There Are No “Yellow People” in This World

世上本无黄种人

By Luo Xin (罗新)

【Editor’s Note: In Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, Michael Keevak traces the Western invention of the "yellow race" and how this artificial classification, once scientifically codified, traveled East to be absorbed by the very people it marginalized. Luo Xin recalls hearing Zhu Zheqin’s haunting song “Huang Haizi” as a young scholar and reflecting on the racial identity that had been ascribed to him. Keevak reveals that East Asians were not always seen as “yellow”—early Western observers often described them as white or olive-toned. It was only with the rise of scientific racism and Eurocentric taxonomy in the 18th and 19th centuries that “yellow” became fixed, especially through thinkers like Linnaeus and Blumenbach. These racial ideas permeated medicine and anthropology, persisting for generations. Keevak’s book dismantles these myths, exposing how deeply entrenched, yet scientifically unfounded; racial categories continue to shape perception—particularly in China, where “yellow” remains widely accepted.】

When I was young, on a winter night while rushing to finish my doctoral dissertation, I happened to hear Zhu Zheqin (朱哲琴) singing “Huang Haizi” (“黄孩子”) on FM97.4. The song’s sense of loneliness and despair, of emptiness in a wind-swept expanse, precisely matched my own dead-end feeling of having to write something I had lost any capacity to write. “On the white man’s great boulevard, so many blue eyes abound.… In the yellow man’s family, so many black eyes abound.” The lyrics draw a parallel between the blue-eyed whites and the black-eyed “yellows,” revealing the East’s sense of loss in the face of the West. The song goes, “Then, at that time, at that time, I didn’t know I was a yellow child.”

By the time I heard the song, I was already aware, just as Zhu Zheqin (朱哲琴) was when she sang it, that I was supposedly one of the “yellow people.” A ubiquitous lyric in “Descendants of the Dragon” (“龙的传人”)—a tune popular throughout China—stresses “black eyes, black hair, yellow skin, forever the descendants of the dragon.” We are taught to identify with our status as “yellow” to affirm that our skin is yellow—even if the naked eye reveals nothing of the sort, except in the case of a particular illness.

Over the years, in a process reminiscent of Zhou Botong (周伯通) exerting enormous effort to forget The Nine Yin Manual (《九阴真经》), many of us have gradually peeled away layers of educational mush from our minds. Concepts embedded in race-based logic have grown outdated; we now understand that “racial” classification is pseudo-science. We also know that human physiological variations are adaptations shaped by tens of thousands of years of survival in differing environments. In Western academic works and mainstream media, one seldom finds tags like “Mongoloid” or “yellow race” for East Asians.

Unhappily, however, these labels—and the racial thinking behind them—are far from defunct in societies like China, which have for two centuries been victims of racialized worldviews. Even in recent Chinese archaeological reports, we frequently find specialized chapters on skeletal analysis offering data on “racial” classification—especially for ancient frontier populations—reporting how many “belong to the Europoid race,” how many to the “Mongoloid race,” and so on. In still lower-tier instances, there are elaborate skeletal categorizations of ancient ethnic groups, utterly disregarding that the essential nature of ancient “ethnic” identities was political rather than genealogical.

Unquestionably, our education has a gaping void when it comes to self-examination and critique of racial thinking.

In this sense, we now have a superb resource for reflecting on race-based concepts: Michael Keevak (奇迈可)’s new book, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (《成为黄种人：种族思维简史》).

Keevak concentrates on reconstructing Western society’s shifting perceptions of East Asian peoples, studying the origins of the “yellow race” concept, how the classification of a “yellow Mongoloid race” gained footing in Western science, and how this doctrine found its way to the East, where it was widely accepted. The result is a fascinating yet weighty cultural and social history of racial thinking.

It’s not difficult to see that “yellow race” is meant to indicate a group of people whose skin is supposedly yellow. Yet one of Keevak’s more startling discoveries is that the label “yellow,” in reference to East Asians, did not arise from empirical observation. Rather, it was a new invention of modern science. Prior to the mid-18th century, few Western travel accounts described the skin of East Asians (primarily Chinese and Japanese) as distinctly different from that of Europeans. In many accounts, they were depicted as fair-skinned, slightly darker white, or olive-toned.

Observers such as travelers, traders, and missionaries noted considerable variations across the East Asian region—for instance, people in southern China were generally darker than those in the north—but they viewed it much like skin-tone differences within Europe, regarding it as no more than variations of light to dark. That was empirical reality. Ironically, those often labeled as “yellow-skinned” at the time (in the 19th century, they would eventually be deemed “white”) were Indians.

Color, of course, is more than the objective observation of physical phenomena; it’s imbued with the values and emotions assigned by cultural tradition. Broadly speaking (at least regarding Keevak’s argument), in Western tradition, white symbolizes sanctity, purity, wisdom, and nobility; black signifies evil, corruption, death, and barbarism; yellow can suggest impurity, vulgarity, sickness, or terror.

When East Asia, represented by China, was perceived by the West as an advanced civilization comparable to its own, Western travelers tended to see the East Asian complexion as white, not at all yellow. But with the progress of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, ancient Eastern societies grew to be perceived as backward, stagnant, and in decline, and thus the East lost the privilege of having its people described as white.

Keevak charts this transition. He notes how more and more observers began saying East Asian skin was close to white but not quite white. What color, then? Brown, olive, grayish-white, leaden—many possibilities. But it was no longer “white.” Almost no one used a purely “yellow” descriptor for the simple reason that you couldn’t truly see it with the naked eye.

Once “whiteness” was monopolized by Europeans, the question of how to describe East Asians remained unsettled for some time and across different contexts. The question would eventually be answered with the ascendancy of Eurocentrism, when modern taxonomy, anthropology, and evolutionary theory helped facilitate a historic leap: the shift from white to yellow.

Mid-18th-century classifications of human “races” signaled the triumph of modern natural science’s racial logic over classical empiricism, methodically slotting humanity into a grand “natural system.” The first major scholar in racial classification, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), published Systema Naturae in 1735, dividing humanity into four types. Europeans (white), Indigenous Americans (red), and Africans (black) were designations already familiar to the West. He gave Asians a Latin term, fuscus, meaning dark or brown. In a 1740 German translation, fuscus was rendered as gelblich, or “yellowish.”

Keevak considers this shift a critical step toward “yellow” as the defining color for Asians. But the more significant leap was Linnaeus’s own. In the 10th edition of Systema Naturae (1758-1759), he changed fuscus to luridus, a Latin word that can be interpreted as yellow, pale, sallow, sickly—evoking something ghostly or unwell. Keevak underscores that Linnaeus was not merely choosing an in-between shade to bridge the extremes of “white” and “black.” Rather, he was seeking a term that conveyed disease and unhealthiness. Linnaeus had remarked that plants described as luridus had connotations of sorrow and suspicion.

In the late 18th century, so-called “Scientific Racism” made strides through the anthropologist Johann F. Blumenbach (1752-1840). Known as the father of physical anthropology, the German scientist rejected Linnaeus’s geography-based and color-based system, preferring analysis of skull morphology instead. He proposed five “races”: Caucasian, Ethiopian, American, Malay, and Mongolian.

Two of Blumenbach’s coinages—“Caucasian race” and “Mongolian race”—proved enormously enduring. Even now, when racial concepts are being set aside, these terms stubbornly surface in both scientific and popular discourse.

Though Blumenbach criticized color-based classification for its imprecision and stuck to skull analysis in his own work, he nonetheless fused popular color labels to his five racial groups: “white Caucasian,” “black Ethiopian,” “red American,” “brownish-black Malay,” and “yellow Mongolian.” In Keevak’s view, because “Mongolian” was so widely adopted in scholarly circles, “yellow” eventually stuck as the standardized color. At that point, East Asians were definitively labeled both “Mongoloid” and “yellow-skinned.”

The year 1795 was crucial in the history of scientific racism. Blumenbach’s coining of “Mongolian race” and “Caucasian race” offered wholly novel concepts. Over the ensuing decades, while debate persisted over how best to describe the East Asian complexion, the Mongolian classification for East Asia was widely accepted.

Why “Mongolian” to name the East Asian race? Keevak notes that it was neither casual nor simply a convenient choice, nor was it based on the alleged typicality of a “Mongolian” skull (the stated logic behind using the Caucasus to define the “white race”). Rather, the Mongols had been the most fearsome Eastern people in Western historical memory, eliciting recollections of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane.

Blumenbach took pains to distinguish Mongols from Tatars. He labeled Turkic peoples as Tatars and placed Central Asians (including the Tatars), the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa in the Caucasian race, reserving the “Mongolian race” specifically for East Asia.

Once physical anthropology seized on the study of human races, it propelled scientific racism to its extreme. “In-between” groups like the red race, the brownish-black, and the yellow race became transitional steps between the darkness of “uncivilized” black and the brightness of “civilized” white—between the savage night and the light of day, between the perfect and the contemptible. In this worldview, physiological differences among the races reflected moral and intellectual differences.

Anatomical analysis showed that the larger cranial capacity of the Caucasian race supposedly conferred greater intelligence and, by extension, higher moral standards—an outcome of their fair skin and prominent brow. Conversely, what they considered the distinctive sallow hue and epicanthic folds of the Mongolian race were presumed to correlate directly with cunning, rigidity, and gloom. As for the Ethiopian race’s deep skin tone, low brow, and thick lips, these traits placed them closer to apes.

If moral and cognitive distinctions stem from biological differences, the logic extends to subdivisions of each race, implying hierarchies of blood purity and superiority. Teutons, for instance, would rank above other whites, yet the Jews and Roma were seen as the greatest threat to white “purity.” Such ideas propelled scientific racism to absurd—and evil—extremes.

Keevak’s work focuses on skin color, specifically that of the so-called Mongolian race. He devotes many pages to describing how physical anthropologists, in the name of scientific rigor, strove tirelessly to determine the “true” skin color of “colored” peoples, particularly East Asians. They devised methods and instruments, collecting and analyzing reams of data. From the outset, they assumed the yellow skin of the Mongolian race was an undeniable fact. If the eye fails to see yellow, it must be concealed beneath the surface; only scientific measurement, experiment, and calculation could expose that truth.

Drawing on evolutionary theory, these anthropologists situated East Asians squarely between the “perfect” Caucasians and the “primitive” Africans. East Asians, with their yellow skin, represented a mid-stage in evolution, explaining why, despite a sophisticated ancient civilization, they later stagnated and lagged behind the West. And if certain East Asian individuals looked as fair as, or even fairer than, many Europeans, that must have been because of mixed European blood at some point in history.

Keevak devotes an entire chapter to the evolution of racist ideas within medicine, focusing on three conditions named after “Mongolia.”

The first is the “Mongolian fold” of the eyelid. Physical anthropology described East Asians as having narrow, small eyes with a prominent epicanthic fold (also called the Mongolian fold) that overlaps the inner corner. Physicians found that some European children also exhibit epicanthic folds in childhood; from an evolutionary perspective, such folds seemingly testified to the higher evolutionary status of white people.

Second is the “Mongolian spot,” a congenital birthmark usually found around the sacral area. It appears in all human populations worldwide, though it’s less noticeable on Africans (who have darker complexions) and Europeans (lighter). Among East Asians, its visibility led Western medicine to assume it was unique to them, so it was named the “Mongolian spot.” One explanation framed it as the vestigial remnant of the human tail, supposedly lost to “advanced” humans—i.e., whites. For the occasional European infant who has such a birthmark, some explained it as a legacy of the medieval Mongol invasions, evidence of miscegenation’s perils.

Third is the “Mongolian disease,” which British doctor John L. Down identified and named in the late 19th century. Now known by the discoverer’s surname (“Down syndrome”), it’s a genetic disorder caused by a chromosomal anomaly, first recognized in Europe. Because its patients all had similar facial features—relatively broad faces, small upward-slanting eyes reminiscent of typical “Mongoloid” traits—Down dubbed the condition “Mongolian disease” or “Mongolian idiocy.”

Why would white patients with intellectual disability display what were interpreted as “Mongolian” features? An evolutionary explanation: intellectual disability represented a reversion to lower evolutionary stages. If Caucasians regress, they revert to the inferior Mongolian stage, hence the stereotypical “Mongolian” face. According to this bizarre pathology, if a Mongolian patient were to regress, that person might take on African features. Although such explanations were long ago abandoned, the term “Mongolism,” with its pathological connotations, persisted in medical literature until about two decades ago.

As some medical organizations criticize, the rise of scientific racism gave impetus to reflexively using racial or ethnic groups—defined as if by blood-based boundaries—to explain disease origins and epidemics. This approach still flourishes despite major international medical journals having begun to forbid the use of race as an explanatory variable.

Consider a widely known example in China: interpreting split pinky toenails as a “racial” or “ethnic” trait. In Chinese popular culture, one hears all sorts of claims—that it’s a defining feature of the Mongolian race, or the Han ethnicity, or the Manchus. Some romanticize it as evidence of ancestry from the Hongtong County migrations in the Ming dynasty. Yet this condition (onychoschizia) appears worldwide, likely related to poor nutrition or dehydration, making it fruitless to seek a racial explanation.

Every culture or society has its own strain of racial thinking. But only Western “scientific racism” bears the halo of modern science and entered non-Western worlds as part of Western knowledge systems. Keevak studies how the concept of the “yellow Mongolian race” was received in China and Japan, noting that China adopted it more readily. “Yellow” carries fewer negative connotations in Chinese culture—though “yellow” as a suggestive color (e.g., pornography) is a later usage derived from the Western term “yellow journalism.” Because the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) and the Yellow River (Huanghe) and the color’s imperial connotations were well ingrained in Chinese tradition, classifying themselves as “yellow people” posed little difficulty—provided the negative moral or aesthetic judgments were stripped out. Japan, lacking a tradition that linked “yellow” to exalted symbols, took a more circuitous route to adoption.

Keevak also notes that, in China, those first to embrace and actively promote “yellow” as a racial identity were typically elites with exposure to Western education or information. Meanwhile, Europe’s response to Japan’s rise—and to anti-Western movements in China, such as the Boxer Rebellion—manifested in the “yellow peril.” Though nominally referring to the modern ascendant powers of China and Japan, this “yellow peril” rhetoric drew on the historical memory of the 13th-century Mongol conquest, conveniently ignoring how China itself was victimized by Mongol rule and how Japan barely escaped it. Bringing together “Mongolian race” and “yellow race” as labels fed the spread of “yellow peril” alarmism.

Since Richard Lewontin published his 1972 research on the distribution of human genetic diversity, the practice of categorizing humans into “races” or sub-races by label has been losing its footing in biology. Researchers believe that the bulk of human genetic variation exists among individuals, rendering differences between geographical or ethnic populations negligible. There’s no scientific basis for drawing firm lines between “races.”

Regrettably, such knowledge has yet to become mainstream in Chinese society—even among some intellectuals or scholars studying history, ethnicity, and groups. Instead, we frequently encounter the “descendants of the dragon” mindset about “black eyes, black hair, yellow skin.” Tellingly, the song repeats, “A distant eastern land has a great river,” “A distant eastern land has a great river.” The songwriter and singer were physically located in East Asia, yet called it “distant,” revealing how fully they’d internalized Western-centered racial concepts and measured themselves from that vantage point.

Meanwhile, terms like “Mongoloid,” “yellow race,” and “yellow skin” have basically vanished from Western mainstream media and academic publications. That’s not merely an exercise in “political correctness” but primarily an exercise in “intellectual correctness,” reflecting how modern science has reinvented itself by discarding old racial logic.

In this sense, Keevak’s Becoming Yellow holds significant value for the Chinese intellectual community—indeed, it serves as a kind of scientific primer. Only by understanding the historical trajectory of racial thinking can we see how absurd and dangerous “racial” categories truly are.

This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The original text is from：

“Shanghai Review of Books” (《上海书评》)