Word: fu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quite a while before writers find an arena as morally complex or financially rewarding. Before World War II, the spy novelist usually took the low road: the hero was implausibly good, as in John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Evil was unambiguous. Sax Rohmer invested his villain, Fu Manchu, "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." But in the postwar period the public grew weary of caricatures, and only Ian Fleming could profitably drive on the old thoroughfare, with men like Doctor No and Goldfinger in the backseat...
...communists took power in Beijing in 1949, and then, contrary to General Douglas MacArthur's confident predictions, the Chinese People's Liberation Army entered the Korean War against U.N. forces in 1950. The American image of China suddenly flipped back to the stereotype of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril. Washington's constant assumption that Chinese aggression threatened all of Southeast Asia led in time to America's war in Vietnam...