The Yellow Peril

The first ripples of Chinese migration are already striking upon the East Indies, Australia and the Pacific sea-board of North America, and the brutality with which these states are repelling this peaceful, casual invasion shows how terribly they dread the pressure to come. Forcible exclusion will succeed for the present, because China still lies in the grip of a thousand years’ political paralysis; but the power of movement is already returning to her limbs. The fundamental factor of world-politics during the next century will be the competition between China and the new commonwealths. China will strive to reorganise her national life, and to bring all her immeasurable latent strength to bear on the effort to win her “place in the Sun” (a more titanic struggle this than Germany’s present endeavour): the others will make haste to swell the ranks of their white population till they can muster enough defenders to man the wide boundaries of the inheritance they have marked out for themselves, and become strong enough either to fling back China’s onset or to deter her from making it at all. All the threatened nations – Canada, the U.S.A., the South American republics, New Zealand and Australia – will draw together into a league, to preserve the Pacific from Chinese domination. Japan will probably join their ranks, for she is the Great Britain of the China Seas, and, just like ourselves, would be menaced most seriously by the emergence of a World-power on the continent opposite her island country. Russia, who has not even a strip of sea to protect her, but is China’s immediate continental neighbour along a vast land-frontier, will actually be the chief promoter of this defensive entente, for she will be exposed to the first brunt of the Chinese attack.

This was a common set of predictions in the early twentieth century. Toynbee does not use the phrase Yellow Peril, which seems to have been coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895. He commissioned a picture with this title from Hermann Knackfuß depicting the Archangel Michael leading an allegorical Germany against an Asiatic threat represented by a golden Buddha and ordered it to be hung in ships of the Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher Lloyd lines. Strangely enough, I can find only a low resolution image of it online: here it is. The phrase was often used in English in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. I am told that my German grandfather (1886-1964) occasionally used it.

Angel Island

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915