Fu Manchu - Controversy

Controversy

After the 1932 release of MGM's adaptation of The Mask of Fu Manchu, which featured the Asian villain telling an assembled group of "Asians" (consisting of caricatural Indians, Persians and Arabs) that they must "kill the white men and take their women", a Harvard University student group petitioned MGM producer William Randolph Hearst (who had also serialized the novel in his Cosmopolitan magazine) to cease making further films based on the property.

Following the 1940 release of Republic Pictures' serial adaptation of Drums of Fu Manchu, the U.S. State Department requested the studio make no further films with the character as China was an ally against Japan. Likewise Rohmer's publisher, Doubleday, refused to publish further additions to the bestselling series for the duration of the Second World War once the United States entered the conflict. BBC Radio and Broadway investors subsequently rejected Rohmer's proposals for an original Fu Manchu radio serial and stage show during the 1940s.

A planned 1972 U.S. network television screening of the 1966 Warner Bros. film The Brides of Fu Manchu was cancelled due to protests from an Asian anti-defamation group.

Rohmer himself was quoted in the biography his wife co-authored Master of Villainy to respond to charges that Fu Manchu had demonized all Chinese people by stating that

Of course, not the whole Chinese population of Limehouse was criminal. But it contained a large number of persons who had left their own country for the most urgent of reasons. These people knew no way of making a living other than the criminal activities that had made China too hot for them. They brought their crimes with them.

It was Rohmer's contention that he based Fu Manchu and other "Yellow Peril" mysteries on real Chinese crime figures he knew during his time as a newspaper reporter covering Limehouse activities.