Mr. Wu and the Rearticulation of "The Yellow Peril"

In Heidi J. Holder's Survey of imperial melodrama in "Melodrama, Realism and Empire on the British Stage," she identifies the emergence of a new kind of stage villain in the early twentieth century: "the Europeanised 'native,' who threatens the self by his very likeness to the self": "Whereas in the imperialist drama it was the British manipulation of knowledge that insured victory, in this late group of plays the danger to the British comes from the 'natives" use of intelligence and communication.... The British had earlier 'replaced' the subject races as agents of good or villainy; now those subjects take the place of the British as wielders of knowledge and power."¹ Holder sees this as a late imperial twist in the presentation of the imperial self and the native Other, coming to this conclusion by looking at two plays from the twenties, William Archer's The Green Goddess and W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter. The former features a charming, urbane but dastardly Raja of Rukh, the latter a more modest Chinese figure, Ong Chi Seng, who nonetheless deploys his knowledge of local Malayan affairs and British ways of doing things to quietly manipulate a British scandal for his financial benefit. The threat of the Europeanised racial Other onstage, however, has earlier precedents if we look at plays that deal not with colonial India or Malaya but with territories just beyond full British control—Japan and semicolonial China—in the 1912-1913 narratives of "The Yellow Peril."

The beginnings of Yellow Peril discourses go back to the late nineteenth century but by 1912 a shift was occurring. With Japan's stunning and alarming victory over Russia in 1905 after several decades of rapid Westernization and modernization and the revolution in China in 1911 that saw the country finally throw off its antiquated dynastic ruling system in favour of a modern republic, the Far East was awakening and thus a likely breeding ground for a new kind of threat to white civilization, a threat combining Eastern cunning and Western technological knowledge. In popular fiction, these fears coalesced into the figure of Sax Rohmer's now notorious Dr. Fu Manchu and on the West End stage into the formidable title character of the play, Mr. Wu. Though now almost forgotten, Mr. Wu had been a sensation on stage in its London West End debut, running for 404 nights to rave reviews.² Its success led to its novelization in 1918 and a lavish, successful British silent film adaptation a year later by Stoll Pictures. The play was again revived in 1916 and 1922 by Matheson Lang, who had played Mr. Wu in 1913, to still-great acclaim, with the Times reviewer of the 1922 production even claiming that "Lang's conception of Mr. Wu, with his Oriental passions and his Occidental culture, was far too good to be lost to us forever."³ Indeed, Matheson Lang was so identified with the role that he even titled his autobiography, Mr. Wu Looks Back.⁴ The rest of the 1920s saw Mr. Wu continue to thrive in another silent film version in 1927, this time from Hollywood's MGM Studios with Lon Chaney in the lead role, and a BBC radio broadcast of a Matheson Lang production of the play the following year.⁵ By the 1930s, what had in 1913 been carefully billed as an "Anglo-Chinese play," however, was now being classified as a suburban melodrama.⁶ But in its prime, Mr. Wu marked a distinctive moment when the Yellow Peril was rearticulated for a new geopolitical era by drawing attention to the charismatic Oriental who embraced Western modernity and wielded Western learning and in so doing, became both villain and hero, rendering the British hero worryingly redundant.

The Changing Yellow Peril & Its Discourses

In its earliest incarnations, the Yellow Peril signaled the problem of a mobile and diligent Chinese labour force, willing to travel en masse to distant countries to work seemingly cheerfully in difficult conditions for low pay. The large influx of Chinese labour had already caused anxieties in a number of predominantly white...