China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922 by Susanna Soojung Lim

Author:Susanna Soojung Lim [Lim, Susanna Soojung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781135071615
Google: OdmPXT_RvSYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-03-05T05:46:24+00:00

5 From Pan-Mongolism to proto-Eurasianism, 1890–1900

The insecure West

Of the many images and texts of the later nineteenth century that warned of a yellow peril, none became as iconic as the painting sketched by the German kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895, shortly after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5). In this painting, the archangel Michael, standing aloft a cliff, directs the attention of seven female warriors, each symbolizing the European nations (including Russia), to an image of the Buddha glimmering ominously in the distance. Above them shines the Christian cross. The caption reads: “Nations of Europe, protect your holiest Goods!” Although triggered by Japan’s surprise victory over China, Wilhelm’s readiness for a racial battle had deeper roots, including his anti-Semitism, his belief in the purity of the German race, and his penchant for Nordic mythology. It also had to do in part with the personality of the famously mustachioed kaiser, widely considered by contemporaries as being unstable and even megalomaniac.1

But Wilhelm’s aggressive posturing also reflected, paradoxically, a growing insecurity on the part of the political and cultural elite of Europe regarding the place of the West in the world at the turn of the century. The signs of the decline of the West, diagnosed for so long, as we have seen, by Russian thinkers from Herzen to Leontev, had begun to be detected by Westerners as well. In 1855, the French aristocrat and writer Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau had argued in his influential An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races that miscegenation, the mixing not only of different races but also different classes, was the main cause of the weakening of the noble, white, Aryan race. And, in 1893, an international bestseller by British-born Australian historian Charles Pearson, National Life and Character, painted in vivid terms how the decline of the white race would be met with the rise of “peoples whom we looked down upon as servile.” Like observers in America, Pearson turned his attention to China, and described the economic and military threat it posed to the West.2

Wilhelm fervently promoted his message of the yellow peril, even sending copies of the painting to the leaders of the major powers. In a letter of 1895 to his cousin Nicholas, crowned tsar of Russia the previous year, the kaiser explained that he had commissioned the painting with the aim of calling upon the powers of Europe “to unite in resisting the inroads of Buddhism, heathenism and barbarism

Figure 5.1 Sketch of the yellow peril commissioned by kaiser Wilhelm II.

Public Domain.

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