China and the Chinese in Popular Film

From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784537203
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image involved the heroic peasants of The Good Earth and Dragon Seed fighting against Japanese invasion in wartime tributes to the West's ally, Nationalist China. The cinema's split level response is also traced through the images of the ultimate Oriental villain, the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and the timeless Chinese hero, the intelligent and benevolent detective Charlie Chan.Filling a longstanding gap in Cinema and Cultural History, the book is founded in fresh research into Hollywood's shifting representations of China and its people.

1

Western Attitudes to China and the Chinese

The oldest and most enduring image of China and the Chinese in the West is of numberless yellow hordes swarming out of the East to engulf Western civilisation. This constituted a folk memory and derived directly from the eruption in the thirteenth century of the Mongol armies, led by the grandson of Genghis Khan, who appeared suddenly from the mysterious heart of Asia and rampaged through Russia, Eastern and Central Europe before being halted at the gates of Vienna in 1241–2. It lurked in the collective consciousness to be reawakened periodically by events such as the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising and the Korean War which were seen and reported in the language of vast and apparently unstoppable hordes.

A more positive image emerged from the narratives of Western travellers to China in the later medieval and Renaissance periods, the Italian Marco Polo, Spanish and Portuguese travellers, Franciscan friars and Jesuit missionaries. They reported on a peaceful, prosperous and well-ordered empire with a modest, hard-working and law-abiding population. But a darker side to the civilisation surfaced in reports of slavery, footbinding, female infanticide and the castration of male children to create eunuchs, tales which created a belief in a tendency to cruelty as an inherent character trait of the Chinese. Sinophilia reached a zenith in the eighteenth century, particularly in France, with admiration and imitation of the style dubbed Chinoiserie which embraced items such as blue and white porcelain, ornamental pagodas and pavilions, lacquered furniture, Chinese lanterns, Chinese screens, Chinese wallpaper and embroidered silk, and in the celebration of an idealised Chinese Empire which was utilised as a means of critiquing contemporary Western society.

This all changed in the nineteenth century in the context of the rapid and apparently irreversible development of European empires and the transformation of Western society by the industrial revolution. Apart from the enclaves of Macao and Hong Kong, China never became part of the formal European empires but it was integral to an informal imperialism based on Western trade and commerce. The European powers, in particular the British, took up residence in Shanghai and the so-called treaty ports and participated in the Imperial and Maritime Customs service, which was the principal source of revenue for the Chinese imperial government, and which was run by a succession of Britons.¹

Compared to the dynamic and expanding European empires, China came to seem stagnant, backward, hidebound and firmly opposed to progress and innovation, its government system corrupt, sclerotic and autocratic, its people cruel, cunning, superstitious and xenophobic. The horrors of the Indian Mutiny, graphically reported in a rabidly racist press, had instilled a generalised fear of Asiatics in the Western population and this was apparently confirmed by the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the foreign legations in Peking in 1900. As Paul A. Cohen has written of the Boxers: ‘In film, fiction and folklore, they functioned over the years as a vivid symbol of everything we most detested and feared about China.’²

Although the bulk of the people of Britain and America never went anywhere near China, they were to come into contact with the Chinese as a result of immigration and, as with all immigrant groups, popular attitudes towards them would be crucially shaped by the issues of work and sex. These practical issues reinforced the fears and hatreds associated with the images of invasion and the yellow horde.

The invasion fear was given practical form by an influx of Chinese labourers into California in the late 1840s and 1850s, first to work in the mines opened up in the California Gold Rush and later to help build the transcontinental railway. A toxic combination of attitudes (the competition for jobs with the native white population, the presumed inferiority of Asiatics prescribed by the prevailing theories of racial hierarchy, the fear of miscegenation diluting the pure blood of the dominant white race) led from the outset to discriminatory rules aimed at the Chinese. They were forbidden to own real estate or give evidence in court cases, and they were not permitted to become naturalised American citizens. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act specifically banned the immigration of Chinese labourers into America and in 1924 all Asian immigration was banned by the National Origins Act. Thirteen states passed anti-miscegenation laws.

From the 1850s onwards, negative stereotypes of the Chinese developed in fiction, theatre and cartoons, fed by a steady stream of negative accounts by American traders, diplomats and missionaries stressing the moral degeneracy of the Chinese, who were characterised by ‘deceit, cunning, idolatry, despotism, xenophobia, cruelty, infanticide and intellectual and sexual perversity’.³ Although writers like Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce showed some sympathy for the Chinese in their stories and opposition to anti-Chinese prejudice, the dominant trend in popular fiction was to reinforce the negative stereotypes. There was, for instance, a now forgotten subgenre of Chinese invasion narratives by writers such as Atwell Whitney, Robert Woltor, Pierton W. Dooner and Oto Mundo.⁴

As the existing Chinese residents clustered together in so-called Chinatowns for mutual protection and support and found work operating laundries and restaurants, popular fiction followed them. William Wu concludes that American Chinatowns became the primary setting and subject for the fiction about Chinese Americans after 1882.⁵ Much of it centred on criminality, particularly involving wars between the tongs, rival Chinese secret societies, opium dens and gambling joints, all laced with characteristic Chinese cruelty.

The Chinese community in Britain was comparatively small (not much over a thousand) and concentrated in specific locations such as the dockland area of London, Liverpool and Cardiff. It grew up particularly from the 1880s onwards and the population was largely transient, mainly seamen, but boarding houses, eating houses, laundries, social clubs and shops sprang up to cater for them. Like all other immigrant groups down the years, they suffered from allegations that they were taking over English jobs and English women and that they were bringing with them criminality in the form of drugs and gambling. These prejudices were fed by certain indisputable facts. The Chinese population was predominantly male. Their favoured recreations included gambling and opium smoking. The recruitment of Chinese seamen at very low wages did undercut English seamen and they were used as strike-breakers in the 1911 seamen’s strike. But these facts were made the basis of lurid fantasies. A commission of inquiry set up by Liverpool City Council reported in 1907 that ‘the Chinese appear to much prefer having intercourse with young girls, more especially those of undue precocity’ and ‘the evidence of seduction of girls by Chinamen (was) conclusive’.⁶ This conclusion was directly contradicted by the testimony of the Chief Constable that the Chinese community gave the police no cause for concern in the matter of criminal behaviour. He told the Home Office in 1906 that the Chinese ‘treat their women well, they are sober, they do not beat their wives and they pay liberally for prostitution’.⁷

To the spectre of rampant inter-racial and under-age sex was added the image of the opium den which became a symbol of Oriental depravity. Although it figured rarely in the pre-war popular press, the opium den appeared in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip (1892). In each case, opium was associated with the degradation of a respectable white man. Virginia Berridge, who has looked into the truth behind the myth, has concluded that there were not many opium dens, that many of them were actually more like social clubs; that the local people most in touch with opium tolerated it and that there was little association with white society.⁸ But the link between opium, gambling and sex was simply too juicy a story for the journalists to leave alone and so the popular press, then as now happy to pander to prejudices, reinforce stereotypes and stir up sensationalist reactions, continued to promote this image. The Sunday Chronicle (2 December 1906) ran a story headed ‘Chinese Vice in England. A View of Terrible Conditions at Close Range’ featuring accounts of English girls plied with opium and seduced by evil Orientals. On 1 October 1920 The Daily Express ran a story headlined ‘Yellow Peril in London – Vast Syndicate of Vice and its Criminal Master – Women and Child Victims’. On 4 October 1929, The London Evening News ran a story ‘The Lure of the Yellow Man’, declaring ‘Drugs, gambling and appeals to every human passion have their place in Limehouse. It is the distributing centre for opium and cocaine … The time has come to draw a cordon round this area of London and forbid any white woman from frequenting it.’⁹

As Sascha Auerbach has shown, it was the competition for jobs that initially fuelled the growth of anti-Chinese sentiment in late Victorian Britain. The ‘Chinese Labour’ question originated not in England but in Australia in the 1880s and South Africa in the period 1903–6, where there were campaigns against Chinese immigration and Chinese labour which, it was claimed, was taking the jobs of white workers. Laws were passed in both countries to restrict Chinese immigration and, as part of the agitation, negative stereotypes of the Chinese as ‘vicious, immoral and unclean’ surfaced in the popular press both in the form of news stories and cartoons. The same stories and images surfaced in Britain after the number of Chinese sailors employed in British ships trebled between 1905 and 1907. Although the Chinese only constituted 5 per cent of the workforce by 1915, the National Sailors and Firemen’s Union (NSFU) campaigned vociferously against Chinese labour and their agitation led to direct attacks on members of the Chinese community. The 1911 Seamen’s Strike featured significant anti-Chinese rhetoric and anti-Chinese violence.

The sexual threat inevitably cropped up once the Chinese were becoming vilified. It was in 1911 that The London Magazine published the first of many similar articles warning of the dangers posed by the immigrants. Titled ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’, the author Herman Scheffauer focused on the evil of miscegenation, the racial mixing through sex, and raised the spectre of race wars and of an international conspiracy within the Chinese diaspora in London, Singapore, Australia, America and Japan to subjugate the white race.¹⁰

It was not until the First World War that the drug threat was added to the mix and there was a steady increase in legal persecution as the inter-racial sex, gambling and opium smoking now indelibly associated with the Chinese were seen to pose a threat to the moral and physical health of the young men needed to fight the war. Opium and opiates had been freely available in Victorian England. There was no restriction on their sale until 1868 and after that only minimal restraints. The 1916 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) criminalised possession and sale of cocaine and opium by anyone but licensed professionals. The police stepped up raids on gambling houses and although no evidence of Chinese opium selling or Chinese-run gambling in the wider white population was found, the raids continued. In the immediate post-war period, there was a moral panic, centred on the idea of white women in the West End being corrupted by Chinese drug pushers. This was stimulated by a handful of sensational cases which received widespread press coverage, notably the deaths in West End flats from drug overdoses of shipping heir William Gibson Jr and actress Billie Carleton. Marek Kohn believes that Carleton’s symptoms suggest an overdose of a sleeping potion, perhaps veronal, rather than cocaine poisoning.¹¹ The newspapers ran lurid stories like that in The Star (9 January 1919) ‘The Evil Trade in Opium: English Girls as the Chinaman’s West End Agents’. In the press reports of the drug underworld, the habit became associated with deviant and criminal figures: liberated women, effeminate or gay men and ethnic minority criminals, chiefly black or Chinese. The popular hostility to the Chinese and other ethnic minorities, based on racial, sexual and economic fears, stoked up by sensationalised press reports, lurid popular fiction and the very real competition for jobs and housing provoked by mass demobilisation of the forces led to race riots in 1919, aimed at black and Chinese men, in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, Newport, Cardiff and other urban centres. The 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act made permanent the emergency powers regulating narcotics, prohibiting the importation of prepared opium, except under license and the import, export or manufacture of raw opium, cocaine, morphine and heroin.

The climax of the moral panic was the trials of ‘Brilliant’ Chang and Edgar Manning on drugs charges. Chang, a prosperous Chinese playboy and Manning, a Jamaican petty criminal and jazz musician, represented perfect archetypes of the alien ‘other’. The press dubbed them ‘Dope Kings’. Both were said to be involved in corrupting white girls with drugs and both ended up in prison. Chang was tried in 1924 for supplying drugs to Freda Kempton. Manning who had supplied drugs to several addicts who died was sent to prison in 1923 for three years. Freda Kempton, who came from a well-to-do family in Stoke Newington, was drawn into the world of London nightclubs, jazz bands and drugs and eventually died of a cocaine overdose in 1922. Chang was sentenced to fourteen months in prison and deportation.¹²

By the late 1920s, both the police and journalists were declaring the threat from Chinatown over. The number of arrests of Chinese dwindled. By the mid-1930s, many of the Chinese residents had left and a large part of the neighbourhood was demolished to allow for the widening of Limehouse Causeway. The Blitz completed the destruction of the old Chinatown. But the image of Chinatown as an exotic centre of crime, vice and Oriental villainy was much harder to erase, having become lodged in the popular consciousness, thanks to sensational journalism and to the books, plays and films inspired by it.

Events and developments in the Far East decisively changed attitudes towards China. China had been turbulent and unstable since the Boxer Uprising. Imperial rule had been overthrown in 1911 and a republic proclaimed under Sun Yat-Sen aimed at restoring China’s national integrity. But its hold on the country was fragile and by the 1920s the country had collapsed into warlordism and banditry. The reaction to this was the emergence of the Communist Party, founded in 1921, and a nationalist movement which resulted from the development of an urban proletariat, an influential bourgeoisie and an articulate student body. There were a series of strikes and boycotts of foreign interest. The British response was one of conciliation as they made concessions and sought to secure a policy of cooperation with the moderate nationalists. By 1928, Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Party, the Kuomintang, had eliminated its rivals and established a national government based in Nanking. The nationalist government ended labour unrest, implemented important reforms and sought to create a modern business environment.

Japan was a far more serious threat in the interwar years than China. Japan had been an ally of the United States in the First World War. But Japan had decisively beaten Russia in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War. It took over Korea in 1910 and Manchuria in 1931. It also established the largest network o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements and Note on Chinese Names
• 1 Western Attitudes to China and the Chinese
• 2 ‘The Yellow Peril Incarnate in One Man’: The Literary Fu Manchu
• 3 The Devil Doctors: Cinematic Fu Manchu
• 4 Fu Manchu’s Daughter: The Unique Career of Anna May Wong
• 5 Chinatown Nights
• 6 The ‘Real’ China
• 7 Miscegenation Melodramas
• 8 Allies and Enemies
• 9 The Oriental Detectives: Charlie Chan, James Lee Wong and Mr Moto
• Notes
• Series Information