Complicating the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese Responses to Early Twentieth-century British Literary Representations of China

The Yellow Peril is understood generally as a racist discourse that degrades Easterners, especially the Chinese. But the crucial reactions to Yellow Peril from Chinese writers, the three British writers (Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Sax Rohmer, and William Somerset Maugham), and the Chinese readers of the three British writers’ works I study suggest a strategic and instrumental response that attempts to exploit the Yellow Peril and its associated ideas to defend or advance personal and national interests (British or Chinese). This duo-foci study not only contributes to literary-historical research but to China–West studies more broadly.