Wiktionary
alt. 1 (context derogatory racially offensive sometimes capitalized English) The alleged threat to Western nations by East Asians, especially Chinese or Japanese people, due to their vast population, non-Western cultures, or supposed antagonism to the West. 2 (context derogatory racially offensive sometimes capitalized English) East Asian nations or peoples, conceived as threatening. n. 1 (context derogatory racially offensive sometimes capitalized English) The alleged threat to Western nations by East Asians, especially Chinese or Japanese people, due to their vast population, non-Western cultures, or supposed antagonism to the West. 2 (context derogatory racially offensive sometimes capitalized English) East Asian nations or peoples, conceived as threatening.
WordNet
n. the threat to Western civilization said to arise from the power of Asiatic peoples
Wikipedia
The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) was a racist color-metaphor that is conceptually integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism; that the peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western World. As a psycho-cultural vision of the menacing East, the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror represents the white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from The Orient.
Culturally, the Yellow Peril is represented in “the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers”, which are cultural representations of non-white people that originated in the Græco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC), between Ancient Greece and the Persian Empire; centuries later, the Western imperialist expansion then included East Asians to the phrase Yellow Peril.
In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany invented the phrase Yellow Peril, in effort to interest the other European empires in the perils they faced in their invasions of China. To that end, the Kaiser of Germany used the Japanese military victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) to evoke racialist fear among the white peoples of Western Europe, by misrepresenting Imperial Japan as an ally of China, who jointly would overrun the Western world.
The sinologist Leung Wing Fai explained the fantastic origins of the phrase and the underlying racialist concepts: “The phrase Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror or Yellow Spectre) — coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1890s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon, and threatening to invade Europe — blends Western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien Other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East”.
The American historian Gina Marchetti defined the psycho-cultural perception of a menace from the peoples of Asia as “rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasions of Europe, the Yellow Peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped, by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East”; thus, in 20th-century geopolitics, the Western-world perceptions of Japanese imperial militarism then included ethnic-Japanese citizens of the U.S. to the term Yellow Peril.
Yellow Peril is a racist phrase used to express Western fears about East Asian immigration, culture, and economic power.
Yellow Peril may also refer to:
Yellow Peril is a 1991 novel by Wang Lixiong, written in Chinese under the pseudonym Bao Mi (lit. "Secret"), 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 is notable for Wang Lixiong's politics, a Chinese dissident and outspoken activist, its publication following 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 book was published in 1991 by Mirror Books, a Chinese editor in Toronto, Canada, and soon became a best-seller.
Usage examples of "yellow peril".
Topping the list of potential new global bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to American economic security emanating from East Asia, and the so-called Green Peril (green is the color of Islam).
He believed that it was best to start out very simply, to show the student that a very slight rearward pressure on the stick would cause the nose of the Yellow Peril to rise, and that a very slight downward pressure would put the Yellow Peril in a nose-down attitude.
It was such a journey as I had taken once before, early in our pursuit of the genius of the Yellow Peril.
The intellectual facade, the intricate understanding of the Yellow Peril, the sardonic manner, were a shell within which dwelt the real Mrs Bridgetower, who feared to be alone in the world and who was determined that she should not be so long as there was a man from whom she could draw vitality.
Aviation cadets (or in his and Dick Stecker's case, student officers) were gathered someplace shortly after reporting aboard, and a couple of fighters or dive-bombers were flown in from someplace and put on display: This is what you will be privileged to fly if you work ever so hard and shine your shoes properly and don't kill yourself in a Yellow Peril learning how.
He pulled back on the stick, just a little, and the Yellow Peril’.
Gerald decided that he too would become a veritable personification of the Yellow Peril, and that he too would squat like some great evil spider in the center of a web of intrigue, and that he would really accomplish something.
He found it remarkably easy since nobody believed in the Yellow Peril any more.
Also the Soviet 'listening' cell in Mogocha near the Chinese border, where a team of telepaths kept an eye (or an ear) on the Yellow Peril.
You'd spend the war changing Yellow Peril engines at Quantico or Pensacola.