Tom Fowdy : The New Yellow Peril: Sinophobia in the 21st Century

My brother expressed racist views towards the Chinese the other day and I defended them, but it wasn't easy with their horrible wet markets where live animals are sold.

But in the West we have farmers markets where live animals are sold too, and then taken to slaughter, and with what I've seen on Twitter it's often horrendous, so horrible, in fact, that I won't describe it here.


Sinophobia is a fear or prejudice of expressed towards China and its people. Similar to other varieties of racism, such as Islamophobia, Sinophobia embodies a series of beliefs and discourses that place emphasis on the apparent cultural inferiority and backwardness of “Chinese culture” to the western dynamic, which are used to argue that the “ways” of China pose an existential threat to the norms and values of a given society, or what was historically referred to as a “Yellow Peril”. The prejudice relies upon a series of cliches and representations regarding Chinese people and their way of life and in turn positions itself from a position of assumed western supremacy, of which owing to the legacy of colonialism treats China as “problem must be solved”.

Tom Fowdy : The New Yellow Peril: Sinophobia in the 21st Century