At a time of China's meteoric rise as a world superpower, there is a resurgence of interest in Sinophobia across academic disciplines, as evidenced by several recent publications, ranging from John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats's historical survey, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014) to Christopher Frayling's monograph of cultural studies, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014). In the midst of this boom of Sinophobia studies, Franck Billé’s eponymous book, Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity, comes as a timely intervention and presents a fresh look from a unique perspective.
Unlike most studies that focus on Western hostility toward the Chinese, Billé’s book examines such sentiments among the Mongols, who are traditionally victims or targets of Western racism themselves. Most surprisingly, as Billé’s research shows, Mongols often tend “to identify with...
