Racialised international order? Traces of ‘yellow peril’ trope in Germany’s public discourse toward China

Abstract

This article explores how racial prejudice in the West forms at least part of the ideational foundation in how the rise of China has been perceived, and how such racial prejudices to some extent inflate people’s threat perception and hinders acceptance of any future Chinese hegemony. The article focuses on the leading European power, Germany, and provide a discourse analysis of the contemporary German popular media’s portrayal of China, China’s rise and how the vestiges of racial prejudice continue to define the German public’s view of China. It focuses on an analysis of a small yet representative sample of mainstream media and expert literature in Germany, so as to discern how ‘the rise of China’ is discussed in the German public sphere and the persistence of the ‘Yellow Peril’ trope. This article contests that all the elements that make up the perception of the ‘Yellow Peril’ have persisted, albeit in subtler ways. It argues that the more the literature adheres to the idea of a ‘Yellow Peril,’ the more it tends to perceive the international order in terms of a quasi-natural competition between nations. The article argues that as a non-Western non-White nation, China’s rise has been heavily racialised.