Was Sax Rohmer racist?

That is the rap. His Fu-Manchu novels are said to be anti-Chinese. He certainly was a Yellow Peril pusher. But is the racist charge fully justified?

I do not know, and I do not really care to explore at length. Until yesterday, I had never read a word of the author. But yesterday I received a gift box of vintage American fiction — a good half being westerns, and many of the volumes from one popular publisher, Grosset & Dunlap — in which was included the first of Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu novels. I read the first page. I was not impressed.

So my interest then turned to finding a new home for the novel, someone who might appreciate it more than I do. In that cause, I snapped a photo of a broken binding spread of interior pages, and then looked at what was there.

An interesting passage, here highlighted:

My dubiety rises with my eyebrows.

This passage is about infanticide, which was once — and still is — practiced in China and elsewhere. It is also a gruesome, immoral practice . . . which is increasingly being defended in our abortion-loving West.

Rohmer may have been racist; I am no expert. But if you read this passage and take from it that this white male author was Racist and Therefore Evil, I suspect you yourself may have already embraced a different evil, the anti-human predilection for the destruction of one’s own (or others’) offspring.

Surely baby-killing, with or without a scorpions’ touch, is worse than “racism” unmodified.

If Rohmer seems racist to you for looking down upon a culture that practiced infanticide, maybe your own character needs some attending-to. On the face of it, the implicit defense of the lives of Chinese babies is not a likely case for anti-Chinese racism.

But, sure, something deeper may be involved. What if tolerant nods for infanticide and abortion — say, from a demagogic governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia — is at least sometimes an expression of racism? I bet some white westerners promote abortion and tolerate infanticide because . . . people of other colors engage in such horrors more often than whites.


If that is indeed your attitude, ask the next question: what evildoer “Fu-Manchu” does your attitude promote?

And is your “Fu-Manchu” white, and running for office in your favored political faction?

twv