yellow peril

• Yellow Peril
• (alleged threat to western nations): the yellow peril

Of yellow +‎ peril, modeled on earlier French péril jaune.[1] Compare yellow as a racist term for East Asian people. Attested in English from the 1890s. The French cognate is attested from the 1880s.

yellow peril (usually uncountable, plural yellow perils)

1. (derogatory, racially offensive, sometimes capitalized) 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.
   • 1891, Phillip Jaisohn, “The Far Eastern War from a Japanese point of view”, in Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends‎, page 94:

     Perhaps the German Emperor is the only man who really believes in the “Yellow Peril,” and what is this “Yellow Peril”?
     The thought that the Japanese will get control of 500,000,000 Chinamen, arm them, and kill off the white men is so absurd that a child would laugh at it.

   • 1900 December, Lloyd Sanders, “The Yellow Perils”, in The Anglo-Saxon Review‎, volume VII, page 102:

     I cannot, after a survey necessarily crammed with conjecture, conceive that the Yellow Peril will devastate Europe, or endanger the East Indies, though it may change their populations.

   • 2021 June 6, Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Flawed Fiction of ‘Asian American’”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN, page SR 3:

     As long as the United States remains committed to aggressive capitalism domestically and aggressive militarism internationally, Asians and Asian Americans will continue to be scapegoats who embody threat and aspiration, an inhuman “yellow peril” and a superhuman model minority.

2. (derogatory, racially offensive, sometimes capitalized) East Asian nations or peoples, conceived as threatening.
   • 1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, page 335:

     It was such a journey as I had taken once before, early in our pursuit of the genius of the Yellow Peril; but this was infinitely more terrible; for now we were utterly in Fu-Manchu’s power.

• (alleged threat): yellow menace, yellow terror
• (East Asian nations or peoples conceived as threatening): yellow horde