The Worldwide Effort to Bar Chinese Immigration
Credit...California Historical Society
THE CHINESE QUESTION
The Gold Rushes and Global Politics
By Mae Ngai
Book Review by
The New York Times Review of Books, Aug. 24, 2021
In his classic treatise on American pauperdom, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), Jacob A. Riis, a Danish carpenter turned journalist and photographer, opines, “The Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population,” and “they serve no useful purpose here.” Ascribing his own failure in penetrating the inner soul of New York’s Chinatown to proverbial Oriental inscrutability, Riis asserts that each Chinese in America, unlike European immigrants, is “a homeless stranger among us.”
In hindsight, these racist statements from a progressive social reformer may sound shocking, but as Mae Ngai shows in her meticulously researched book, “The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics,” views like Riis’s actually represented the prevailing sentiment toward Chinese, not just in the United States but throughout the Anglophone world in the 19th century. Tracking the migration of Chinese to California, Australia and South Africa, Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, locates the beginnings of Chinese communities in those far-flung gold-producing regions, where they faced marginalization, violence and exclusion from self-described “white men’s countries.”
The so-called Chinese Question (at the time thorny social issues were called questions: the Negro Question, the Jewish Question, the Woman Question and so on) boiled down to this: Are the Chinese a racial threat to white, Anglo-American countries, and should Chinese be barred from them?
Excavating rich deposits of the past, Ngai has certainly made striking discoveries. She ties the Chinese Question to a pivotal period in the 19th century that saw the ascendence of British and American financial power spurred by gold production, colonial dispossession and capitalist exploitation. Born out of an alchemy of race and money, the history of the Chinese communities in the West, Ngai cogently argues, were not extraneous to the emergent global capitalist economy but an integral part of it.
John Bigler riding the issue of Chinese exclusion successfully to the first California governor’s office in 1852 to the role that the Chinese Question played in the landmark 1906 victory by the Liberal Party in Britain, not to mention modern politicians who routinely bash China as a vote-getting ploy, Ngai’s narrative recounts events that sound all too familiar today. The Chinese became mere pawns in a cynical political game.
A Rise in Anti-Asian Attacks
A torrent of hate and violence against people of Asian descent around the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
- Background: Community leaders say the bigotry was fueled by President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language like “Chinese virus” to refer to the coronavirus.
- Data: The New York Times, using media reports from across the country to capture a sense of the rising tide of anti-Asian bias, found more than 110 episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of race-based hate.
- Underreported Hate Crimes: The tally may be only a sliver of the violence and harassment given the general undercounting of hate crimes, but the broad survey captures the episodes of violence across the country that grew in number amid Mr. Trump's comments.
- In New York: A wave of xenophobia and violence has been compounded by the economic fallout of the pandemic, which has dealt a severe blow to New York’s Asian-American communities. Many community leaders say racist assaults are being overlooked by the authorities.
- What Happened in Atlanta: Eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in shootings at massage parlors in Atlanta on March 16. A Georgia prosecutor said that the Atlanta-area spa shootings were hate crimes, and that she would pursue the death penalty against the suspect, who has been charged with murder.
Ngai not only shows that anticoolieism was foundational to Western identities of nation and empire, she also demonstrates the many ways that the Chinese communities were themselves agents of change, not slavish coolies or passive victims of abuse and discrimination. Facing violence, harassment and institutionalized inequality, they looked within their own communities — forming huiguans (associations) and tongs (secret societies) when denied justice in a courtroom, building networks to the homeland when marginalized by mainstream society, seeking alternative means of influencing local politics when denied citizenship and the right to vote. Woven into these poignant and stirring stories of communal building are Ngai’s colorful profiles of little-known individuals like Yuan Sheng, Lowe Kong Meng and Xie Zixiu — “representative men” who rose to wealth and power from their humble origins in the mining camps. She describes as well accused murderers and petty criminals who tried to defend themselves in pidgin English but did not stand “a Chinaman’s chance.”
To be sure, the narrative pace is somewhat uneven and Ngai is not always successful in keeping a balance between her dry data and her storytelling. Still, her book is a deep historical study, and a timely re-examination of the persistent Chinese Question in America and elsewhere.
