Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States

Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States has existed since the late 18th century. It has started from 1864, when the Chinese built the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1882, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was added. Its origins have been traced to the American merchants, missionaries, and diplomats who sent home from China "relentlessly negative" reports of the people they encountered there.[1] These attitudes were transmitted to Americans who never left North America, triggering talk of the Yellow Peril, and continued through the Cold War during McCarthyism. Modern anti-Chinese sentiment is the result of China's rise as a major world power. Anti-Chinese sentiment or sinophobia is a broad opposition or hostility to the people, policies, culture, or politics of China.

A caricature of a Chinese worker wearing a queue an 1899 editorial cartoon titled "The Yellow Terror In All His Glory"
A defiant Columbia in an 1871 Thomas Nast cartoon, shown protecting a defenseless Chinese man from an angry Irish lynch mob that has just burned down an orphanage. The billboard behind is full of inflammatory anti-Chinese broadsheets.

Early Chinese immigration to the United States

Starting with the California Gold Rush in the late 19th century, the United States—particularly the West Coast states—imported large numbers of Chinese migrant laborers. Early Chinese immigrant worked as gold miners, and later on subsequent large labor projects, such as the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad. The decline of the Qing Dynasty in China caused many Chinese to emigrate overseas in search of a more stable life, and this coincided with the rapid growth of American industry. The Chinese were considered by employers as "reliable" workers who would continue working, without complaint, even under destitute conditions.[2]

Chinese migrant workers encountered considerable prejudice in the United States, especially by the people who occupied the lower layers in white society, because Chinese "coolies" were used as a scapegoat for depressed wage levels by politicians and labor leaders.[3] Cases of physical assaults on Chinese include the Chinese massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles and the murder of Vincent Chin. The 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel in New York, of which a Chinese person was suspected, was blamed on the Chinese in general and led to physical violence. "The murder of Elsie Sigel immediately grabbed the front pages of newspapers, which portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women. This murder led to a surge in the harassment of Chinese in communities across the United States."[4]

The emerging American trade unions, under such leaders as Samuel Gompers, also took an outspoken anti-Chinese position,[5] regarding Chinese laborers as competitors to white laborers. Only with the emergence of the international trade union Industrial Workers of the World did trade unionists start to accept Chinese workers as part of the American working-class.[6]

During this period, the phrase "yellow peril" was popularized in the U.S. by newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst.[7] It was also the title of a popular book by an influential U.S. religious figure, G. G. Rupert, who published The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident in 1911. Based on the phrase "the kings from the East" in the Christian scriptural verse Revelation 16:12,[8] Rupert, who believed in the doctrine of British Israelism, claimed that China, India, Japan and Korea were attacking England and the U.S., but that Jesus Christ would stop them.[9] In his 1982 book The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American fiction, 1850-1940, William F. Wu states that "Pulp magazines in the 30s had a lot of yellow peril characters loosely based on Fu Manchu... Most were of Chinese descent, but because of the geopolitics at the time, a growing number of people were seeing Japan as a threat, too."[10]

This map was published in 1885 as part of an official report of a Special Committee established by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors "on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter".[11]

In the 1870s and 1880s various legal discriminatory measures were taken against the Chinese. These laws, in particular the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were aimed at restricting further immigration from China,[12] although the laws were later repealed by the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943. Another key piece of legislation was the Naturalization Act of 1870, which extended citizenship rights to African Americans but barred Chinese from naturalization on the grounds that they and other Asians could not be assimilated into American society. Unable to become citizens, Chinese immigrants were prohibited from voting and serving on juries, and dozens of states passed alien land laws that prohibited non-citizens from purchasing real estate, thus preventing them from establishing permanent homes and businesses. The idea of an "unassimilable" race became a common argument in the exclusionary movement against Chinese Americans. In particular, even in his lone dissent against Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), then-Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote of the Chinese as: "a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race."[13]

In the USA xenophobic fears against the alleged "Yellow Peril" led to the implementation of the Page Act of 1875, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, expanded ten years later by the Geary Act. The Immigration Act of 1917 then created an "Asian Barred Zone" under nativist influence.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in U.S. history. The Act excluded Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining" from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. Many Chinese were relentlessly beaten just because of their race.[14][15] The few Chinese non-laborers who wished to immigrate had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate, which tended to be difficult to prove.[15]

The 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and then the Immigration Act of 1924, restricted immigration according to national origins. While the Emergency Quota Act used the census of 1910, xenophobic fears in the WASP community lead to the adoption of the 1890 census, more favorable to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population, for the uses of the Immigration Act of 1924, which responded to rising immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.

One of the goal of this National Origins Formula, established in 1929, was explicitly to keep the status quo distribution of ethnicity, by allocating quotas in proportion to the actual population. The idea was that immigration would not be allowed to change the "national character". Total annual immigration was capped at 150,000. Asians were excluded but residents of nations in the Americas were not restricted, thus making official the racial discrimination in immigration laws. This system was repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Chinese Labours and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

According to statistics, between 1820 and 1840, only 11 Chinese people emigrated to the United States. However, many Chinese were living in distress due to the end of the Qing Dynasty. The United States offered a more stable life, thanks to the gold rush in California, the construction of railways, and the resulting large demand for labor. Beginning in 1848, many Chinese chose to immigrate to the US.

In order to recruit more laborers, the United States and China signed the Burlingame Treaty in 1868.[16] The Burlingame Treaty provided several rights, including that Chinese people can freely enter and leave the United States; the right of abode in the United States; and the United States most-favored treatment of Chinese nationals in the United States. The Treaty stimulated immigration for the 20 years between 1853 to 1873, and resulted in the immigration of nearly 105,000 Chinese to the United States by 1880.[17]

1882 was an election year in California. In order to secure more votes, California politicians adopted a staunch anti-China stance. In Congress, California Republican Senator John Miller spoke at length in support of a bill to prohibit further Chinese immigrants, substantially the same as one from the prior session of Congress that had been vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Senator Miller submitted a motion to ban the immigration Chinese laborers for 20 years, citing the passage of the 1879 anti-Chinese referendums in California and Nevada by huge margins as proof of popular support.[18] The motion was discussed in the Senate over the next eight days. All the Senators from western states and most of the southern Democratic Party supported Miller's proposal, strenuously objected to the eastern states senator. After intense debate, the motion eventually passed the Senate by a vote of 29 of 15; it would go on to pass in the House of Representatives on March 23, by 167 votes to 66 votes (55 abstentions).[17]

President Chester A. Arthur vetoed the bill on April 4, 1882, as it violated the provisions of the Angell Treaty, which restricted but did not ban immigration from China. Congress was unable to overturn the veto, and passed a version of the bill that banned immigration for ten years in lieu of the original twenty-year ban. On May 6, 1882, Miller's proposal was signed by President Arthur, and became the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.[17]

Amendments introduced during the debate over the bill prohibited the naturalization of Chinese immigrants.[17][19] After the initial ten-year ban ended, Chinese Exclusion was extended in 1892 by the Geary Act and then made permanent in 1902.[19] California Governor John McDougal in 1851 praised the Chinese as "the most valuable immigrants" to California.[20]

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 shifted Americans' fears of the Yellow Peril from China to Japan.[21]

Cold War

Anti-Chinese sentiment during the Cold War was largely the result of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, which coincided with increased popular fear of communist espionage because of the Chinese Civil War and China's involvement in the Korean War.[22] During the era, suspected Communists were imprisoned in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[22] Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees, had a real past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. However, for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous.[23] Among these victims were Chinese Americans, who were suspected of being affiliated with the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.

Deportation of Qian Xuesen

The most notable example is that of the top Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen. Allegations were made that he was a communist, and his security clearance was revoked in June 1950.[24] The Federal Bureau of Investigation located an American Communist Party document from 1938 with his name on it, and used it as justification for the revocation. Without his clearance, Qian found himself unable to pursue his career, and within two weeks, he announced plans to return to mainland China, which had come under the government of Communist leader Mao Zedong. The Undersecretary of the Navy at the time, Dan A. Kimball, tried to keep Qian in the US:

It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.[25]

Qian would spend the next five years under house arrest, which included constant surveillance with the permission to teach without any research (classified) duties.[24] Caltech appointed attorney Grant Cooper to defend Qian. In 1955, the United States deported him to China in exchange for five American pilots captured during the Korean War. Later, he became the father of the modern Chinese space program.[26][27][28]

21st century

Modern anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States may originate from American fears of China's role as a rising power. Perceptions of China's rise have been so widespread that 'rise of China' has been named the top news story of the 21st century by the Global Language Monitor, as measured by number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet and blogosphere, and in Social Media.[29]

In the United States 2010 elections, a significant number[30] of negative advertisements from both major political parties focused on a candidates' alleged support for free trade with China. Some of the stock images that accompanied ominous voiceovers about China were actually of Chinatown, San Francisco.[31] In particular, an advertisement called "Chinese Professor", which portrays a 2030 conquest of the West by China, used local Asian American extras to play Chinese, but the actors were not informed of the nature of the shoot.[32] Columnist Jeff Yang said that in the campaign there was a "blurry line between Chinese and Chinese-Americans."[31] Larry McCarthy, the producer of "Chinese Professor," defended his work by saying that "this ad is about America, it's not about China."[33] Other editorials commenting on the video have called the video not anti-Chinese.[30][33][34]

Chinese exclusion policy of NASA

As part of the Chinese exclusion policy of NASA, many American space researchers were prohibited from working with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state enterprise or entity.[35] In April 2011, the 112th United States Congress banned NASA from using its funds to host Chinese visitors at NASA facilities.[36] Earlier in 2010, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) had urged President Barack Obama not to allow further contact between NASA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA).[37][38]

Donald Trump 2016 campaign

Donald Trump took a number of anti-Chinese stances during the 2016 campaign such as saying that China is raping the US with free trade.

In November 2015, Trump promised to designate China as a currency manipulator on his first day in office.[39] He pledged "swift, robust and unequivocal" action against Chinese piracy, counterfeit American goods, and the theft of American trade secrets and intellectual property. He also condemned China's "illegal export subsidies and lax labor and environmental standards."[39]

In January 2016, Trump proposed a 45% tariff on Chinese exports to the United States to give "American workers a level playing field."[40][41] When asked about potential Chinese retaliation to the implementation of tariffs, such as sales of US bonds, Trump judged such a scenario to be unlikely: "They won't crash our currency. They will crash their economy. That's what they are going to do if they start playing that."[42] In a May 2016 speech, Trump responded to concerns regarding a potential trade war with China: "We're losing $500 billion in trade with China. Who the hell cares if there's a trade war?"[43]

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Gyory, Andrew (1998). Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 10.
  2. ↑ Norton, Henry K. (1924). The Story of California From the Earliest Days to the Present. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. pp. 283–296.
  3. ↑ See, e.g., http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5046/%7C
  4. ↑ Ling, Huping (2004). Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community. Temple University Press. p. 68. The murder of Elsie Sigel immediately grabbed the front pages of newspapers, which portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women. This murder led to a surge in the harassment of Chinese in communities across the United States.
  5. ↑ Gompers, Samuel; Gustadt, Herman (1902). Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?. American Federation of Labor.
  6. ↑ Lai, Him Mark; Hsu, Madeline Y. (2010). Chinese American Transnational Politics. University of Illinois Press. pp. 53–54.
  7. ↑ "Foreign News: Again, Yellow Peril". Time. 1933-09-11.
  8. ↑ "Revelation 16:12 (New King James Version)". BibleGateway.com. Archived from the original on 18 November 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
  9. ↑ "NYU's "Archivist of the Yellow Peril" Exhibit". Boas Blog. 2006-08-19. Archived from the original on 13 October 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-05.
  10. ↑ LISA KATAYAMA. "The Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu, and the Ethnic Future". io9.
  11. ↑ Farwell, Willard B. (1885). The Chinese at home and abroad: together with the Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco on the Condition of the Chinese quarter of that city. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co. Retrieved 16 June 2018.
  12. ↑ "An Evidentiary Timeline on the History of Sacramento's Chinatown: 1882 - American Sinophobia, The Chinese Exclusion Act and "The Driving Out"". Friends of the Yee Fow Museum, Sacramento, California. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  13. ↑ Chin, Gabriel J. "Harlan, Chinese and Chinese Americans". University of Dayton Law School.
  14. ↑ "Exclusion". Library of Congress. 2003-09-01. Archived from the original on August 10, 2009. Retrieved 2010-01-25.
  15. 1 2 usnews.com: The People's Vote: Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) Archived March 28, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  16. ↑ Schrecker, John (March 2010). ""For the Equality of Men - For the Equality of Nations": Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States, 1868". Journal of American-East Asian Relations. 17 (1): 9–34. doi:10.1163/187656110X523717. ISSN 1058-3947.  Alternate URL
  17. 1 2 3 4 Chin, Philip (January 2013). "The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882". Chinese American Forum. 28 (3): 8–13.  Direct URLs: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
  18. ↑ "Senator Miller's Great Anti-Chinese Speech". Daily Alta California. 1 March 1882. Retrieved 19 June 2018.
  19. 1 2 "Primary Documents in American History: Chinese Exclusion Act". The Library of Congress. Retrieved 19 June 2018.
  20. ↑ Chen, An (2012). "On the Source, Essence of "Yellow Peril" Doctrine and Its Latest Hegemony "Variant" – the "China Threat" Doctrine: From the Perspective of Historical Mainstream of Sino-Foreign Economic Interactions and Their Inherent Jurisprudential Principles" (PDF). The Journal of World Investment & Trade. 13: 1–58.
  21. ↑ Lyman, Stanford M. (Summer 2000). "The "Yellow Peril" Mystique: Origins and Vicissitudes of a Racist Discourse". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Springer. 13 (4): 699. ISSN 1573-3416. JSTOR 20020056. (Subscription required (help)).
  22. 1 2 Schrecker, Ellen (1998). Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown. p. xiii. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.
  23. ↑ Schrecker, Ellen (1998). Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown. p. 4. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.
  24. 1 2 "Tsien Hsue-Shen Dies". November 2, 2009. Archived from the original on September 28, 2011. Retrieved October 2, 2011.
  25. ↑ Perrett, B. (January 7, 2008), Sea Change, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Vol. 168, No. 1, p.57-61.
  26. ↑ https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-02-06/us-trained-scientist-was-deported-then-became-father-chinese-rocketry
  27. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/asia/04qian.html
  28. ↑ http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-qian-xuesen1-2009nov01-story.html
  29. ↑ "21世纪新闻排行中国崛起居首位" (in Chinese).
  30. 1 2 Chi, Frank (2010-11-08). "In campaign ads, China is fair game; Chinese-Americans are not". The Boston Globe.
  31. 1 2 Lyden, Jacki (2010-10-27). "Critics Say Political Ads Hint Of Xenophobia". NPR. Archived from the original on 26 November 2010. Retrieved 2010-12-05.
  32. ↑ Yang, Jeff (2010-10-27). "Politicians Play The China Card". Tell Me More. NPR. Archived from the original on 25 November 2010. Retrieved 2010-12-05.
  33. 1 2 Smith, Ben (2010-10-22). "Behind The Chinese Professor".
  34. ↑ Fallows, James (2010-10-21). "The Phenomenal Chinese Professor Ad".
  35. ↑ Ian Sample. "US scientists boycott Nasa conference over China ban". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  36. ↑ Seitz, Virginia (11 September 2011), "Memorandum Opinion for the General Counsel, Office of Science and Technology Policy" (PDF), Office of Legal Counsel, 35, retrieved 23 May 2012
  37. ↑ John Culberson. "Bolden to Beijing?". United States House of Representatives. Archived from the original on 15 September 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  38. ↑ "NASA chief to visit China". AFP. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  39. 1 2 Doug Palmer & Ben Schreckinger, Trump's trade views vows to declare China a currency manipulator on Day One, Politico (November 10, 2015).
  40. ↑ Maggie Haberman, Donald Trump Says He Favors Big Tariffs on Chinese Exports, The New York Times (January 7, 2016).
  41. ↑ Binyamin Appelaum, On Trade, Donald Trump Breaks With 200 Years of Economic Orthodoxy, The New York Times (March 10, 2016).
  42. ↑ "Donald Trump on the trade deficit with China". Fox News. February 11, 2016. Retrieved May 24, 2016.
  43. ↑ "Trump: 'Who the hell cares if there's a trade war?'". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 21, 2016.

See also

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