Sadly, Sinophobia and anti-Chinese racism are all too common in the Western media. In a 2012 column in The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson, a television presenter with a track record of making public racist comments (they're not charming 'gaffes'), compared synchronised swimmers with the 23 Chinese immigrants who drowned at Morecambe Bay in 2004, saying: 'Chinese women in hats, upside down, in a bit of water. You can see that sort of thing on Morecambe Beach. For free.' In recent years, meanwhile, there has been a boom in scarily-titled books (China: The Gathering Threat) and television documentaries (The Chinese Are Coming!) that present China as a threat to global stability, as though the US and UK were not themselves the world's leading exporters of imperialist violence.
Anti-Chinese racism even seems to have traction among those who would abhor racist comments about black people. I recently heard a senior academic ask a group of his colleagues whether Harrow (an area of north London) is 'how the Chinese say "hello"'. The same academic later proposed to the same group that Chinese students might be attracted to his institution if they were allowed to watch episodes of the 1970s Hanna-Barbera animation Hong Kong Phooey. I somehow couldn't imagine the same individual joking about calypso songs and bananas in the same carefree manner.
It is possible to see such phenomena as evidence of a resurgence of Sinophobia in recent years, correlating with the emergence of China as a global superpower. But it is also useful to remember that they are part of long tradition of colonial derogations of China (and Asia in general), as John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats's new book Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear demonstrates. The book is a very useful sourcebook containing examples of well-known (e.g. the Fu Manchu franchise) and lesser-known cultural texts in which 'Chineseness' is demonized, as well as a wide range of anthropological and historical writing about Western Sinophobia from the Middle Ages to the present day. I highly recommend it for students, scholars and anybody with an interest in why public discourse about China has become so debased.
Anti-Chinese racism even seems to have traction among those who would abhor racist comments about black people. I recently heard a senior academic ask a group of his colleagues whether Harrow (an area of north London) is 'how the Chinese say "hello"'. The same academic later proposed to the same group that Chinese students might be attracted to his institution if they were allowed to watch episodes of the 1970s Hanna-Barbera animation Hong Kong Phooey. I somehow couldn't imagine the same individual joking about calypso songs and bananas in the same carefree manner.
It is possible to see such phenomena as evidence of a resurgence of Sinophobia in recent years, correlating with the emergence of China as a global superpower. But it is also useful to remember that they are part of long tradition of colonial derogations of China (and Asia in general), as John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats's new book Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear demonstrates. The book is a very useful sourcebook containing examples of well-known (e.g. the Fu Manchu franchise) and lesser-known cultural texts in which 'Chineseness' is demonized, as well as a wide range of anthropological and historical writing about Western Sinophobia from the Middle Ages to the present day. I highly recommend it for students, scholars and anybody with an interest in why public discourse about China has become so debased.
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