England's Yellow Peril Sinophobia and the Great War

As England suffered heavy casualties at the front during World War I, the nation closed ranks against outsiders at home. England sought to reaffirm its racial dominance at the heart of the empire, and the Chinese in London became the principal scapegoat for anti-foreign sentiment. A combination of propaganda and popular culture, from the daily paper to the latest theater sensation, fanned the flames of national resentment into a raging Sinophobia. Opium smoking, gambling, and interracial romance became synonymous with London's Limehouse Chinatown, which was exoticized by Sax Rohmer's evil mastermind Fu Manchu and Thomas Burke's tales of lowlife love. England's Yellow Peril exploded in the midst of a catastrophic war and defined the representation of Chinese abroad in the decades to come.

Anne Witchard is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, where she specializes in fin de siècle culture, modernism, China studies, and the Gothic. She has researched and written on London and Chinatown in the early 20th century. Her books include Lao She in London and Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.