[War & Business] The Return of the Yellow Peril Theory

The image of the painting "The Last G7" posted on April 14 by Chinese artist Ban Tonglaoatang on his Weibo. It is known to criticize the announcement of the anti-China joint front agreement in the 2021 Group of Seven (G7) summit's public statement. [Image source= Weibo]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] The so-called "anti-China coalition," which was a major topic at this year's Group of Seven (G7) summit, is actually linked to the Western society's "Yellow Peril" that has persisted since the 19th century. The Yellow Peril was a "Sinophobia" popular among European politicians and intellectuals in the 19th century, emphasizing that Western societies, including Europe and the United States, must unite to prevent the global domination of the Chinese Yellow race.

The theoretical foundation of the Yellow Peril is attributed to Hegel, a master of German idealist philosophy. In his 1819 lectures on the philosophy of history, he harshly criticized China, describing it as "a vast totalitarian organization where only the absolute ruler, the emperor, enjoys freedom, while the rest of the people are used and sacrificed solely for the emperor," warning that it could threaten European liberty.

Later, in 1895, Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, cited the scale of the Qing dynasty's army and navy mobilized during the First Sino-Japanese War in East Asia, arguing that "the peoples of Europe must unite to protect their sacred assets." This Yellow Peril ideology spread to the great powers of the time, including Britain, the United States, and Russia.

There was some basis for his Yellow Peril theory. Although the Qing army of the 19th century is now considered a paper tiger, before the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing's Beiyang Fleet was ranked as the world's third-largest ocean fleet after Britain and Russia. The flagship of the Beiyang Fleet, the Dingyuan, was a state-of-the-art dreadnought-class battleship developed in Germany, which the German military itself could not afford to acquire.

After the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Combined Fleet, which defeated the once-invincible Beiyang Fleet, emerged as the new core of the Yellow Peril narrative. Particularly in the United States, which suffered the Pearl Harbor attack?a surprise operation using the world's first combat-deployed aircraft carriers by the Japanese Combined Fleet?fear of Asians intensified.

The Yellow Peril, which had quieted down after Japan's bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, deepened again with China's rapid rise in the early 2000s. In 2003, reports emerged that U.S. Air Force fighter jets struggled against the air defense systems supplied by China's Huawei to the Iraqi military during the Iraq War, leading the U.S. to portray China as a far more formidable adversary than the former Soviet Union.

As China has risen to become the world's second-largest military and economic power after the United States, American Yellow Peril rhetoric has spread more widely across Western societies than Germany's 19th-century version. The U.S. warns that if China's expansion is left unchecked, a second Pearl Harbor attack could occur at any time, urging Western countries to unite. The entire world is holding its breath, watching whether the U.S.-China hegemonic rivalry within this 21st-century Yellow Peril will escalate into actual armed conflict.