ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 traces the memory of historical ideas regarding China from the late nineteenth century through the Cold War and into the present. I argue that four tropes commonly used to portray China as the yellow peril have been revised to cast China as a red peril. These tropes portray China as a threat to U.S. moral, political, economic, and military well-being. I first trace the origins of these tropes to nineteenth-century yellow peril rhetoric. I then illustrate how the yellow peril frames evolved into a red peril. After the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, yellow peril tropes that characterized China as a moral, political, economic, and military threat were infused with anti-communist sentiment and fear of the red menace to position the country as a distinctly red peril. These four tropes continue to undergird portrayals of China as a red peril in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. public discourse.
