Yellow Peril

The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) is a racist color-metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism: That the peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western world. As a psycho-cultural perception of menace from the East, fear of the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is the white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from the Orient.

The racist ideology of the Yellow Peril is a "core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which are cultural representations of colored people that originated in the Græco–Persian Wars (499–449 BC), between Ancient Greece and the Persian Empire; centuries later, Western imperialist expansion included East Asians to the Yellow Peril.

In the late 19th century, the sociologist Jacques Novikow coined the phrase The Yellow Peril, in the essay "Le péril jaune" (1897); later, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany used Yellow Peril racism to encourage the European empires to invade, conquer, and colonize China. To that end, the Kaiser misrepresented the Asian victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) as a racialist threat to the white folk of Western Europe, and misrepresented China and Japan in alliance to conquer and subjugate the Western world.

The sinologist Wing-Fai Leung explained the fantastic origins of the phrase and racialist ideology: "The phrase Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror or Yellow Spectre), coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1890s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon, and threatening to invade Europe, blends Western sexual anxieties, racist fears of the non-white Other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East".

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