Whether its students from China filling the ranks of American universities or China’s less than generous response to the victims of Typhoon Haiyan, China has been much talked about in the news lately.
Add that to the ongoing stories about China’s autocratic government to its unfriendly policies towards the environment and its intolerance towards freedom of speech, Ellen Wu, a professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington, wonders in a blog for the History News Network if all this marks the return of the yellow peril.
As a Chinese American, Wu says all this concerns her because of what she sees as a connection between foreign policy and race relations here in the United States. She says 18th and 19th century prohibitions against immigration to the United States, bans on citizenship for those Chinese already here to anti-miscegenation laws and discrimination were all tied to China’s inability to respond to such laws at the time.
These laws were not repealed, says Wu, until another yellow peril surfaced as the attack on Pearl Harbor turned unfavorable attention from the Chinese Americans to Japanese Americans.
But has the yellow peril returned or did it ever really go away? You can read Wu’s thought on this provocative topic on the History News Network.
