Western literature is a reflection of the adamant perceptions of the Orient as dangerous and evil, grouping all Eastern nations together and pitting them against the good forces of the West while ignoring true political realities.

In The Yellow Danger, Yen How appropriates the classical imperial strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ as the first step of China’s world conquest. He creates a considerable amount of mutual suspicion and infighting among the European empires by suddenly granting more territorial concessions to France, Germany and Russia but not to Britain. With a looming ‘financial panic’ in the country, Britain decides that ‘the idea that England should submit to such a conspiracy’ has to be ‘scouted with indignation’, and a war with France ensues.40 The imagination of these disastrous events shows that Shiel was concerned about the continuance of English supremacy over the other European powers in their fin-de-siècle ‘Scramble for China’, which is ironic since just two years after the publication of the novel, the major European countries would achieve an unprecedented degree of solidarity in The Eight- Nation Alliance’s invasion of China.41 It is therefore easy to see that the Yellow Peril discourse for Shiel is more of a warning for England and Europe than any accurate depiction of the political reality of China. The same can be said about ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ as London insists on the danger of a potential Sino-Japanese alliance against ‘white-skinned people’ while totally ignoring the recent wars and ongoing tensions between the two countries.42 Such textual prioritization of self-concern over the concrete geopolitical situation of the Other makes their Yellow Perilism quintessential cases of Edward Said’s Orientalism. As Said states, ‘the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture. . . ’.43 For Shiel and London, the political reality of the Yellow Peril does not really matter. What matters is the discursive function it serves for their own socio-political agenda–to ‘justify their current prejudices and fears’ and ‘boost their own sense of cohesion’.44