The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

Some might argue that the view of the Chinese generated by his books does not merit earnest analysis. The formulaic cheapness of it all – the soothing repetitiveness with which Rohmer dwells on his villain’s impulses to evil (this ‘sinister genius’, ‘that awful being’, ‘the incarnate essence of Eastern subtlety’); the number of times the stories’ white heroes are foiled, within feet of their Oriental prey, by the action of a button-operated trapdoor – seems to implore a twenty-first-century reader to see the funny side. Or perhaps we should just resign ourselves to Rohmer’s prejudice: racism was depressingly normal in early twentieth-century European and American writing. John Buchan’s anti-Semitism, for example, has not stopped his books slipping onto canonical lists of High Literature. Yet it is not easy to dismiss the popularity and durability of the Fu Manchu phenomenon, and the degree to which it exploited and reinforced anti-Chinese feeling at the time. At the height of Rohmer’s fame, Fu Manchu novels occupied public libraries, cinemas and the book collections of liners carrying Westerners out to China, ensuring (in the words of one such young traveller of the 1920s) that they ‘knew all about Chinamen; they were cruel, wicked people’.62

  Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu was only the most successful fictional incarnation of sinophobia. From around 1873, morbid fear of Chinese dastardliness (exploiting widespread concern about economic competition from Chinese immigrant workforces) had become a staple of schlock American fiction: in H. J. West’s 1873 The Chinese Invasion, in Atwell Whitney’s 1878 Almond-Eyed, in Robert Wolter’s 1882 A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899. (An 1887 example of the genre, White or Yellow? A Story of the Race-war of A.D. 1908, was penned by the founder of the Australian Labour Federation.)

  1898 saw the publication of the work that helped popularize the term Yellow Peril, Matthew Shiel’s The Yellow Danger, in which the brilliant Chinese prime minister Yen How (a half-Japanese, half-Chinese, wholly satanic embodiment of the East) conceives and executes a ‘wilful and wicked conspiracy’ to massacre Europe and repopulate it with yellow masses, for the blissfully simple reason that ‘he cherished a secret and bitter aversion to the white race’.63 Like the epitome of Chinese cruelty that he is, Yen derives an unholy pleasure from his vile plot, his eyes ‘wrinkl[ing] up into delicious merriment’ as he unveils his foolproof plan for destruction of the white man. In the dystopian invasion novels of the 1870s and 1880s, the fear had been a little uncoordinated and faceless. Shiel created, for the first time, a mastermind, premeditating the conspiracy in the highest echelons of the East Asian leadership. Shiel further fanned Anglo-Saxon anxieties by giving his villain a lust for white women: ‘What was Dr Yen How’s aim? Simply told, it was to possess one white woman, ultimately, and after all. He had also the subsidiary aim of doing an ill turn to all the other white women, and men, in the world. If the earth had opened and swallowed him, then he would have renounced his hope; but for no lesser reason.’64

  At the time of its publication, there were plenty who found Shiel’s visions amusingly melodramatic. ‘[Shiel] must certainly expect us to laugh,’ The Times reviewer chortled insouciantly, ‘but we laugh with him rather than at him.’65 The climax of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 made it hard to see the funny side any more. Yellow Peril fiction now began to merge with the vengeful soldiers’, missionaries’ and diplomats’ accounts coming out of China, both sets of narratives authenticating and pushing one another to new professions of hatred. ‘Well, what are we to say of such a race, men?’ Yen How’s heroic British nemesis, John Hardy, asks a crew of marines under his command. ‘Do you not agree with me that the earth would be well rid of such a people?’ ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ they chorus back. ‘I, here and now, devote my entire life henceforth to their destruction.’66 By 1904, the Chinese master criminal (with his ‘crafty yellow face twisted by a thin lipped grin’, dreaming of world domination by forcing ‘innocent men to commit crimes by injecting them with germs obtained from criminals’) had become a staple of children’s publications like Pluck and Magnet, his Oriental villainy usually infused by opium: ‘a measured dose’, revealed one comic-book detective, ‘lulls the moral sense . . . it makes the victim blind to common honesty and capable of any theft or unscrupulous piece of work.’67

  Chinese invasion plots regularly cropped up across the pages of children’s serials. In ‘Terror from the East’, the ‘Yellow Peril that men had dreamt about broke loose at last’, with cohorts of Scouts battling on Brighton’s beaches a ‘hissing crew of Orientals munching handfuls of rice’. In 1910, even Girls’ Own Annual felt compelled to warn its innocent readers of the global conspiracy taking place around them (the ‘readiness of the Chinese to settle in the midst of other nations, and the evils which may follow in its train . . . constitutes the “Yellow Peril” ’68). That same year, Jack London’s own fictional take on the Yellow Peril, ‘The Unprecedented Invasion’, imagined a China that in 1976 had at last ‘awakened’. ‘China rejuvenescent!’ London breathed. ‘It was but a step to China rampant.’ At the end of the story, the West is driven to destroy the Chinese with biological warfare, dropping – in neat little glass tubes – ‘every virulent form of infectious death’ over the ‘chattering yellow populace . . . The plague smote them all.’ Those who try to escape China are slaughtered by waiting Western armies massed on the frontiers. ‘Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China,’ the story concludes. ‘And then began the great task, the sanitation of China . . . according to the democratic American programme.’69

  Yet none of these scenarios captured the public imagination like Sax Rohmer’s Devil Doctor. The Fu Manchu brand succeeded and lasted as it did for several reasons. First, it danced artfully between hysteria and plausibility, mixing vague, fantastical fears about the Chinese presence in Britain with topical headline stories and police reports – about alleged Chinese webs of organized crime, and the shadowy world of Chinese opium dens, Oriental curio shops and other small businesses. Secondly, Rohmer focused all this supposition on a single antihero, whose memorable attributes (his love of sinister scientific plots and of extraordinarily elaborate tortures) would be imitated by later writers such as Ian Fleming. (By the 1930s, legend goes, the Chinese Fu-Manchu-style super-villain had become so ubiquitous in British thrillers that new members of the British Guild of Crime Writers were forced to swear an oath that they would never try to create one themselves.70) Finally, Rohmer saw the long-term potential in his creation and made him indestructible (to fire, beheading and being shot through the skull at point-blank range), rather than impatiently killing him off after only one novel (as Shiel did with Yen How).

  To understand how the Fu Manchu phenomenon expressed so many of the distorted ideas about China circulating since the Opium War requires a closer look at the view of the Chinese that it sold to its millions of readers. In form, the novels borrowed heavily from Conan Doyle’s blueprint for Sherlock Holmes, telling of the struggles of the narrator, one Dr Petrie – a solid man of science – and his brilliant, mercurial friend, Nayland Smith, to detect Chinese conspiracies up and down the country. (The second Fu Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor, in which Smith and Petrie come within a whisker of being swallowed up by the bogs of the Somersetshire moors, offers a particularly impudent plagiarism of The Hound of the Baskervilles.) Near the start of each book, a pillar of the British empire is usually murdered by shadowy Asiatic forces. From here, Petrie and Smith quickly deduce who is behind the villainy: ‘the sinister genius of the Yellow movement’, Fu Manchu. ‘Imagine a person,’ runs Rohmer’s first description,

  tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence
. . . you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.71

  In case any reader missed them, Rohmer recapitulates the basic points of his characterization every few pages: ‘the face of Dr Fu Manchu was more utterly repellent than any I have ever known’; ‘that yellow Satan’ was ‘an emanation of Hell . . . an archangel of evil’; and so on. As with Shiel’s Yen How, this is a man of mysterious, aimless malignance, possessed by an unexplained, vengeful hatred of Caucasians and desire for world domination: ‘the great and evil man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule . . . this enemy of the white race, this inhuman being who himself knew no mercy, this man whose very genius was inspired by the cool, calculated cruelty of his race.’ Despite the range and complexity of his impulses to evil, the doctor seems to suffer from a complete innocence of motive, vowing to wage war on the entire white race for the sheer hell of it.72

  Fu Manchu is thus the perfect embodiment of the China fear: cruel, cunning, arrogant and foreigner-hating. On book covers and in films, he is imagined as a timeless imperial Chinese cliché: as the pantomime mandarin of Hollywood stereotype, with his long moustache and grotesquely extended nails, seated on thrones of decadent Asiatic splendour.73 His plots scatter through London practitioners of the dark Oriental arts: barely human lascars, mulattos, hideous poison-beasts from Burmese jungles, Indian thuggees, the sacred Abyssinian baboon with its nine-foot-long arms and unbreakable death-grip. Quite often, his ploys are stupidly complicated: at one point, he tries to dispatch an enemy using a cat whose claws are loaded with poison. At another, he keeps unwanted visitors from his hideaway by placing mice with bells attached to their tails behind the skirting boards, to make the house seem haunted – a tactic discovered only when Nayland Smith lures them out of their holes with toasted cheese. At the same time, however, he is a man armed with the terrifyingly destructive weapons of the modern world: a Doctor of Science from the University of Oxford, always surrounded by ‘scientific paraphernalia’. ‘At a large and very finely carved table’, Petrie observes while (once again) a prisoner in the villain’s lair, ‘sat Dr Fu Manchu, a yellow and faded volume open before him, and some dark red fluid, almost like blood, bubbling in a test-tube which he held over the flame of a Bunsen-burner.’74

  Rohmer’s heroes usually follow a trail of clues and corpses across London until their travails take them into the centre of the terrible doctor’s operations. Not coincidentally, in the first novel this is a ‘literally poisonous’ opium den: ‘a horrible place’ littered with comatose smokers and idiot, simian Chinese chattering pidgin. ‘Here an extended hand, brown or yellow, there a sketchy, corpse-like face,’ Petrie relates, ‘whilst from all about rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices – an uncanny, animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some Chinese Dante . . . we were cut off, were in the hands of Far Easterns . . . in the power of members of that most inscrutably mysterious race, the Chinese.’75 Rohmer’s purpose here is clear: to fill his readers with panic at the thought of the strange and terrible foreignness ensconced in the very heart of Britain. ‘Aliens of every shade of colour were heading into the glare of the lamps upon the main road about us now,’ runs one description of a damp, dark, sinisterly multicultural London, ‘emerging from burrow-like alleys. In the short space of the drive we had passed from the bright world of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.’76 In Rohmer’s England, the white sons and daughters of the British empire are nowhere safe: ‘an elaborate murder machine was set up somewhere in London’, gasps Nayland Smith, ‘sleep is a danger – every shadow threatens death.’77

  Naturally, Fu Manchu is himself an opium addict: when he smiles ‘the awful mirthless smile which I knew’, observes Petrie, he reveals ‘the teeth of an opium smoker.’78 The books’ storylines are spiked with other stealthy poisons, too. ‘In the distorting of nature, in the disturbing of balances and the diverting of beneficent forces into strange and dangerous channels, Dr Fu Manchu excelled . . . in the sphere of pure toxicology, he had, and has, no rival: the Borgias were children by comparison.’79 Fu Manchu’s murder scenes are steeped in toxins; his first victim, Sir Crichton Davy (head of the Colonial Office), is dispatched with the ‘Zayat Kiss’ – the bite of a particularly deadly scarlet centipede of the Burmese jungle; a mysterious green toxic mist from a mummy case sees off an Egyptologist’s secretary. As with most features of the Fu Manchu stories, Rohmer lifted his villain’s poison fixation from earlier models. Magazines such as Chums, Pluck and Marvel had all thoroughly established the Chinese predilection for mass poisonings (by germ warfare especially) during the first decade of the twentieth century.80

  In probably every decade since its invention, the Yellow Panic has featured in Western consciousness, regardless of the reality of China’s own political, social or economic capacity to pose a threat. In 1898, as Matthew Shiel created Yen How, the Qing empire was still reeling from a shocking defeat in Korea at the hands of its former cultural tributary, Japan. As Sax Rohmer began generating his Fu Manchu canon in the 1910s and 1920s, ethnic Chinese populations in London arguably possessed the hardest-working and generally least threatening social and political profile of any non-white British group. The 1932 movie of The Mask of Fu Manchu (in which the eponymous doctor screams for the destruction of the white race while trying to resurrect Genghis Khan by sacrificing a blonde white woman lashed to a stone altar) was filmed as China’s military energies were fully absorbed either in civil war, or in facing off the Japanese aggression that would culminate in the Second World War. In 1938, only months after many tens, and quite possibly hundreds of thousands, of Chinese civilians had been massacred by Japanese forces at Nanjing, Sax Rohmer was still suggesting the imminent rise of a ‘Kubla Khan . . . who by force of personality will weave together the million threads and from his loom produce a close-knit China’, spreading dread through its white neighbours.81 ‘I love Fu Manchu novels’, freely admitted a former US ambassador to China, Stapleton Roy. ‘Nothing sends shivers up my spine like sinister Chinese men scheming to take over the world . . . But when you look at what’s happening in China in terms of history, and not fantasy fiction, you’re forced to a very different conclusion.’82

  To a far greater extent than discussions about the world’s other potential new Great Powers (say, India or Russia), non-specialist press debates about China today often appear almost unthinkingly framed in terms of ‘Is China a Threat?’83 There is of course a need for careful work on, for example, the Chinese state’s military build-up; or its ‘soft power’ aspirations through Asia; or its scramble to invest in Africa while enriching dictators. Clearly, China’s ambitions as a rising superstate can clash with those of the West. Competition for global resources, and the political and military tensions this could generate, are genuine causes for concern; such struggles, history tells us, have always accompanied the rise of new powers. But to dress up this matter-of-fact economic phenomenon as a mystically ordained clash of civilizations does not help. Non-specialist American commentators have long questioned the Chinese government’s motives in buying up trillions of dollars’ worth of US debt, as if this were a subtle, ingenious plot to bring America to its knees, rather than a simpler case of US over-spending and under-saving.

  Fu Manchu has generated, it sometimes seems, a lingering Western fondness for ill-qualified scaremongering about China. ‘The China threat is real and growing’, announced Bill Gertz, one of America’s leading China conspiracy theorists, in his 2000 book, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America. ‘The reality today is that China is a major threat to the United States, and a growing one’, he repeated five pages later, before moving on to the revelation that ‘China’s rulers . . . remain communists’.84 Back in 2005, he predicted a mainland invasion of Taiwan within another couple of years, likening the PRC to a Fascist state – even Nazi Germany. ‘We once again will be fighting a war on multiple fronts,’ responded one of his readers, ‘against I
slam, and against the fascist Chinese. I hope we are prepared.’ ‘I don’t doubt for a minute’, agreed another, ‘the Chinese will launch a nuclear attack against us.’85 Never mind that – despite the double-digit growth in Chinese military spending over the past decade or so – America’s military budget remains around eight times that of China’s.

  In almost any trouble connected with China, the old fears resurface. A typical example is the hysteria in 2007 that spread the idea of China exporting ‘poison’ to the world through its faulty products: pet food, drugs, toothpaste, lead-painted toy trains. ‘Is China trying to poison Americans and their pets?’ asked one article.86 ‘The Chinese Poison Train is still out there,’ warned one American consumer association, ‘lurking on a container ship headed our way. Nobody knows when it will strike again.’87 At the same moment, China’s profit-hungry companies were busy poisoning far more Chinese consumers: around 300,000 babies were taken ill in 2008, the year that the scandal about milk-powder tainted with melamine belatedly broke. And after recalling around 21 million toys manufactured in China, Mattel publicly apologized to its manufacturing partners in China, admitting that the ‘vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.’88 China has also been fingered for polluting the world with its economic miracle (the so-called Green Peril) – when Western consumers have been the principal market for cheap Chinese manufactures while letting China’s own natural environment absorb most of the damage. The survival of the Yellow Peril school of thought on Sino-Western relations indicates the resilience of the self-justifying ideas and arguments that drove Britain towards war with China in the 1840s and 1850s: a Western fixation on the idea of unthinking Chinese xenophobia, and on China’s determination to wish the West ill.