West ‘must confront racial discomfort’ over China’s power

Trade disputes between China and the United States have revealed that western nations distrust and fear a “non-Caucasian” global economic power, a leading Singapore academic has said.

Kishore Mahbubani, a public policy professor at the National University of Singapore, says the US needs to question its reaction to China’s emergence as one of the world’s most powerful economies.

“The time has come for an honest discussion of the ‘yellow peril’ dimension in US-China relations,” he writes in an editorial published by the Australian National University in its East Asia Forum blog.