England's Yellow Peril ─ Sinophobia and the Great War

As England suffered heavy casualties at the front during World War One, the nation closed ranks against outsiders at home. England sought to reaffirm its racial dominance at the heart of the empire, and the Chinese in London became the principal scapegoat for anti-foreign sentiment. A combination of propaganda and popular culture, from the daily paper to the latest theatre sensation, fanned the flames of national resentment into a raging Sinophobia. Opium smoking, gambling and interracial romance became synonymous with London's Limehouse Chinatown, which was exoticized by Sax Rohmer's evil mastermind Fu Manchu and Thomas Burke's tales of lowlife love.England's Yellow Peril exploded in the midst of a catastrophic war and defined the representation of Chinese abroad in the decades to come. ‘The First World War altered the course of the twentieth century, heralding the decline of the great European empires and ending a golden era of optimism. While for many, the Great War was a European war, the war was actually much more wide reaching. Its battles were fought as far away as the Shantung Peninsula in northeastern China, and its legacy continues to reverberate in the modern geopolitical relationships that the world’s biggest rising power has with its neighbor.To mark the centenary of the First World War, Penguin China has assembled a series of Specials by the world’s top China hands that bring a fresh and fascinating perspective to the conflict.’

Anne Witchard is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, where she specializes in fin de siecle culture, modernism, China studies and the Gothic. She has researched and written on London and Chinatown in the early twentieth century. Her books include Lao She in London and Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.