Depiction of China as an ontological threat is racial imagination par excellence that justifies global war

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Pages 165-167, 2 August 2021,

It should come as no surprise, then, that the modern self-understanding of the West over the past two centuries relies on a conceptualization of a menacing East and that during moments of acute geopolitical crises the “othering” of the East becomes ever more politically salient. In particular, the yellow peril as world-making practice is something that is profoundly embedded in the idea of the West itself, continuously molded to activate forms of self-awareness and autoimmunity. 77 This becomes even more crucial at the beginning of the Cold War and influences a wide range of important thinkers in a wide range of disciplines. Martin Heidegger infamously referred to Russia (alongside America) as the metaphysical other to German-rooted (i.e., European) Being.78 Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1953 but originally from a 1935 lecture, properly reflects a time of existential and political peril during the Cold War. But more evidently, as Emmanuel Faye shows, the very notion of the “Asiatic” for Heidegger in the 1930s is crucial in determining the enemy in the Schmittian sense. For example, in a lecture in Rome in 1936, Heidegger speaks of the “preservation of the European peoples against the Asiatic.”79 Such sentiments, which for Faye pervade Heidegger’s seminars of the 1930s, blend into a general nexus between the Asiatic as the radical other and the explosion of anti-Semitism (see Chapter Five).

Hannah Arendt’s famous The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was not just a genealogy of Nazi totalitarianism in terms of antiSemitism and imperialism; it was widely read at the time as a way of insulating the West from the totalitarian experiments of total domination that really connected Nazim and Stalinism. What is remarkable in Arendt, however, is that this notion of total domination appears to gain much more fertile ground in what she calls “the lands of traditional Oriental despotism.” As she writes,

The chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there is almost inexhaustible material to feed the poweraccumulating and man-destroying machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass man’s typical feeling of superfluousness—an entirely new phenomenon in Europe, the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth of the last 150 years—has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life. 80

We may note the stark dehumanization of Asians, as “inexhaustible material,” but also how Arendt imagines that totalitarianism appears to be something deeply embedded in the “Orient,” whereas it is a “new phenomenon” in Europe.81 If the Cold War is the distinction between totalitarian and non-totalitarian worlds, then Asia becomes imagined at the ever-present threat to the West’s ontological security, if not its physical security. But perhaps the clearest expression of this gulf or distance between East and West was infamously expressed by Emmanuel Levinas, known as the philosopher of alterity par excellence. Levinas infamously wrote in an essay entitled “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic,” written and published in 1960,

The exclusive community with the Asiatic world, itself a stranger to European history to which Russia, in spite of all its strategic and tactical denials, has belonged for almost a thousand years, would this not be disturbing even to a society without classes? . . . In abandoning the West, does Russia not fear to drown itself in an Asiatic civilization. . . ?82

Levinas goes on to explicitly draw attention to the very peril that such a radical alterity as the “Asiatic civilization” poses to the West:

The Yellow Peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.83

Much like Arendt, Levinas implicitly dehumanizes Asians through a “racial strangeness” that appears extraterrestrial. He seems to revel in such a radical alterity as a way of delineating the profound threat that Asia and the “Asiatic” poses to Western universality—“to drown itself in an Asiatic civilization.”

What emerges here is a sense of a world marked by irreconcilable differences, racial, spiritual, civilizational, a way of internalizing fear and insecurity at a profound and fundamental level. It merges itself with the ontological constitution of enmity in the early part of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union as a racialized “Asiatic” power that represents a form of absolute alterity. As Perry Anderson explains, “Communism was an enemy far more radical than fascism had ever been: not an aberrant member of the family of polities respecting private ownership of the means of production, but an alien force dedicated to destroying it.”84

The history of the yellow peril is a history of how the global racial imaginary constructs a relation between Western and Eastern worlds that is always perceived to be in crisis, and within which the undoing of the former is always, in a sense, potentially happening as a result of the latter. It is a recognition that a world ultimately built on white Western supremacy cannot last indefinitely.