Sanctified Sinophobia, Christian Nationalism, and M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the bestselling 1898 novel The Yellow Danger , a so-called Chinese invasion fantasy that inspired Sax Rohmer’s infamous Fu Manchu series. Where analysis of The Yellow Danger has tended to underplay its religious dimension, I argue that its depiction of the Yellow Peril constitutes a prototype of what I call “sanctified Sinophobia,” religiously motivated hostility toward China that now fuels contemporary Christian nationalism. Both as a characterological emblem of racial personality and as an eschatological force of nature, the Yellow Terror represents an ineffable Satanic malevolence, defying European Christians’ existing categories of evil. Tracing these two variants of sanctified Sinophobia in Shiel’s novel, I then examine how the text’s logics of ethnoreligious purity continue to structure the prayers, benedictions, and oracles of so-called China Virus discourse.