Yellow Peril - Fiction

Fiction

Emile Driant, a French officer and political activist, wrote under the pen name of Capitaine Danrit The Yellow Invasion in 1905. The story depicts the surprise attack against the Western world by a gigantic Sino-Japanese army, covertly equipped with American-made weapons and secretly trained in the remote Chinese hinterland. The plot is hatched by a Japanese veteran of the Russo-Japanese War: coming out of the war with a fanatical hatred of Westerners, he organizes a world-spanning secret society named the Devouring Dragon in order to destroy Western civilization.

Jack London's 1914 story "The Unparalleled Invasion", presented as a historical essay narrating events between 1976 and 1987, describes a China with an ever-increasing population taking over and colonising its neighbors, with the intention of eventually taking over the entire Earth. Thereupon the nations of the West open biological warfare and bombard China with dozens of the most infectious diseases-among them smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and Black Death—with all Chinese attempting to flee being shot down by armies and navies massed around their country's land and sea borders, and the few survivors of the plague invariably put to death by expeditions entering China. This genocide is described in considerable detail, and nowhere is there mentioned any objection to it. The terms "yellow life" and "yellow populace" appear in the story. It ends with "the sanitation of China" and its re-settlement by Westerners, "the democratic American programme" as London puts it.

The J. Allan Dunn novel, The Peril of the Pacific, a 1916 serial in the pulp magazine People's, describes an attempted invasion of the western United States by Japan. The novel, set in 1920, posits an alliance between Japanese immigrants in America and the Japanese navy. It reflects contemporaneous anxiety over the status of Japanese immigrants, 90% of whom lived in California, and who were exempt from anti-immigration legislation in accordance with the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The novel implies that the primary loyalty of America's Japanese immigrants was to their homeland.

Philip Francis Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., which first appeared in the August 1928 and was the start of the long-lasting popular Buck Rogers series, depicted a future America which had been occupied and colonized by cruel invaders from China, which the hero and his friends proceed to fight and kill wholesale.

Pulp author Arthur J. Burks contributed a series of eleven short stories to All Detective Magazine (1933–34) featuring detective, Dorus Noel, in conflict with a variety of sinister operators in Manhattan's Chinatown.

Robert A. Heinlein's novel Sixth Column depicts American resistance to an invasion by a blatantly racist and genocidally cruel "PanAsian" empire.

H. P. Lovecraft was in constant fear of Asiatic culture engulfing the world and a few of his stories reflect this, such as The Horror At Red Hook, where "slant-eyed immigrants practice nameless rites in honor of heathen gods by the light of the moon", and He, where the protagonist is given a glimpse of the future—the "yellow men" have conquered the world, and now dance to their drums over the ruins of the white man.

Yellow Peril is a book by Wang Lixiong, written under the pseudonym Bao Mi, about a civil war in the People's Republic of China that becomes a nuclear exchange and soon engulfs the world, causing World War III. It's notable for Wang Lixiong's politics, as a Chinese dissident and outspoken activist; its publication following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; and its popularity due to bootleg distribution across China even when the book was banned by the Communist Party of China.

The Yellow Peril is the nickname of Vault, a controversial public art sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann, in Melbourne, Australia.

In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Phineas and Gene decide that Brinker is Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and is therefore Chinese. They nickname him Yellow Peril.

"Yellow Peril" is also the name of a song written and performed by Steely Dan founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker before the first Steely Dan album, later released on various anthologies such as Becker and Fagen: The Early Years. The song includes various Asian motifs and references predating later Steely Dan and related works such as "Bodhisattva", "Aja", and "Green Flower Street".

"Yellow Peril" is also the nickname of a book named Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications published by the MIT Press. The author is Norbert Wiener, an American theoretical and applied mathematician. The book is originally classified, finally published in 1949. the 1942 version of this monograph was nicknamed "the yellow peril" because of the color of the cover and the difficulty of the subject.