Review: The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai

Abstract

“The myriad nations all trade with each other; So how can the Chinese be refused?” (p. 271). Huang Zunxian, the Qing consul general at San Francisco from 1882 through 1885, questioned and bemoaned the unequal commercial and immigration relationships between China and the emergent capitalist Anglo-American world. It is the underlying forces that Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics traces in the domain of what she calls “race and money” (p. 5), where two contradictory tendencies of immigration restriction and capitalist expansion were inextricably linked. In seeking to understand how such a radical idea as Chinese exclusion could turn into widely accepted practices sanctioned by national legislation in the United States and the British settler colonies, Ngai’s book opens up new vistas for transnational histories.Ngai’s use of transnationalism and diaspora as frameworks of analysis brings into focus distinct strands of arguments for Chinese exclusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book sets out to slay the myth in California that portrayed Chinese gold miners as unfree, slave-like coolies. Ngai contends that Chinese prospectors, as free as miners from elsewhere, conducted diverse mining practices either through partnership and cooperative structures or as wage workers. In Australia, by contrast, concerns about an overrun by heathen Chinese immigrants, due to close proximity to China, became a key motivating factor in Victoria’s anti-Chinese activism. Ngai argues cogently that their racial fear lay in “precisely the fact that Chinese were free migrants” (p. 115), an idea opposite to anticoolieism. Xenophobia and anticoolieism worked in tandem with white labor’s anxiety in the United States, Australia, and South Africa to propel analogous efforts for immigration restrictions.In Ngai’s account, colonial and American anti-Chinese resistance on economic, racial, and moral grounds necessarily entangled with domestic and international politics, underscoring the conflicting interests of imperial and colonial governments as well as the unbalanced relationships between intersecting empires. The Afghan crisis of 1888, which involved Chinese passengers on a Hong Kong–based trading ship, highlights the political dynamics where white Australians’ anxiety over a growing Chinese population collided with London’s trade and political concerns in Asia. It took years before Australian colonial officials could secure the authority to restrict Chinese immigration through local legislation. Alarmed by anti-Chinese discrimination abroad, the decaying Qing Empire struggled to seek diplomatic solutions. Ngai presents two episodes that are less-known than the Burlingame Treaty revisions: an on-site investigation of Chinese immigrants’ conditions in Australia ordered by the Zongli Yamen in 1887 and the intense negotiations by the Chinese ambassador in London with British officials in 1903–1904 to protect the basic rights of incoming Chinese workers in Transvaal, South Africa. Nevertheless, Qing’s downfall could afford little protection for Chinese overseas.To infuse into the book a sense of bitterness at the mistreatment of Chinese overseas and frustration toward Qing’s diplomatic ineptitude, Ngai deftly picks lines from Huang Zunxian’s mournful poem “Expulsion of the Immigrants” as sectional epigraphs. Thirteen chapters in four sections constitute this book, with seven devoted to the comparison of Chinese immigrants in California and Victoria, four to the episode of Chinese indentured mining laborers in Witwatersrand, South Africa, and two toward analyzing the consolidation of Chinese exclusion. The narrative could flow more evenly if Chapter 3 about Chinese miners’ pidgin English, though interesting in itself, were integrated elsewhere.