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the political narrative of Yellow Peril presents the dissident politics of anti–Communist Chinese, and consequently was suppressed by the Chinese government.
Short stories
[[File:The Yellow Menace.jpg|thumb|right|In The Yellow Menace film serial, Asian villains threaten the white heroine. (September 1916)
- In "Under the Ban of Li Shoon" (1916) and "Li Shoon's Deadliest Mission" (1916), H. Irving Hancock introduced the villain Li Shoon, a "tall and stout" man with "a round, moon-like yellow face" with "bulging eyebrows" above "sunken eyes". Personally, Li Shoon is "an amazing compound of evil" and intellect, which makes him "a wonder at everything wicked" and "a marvel of satanic cunning."
- The Peril of the Pacific (1916), by J. Allan Dunn, describes a fantastical, 1920 Japanese invasion of the U.S. mainland realized by an alliance between treasonous Japanese-Americans and the Imperial Japanese Navy. The racist language of J. Allan Dunn's narrative communicates the irrational, Yellow Peril fear of and about Japanese-American citizens in California, who were exempt from arbitrary deportation by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.
- "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), by Jack London, set between 1976 and 1987, shows China conquering and colonizing neighboring countries. In self-defense, the Western World retaliate with biological warfare. Western armies and navies kill the Chinese refugees at the border, and punitive expeditions kill the survivors in China. London describes this war of extermination as necessary to the white settler colonialism of China, in accordance with "the democratic American program".
- In "He" (1926), by H. P. Lovecraft, the protagonist white-man is allowed to see the future of planet Earth, and sees "yellow men" triumphantly dancing among the ruins of the White man's world. In "The Horror at Red Hook" (1927), features Red Hook, New York, as a place were "slant-eyed immigrants practice nameless rites in honor of heathen gods by the light of the moon."
Cinema
thumb|right|The Yellow Peril Future: In Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) and a concubine (Carmen D'Antonio).
In the 1930s, American cinema (Hollywood) presented contradictory images of East Asian men: (i) The malevolent master-criminal, Dr. Fu Manchu; and (ii) The benevolent master-detective, Charlie Chan.
The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) shows that the white man's sexual-anxiety is one of the bases of Yellow Peril fear, especially when Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) urges his Asian army to "Kill the white man and take his women!" Moreover, as an example of "unnatural" sexual relations among Asians, father–daughter incest is a recurrent, narrative theme of The Mask of Fu Manchu, communicated by the ambiguous relations between Fu Manchu and Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy), his daughter.
In 1936, when the Nazis banned the novels of Sax Rohmer in Germany, because they believed him Jewish, Rohmer denied being racist and published a letter declaring himself "a good Irishman", yet was disingenuous about the why of the Nazi book-ban, because "my stories are not inimical to Nazi ideals."
Comic books
thumb|upright|The Green Mask#6 p. 43, August 1941, [[Fox Feature Syndicate, art by Munson Paddock]]
In 1937, the publisher DC Comics featured "Ching Lung" on the cover and in the first issue of Detective Comics (March 1937). Years later, the character would be revisited in New Super-Man (June 2017), where his true identity is revealed to be All-Yang, the villainous twin brother of I-Ching, who deliberately cultivated the Yellow Peril image of Ching Lung to show Super-Man how the West caricaturized and vilified the Chinese.
In the late 1950s, Atlas Comics (Marvel Comics) published Yellow Claw, a pastiche of the Fu Manchu stories. Unusually for the time, the racist imagery was counterbalanced by the Asian-American FBI agent, Jimmy Woo, as his principal opponent.
In 1964, Stan Lee and Don Heck introduced, in Tales of Suspense, the Mandarin, a Yellow Peril-inspired supervillain and archenemy of Marvel Comics superhero Iron Man. In Iron Man 3 (2013), set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Mandarin appears as the leader of the Ten Rings terrorist organization. Hero Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) discovers that the Mandarin is an English actor, Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who was hired by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) as a cover for his own criminal activities. According to director Shane Black and screenwriter Drew Pearce, making the Mandarin an impostor avoided Yellow Peril stereotyping while modernizing it with a message about the use of fear by the military industrial complex.
In the 1970s, DC Comics introduced a clear Fu Manchu analogue in supervillain Ra's al Ghul, created by Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams and Julius Schwartz. While maintaining a level of racial ambiguity, the character's signature Fu Manchu beard and "Chinaman" clothing made him an instance of Yellow Peril stereotyping. When adapting the character for Batman Begins, screenwriter David Koepp and director Christopher Nolan had Ken Watanabe play an imposter Ra's al Ghul to distract from his true persona, played by Liam Neeson. As with Iron Man 3, this was done to avoid the problematic origins of the character, making them a deliberate fake rather than a true portrayal of a different culture's insidious designs.
Marvel Comics used Fu Manchu as the principal foe of his son, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu. As the result of Marvel Comics later losing the rights to the Fu Manchu name, his later appearances give him the real name of Zheng Zu.