Slaying the Global Coolie Myth

Abstract

“Contrary to stereotypes of docile and powerless coolies, Chinese in Anglo-American societies were real people who worked hard, adapted, and persisted” (232). So reads the caption to the final photo in Ngai’s magisterial work on global Chinese exclusion. It articulates the central theme of the book: that Chinese migrants had names, families, and communities of their own. In order to “slay the coolie myth,” Ngai examines it as a product of politics and history (xvii). By charting the links and connections between anti-Chinese debates in the United States, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai exposes the people and conditions that produced and upheld it. She skillfully charts how, in all three countries, the question of what to do with Chinese migrants was “fueled by popular racism, theorized by elite thinkers, and weaponized by politicians” (302). In tracing how the Chinese Question began in California and “circumnavigated the Anglo-American world,” Ngai demonstrates how debates over the ability of Chinese to enter and access rights in the world’s three “largest gold-producing regions”— the United States, Australia, and South Africa—were “an integral part” of the “global capitalist economy” that was emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2). The discovery of gold fueled the rise of U.S.-UK dominance; according to one statistic, the United States and Great Britain controlled eighty-eight percent of the world’s gold supply by 1904. Ravaged by the Opium Wars and unequal treaties, China engaged from a position of comparative weakness. Out of a convergence of economic dominance, colonial dispossession, and global racisms, the Chinese diaspora in the Anglo-American world was born. Questions of how to contain and control it arose immediately, and the coolie myth presented an answer.