The Yellow Peril

The Yellow Peril by Jack London

Jack London's "The Yellow Peril" contrasts the Koreans and the Chinese as seen during the war in the Far East, then argues that the true menace to the Western world is a combined Asian power. He begins by saying that a traveller should live among the Koreans for months before crossing the Yalu into Manchuria. In northern Korea, as the Japanese army passed, villages were deserted and fields untilled. Koreans carried their doors and windows off to the mountains, came down only to stand about chattering, and answered every request with "Upso," meaning "Have not got." He calls the Korean the perfect type of inefficiency, used to being beaten and robbed without resistance. He then rides down onto the sandy islands of the Yalu, where the Russian dead are still being buried in their trenches. There a man is ploughing and another is weeding young onions, and he realizes he is in China. In the village of Kuelian-Ching, and then in Antung, people go on working in the middle of the war. Eggs, chickens, fruit and bread are for sale. In Antung he lodges with a grain merchant, who overcharges him thirty cents. He finds a restaurant, a bath, a barber, a worker in iron, and shops stocked with cake, tinned goods, port, cognac and beer. He calls it the land of Canaan. London describes the Chinese as the perfect type of industry. Work is the breath of his nostrils. He is no coward and does not flee when alien soldiers arrive. He carried scaling ladders at the Taku forts for a daily wage, and he strips the battlefield dead for shrapnel and iron. He will chase a soldier down the street to get back a pear. London denies that the Chinese is simply a type of permanence. He says the governing literati have suppressed originality and new ideas for generations, and that Chinese who escape this government grasp the Western code of business, keeping their word, better than the Japanese do. With four hundred millions of workers and rich stores of coal and iron, he says, the Chinese would be the Yellow Peril were it not for his present management. The Japanese enter as possible managers. London pictures a Chinese civilian and a Japanese soldier squatting by a lantern in a Manchurian street, writing characters in the dust to talk. The two peoples diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol stock, and the Japanese, with some infusion of other blood, became a fighting race. He sees Japan as embarked on a Napoleonic dream of conquest, with Korea as a breeding colony and Manchuria as a granary. Forty-five millions of Japanese alone, he argues, could not grow in time to menace the Western world. The danger is that they would guide the four hundred millions of Chinese. The Japanese think in the same symbols and grooves as the Chinese and can follow them where we cannot. He imagines a cry of "Asia for the Asiatic!" London then gives reasons why the Western mind refuses to believe the adventure could succeed. The Western world will not permit it, and there is a weakness in the brown man. The Japanese have borrowed Western material achievement but not Western soul stuff. He says the Western race has a stern conscience, a long spiritual struggle and the religion of Jesus Christ. An American woman who lived in Japan said the Japanese seem to have no soul. London says they have a religion of their own: worship of the State, with the Emperor as deity. The individual is to the State as a worker bee is to the hive. London holds that no great race adventure can last without an ethical impulse, but admits this view may be Western race egotism. He ends by saying that affairs rush to conclusion and that we shall ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the Brown.

By Jack London · First published 1904 · Genre: Political essay, Geopolitical analysis, Yellow Peril literature · 4,690 words

First lines

No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to the paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing from Korea to China. To achieve a correct appreciation of the Chinese the traveller should first sojourn amongst the Koreans for several months, and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria. It would be of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation did he cross over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.

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Russo-Japanese War · Korea · Manchuria · China · Yalu River · Japanese imperialism · Pan-Asianism · Racial theory · Chinese labour · Japanese nationalism · Worship of the State · Western civilization

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