High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

Anna Chen – 11 July 2025, Anna May Wong and containing China

China catches up and America fires off a frenzy of Yellow Peril mania since Trump’s first trade war.

Western anxiety about Chinese getting too big for their foot bindings has been with us ever since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The mountain of guilt, fear, loathing and desire that went into defining them as a dehumanised Other is still with us today, turbo-charged by neocon ambitions.

Yep, desire is in there as well: you fear the thing you crave. And, so often, vice versa. Powerful it may be, but the impulse is also paralysing.

One way to escape the pain is to destroy the object of desire. What was Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick about if not the control of the entity that was more powerful than him, making off with his leg in a classic image of castration? Some societies eat their enemy. Some have hot wars. Many seek resolution in territorial pissing turf wars.

In the light of all-pervasive sinophobic insanity, I’m coining the term Green Hornet Syndrome to designate the white saviour cohort which insists on Chinese being underlings, or invisible even –— especially! — when outclassed by them. 

Be a sidekick or die. 

At the macro level, it means tearing down China for being so damn good. 

At the micro level, it means tearing down Chinese for being so damn good.

And that’s across the political spectrum.

It’s not just the usual suspects of the usurped Masters of the Universe who cling on to the delusion of supremacy. Purported progressives who can’t resist the system’s white domination blandishments, even subconsciously, are also doing the work of the state. If there’s no visibility, there’s no empathy. No empathy means less resistance to war on a group you barely recognise as human. Look what happened to Muslims after 9/11.

Deletion, cancellation, erasure and invisibility are the boss group’s stock-in-trade. In America’s economic downturn of the 1870s, it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white man. Demagogues like Denis Kearney were able to whip up a diversionary wave of hate among European workers who were losing their livelihoods, culminating in the Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically aimed at the Chinese. We see the same attitudes today despite the lip-service of enlightenment. Chinese are written off as copyists, incapable of original thought. They lack an inner life. The ruling group must speak for them. Nothing is true until a white person says it is true.

This regression into archaic relations from a bygone era exposes a widespread lowering of consciousness that’s depressingly become the norm in our sophisticated age.

The template currently coded into the Matrix seems to be: occupy the space and clear out the inhabitants. Absurdly, in the face of World War III, the urge to be an asshat eclipses urgent communal efforts for the collective good. A colonial mindset prevails when more self-knowledge, generosity and solidarity in the face of disaster might be more helpful than indulging residual Gamergate impulses.

It’s a mentality that needs challenging. In 2005, I wanted to make a programme about Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, for her 1905 birth centenary. I was astonished that so few knew who she was. It was disappointing when the BBC’s commissioning editor turned down our first pitch on the grounds that “No-one’s heard of her”. Fortunately, my brilliant producer persisted and we eventually made A Celestial Star in Piccadilly in 2008, broadcast in 2009.

Anna May Wong’s story beautifully illustrates the dynamic of imperial power relations which remain embedded in the cultural codes. Our perceptions are invisibly shot through with it at every level like a repeating pattern in a Mandelbrot Set and, as it is ubiquitous, the situation is accepted as a given.

China has been suppressed and degraded in the public eye through the press, literature and the screen arts, ever since the Opium Wars carve-up by Britain and the Eight Nation Alliance which put down the Boxer Rebellion. Yellow Peril untermenschen tropes abound in the cultural undergrowth. Wong’s oppressive experience provided a miniature synechdochal example of the whole process.

I wrote a poem about Wong’s unique pioneering position, wanting to satirically distil its essence and flag it up to a wide audience. It’s not something I was aware of doing while writing it. I was simply unloading what I felt about the hypocrisy and oppression to which I could relate. Only in reading it back did I realise what was nailed, the heart of the matter exploding out of the final two lines.

Wong was born third-generation Chinese American in Los Angeles, 1905. Not only did she face race discrimination in her everyday life, her successful film career in early Hollywood turned her into a symbol of it. The same forces present in Anna May Wong’s life-long struggle within and against a hostile system are here today in America’s bid for supremacy over a rising China.

In her movies, whether playing angel or devil, she had to be punished for the white hero’s attraction to her, sex being one of our fundamental drivers. From a 17-year old playing a tragic Madam Butterfly character in Toll of the Sea, to the daughter of Fu Manchu, her character always had to die.

As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate threat to the white man’s world is embodied in a non-white woman of Freudian nightmare: mysterious, untamed and powerful. The horror! A feminised China in Western eyes similarly represents to timid minds the unknowable, unconquerable entity at the centre of their own id: their fears made flesh.

Even though the white hero could flirt with Wong, find her amusing, be besotted with her exoticism, they were never allowed to kiss onscreen. Similarly, the West may play with the exotic East, admire China’s cleverness and buy its cheap goods, but will never recognise it as an equal. As long as the object of desire never excels, reminding them of what it is they lack, it is tolerable.

However, being cleverer, more able when let off the leash, repositories of secret knowledge held in dark corners of the mind alien to the big lugs who seek dominance, is not tolerable. Never mind that this threat is mostly paranoid projection. How insecure do you have to be to hold Chinese from Anna May Wong to the nation of China responsible for your own neurosis surrounding their outstanding distinction? They have to be smacked down for someone else’s inadequacy?

As above, so below. So here is a poem about it. My political analysis and cultural response in a simple 32 lines.

Down in the alleys of old Chinatown,

In the gawdy bawdy backstreets of sinister renown,

Dope pedlars peddle, the dragon gets chased,

It’s the same old story, the same yellowface

The Man with the Fu Manchu opium embrace

Could kill you in an instant and never leave a trace.

He knows all the tricks how to get you high

And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Down in the sewers of Chinatown way,

Chinamen get chinkified every single day.

Little yellow people all merging into one,

You eat their rice for punishment, their noodles are no fun.

Robotic ant-like army with phasers set to stun,

Marching cross the countryside, nowhere left to run. 

Here’s a tall poppy soaring in the sky

And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Silver screen dreams in black and white

But without the black bits, so that’s alright.

Along came a flapper, a cute little score,

The women went ‘Ooh!’ and the boys went, ‘Phwoah!’

Black hair, almond eyes, a figure to adore,

Yellow skin glistening, sticking in their craw,

There’s a comet in the heavens, the end is nigh

And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Who’s that upstart flouting all the rules?

Not one thing or the other, fall between two stools.

It’s Anna getting cocky, Anna out of line,

Anna take your punishment, Anna do your time,

Scary Chinee nemesis looking mighty sly

Crush the Dragon lady, the mastermind of crime.

Anna kissed a white boy and made him cry

And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Anna Chen, 2009

More about Anna May Wong in the BBC profile: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly (2009)