BRET HARTE
“Plain Language from Truthful James” (often re-titled “The Heathen Chinee”) is a brief narrative poem by Brete Harte (1836–1902) It was, in its conception, an attempt to undermine the pervasive prejudice against the Chinese in The Age of Contempt. In it, Ah Sin enters a game of euchre with the narrator, “Truthful James,” and his companion, Bill Nye. Nye has stuffed his sleeve with cards in order to cheat Ah Sin, but Ah Sin, whose capacious Chinese costume has longer sleeves, has more cards (“twenty-four packs”) up his, and so proves to be the more accomplished cheater. The poem, which appeared first in the September 1870 issue of Harte’s California journal, Overland Monthly, became a popular success. It was widely reprinted, often as an illustrated pamphlet. It was frequently cited by those who took Harte’s point about the hypocrisy of whites condemning the Chinese for practices that the whites themselves practiced, and, as well, by those who, quoting “Truthful” James’s final lines—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar—
wished simply to condemn the Chinese. However double-edged Harte intended his portrait of Ah Sin, victim and victimizer, the two elements of Truthful James’s charge against the heathen Chinee—that his ways are dark, but that his cunning tricks are, in the end, “vain” – epitomize an American stereotype of the Chinese. They are devious and malignant; they pose a real threat; but ultimately they will fail, and Western straightforwardness will prevail.
M.P. SHIEL
The dark and cunning Chinaman manifested himself in two principal ways in the lowbrow literature of the first part of the 20th century.31 In his simplest form, he was a villain simply by his heathen Chinee nature. But from a very early point, his preternatural evil was polished by a geopolitical ambition: he desired to rule the world on behalf of his race. China (or, often, China and Japan) would rise and assert its racial pre-eminence, necessarily dislodging the Western powers that had usurped this hegemony. This ambition was most often expressed by British writers, who were obviously projecting the imperial project of their own nation upon the Chinese (and the Japanese). But the fantasy resonated in the United States, which, having absorbed a continent, was in 1898 engaged in expanding its own Pacific empire, and which was, within its own boundaries, passing through the phase of xenophobia that was expressing itself in immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Where Standard Oil and other companies saw 400 million potential customers, lowbrow literature saw the Yellow Peril, 400 million potential invaders.
The phrase “Yellow Peril” has been attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895 (“gelbe Gefahr”), speaking with reference to the Japan’s demonstration of its rising power in the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 (Métraux 29), but it encapsulated a constellation of anxieties with dimensions that were demographic (the mere number of East Asians—Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans being lumped together under the “yellow” banner), political (the ambitions of the Meiji regime in Japan), and historical (memories of the Mongol invasions of the 13th century).32 One of the earliest literary representations of the threat of a new Yellow Peril came in The Nugget Library, a serial publication of five-cent novels (1891–92). The February 1892 issue offered a narrative belonging to the then-popular pulp genre of Edisonades—fictions exploiting Thomas Alva Edison’s reputation for inventive thinking, and often, as well, his name. In “Tom Edison Jr’s Electric Sea Spider, or The Wizard of the Submarine World,” by Philip Reade, the American hero, Tom Edison, Jr., takes on a Chinese threat. The pirate “Kiang Ho of the Golden Belt” is threatening the peace of the Pacific Ocean with his pirate crew. Having been educated in America—Kiang Ho is “a Celestial who gained considerable renown among American colleges before going back to China” (5)—the pirate has invented a revolutionary submersible, the Sea Serpent which has enabled him to disrupt shipping and to capture American sailors. Tom Edison, Jr., with his Yankee ingenuity, has developed his own Yankee submersible, the electric Sea Spider, and in a series of confrontations rescues prisoners, acquires treasures, and eliminates the Chinese threat. The story is significant in its prediction that the Chinese, in 1892 an empire in distress under the late Qing dynasty, might pose a technological threat to the West. “I was amazed to discover such knowledge of the hidden powers among the Celestials,” declares an American who has been taken aboard the Sea Serpent. “The Chinese are advancing rapidly in the arts of warfare, and it will not be long ere they take a leading part in such matters” (4).
But “Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider,” though it would eventually be followed by hundreds of pulp stories featuring demonic Chinese villains like Kiang Ho, remained an outlier. The first really important literary manifestations of Yellow Peril fiction in America, M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913), were both the products of Englishmen whose country at the time was home to perhaps a thousand “yellow” residents, less than one half of one percent of the foreign-born population of Britain.33
The first great dark and cunning Oriental villain was Dr. Yen How, the half–Chinese, half–Japanese protagonist of M.P. Shiel’s 1898 novel, The Yellow Danger. Shiel (1865–1947) had begun his literary career in England associating himself with the Decadent movement; after the trial of Oscar Wilde, he turned to adventure stories and science fiction. The Yellow Danger was his first and greatest success as a novelist. Building upon current headlines about the Western competition for Concessions in China, Shiel imagined an Oriental mastermind, the half–Japanese, half–Chinese Dr. Yen How, reversing what Europeans took to be the natural expansion of Western culture outward into Africa and Asia by sending masses of Chinese citizens westward, overwhelming the European continent. The novel was serialized in Short Stories and then published in book form in the summer of 1898. Its success in Britain (and one year later in the United States) suggests that there was a large audience in both countries disposed to fear that the Western imperial project—a project which the U.S. had joined belatedly but dramatically in that very year, 1898—was vulnerable to competition from reemerging oriental powers. Japan, whose Meiji Restoration was bearing fruit in rapid modernization and industrialization, was the model of the new threat, but it was China, with its vast human and natural resources, and it own imperial history, that appeared as the object of the greatest Western anxiety. In both Britain and America, Shiel’s vision of a China-led invasion from the East clearly resonated with a wide audience.
Yen How’s dual ethnicity makes him the epitome of the Yellow Peril: “He combined these antagonistic races in one man. In Dr. Yen How was the East” (4). In a chapter entitled “The Heathen Chinee,” Shiel presents Yen as a mastermind with an intellect “like dry ice” and two passions: “a secret and bitter aversion to the white race” (5) and a desire to obtain “one lillee kiss” from Ada Steward a lovely English girl, whom he happens to encounter on a London omnibus. (“He had two defects—his shortness of sight, which caused him to wear spectacles; and his inability, in speaking without effort to pronounce the word ‘little.’ He still called it ‘lillee.’” [5].)34 The second passion seems incomprehensibly ridiculous to a 20th-century reader. Having whispered his desire for the lillee kiss to an indignant Ada, the forty-year-old Yen How waits vainly for her to fulfill his desire at a rendezvous. She insults him, and he persists. Finally, a bluff English soldier knocks him to the ground. Yen How departs for the orient, becomes a member of the Japanese parliament, and begins to travel between Tokyo and Peking, developing his plan to overwhelm Europe. When, toward the middle of the novel, Yen How captures Shiel’s English hero, the tubercular naval sub-lieutenant, John Hardy, he forces from his captive the confession that Hardy has enjoyed that “lillee kiss” that Ada Stewart denied Yen How.35 Yen How therefore applies various forms of torture upon Hardy, including the branding of the letters “A” and “S” on his breast. When his oriental hordes have overrun continental Europe and are preparing to i
nvade England, Yen How issues a specific order: “that none of the women of England must be killed!—till he gave the word” (270–71). Having organized the rape, torture, and murder of tens of millions of victims, Yen How so covets Ada Seward that he imposes this scruple upon his troops as they confront their final enemy. In the event, Ada Steward proposes to sacrifice herself for her nation (“didn’t he give me to understand that, if I came, he would save England from the Chinese?” 307), and is only prevented from doing so when John Hardy intercepts her in the English Channel off the French coast and returns her to England before executing his own plan to exterminate tens of millions of Chinese.
If the master villain’s obsessive desire for a “lillee kiss” from a pretty but commonplace English girl seems ridiculous, the quantities—the tens and hundreds of millions—who die first at the hands of the invading Chinese hordes and then as a result of the design of John Hardy (he infects 150 Chinese captives with the Black Death and, by landing them at continental ports, kills some 150 million Chinese in three weeks) suggest that Shiel was aiming for the lowbrow sublime in Yen How’s first passion for Yellow domination of the globe. Yen How is capable through intellect and will of advancing himself to political mastery first of Japan and then of China. Recognizing that “the white man and the yellow man” will inevitably “contend for the earth” (12)—the Black and Brown races he dismisses as irrelevant—he plots to have the Europeans first fight amongst themselves. He achieves this by having China, already being dismembered by the Europeans through the Concessions that they have forced since the Opium Wars, suddenly cede vast expanses of territory to the Germans, the Russians, and the French, thus setting those nations against the English, which would lose its existing concessions. Other fractures in European alliances occur, but the central bloody conflicts on land and sea are between doughty England and the greedy German-Russian-French. Once the Europeans have decimated one another’s armies and navies, Yen How’s masses—Chinese soldiers with Japanese officers—can swarm across Asia and penetrate Europe, halted only by the English Channel.
Shiel attributes Yen How’s success to “a profound knowledge of the Chinese character,” and “the principal points of this character are an immeasurable Greed, and absolute Contempt for the world outside China, and a fiendish Love of Cruelty” (109); it is, Shiel continues, “impossible for the vilest European to conceive the dark and hideous instincts of the Chinese race.” He evidently intends his three-part analysis of the Chinese race seriously, repeating it with the addition of grounding it in the Confucian tradition: Yen How inspires his horde “by preaching, with the inspiration of Confucius, only with a far greater success than Confucius, his three gospels of Greed, of Race, and of Cruelty” (259).36 The last two of the “instincts” draw upon existing stereotypes. The Middle Kingdom’s Sino-centeredness was notorious in England, at least since the Emperor Qianlong’s notorious response to George Macartney’s 1793 diplomatic mission to the Qing court, when the Chinese emperor seemed clearly to undervalue the cultural and technological advances made in Europe since the Renaissance (especially, and the Opium Wars would soon demonstrate, the technological advances). The letter that Qianlong sent back with Macartney to King George III had begun, “You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas, nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilisation, you have dispatched a mission respectfully bearing your memorial” (Backhouse & Bland 322). Qianlong explained that China had “no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce” (326), and excused English backwardness (“I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of our Celestial Empire” 326). Nonetheless, he declined all cooperation, and concluded, “Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!” (331). And if China’s supercilious attitude toward the western barbarians underlay Shiel’s attributing to the Chinese an “absolute Contempt for the world outside China,” stories about such atrocities as the Chinese water torture and the Chinese bamboo torture and the Chinese death-by-a-thousand-cuts may explain his attribution to them of a “fiendish Love of Cruelty.” But “an immeasurable Greed” seems to be an entirely ad hoc attribution, without a source in any prior racist stereotype, but necessary to make plausible the willingness of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants to troop across Asia in order to despoil Europe.37 Even if an atavistic fear of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan lies distantly behind Yen How’s mass armies, “greed” seems an inapt rubric, as the narrative’s emphasis is upon the destructiveness, not the acquisitiveness, of the new Hordes. Shiel graphically describes mass rapes and mass murders, but Yen How and his men (like Qianlong and his) seem not to covet western material goods.
The Yellow Danger was M.P. Shiel’s greatest popular success. It was serialized in Short Stories from 5 February to 18 June 1898 as “The Empress of the Earth,” and its popularity led Shiel to expand the narrative from its initial 70,000 words to a final total of 150,000. Somewhat reduced, it was published in book form as The Yellow Danger by Grant Richards in July, and made the British bestseller list for several weeks in August and September. An American edition was published the following year (September 1890) by R. F. Fenno, with some anti–American sentiments excised (Billings 56, 77). When the Chinese have overrun the Continent, and refugees flood into England, America cheers the British cause, “but as soon as it came to a question of detail, of making sacrifices, Mammon, ‘the least erect’ of all the spirits, drew back into selfish aloofness” (276). Shiel is quite pointed about the spineless and hypocritical New World: “America, crowded with ten thousand Christian churches, refused to receive the fugitives from Europe” (276). The American edition was successful enough to be reprinted the following year. Shiel attempted twice to recover the popularity of The Yellow Danger, once building his novel upon the 1904–1905 war between the Japanese and the Russians in The Yellow Wave (1905) and once returning to the prospect of a Chinese-Japanese invasion of Europe (with a future Prince of Wales as the hero) in The Dragon (1912), but neither effort made much impact.
JACK LONDON
Another writer was stimulated by the Russo-Japanese War to imagine the rise of a Yellow Danger. Jack London (1876–1916) actually visited the battlefront in Korea and Manchuria as a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers in 1904. Japanese restrictions prevented him from achieving the full experience of the war’s impact, but London did respond to the evidence of Japan’s rising place in geopolitics. In his essay, “The Yellow Peril,” written in Manchuria in 1904 and reprinted in the 1910 collection, Revolution and Other Essays, London saw the Japanese as the “Brown race,” and like Shiel, attributed to them the ability to assimilate Western ideas and Western technologies and the “Napoleonic dream” to use those acquired ideas and technologies to dominate their world. But with a population of only 45 million, Japan does not, London argues, pose the peril. It is the four hundred million Yellow citizens of China whom, “should the little brown man undertake their management” (281), the West needs to fear.
The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management he will go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this management. Not only has he proved himself an apt imitator of Western material progress, a sturdy worker, and a capable organizer, but he is far more fit to manage the Chinese than are we. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character is no baffling enigma to him. He understands as we could never school ourselves nor hope to understand. Their mental processes are largely the same. He thinks with the same thought-symbols as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same peculiar grooves. He goes on where we are balked by the obstacles of incomprehension [281].
It is only the self-protective conservatism of the current Chinese ruling class that keeps the massive Chinese population safely in place.
Truly would he of himself constitute the much heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management. This management, his government, is set, crystallized. It is what binds him down to building as his fathers built. The governing class, entrenched by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will never free him. It would be the suicide of the governing class, and the governing class knows it [278].
In 1907, London composed a Yellow Peril short story, “The Unparalleled Invasion.” It would not be published until 1910, and not collected in book form until 1914 in The Strength of the Strong. And in it, Japanese management is not required. The story is told in a retrospect from 1976. The Japanese victory over the Russians is the starting point. Japan inevitably extends its control over increasingly large portions of China, and imposes modernizations, mechanizing the Chinese army, building factories and foundries, extending lines of communications. But instead of Japanese officers leading Chinese masses on an irresistible movement to occupy Europe, London sees the Chinese evicting the Japanese. “Exit Japan from the world drama” (80).
And then China begins to expand, not out of ambition—“She had no Napoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts of peace” (80)—but from mere pressure of population. By 1970, China’s population has risen to 500 million, and her people begin to spill into neighboring territories. The French attempt to halt the advance into French Indo-China, but an army of 100,000 cannot stop the flow, and a punitive expedition of a quarter of a million French soldiers simply disappears two days after landing to march on Peking. In the next five years the Chinese expand in all directions, into Burma, Siberia, Afghanistan, and Persia. Demographics, not the offended sensibility of a seeker of one lillee kissee from an English maiden, motivate the movement. Nor is it, as Shiel would, somewhat more seriously, have it, the innate racial greed, racism, or cruelty that moves the Chinese expansion. London’s China does not covet European goods, nor is there any impulse to rape and pillage.38 As 20th-century agriculture eliminated famine, “the real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins” (81); the mere quantity of China’s population, not any defect in the quality of her people’s character, constitutes the peril. The expansion begins with increasing Chinese emigration into neighboring territories (London is surely influenced here by the controversy in his native California over Chinese immigration). This is followed by a more pressing invasion: “Next came the clash at arms and the brushing away of all opposition by a monster army of militia soldiers, followed by their families and household baggage. And finally came their settling down as colonists in the conquered territory. Never was there so strange and effective a method of world conquest” (85).
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