Imperial yellow: Local phenomena, transnational fears, and the changing image of the Chinese in early twentieth-century Britain

In the early twentieth century, the Chinese were an enigmatic presence in the British imagination and occupied multiple positions at once---poor coolies and shrewd businessmen, masculine Boxer rebels and effeminate sodomites. They were intimate yet alien, imagined to be segregated but often assimilated into British society. These contradictory images made it difficult for the British to pin down the Chinese in the imperial framework. This thesis argues that there was no one image of Chinese men. Instead I demonstrate that the shifting political relationship between Great Britain and China, and the unique status of the Chinese as both semi-colonial and independent citizens, complicated the ways in which the British media, government, and public imagined Chinese men.;Whereas the scholarship on the Yellow Peril suggests a global perspective, the problems the Chinese generated were in fact very local events that were dependent upon very specific local situations. To demonstrate this, this thesis focuses on the Boxer Rebellion, the Transvaal Labor Dispute, and the rise of Chinese Laundries to argue that there were moments when the Chinese became problematic for the British because of the ways in which they generated anxieties about economics, class, geopolitics, and sexuality. Through the study of these particular moments, I will demonstrate that British images of the Chinese were not stable but malleable and that multiple contradictory images of Chinese men existed simultaneously. I argue therefore that the construct of the Yellow Peril is inadequate to explain British-Chinese relations in the early twentieth century.