Abstract
The sinophobia of the early 20th century was aroused and animated by various sources. These included pulp literature and the popular weekly press, along with the music hall, early variety theatre and – rather later – popular film. Sinophobia bred attitudes and anxieties revolving around the putative threat of ruthless and maleficent Orientals to Western civilisation. The most notorious and influential embodiment of this threat was Dr Fu Manchu, the fictional character created by Arthur Sarsfield Ward, a former clerk from an Irish-Birmingham background who became famous around the world through his nom de plume of Sax Rohmer. This evil genius and the sinophobia which he fostered and fuelled are central to this extensive study by Christopher Frayling. Fu Manchu epitomised the ‘yellow peril’ involving Chinese conspiracies and machinations that would corrupt and destroy White society and did so through his persona as a mysterious master-villain acting on inherent racial traits that stood in contradistinction to ‘the British character’. This was all of a piece with the period of ‘high’ imperialism and extended into the early 20th century, but the ground was laid by others earlier in the 19th century, and pre-eminently by Charles Dickens, in both his essays and his fiction: his final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, had an enormous influence over how the Chinese and Chinese residential areas were subsequently depicted, with the lurid opium den acting as its symbolic centre. Frayling presents all the circumambient detail of early 20th-century sinophobia wonderfully. He makes abundantly clear how pervasive it was, moving to the other side of the spectrum from Edward Said in showing how Chinese Orientalism ran not only through ‘high’ culture and literary sources but also through much of the popular culture of the day. This is apparent even from the many illustrations in this book, drawn from sheet-music covers, posters, dust-jackets, comic-strips and so on. But it is Dr Fu Manchu who remains in the limelight as ‘the yellow peril incarnate in one man’ (p. 229; the words are Nayland Smith’s, whose pluck and stiff upper lip were pitted against him). The popularity of the Fu Manchu novels and films directly exploited, and expanded, anti-Chinese feeling in the first half of the 20th century. Frayling charts all this with a sure hand while at the same time arguing for yellow peril resilience, with various aspects of sinophobic stereotyping remaining into the early 21st century. This was readily apparent during the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, for example, and during the 2007 panic over ‘poison’ in faulty Chinese products. Frayling’s book is highly recommended. It represents cultural history at its best, and we would do well to heed his message that we have yet to escape from under the shadow of the racism that is so assuredly treated in his study.