the gold mines of the Witwatersrand Basin the most productive in the world. New Zealand In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, populist Prime Minister Richard Seddon compared the Chinese people to monkeys, and so used the Yellow Peril to promote racialist politics in New Zealand. In 1879, in his first political speech, Seddon said that New Zealand did not wish her shores "deluged with Asiatic Tartars. I would sooner address white men than these Chinese. You can't talk to them, you can't reason with them. All you can get from them is 'No savvy'". Moreover, in 1905, in the city of Wellington, the white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered Joe Kum Yung, an old Chinese man, in protest against Asian immigration to New Zealand. Laws promulgated to limit Chinese immigration included a heavy poll tax, introduced in 1881 and lowered in 1937, after Imperial Japan's invasion and occupation of China. In 1944, the poll tax was abolished, and in 2002 the New Zealand government formally apologized to the Chinese populace of New Zealand. Sexual fears Background The core of Yellow Peril ideology is the White man's fear of seduction by the Oriental nonwhite Other; either the sexual voracity of the Dragon Lady and the Lotus Blossom stereotypes, or the sexual voracity of the Seducer. Racist revulsion towards miscegenation — interracial sexual intercourse — by the fear of mixed-race children as a physical, cultural, and existential threat to Whiteness proper. In Queer theory, the term Oriental connotes contradictory sexual associations according to the nationality. A person can be perceived as Japanese and kinky, or as Filipino and available. Sometimes, Oriental could be sexless. The seducer The seductive Asian man (wealthy and cultured) was the common White male fear of the Asian sexual "other." The Yellow Peril sexual threat was realized by way of successful sexual competition, usually seduction or rape, which rendered the woman a sexual untouchable. (see: 55 Days at Peking, 1963) In Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1994) the critic Gary Hoppenstand identified interracial sexual-intercourse as a threat to whiteness: In The Cheat (1915), Hishuru Tori (Sessue Hayakawa) is a sadistic Japanese sexual predator interested in Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward), an American housewife. Although superficially Westernized, Tori's sexual sadism reflects his true identity as an Asian. In being "brutal and cultivated, wealthy and base, cultured and barbaric, Tori embodies