Anti-Chinese Campaigns Research Articles

Repressive Policy as a Tool of Resolving the “Chinese Issue” in the USSR in the 1930s

The authors analyze the dynamics of repressions in the 1920-1930s towards Chinese people permanently residing on the territory of the USSR. There is illustrated the interdependence of the naturalization of the Chinese and the punitive policy. It is shown that in the period of 1929-1936 there were several anti-Chinese campaigns in the Far East and Siberia, and there is given an assessment of their consequences. The authors refute the hypothesis of conducting a special “Chinese” operation in the USSR during the Great Terror of 1937-1938. Based on the materials of extrajudicial bodies and reporting statistics of the NKVD, it is concluded that this category of the population was referred to two “national” categories, namely, “Harbin” and “mixed.” It is proved that from February 1938 terror against the Chinese was escalated, but only in September 1938 did an independent “Chinese” category appear in the statistics of the NKVD; in total, during the years of the Great Terror, about 18,000 Chinese underwent “national” punitive actions. Repressions against them were justified by a single logic implemented in relation to foreign nationals, which nevertheless allowed some regions to intensify repressions against certain ethnic groups. It is well documented that the expulsions of Chinese outside the country were widely used; they were organized repressive campaigns. It is concluded that the political repressions and state actions in the field of naturalization led to the reduction in the size of the Chinese diaspora and changed the geography of its settlement.

Chin-Chun-Chan:Popular Sinophobia in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City

AbstractThis article looks at popular responses to the zarzuela Chin-Chun-Chan and the issues that surfaced around its timely subject in early twentieth-century Mexico City. The principal source is the Mexico City satiric penny press for workers, supplemented by somewhat less polemical broadsides, both sold on the streets of the capital. Aimed mostly at working-class Mexicans, these sources offer a glimpse at popular attitudes circulating in a public sphere otherwise dominated by the perspective of educated elites. The article has four sections. First, it briefly reviews social commentary on the democratization of musical theater. Second, it examines Chin-Chun-Chan as a political symbol that crystalized around working-class complaints about the Porfirian regime, especially its alleged disregard for Mexican workers and Mexican national identity. Third, it analyzes the ways in which the phrase “Chin-Chun-Chan” entered popular language as a racial signifier for a range of things, some of which bore little relation to its theatrical origins. Finally, it links popular Sinophobia in late Porfirian Mexico City to the virulent anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico, which played a key role in defining national identity after the 1910 Revolution, and to the “hemispheric orientalism” that has characterized anti-Asian sentiments throughout the Americas.

Women's Suffrage, the Anti-Chinese Campaigns, and Gendered Ideals in Sonora, Mexico, 1917–1925

AbstractSonoran women who organized anti-Chinese auxiliaries in the immediate postrevolutionary years participated in Mexican women's movement into the public sphere from a more constrained role in the private spaces of home and church. While a particular ideal of womanhood imposed on women a duty to defend country, race, and gender—increasingly in the public sphere—the lack of suffrage constrained women's political participation. At least two Sonoran women, María de Jesús Váldez and Emélida Carrillo, imagined the vote for women, a vision in which women's suffrage depended on and was instrumental to racial hierarchy and discrimination against Chinese. As leaders of anti-Chinese committees, chineras, pelonas, voters in newspaper contests, and Independence Day Queens, Sonoran women acted both within and against evolving notions of ideal Mexican womanhood, an ideal that was gendered, racialized, and classist. Women's anti-Chinese activism in Sonora complicates the story of women's enfranchisement in Sonora.

ChineseDragon andEagle ofAnáhuac: TheLocal, National, andInternationalImplications of theEnsenadaAnti-ChineseCampaign of1934

This article reexamines the anti-Chinese movement in Mexico through a discussion of a failed anti-Chinese campaign in Baja California. It argues that Chinese migrants organized in the face of Sinophobic aggression and that the national and international implications of anti-Chinese violence forced diplomats and government offcials to grapple with Chinese demands for equal treatment in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands

Using the testimonio of Manuel Lee Mancilla, a Chinese Mexican man born in Mexicali in 1921, this article explores the experiences of the Chinese in northern Mexico in the early 1900s. It examines the conditions under which Chinese immigrants came to and helped build new borderland communities and simultaneously recovers the day-to-day relationships that were negotiated and nurtured there. Meaningful moments of Chinese Mexican cooperation emerged amid intense conflict and despite the anti-Chinese campaigns of the Mexican Revolution and the infamous Sonoran purges of the 1930s. Challenging static notions of ethnic and racial identities and relations, and analyzing the anti-Chinese movements in less monolithic terms, this article examines not only how Chinese and Mexicans weathered revolutionary violence and xenophobia but also the turbulent forces of U.S. capital and labor exploitation on both sides of the border.

Chico Women: Nemesis of a Rural Town's Anti-Chinese Campaigns, 1876-1888

Chico Women: Nemesis of a Rural Town's Anti-Chinese Campaigns, 1876-1888

The Anti-Chinese Campaigns in Sonora, Mexico

This paper summarizes the history of the Chinese in Sonora, Mexico and describes the anti-Chinese campaigns and propaganda leading to their expulsion in 1931. While Chinese racial and cultural differences became focal symbols for hostility, this inter-ethnic conflict masked an underlying class conflict. Anti-Chinese political propaganda intensified after many Mexicans returned to Mexico from the United States unable to acquire jobs there because of the Great Depression. In Sonora they discovered that the Chinese controlled jobs and wealth that they wanted. Discriminatory laws were passed and in 1931 the Chinese were forced to liquidate their holdings and leave. It is suggested that it is easier to generate class conflict when cultural and racial differences separate the groups involved than where members of the working class identify with the upper-class landowners.

The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898. By Edgar Wickberg. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965. x, 280, Maps, Illustration, Appendices, Bibliography, Index. $7.50.

The development of overseas Chinese communities, economically powerful, socially and culturally resistant to assimilation, and tied in many ways to China, has been a significant phenomenon in the modern history of Asia. During the half century from 1850 to 1898, the Chinese population in the Philippines increased drastically from 5000 to perhaps 100,000, and penetrated every part of the archipelago. Liberalized Spanish immigration laws and their own superior business methods enabled the Chinese to profit from the development of an export crop economy, which involved the exchange of Philippine raw products for foreign manufactured goods, and caused a shift in the emphasis of Chinese enterprise - from small-scale retailing to a virtual monopoly of raw material collection and import distribution. Their increased economic power gave impetus to an anti-Chinese campaign in the latter years of the century, and the Philippine Chinese, for the first time, developed community institutions to resist assimilation and turned to China for aid. The purpose of this study is to describe the position of the Chinese in the Philippines as of 1850 and to determine how it was affected by the ensuing economic and social changes of the next four decades.