Last week's column about the long-lasting image of the racist excesses of the fictional character Dr Fu Manchu - now reincarnated in the guise of The Mandarin in the warped Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man 3 - struck a chord with regular readers. Most of their responses about the shameful "Yellow Peril" figure he caricatures expressed bewilderment and disappointment that in this day and age movie audiences, especially those in the United States, should be entertained by the outrageous bigotry of such a character.

"Yellow Peril" and other insulting terms like "Chinaman" perpetuate shameful old hatreds that have no place in modern international society. Symbolically, nothing highlights a greater East-West cultural clash than the mythical dragon. Whereas in China, it is worshipped as a creature of nobility, imperial power and positive energy; in the West, this fire-breathing dragon epitomizes evil that no self-respecting knight in shining armor would hesitate to slay to save either a kingdom or a damsel in distress. Such symbolism is completely absurd and can only incite racism, at worst, and at best create needless cultural misunderstanding.

Indeed the world is a vastly different place from a century or so ago when the menacing Fu Manchu made his first appearance in a novel. Since then there have been two World Wars (in both of which China supported the West's cause), while, 68 years ago the nations of the world came together to create the United Nations in the hope that differences between countries could be settled amicably and all would follow the path of peace. The UN's most powerful body is its Security Council, on which the People's Republic of China holds a permanent seat alongside Russia, the US, Britain and France.

A century ago virtually all of the Orient was under the West's brutal boot, but after Japan's surrender in 1945 the race-conscious colonialists reluctantly disgorged their ill-gotten possessions, and since then Asia's ascent to its rightful place on the world's stage has been compelling.

Those downtrodden Asian countries of yesteryear are today the leading manufacturers of many of the goods that now give Western nations such a high standard of living. These range from cars, TV sets, sound systems, kitchenware and clothing to computers, cell phones and other hi-tech communications gear.

American householders joke that: "My TV and computer are from China, my cell phone's from Korea, my car is from Japan but otherwise I'm a true-blue American." All over the world hundreds of millions of other happy customers cheerfully admit that this situation applies to them too. Furthermore, it is the cheaper wages paid to Asian workers, combined with the longer hours they work, that enables these products to be sold far more cheaply than would be the case with products manufactured by those countries' own factories.

But when it comes to racial profiling, the world has been done a disservice by the present spread of communication tools that take only moments to disseminate a never-ending flow of chit-chat, much of it harmless but some of it constantly stirring old biases. For example, an episode of The Simpsons described a Frenchman as a "cheese-eating surrender monkey" - a nasty allusion to French tastes combined with the fact that the French surrendered to Germany in 1940. Within hours this atrocious slur went viral on social media.

Then there are the stand-up comics who present cruelly funny skits based on, say, the characteristics of the Indian waiter at a curry restaurant, a foot-faulted Japanese tennis player at Wimbledon, or a thirsty Australian stockman who finds the pub's got no beer.

Meanwhile, on the Internet, it takes just a mouse click to find a long list of racial slurs all the way from A to Z.

Not surprisingly the Net's section on Jewish slurs carries an important lesson for us all. It was partly through a build-up in snide asides about Jewish people that Adolf Hitler's ultra-racist propaganda head Joseph Goebbels stoked widespread hatred of the Jews from the mid-1930s, "softening up" the public mood across Germany before the concentration camps began proliferating. Tellingly, Goebbels once boasted back in those pre-TV years: "Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."

The result of this racial profiling was the Holocaust, in which it is estimated that 6 million Jewish men, women and children were exterminated for no other reason than their race.

The US should also hang its head in shame over the Chinese Exclusion Act that was passed by Congress in 1882 in a panic of grave concern over the "Yellow Peril" posed by Chinese would-be migrants. It was not repealed until Dec 17, 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt was leaned on by the Chinese leadership to erase this blot on the national conscience.

Isn't it time that we clamped down on all this bigotry by racist zealots and replaced their spiteful fantasies with common sense spurred on by a desire for international peace?

The author is vice-chairman and secretary general of the China Energy Fund Committee, a Chinese think tank on energy and China-related issues.

(HK Edition 05/22/2013 page1)