In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II began to spread a word in the Western world: the Yellow Peril.
To make his nightmare more convincing, he approached court painters and asked them to paint them while describing his imaginary vision of the Yellow Peril.
The name of the painting is "Yellow Peril".
In the painting, the buddha mount rides on a Chinese dragon, forcing the seven figures symbolizing angels (representing seven Western countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and Russia) to the cliff. Archangel Michel faced everyone with a serious and sacred expression and said, "The European countries unite!" Defend your faith and homeland! ”
The painting was printed and given to the relatives and friends of Wilhelm II and the rulers of major European countries.
Soon, this painting of "insulting China", together with the word "insulting China", was widely disseminated in the Western world.
At that time, China was on the verge of decay, being beaten by various powers, and had no ability to defend itself, let alone counterattack and threat.
The beaten person instead becomes the nightmare of the beater. Where does the fear in the hearts of Westerners come from?
Kaiser Wilhelm II asked him to draw a picture of the Yellow Peril.
1
Westerners' fear of the Yellow Peril stems from China's huge population and overflowing immigration.
In 1885, after the Sino-French War, Westerners had imagined "the scene of Chinese Yankees running around the world."
Prior to this, the Russian Bakunin called China a "great danger from the East", believing that Chinese population overbreeding, unable to survive within the territory, would inevitably expand to the world, directly threatening Siberia. He advised Tsar Nicholas II to begin conquering the East as soon as possible in order to avoid this potential threat becoming a reality.
Europeans used to use the term "Mongolian nomadic tribes" to disparage the Chinese who ran around the world. In the Western context, the term first referred to barbarians surging out of the heart of Central Asia, terrifying half-human, half-beast monsters.
In the United States, Chinese immigrants to California to pan for gold, build railroads, work as coolies, and thus form a Chinese community throughout the United States, Chinatown, make Americans feel anxious and uneasy.
Chinese are incompatible with American personalities in terms of looks, beliefs, lifestyles, and values. In particular, Chinese hard-working spirit has led many Americans to fear that their arrival would threaten their jobs. Therefore, competentness is also a label for Westerners to insult Chinese.
Since the 1870s, discrimination and persecution of Chinese immigrants by Americans has reached the level of openness. The Americans decided that Chinese were a cruel and evil group that could not be controlled by whites and could only be eliminated.
In the United States at that time, there were hundreds of public massacres of Chinese immigrants, and most of the perpetrators were released because of "insufficient evidence".
In 1882, the United States introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly prohibited all Chinese from immigrating to the United States, and the life and business activities of Chinese in the United States were also subject to extremely strict restrictions. This famous discriminatory act was not repealed until 1943 in the context of the Sino-American alliance in World War II, but its restrictions on Chinese Americans were not finally eliminated until 1965.
Under such a distorted social propaganda and hatred confrontation, how can Westerners have a good impression of Chinese?
The Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States is the pinnacle of discrimination against Chinese.
2
In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out, and the Tuan people turned their disgust and fear of Westerners into specific actions such as killing missionaries, burning churches, and besieging embassies.
The degree of barbarism is no different from the brutal killing of Chinese immigrants by Westerners, but the results are very different in morality and propaganda.
At that time, China would not speak out against the Discrimination and Persecution of Chinese Immigrants by the United States and other Western countries, and the powerful Western countries would never miss the opportunity to render the Boxer Rebellion as a realistic version of the Yellow Peril.
While the Boxers were wielding spears and knives, news reports of all kinds had exploded in the Western world. They tirelessly described the Boxers as locusts flocking to churches and embassies, burning and looting, and being miserable.
More and more horror stories, through the pen of Westerners, spread from China to the Western world:
"White women are being subjected to inexplicable brutal torture, and as far as we know, some of the victims endure terrible torture for several days in a row, and the atrocities of the Indian mercenary uprising are not so cruel."
"Children are killed in front of their parents, women are raped and enslaved, parents are tortured and killed... Needless to say, the civilized world cannot endure such a brutal slaughter, and we must take revenge. ”
The American "Time" magazine published an article saying:
"China, whether it is the Chinese government or the Chinese people, has waged war against us, and the massacre in Beijing has begun and will continue. All the civilized nations of the West must be armed for revenge. Chinese must be treated like a cannibal and razed Beijing to the ground. ”
Under the demagogy of this extreme discourse, all Westerners believe that the invasion of China by the Eight-Power Alliance was a just act of civilization to conquer barbarism.
The common catastrophe of mankind is written as the barbarism of one side against the other, and the justice of one side against the other.
To this day, in the general perception of Westerners, we still only see the horror of the Boxers besieging embassies and churches, but we can't see the horror of the Eight-Nation Alliance's looting of the city of Beijing.
The arrogance and prejudice of Westerners against China is not something that exists now, at least from the time when the British opened the gates of China with gunboats, and were already deeply rooted in the eight-power alliance when they invaded China.
A few years ago, Zhang Weiwei, a professor at Fudan University, was interviewed by the New York Times, and there was a passage that was very reasonable.
He said that the distortions of the actual situation of Chinese society by many Western media and critics reminded him of the visit of the British emissary Macartney to China in 1793. At that time, the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty took an arrogant posture in front of foreign envoys, showing the Chinese version of the "end of history" theory. Nowadays, the theory of the "end of history" of Western democracy is rampant, is things reversing? This fate seems to have befallen the West: is the West turning into an arrogant "Qianlong"?
In fact, when the West discovered that gunboats were justice, they had become arrogant "Qianlong".
Cixi, who had fled back to Beijing, shed her arrogance toward the West and made overtures to the wives of the ministers of various countries.
3
The Boxer Rebellion passed, but the fears of the Yellow Peril did not disappear in the West.
R. Druce's analysis states:
In any case, some idea of the "Yellow Peril" constantly intruded the European imagination. The "Yellow Peril" is a series of panics that seem to be true or false, if there is none. Its threat to the Western economy lies in the influx of cheap labor; the threat to Western philosophy and the Christian church, the spread of Buddhism; and the direct threat to Western power on a larger scale is that China is working with other countries to fight for political and economic freedom. Of course, the most unthinkable panic also lies in a nightmare in which the yellow race floods the world like a flood and eventually rules the world.
This panic, along with the horrific memory of past history, has spawned a series of cultural events in the West that "humiliate China."
The most typical is that in 1912, the image of "Dr. Fu Manchu", which began to be created by a third-rate British novelist Sax Rohmer, has become the most classic image of Chinese in the eyes of Westerners.
Recalling his original motivations, Romer said: "I often wonder why I didn't have this inspiration before that. In 1912, it seemed that all the time was ripe to create an image of a Chinese villain for the mass culture market. Rumors of the Yellow Peril caused by the Boxer rebellions are still circulating, and the recent murders in London's slums have turned public attention to the East. ”
The murder he was referring to was a gang crime case in east London in 1911, supposedly linked to the local Chinese underworld.
Fu Manchu is the image representative of the "Yellow Peril" in Western mass culture for a century. He was tall, bald, with long upside-down eyebrows, a sinister and vicious face, walking without sound, and raising his hands and feet to suggest conspiracy and danger.
The created Fu Manchu was a member of the Chinese royal family who controlled a Chinese terrorist group called Si-Fan, which was financed mainly by its "white slave trade."
Fu Manchu was a genius in science, with a doctorate from four famous universities in Europe, but he always used traditional "Oriental" methods to do evil, would kill female babies, force women to bind their feet, would torture with a thousand knives, would massacre Christian missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion, and would use dogs and cats as food...
In the novel, the white police officer Smith says, "Our fate is in the hands of Chinese, a small nation!" A race that worships its ancestors, can do anything..."
Over the past 40 years, Romer has written more than a dozen novels with Fu Manchu as the main villain, which are best-selling in the Western world. Film and television dramas adapted from these novels have also emerged, influencing and shaping the collective impression of Chinese by generations of Western audiences.
An ordinary Westerner, he may not have been in contact with Chinese, but he certainly knows that fu Manchu, the representative of Chinese. Thus, in their minds, Chinese immigrants are clever, indifferent, cunning, and cruel, crowding into the dirty Chinatowns to carry out all kinds of evil deeds, and trying to subvert the world and eliminate white people.
This vilified Chinese image, spread through books, comics, cartoons, TV shows and movies, seems to represent all Chinese. It is almost impossible to expect Westerners to accurately understand and evaluate China and Chinese under the "brainwashing" of Fu Manchu's image.
Fu Manchu, demonized Chinese image.
4
In the 1920s, Lao She lived in London for five years. During these five years, he observed how Westerners perceive Chinese:
If there were twenty Chinese living in Chinatown, their records would be five thousand; and these five thousand yellow-faced ghosts were smokers, smuggled arms, killed people, hid their bodies under their beds, raped women regardless of whether they were old or young, and did everything that should be at least a thousand knives. Novels, plays, films, Chinese are all based on such legends and reports. Then the girls who watched the plays, the movies, the girls who read the novels, the old ladies, the little children, and the English emperor, took this unreasonable thing firmly in their minds, and Chinese became the most sinister, the dirtiest, the most hated, the most despicable two-legged animal in the world!
This passage, placed nearly a hundred years later, still applies. Westerners' arrogance and fear of China has never changed, and with China's rise and opening up, it has intensified.
In recent years, the "China threat theory" is, to put it bluntly, a contemporary version of the "yellow peril theory."
The West has always hung high the universal truth, but their treatment of China's double standard has never changed.
In modern history, they have used unequal treaties as chains to coerce China, they have stationed troops in China, they have divided up territory, and they have made a lot of windfall in China. But they were not satisfied, and while playing the role of greedy robbers, they vigorously advocated the "Yellow Peril Theory", created "Fu Manchu", and preached the threat of Chinese. It was as if all their acts of aggression had become legitimate defence.
Power is justified, and nothing is too much.
Don't think that now is the 21st century, the Internet era, the world has really become a global village. In essence, the mutual knowledge and understanding of different ethnic groups in the world has not grown much compared with the 20th century or even the 19th century.
It's not how difficult it is for humans to get information about each other, it's that we've always believed only the truth about the nations and nations we're willing to believe.
However, our understanding of Westerners, Western countries, and Western civilization is more complete and more benign than that of Westerners.
After all, we have had a stage of sincerely studying the West, especially after the May Fourth Movement, all of us taking the West as the benchmark and pursuing the establishment of a democratic, civilized, rich and strong country. The so-called West, on the other hand, has basically not looked at us positively since the 18th century, and has long been accustomed to describing us with inherent words such as backwardness, barbarism, evil, and terror.
This is their obsession. As the scholar Zhou Ning said, "If we are not sure about the East of ignorance and ignorance, poverty and backwardness, we cannot show a noble West of freedom and democracy, prosperity and progress."
In this sense, we may have been arrogant, but Westerners are more arrogant; we may have been conservative, but Westerners are more conservative; we may have been cruel, but Westerners have been more brutal; we may have been evil, but Westerners are more evil; we may be Fu Manchu, but Westerners are more Fu Manchu than Fu Manchu...
bibliography:
Zhou Ning, Distant Heavenly Dynasties: A Study of the Image of China in the West, Peking University Press, 2006
Lü Pu: Selected Historical Materials of the "Yellow Peril Theory", China Social Science Press, 1979 edition
Kaiti, "Fu Manchu: The Demonized Chinese Image," Wen Wei Po, January 16, 2015
Harold Isaacs: The Image of China in the United States, translated by Yu Dianli et al., Current Affairs Press, 1999