![]() ![]() The Boxers, as historian James Carter explains, were a “variety of groups that had coalesced amid economic depression, ecological catastrophe, and foreign encroachment,” but their main rallying call was to “revive the Qing and destroy the foreign” (扶清滅洋 fúqīng mièyáng). Of course, as ominous figures go, the Buddha is not a very good one, but Western powers would soon have a casus belli every bit as potent as 9/11 in the Boxer Uprising. ![]() A pre-Boxer Uprising “yellow peril” lithograph commissioned by Wilhelm II of Germany in 1895. At his instruction, the art history professor Hermann Knackfuss produced a lithograph in 1895 titled “People of Europe, Protect Your Holy Heritage!” It showed the archangel Michael, the symbol of Christianity, protecting the people of Europe, sword in hand, gesturing to the distant, ominous figure of the Buddha. Before this, China was largely cast as the “ sick man of Asia,” too weak and internally divided to pose a real threat, and “yellow peril” racist memes were relatively amorphous. That didn’t stop people like Wilhelm II of Germany from beating the idea like a war drum. One of the principal chapters in the development of the “yellow peril” trope, the Boxer Uprising lasted from 1899 to 1901. The most important one? The Boxer Uprising. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting all Chinese immigration (it would not be repealed until 1943) and in Wyoming in 1885, British, Irish, and Swedish miners, fearing that Chinese immigrants were driving down their wages, murdered, mutilated, and burned at least 28 Chinese miners.īut the “yellow peril” was also, like Islamophobia, catalyzed by specific historic events. Hall that Chinese could not testify against whites Chinese gang violence in Los Angeles resulted in the death of a white man in 1871 and an angry mob that lynched about 20 Chinese men, many of them cooks the U.S. starting more than a century ago, and it’s worth recalling a few key examples from history: In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Many Americans are too unfamiliar with just how violently Chinese immigrants were attacked and rejected in the U.S. ![]() “Yellow peril” fear and violence against Asians in America similarly have both a long history and a historical catalyst. Where did such an idea even come from? As intellectual diseases go, Islamophobia is an old one (see: the First Crusade to Jerusalem in 1099), but for many young Americans today, it has a recent catalyst: the September 11 attacks. One survey found 43% of Chinese Canadians have been threatened because of the pandemic, while another found that 60% of Asians in the U.S. In New York City, a woman grabbed a female Korean student by the hair as she was entering her building, yelled an expletive at her, and punched her in the face, dislocating her jaw. In Munich, a Chinese woman of German descent was sprayed with disinfectant by her neighbor, who screamed “Corona!” at her and threatened to cut off her head. In Italy, a Chinese man entered a gas station to make change for a 50 euro note when someone broke a bottle over his head. Donald Trump’s excessive use of terms such as “Chinese virus” or “kung flu” - or even, at a rally in Phoenix this past June, “ the China” - recalls a history that goes back over 150 years to the origin of the “yellow peril” trope, the racist fear that East Asians pose an existential threat to the Western world, and one that has boiled over with the current pandemic in ugly and even atrocious ways. ![]()
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