"China's Chernobyl": COVID-19 Narratives of Collapse and Global Domination

In COVID-19's first months, US politicians and media forecast that a contrast between Chinese deception and incapability and Western success against the pandemic might fatally sink internal confidence in China's party-state. They also predicted that it would diminish China externally, as it came to be seen as endangering the world by spreading biological pollution. A "China's Chernobyl" prediction became the latest "China collapse" wish-fulfillment. This speculation rests on two contradictory yet co-existing Yellow Peril tropes: "deceit and incompetence" and "world domination." However, no empirical basis exists for either notion: China prevailed against the pandemic and lacks the capacity for global hegemony. "China's Chernobyl" is most relevant then as a wish that creates a belief, that China should and could collapse. That in turn bolsters the US-led mobilization to counter China as a "strong competitor" and frames China as the common enemy, thereby promoting Western transnational and US internal cohesion.

Global Race War

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.

The “Yellow Peril” and the Asia-Pacific War

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.

Bio-orientalism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life

While recent literature on Asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents Asian life as mechanically non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and other developments under the Anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of Asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the West. In this article I argue that a unique discourse of bio-orientalism contributes to the depiction of Asians as a "Yellow Life" that is an existential threat to Western forms of life. Western life posits that this Yellow Life must be resisted and ultimately eliminate for the flourishing of all non-Asian life. Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in yellow peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Rather than embracing an Asian Americanist response that would also seek to disavow Yellow Life, in a reading of Bryan Thao Worra's poetry I speculate upon embracing Yellow Life as another mode in which Asian American studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary Western-centric and humanist responses to anti-Asian racism.

Historical Narratives of Sinophobia – Are these echoed in contemporary Australian debates about Chineseness?

Historically, Australianness has been defined in contradistinction to its location – a British bastion in the Asia-Pacific region.A fear of being swamped by the Chinese – the ‘yellow peril’ – prompted federation, and a restrictive migration policy aimed at making Australia white. Thus, sinophobia has been significant in the national imaginary. This paper discusses how contemporary representations of Chineseness may be echoing this historic narrative of fear about being overrun. This is explored in the context of China’s shifting global significance and Australia’s growing economic relationship with China.