The Unparalleled Invasion Flashcards
by Jack London — tap or click to flip
Flashcard Review
Flashcards: The Unparalleled Invasion
What event does the narrator identify as the beginning of China's awakening?
Japan's victory over Russia in the Japanese-Russian War of 1904, which inspired China to modernize.
How does Japan modernize China after 1904?
Japanese agents reorganize China's army, build factories and railroads, start newspapers, and replace reactionary scholars with progressive officials.
What happens when China turns against Japan in 1922?
China expels Japan's advisors, defeats Japan in a seven-month war, seizes Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa, and bankrupts Japan permanently.
What alarming statistic does Burchaldter reveal in 1970?
China's population has reached 500 million -- more than all white-skinned people combined -- and is growing by millions each year.
What happens to France's punitive expedition of 250,000 soldiers?
It marches into China's interior and vanishes completely -- the communication line is cut on the second day and no survivor returns.
What is Jacobus Laningdale's secret plan to defeat China?
Dropping glass tubes filled with laboratory-cultured plague germs from airships over all Chinese cities, towns, and villages.
What do the Western nations do after the biological attack devastates China?
They spend five years sanitizing the land, kill all survivors they find, then colonize China with a mixed international population beginning in 1982.
What is the Convention of Copenhagen in 1987, and what does it pledge?
A gathering where all nations solemnly promise never to use laboratory biological warfare against each other again -- notably only after China has already been destroyed.
Who is Jacobus Laningdale, and what role does he play?
An obscure scientist at New York City's Health Office who devises the biological warfare plan that exterminates China's population.
Who is Li Tang Fwung, and what is his significance?
The power behind the Dragon Throne who boldly defies the Western nations at the Convention of 1975, but dies in the second week of the plague attack.
What role does Burchaldter play in the story?
He is the statistician who raises the alarm about China's population, calculating that the Chinese outnumber all white-skinned people combined.
How is China personified throughout the narrative?
As a sleeping giant that awakens, laughs at Western threats, smiles confidently at military preparations, and is described with organic metaphors like a glacier or flood.
Why does the narrator claim Western nations failed to awaken China before Japan did?
Because there was no common psychological speech between Western and Chinese minds -- their thought-processes were radically dissimilar and mutually incomprehensible.
How does the story portray the theme of racism and xenophobia?
Through its casual dehumanization of the Chinese, treating a billion people as a faceless biological threat to be exterminated rather than individuals with inherent worth.
What does the story reveal about Western attitudes toward population and race?
It frames non-white population growth as an existential threat requiring elimination, reflecting the 'Yellow Peril' anxieties prevalent in London's era.
How does the story explore the ethics of science and warfare?
Laningdale's scientific genius is used to create weapons of mass extermination, and the narrator presents this genocide as a rational, even heroic, solution without moral reflection.
What is ironic about the Convention of Copenhagen's pledge against biological warfare?
The nations ban biological weapons only after using them to annihilate a billion people, and the pledge applies only to 'one another' -- not to future non-Western targets.
What narrative technique does London use to tell this story?
A pseudo-academic frame narrative, presented as an excerpt from a future history textbook ('Walt Mervin's Certain Essays in History'), lending the genocide a chillingly detached, authoritative tone.
How does dramatic irony function in the glass tube scene in Peking?
The crowd laughs at the harmless-seeming tubes, not understanding they contain plague germs -- the reader knows these 'harmless missiles' will kill millions within weeks.
What is the effect of the narrator's matter-of-fact tone when describing the genocide?
It mirrors the dehumanizing mindset that makes such atrocities possible, treating mass death as a logistical achievement rather than a moral catastrophe.
What does the phrase 'the unparalleled invasion' refer to?
Not a traditional military invasion, but an unprecedented biological attack -- the dropping of cultured plague germs on China from airships, a new form of warfare.
What does 'fecundity' mean in the context of 'the fecundity of her loins'?
Extreme fertility and reproductive capacity -- the narrator uses it to frame China's high birth rate as the true threat to Western civilization.
What does 'charnel-house' mean when China is called a 'vast and festering charnel-house'?
A vault or building where corpses or bones are stored -- it describes China as a massive tomb after the plagues have killed most of the population.
What is significant about Li Tang Fwung's speech at the Convention of 1975?
He confidently declares China's population is its invincible weapon, saying even five million invaders would be 'a mere nothing, a meagre morsel' -- not foreseeing that the West would bypass military invasion entirely.
What does the closing line about 'the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output' reveal?
The narrator celebrates the civilization built on colonized Chinese land after genocide, presenting the erasure of a billion people as a foundation for progress.
What is the significance of the line 'All survivors were put to death wherever found'?
It reveals that the campaign was not just biological warfare but deliberate total extermination -- even those who survived the plagues were systematically killed by the invading forces.