White Peril in England

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Does anyone have advice as to how to cite newspaper articles (old ones) which do not appear to have an author? I have all the other info, just not the author? I used footnotes because I couldn't find the proper MLA format to cite them. Thanks.

Man-Cheong
20 September 2009

The “White Peril” of Broken Blossoms: an inevitable life of misfortune

At the turn of the 20th century, anxiety about the influx and subsequent integration of Chinese immigrants had reached a fever pitch in England. Warding off what was then known as the “Yellow Peril” had become a prominent objective among nationalistic British who felt that the “purity” of their Anglo-Saxon society (Scheffauer 654) was being threatened. In particular, many felt that the growing trend of miscegenation between Chinese men and English women was “part of a vast conspiracy, one designed to degrade White women and to undermine the moral and physical strength of the British imperial centre” (Hevia 234). The area known as Limehouse Causeway was at the time the largest Chinese community in London and (perhaps not by coincidence) was also severely economically depressed. The British media, in an effort to alert the public to the “growing national problem” of Chinese in England (Scheffauer 645), accordingly painted portraits of Limehouse as a sordid locale, a “scandal, a peril, and a plague spot” , not befitting of polite (English) society. Chinatowns, and Limehouse in particular, were purported to be veritable “dens of iniquity”; they had, according to the media, become that way as a direct result of the vices brought to Britain by the Chinese. Gambling, opium dens, and prostitution, for example, were all vices deemed to have brought moral destabilization and ruin to England; the most outrageous result of which having been the miscegenation of Chinese men and White women. Negative depictions of the moral lassitude of Limehouse soon became prominent in the film world as well, creating a new and comprehensive awareness of the “Yellow Peril”. What these arguments fail to take into account, however, is that these destructive vices, supposed exclusively to be Chinese, actually were in place in Britain long before any influx of Chinese immigration. Perhaps the seeds for miscegenation had already been planted by White people in English society, and the Chinese just helped the issues come to fruition. This essay will discuss how these problems were actually previously established in England, how they presented an intrinsic “White Peril” in their own right, and how they cannot therefore be allocated solely to the “Yellow Peril” and its introduction to Britain.

The interpretation of Chinatown as a den of iniquity was not limited to print. We can see a similar depiction of Limehouse in American director D.W. Griffith’s 1919 film Broken Blossoms (or, the Yellow Man and the Girl), based upon a short story by English writer Thomas Burke called The Chink and the Child. After his earlier work, The Birth of a Nation, was panned by critics as being outrageously racist, Griffith made Broken Blossoms, a love story between a Chinese man and a young English girl, in an effort to clean up his public image. The movie attempts to portray the interracial relationship between Cheng Huan and little Lucy Burrows in a positive light; yet we see that nothing positive can come of their relationship, as by the end of the film both characters are dead. In this, there is an implicit message which reflects that of the public opinion of the day: namely, that engaging in such “unnatural” behavior as miscegenation, no matter how genial the relationship, is detrimental to British society and can only result in ruin and misfortune.
In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, we follow young Lucy Burrows who, “when not serving as a punching bag for [her abusive father]’s feelings … may be seen creeping around the docks of Limehouse”. She sits dreaming of a better life, of an escape from her miserable existence at the hands of her father Battling Burrows. Burrows, a raging alcoholic, frequently beats and starves her, so Lucy wanders around the neighborhood for as many hours of the day as possible; this is preferable to remaining at home. Usually, a home symbolizes safety and comfort, but here we can see that this is unfortunately not the case for Lucy. For her, home can only be a source of fear and anxiety. Livelihoods like these were apparently fairly common among impoverished English women, and Lucy’s unfortunate situation provides a compelling reason White girls at that time sought to break away from their immediate surroundings. They hoped to better themselves. Their situations were so bad, that any other prospects, even Chinese ones, had quite a good chance of being better than what these girls had previously been dealt.

This scene is pivotal because it allows us as an audience to fully understand Lucy’s predicament. Later in the scene she passes a couple of prostitutes on the corner, who emphatically advise her not to succumb to the pitfall of their profession. The pitiful plight of the white Englishwoman in Limehouse is further underscored by Lucy’s “married acquaintance”, who is as equally enslaved to her husband as Lucy is to Battling. “Whatever you do, dearie, don’t get married”, she warns. In this woman’s opinion, marriage is an even worse prospect for Lucy than the one she already has. From this exchange, we can see that that English women at that time frequently had strained or tumultuous relationships with English men, and that moreover neither the women nor the girl seem to have any means of escape from her fate. Both the prostitutes and the married woman wish to help Lucy in the only way they can. They understand that their lives are unhappy, but that it may be possible for a younger, more upwardly mobile girl to improve her living situation. It seems that in a lower class neighborhood like Limehouse, girls are destined either to a life of prostitution or of marital drudgery, often overworked by their abusive husbands. For Lucy, and indeed all women who are victims of this unfortunate sort of upbringing, there seem to be no other options. In this short scene, we are presented with all of the archetypical reasoning for White girls to be driven to “take up with Chinamen”: squalid living conditions populated by “underworld types”, physical and emotional abuse at the hands of White men, prostitution, and ultimately the drudgery of a life of poverty.

The media, in its attempt to demonize the Chinese, deliberately used specific language and imagery to put British women on a pedestal. Women were often portrayed as innocent and helpless, and thus easily corruptible. In Burke’s original short story, Lucy is constantly being referred to as “birdlike” (Burke 27). The very title of the film itself suggests that “White Blossom” as Lucy is called by Cheng Huan) is quite clearly to be perceived as a delicate flower, easily crushed by the societal evils by which she is surrounded. For Griffith, as well as for many jingoistic Britons, these evils are decidedly and irrevocably Chinese. Yet the hypocrisy of this mentality is really quite astonishing. Prostitution, which is a profession that existed in Biblical times, clearly was present in England before the arrival of Chinese. The same goes for gambling; British policemen would often arrest or fine Chinese for this offense. While it is true that gambling had, and still has, a visible presence in Chinese culture, the English hardly had room to criticize this: they themselves had been betting money on horse races long before the card game of “fan-tan” ever reached Europe (Scheffauer 472). Similarly, the argument to condemn the Chinese for the smoking of opium also does not carry much weight; if we are to accept Broken Blossoms as truth, it is clear that Battling Burrows (a White Englishman) has a heavy dependence on liquor — and his subsequent misdeeds, as a direct result of this, far exceed any problem caused by Cheng Huan’s occasional visit to the opium parlor. To further underscore the hypocrisy of this ideology, we can also argue that the English (who, in an attempt to address a trade imbalance, initially introduced opium to China) actually created the problem of Chinese addiction to opium in the first place. If it had not been for the English and their trade embargoes, China would never have traded opium on such a scale, and most probably would not have developed such an infatuation with the drug. Therefore, it can be said that the Chinese dependence on opium was a direct result of English exploits, and should not be considered inherently a Chinese problem. From these examples, it is clear that many of the so-called “problems” with Chinese society in London, including the issue of miscegenation with White women, ultimately came about as the result of a vicious cycle and were actually propagated by British actions.
To journalists like Scheffauer and Burke, and filmmakers such as Griffith, the issue of White women’s fraternizing with (or, God forbid, marrying!) Chinamen was seen as a destructive force, an unnatural phenomenon, an “abomination” (Scheffauer 478) that must be stopped at all costs. Groups of well-meaning “rescuers” invaded Limehouse with all the zeal of Christian missionaries, in a crusade to return the White women there to conventional London society. Although many of these articles make explicit mention of the fact that the White English women who took up with Chinese did so because it was preferable to the conventional life among other Whites, the underlying message and goal of these publications was to “rescue” these girls from their scandalous existences and return them to more “respectable” ones. It would seem that preserving the purity of the White race from being tainted with “Yellow” blood was a more important objective than solving the home-grown economic problems which prompted the English women towards Limehouse in the first place. This is an egregious disconnect; the fact that the film audience would actually rather see Lucy die than wind up with a Chinaman, is quite telling of how unacceptable that lifestyle was considered to be. Even though Lucy’s being with Cheng is clearly far superior to her miserable existence beforehand, socially it is still completely unaccepted. One might ask, if a life among the English was admittedly so bad for poor English women, why — even when they themselves affirmed that they were more contented among the Chinese — was their situation publicly considered to be worse? This is a question not readily answered, except for the acknowledgement that an overwhelming fear of the “Yellow Peril” had blinded British society to the fact that a “White Peril” was already looming at home. It is always easier to point fingers at someone else than to shoulder the blame.

It is therefore easy for third parties from slightly higher classes, who have admittedly “never known what poverty is” , to speculate on the reasons for White English women to be drawn to the Chinese element of Limehouse. Fingers pointed the blame at gambling, opium dens, and prostitution rings as inherent Chinese problems that had somehow invaded England’s lower-class neighborhoods in a grand scheme to “hypnotise” their White women. What almost all of these reports fail to explicitly acknowledge, however, is that this so called “problem” of miscegenation would not have arisen in the first place if it had not been for the poor economic conditions to which women in London were already being subjected, with or without the influx of the Chinese. Yet almost all of these accounts, including Broken Blossoms, postulate that the White girls are driven to the Chinese because of their insufferable economic conditions, often exacerbated by drunk and/or abusive White husbands. These issues, as well as gambling, prostitution, and alcohol abuse all had existed in England long before the Chinese arrived. The social evils which the prevailing opinion of the day deemed to be exclusively Chinese institutions, in fact had always been present in London, particularly in economically depressed areas like Limehouse. Therefore, it can only be deduced that this so called “problem” was really a product of the English themselves, their hypocritical class system and their speculative fear of the “Yellow Peril” itself.








Works Cited
Burke, Thomas. “The Chink and the Child”. Limehouse Nights. New York: McBride & Co., 1919.
Broken Blossoms (or, The Yellow Man and the Girl). Dir. D.W. Griffith. Perf. Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp, Lillian Gish. Paramount, 1919. Film.
Hevia, James L.. “The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu Manchu”. Cultural Studies. 12.2, (1998). 234-264. Print.
Marchetti, Gina. “Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: race, sex, and discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Scheffauer, Herman. “The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem”. The London Magazine. June 1911: 465-480. Print.
Scheffauer, Herman. “The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem”. The London Magazine. July 1911: 644-657. Print.