Chinese Exclusion Research Articles

The Chinese Freedom Schools: Historicizing and intersecting Lau with Brown

AbstractThe Chinese of Chinatown, San Francisco largely opposed the city-wide racial integration plan that would bus their children across the city beginning in 1971. Claiming that it was a violation of their language rights, a need for cultural preservation and continued autonomy from the San Francisco that had long excluded them, Chinatown instituted its own school system called the Chinese Freedom Schools. With this boycott of the public schools, the Chinese were constituted as oppositional to the aims of racial integration, searing constructions of them as being pro-White, anti-Black, and separatist. Yet, such a simplistic and binary argument omits the long history of exclusion including employment, schooling, housing, and voting discrimination as evidenced by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1965), the only law to exclude a specifically named ethnolinguistic group. To historicize and understand the Chinese Freedom Schools, I analyze this phenomenon using a racial matrix where Asians have long occupied a liminal, in-between space as perpetually foreign, unassimilable, and as a suspect class. Drawing from the theories and concepts of LangCrit, raciolinguistic ideologies and Asian American studies, I examine how agents, institutions, the press, and policies imposed, assumed, or negotiated specific identities of the Chinese during the development, implementation, and dissolution of the Chinese Freedom Schools. I analyze how the Chinese were constructed as uncooperative, creating a competitive cleavage among Asians and Blacks, while dismissing the centrality of White families who largely moved out of the system, avoiding critique. Implications for language-in-education policy are proposed for Lau’s 50th anniversary.

The Politics of the Excluded: The Political Thought of Wong Chin Foo

This article examines the concepts of citizenship and exclusion in the writings of the nineteenth-century Chinese American figure Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898) and situates his works within the context of Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Against a backdrop of intensifying racial violence and legal and social exclusion, Wong repudiated racial stereotypes that were used to justify Chinese exclusion. He argued that the Chinese were culturally and morally distinctive but assimilable to American society. Central to his argumentative strategy was his critical reappropriation of the idea of the Chinese as unassimilable “heathens.” However, his conception of citizenship as conditional on “character and fitness” exposed the exclusionary nature of American citizenship and reinscribed its boundaries along racial and class lines. In treating Wong as a political thinker in his own right, this essay makes three contributions. First, it offers a historical elucidation of what Gordon Chang has called “the politics of the excluded.” Wong’s works show how central categories of politics and political thinking—like citizenship—are reconfigured by the very people those categories were designed to exclude. Second, this essay offers an alternative interpretive framework for reading texts within Asian American political thought and intellectual history. Finally, this essay forms a theoretical intervention by showing how Wong discloses the peculiarities of Asian American positionality in debates about racial citizenship in America.

Institutional discrimination and assimilation: Evidence from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked a pivotal moment in U.S. immigration policy, effectively prohibiting Chinese immigration while institutionalizing discrimination against Asians within American society. This study investigates the repercussions of such institutional discrimination on the assimilation process of Asian immigrants, leveraging the timing of the enactment of the Act and the regional variation in the intensity of discrimination. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that discrimination posed significant obstacles to the labor market integration of Asian immigrants during the Exclusion Era (1882–1943), and Asian immigrants responded to discriminatory practices by investing in human capital, enhancing English proficiency, and adopting Americanized names. Furthermore, the triple-difference estimates reveal that these effects are more pronounced in regions characterized by heightened discrimination against Asians.

Chinese exclusion? Agent response in the market for owner‐occupied housing

AbstractWe design and implement a correspondence experiment to test for differences in real estate agent response to Chinese clients. In the full sample, real estate agents are no more likely to respond to white clients than Chinese clients. Subsample results show statistically significant differential treatment of Chinese clients in rural areas and in some states. White real estate agents favor white clients (7.90% higher response rate), and Chinese real estate agents favor Chinese clients by a wide margin (151.11% higher response rate).

INVESTIGATING THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE THROUGH THE LENS OF CHINESE AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS

This article explores the evolution of Chinese American literature in tandem with the historical experiences of Chinese immigrants in the US. Through an analysis of key events such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Angel Island Immigration Station, as well as the contributions of notable authors like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, this article highlights the resilience and cultural richness inherent in Chinese American literature.

The Characteristics of the Chinese Exclusion Policy in the Philippines During the First Half of American Colonial Rule (1898-1913)

The Characteristics of the Chinese Exclusion Policy in the Philippines During the First Half of American Colonial Rule (1898-1913)

To Know Every Part: Theorizing Craft Narratives Via Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone

Published nearly thirty years ago, Fae Myenne Ng’s debut novel, Bone, has become a canonical work of Asian American literature for its domestic portrayal of a multi-generational Chinese American family. This article demonstrates how fiction offers a means to theorize contemporary craft. As the daughter of a seamstress, Ng utilizes her own intimate knowledge of industrial and domestic sewing to develop the emotions and intergenerational memories of characters in the novel. In doing so, Bone locates crafting subjects, their work and the handmade objects themselves within a legacy of Chinese exclusion and the ongoing racialized and gendered labor exploitation of Chinese immigrants. In this context, the fictional narrative pushes craft theorists and practitioners alike to instigate essential questions about what registers as craft and the role of narrative in this process. In particular, I focus on a persistent binary of handmade and mass-produced that shapes many dominant narratives of craft. By attending to this binary, we may analyze how dominant narratives actively make use of and reconfigure social constructs like gender and race to elicit certain perceptions (wittingly or unwittingly) about craft, craftspeople, their labors, and the value placed upon them.

Postbellum electoral politics in California and the genesis of the Chinese exclusion act of 1882

Why did the United States move from having nearly open borders from the 1840s to the 1870s to passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law in American history to ban people from entering the United States solely based on race? We argue that the standard story of nativist backlash based on wage pressure explains the demand for immigration restrictions, but not their timing or their racial focus. The demand for immigration restrictions was largely inchoate until the political restructuring that followed the Civil War. Finding themselves uncompetitive in much of the country, the Democrats seized on immigration restrictions, most notably in growing California, as a wedge issue. Chinese residents were unable to vote, thus making restrictions on Chinese entry an especially effective strategy in political economy.

Settler Colonialism and Harte’s Frontier Ecogothic in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racialecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. 1 The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

Immigrant Exclusion Acts: On Early Chinese Labor and Domestic Matriarchal Agency in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.

Wong Kim Ark’s children: immigrant citizenship under Chinese exclusion

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the pairings of citizenship and immigration, territory and mobility – pairings often considered distinct to or even opposite of one another – are critically interconnected. These links are particularly visible in the experiences of Chinese-born children of U.S.-born fathers. These children secured jus sanguinis birthright citizenship from their fathers, fathers who secured jus soli birthright citizenship under the Wong Kim Ark decision. They were ‘immigrant citizens’ who were allowed to immigrate to the United States only because they were U.S. citizens. Wong Kim Ark’s children, along with other Chinese Americans under exclusion, upend the assumed teleology of immigration preceding citizenship and the association of citizenship with territorial presence. Although they were targeted by U.S. immigration authorities, Chinese immigrant citizens fought for their right to migrate between China and the United States. In the process, they exposed some of the ways in which presumed distinctions between citizenship and alienage were blurred during Chinese exclusion, as well as the ways in which citizenship is legally constructed.

An Arduous Journey of Early Chinese Americans

After the state of California discovered gold in 1848, a gold rush immediately rolled out and spread across North America. But most laborers from the east coast did not want to go to California and only the white Irish workers were drawn to the West because they were smeared as “dirty whites” in the east coast. To attract more laborers to toil in the gold mines, employers began seeking immigrants from China. Unlike white workers, Chinese laborers did not want to stay in the US for very long time and all they wanted was making enough money to buy homes and marry a woman in China. They were willing to work longer time for less, which draw ire from their fellow white workers. Because white workers had voting rights, congressmen in California sided with white workers against Chinese laborers by passing a number of discriminative laws that culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The law virtually banned all Chinese laborers to enter the US until 1943 when China became a wartime ally of the US. Some Chinese including Wong Kim Ark successfully challenged the law by capitalizing on the US legal system. The long and difficult journey of Chinese immigrants finally ran its course in the 1960s thanks to the Civil Right Movement.

The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the Economic Development of the Western U.S

The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the Economic Development of the Western U.S

Chinese Naturalization, Voting, and Other Impossible Acts

Abstract: Historians have taken as a defining characteristic of Chinese experience in the United States their inability to naturalize until the repeal of Chinese Exclusion in 1943. It is certainly true that treaty agreements, court rulings, and discriminatory legislation conspired to prevent the existence of Chinese American citizens. But scholars may have taken for granted Chinese migrants' alien status and disenfranchisement more than they themselves did. In 1900, the US census recorded that 6.7 percent of the Chinese population had naturalized. These naturalized Chinese accomplished a seemingly impossible task and in so doing they exposed broader truths about the uncertain nature of citizenship in the postbellum era.

Writing for Children in the Era of Chinese Exclusion: Yan Phou Lee and When I Was a Boy in China

Yan Phou Lee’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887), the first known book by an Asian published in the United States, was not written as such, but as a series of articles for Wide Awake , a children’s magazine, while Lee, a former Chinese Educational Mission student, finished his education at Yale College. This article considers Lee’s book in light of his purposeful work to become a writer in the service of the Chinese and reads it within the context of a children’s periodical market rife with writing centred on the real and imagined lives of children in other locations – geographic, social, racial, and ethnic. Lee developed a critique of the wonder cultivated and capitalized on by Orientalist representation, and he brought this critique to bear as he wrote for children in the era of Chinese exclusion.

Self-Reliance and Pig Husbandry in Los Angeles Chinatown (1880–1933): New Evidence from Dental Calculus Analysis and Historical Records

AbstractThis study explores the pig-raising practices of Chinese migrants in Los Angeles Chinatown during the Chinese Exclusion Era. Chinese butcher shops sold pork meat, and previous research indicates that they likely sold the more profitable parts outside of Chinatown for additional income while consuming cheaper cuts themselves. Using dental calculus analysis and archival research, this study further explores how Chinatown residents relied on pork to thrive in an anti-Chinese environment. Dental calculus results suggest that Chinese migrants raised their own pigs with food waste and by-products from rice fields; this pork was then sold to meat markets or consumed within the community. The analysis of immigration records indicates that Chinese butcher shops provided employment opportunities as well as housing, banking, and immigration support for Chinese migrants. Pig raising, therefore, not only supplied a source of meat for Chinese migrants but also supported a range of social and financial services for a marginalized group that faced everyday discrimination from dominant society. Overall, this study traces the labor and networks that small businesses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries needed to source and distribute pork, and it highlights how a Chinese diasporic community developed a pork production system to resist racism.

The Immigrant Backstories of Asian American Surgeons.

The stories of Asian immigrants have both shared themes and ones that are unique to the histories of their homelands. Their labor was essential to the settlement and economic development of America, yet their presence incited riots and official restrictions to their rights to immigration and citizenship. Chinese laborers mined the Gold Country, built the transcontinental railroad, and reclaimed tillable land in the Central Valley. Yet they were denied the immense bounty they created, and their immigration was blocked by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.Japanese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos replaced them on farms as migrant laborers. As foreign nationals they were not allowed to own land, but they thrived as independent farmers on leased plots. Their success attracted discrimination and racist violence. They, too, were barred from immigration and citizenship (Johnson-Reed Act, 1924).World War II was a watershed event for Asians in America. Japanese Americans, ethnically identical to the enemy, were imprisoned in concentration camps in the American interior. China, the Philippines, and India, all allies of the US, were rewarded with naturalization rights for their nationals. In 1965 Congress liberalized immigration quotas and reversed the 1924 restrictions, with priority given to those with advanced technical ability in science, including medicine. Asians from Taiwan and India took advantage of the new regulations and predominated among the newcomers. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, America accommodated yet another Asian population in the country, the tens of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia.

Asian American Surgery: A Short History of Immigration, Naturalization, and Refugee Laws and Policies that Brought Asians to America.

Chinese immigration in America in the mid-nineteenth century incited violence and governmental sanctions to restrict Asian immigration and reject citizenship rights. In 1870, Chinese strikebreakers in Massachusetts ignited nationwide demonstrations against Chinese immigration, which ended altogether with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Japanese schoolchildren in San Francisco public schools sparked rioting in 1907, leading Japan to unilaterally limit emigration to the United States (Gentlemen's Agreement, 1908). Congress responded to anti-Punjabi riots (Bellingham, WA, 1907) by refusing naturalization rights to Asians (Barred Zone Act, 1917), policies supported by the Supreme Court (Ozawa, 1922; Thind, 1923). All immigration from Asia was soon prohibited (Johnson-Reed Act, 1924). Anti-Asian measures peaked in 1942 with imprisonment of Japanese in concentration camps, including those with birthright citizenship. Anti-Asian policies unwound in the last half of the 20th century, culminating in sweeping changes in US immunization policy. Naturalization rights were granted to wartime allies against Japan (China, 1943; the Philippines and India, 1946) and the Japanese themselves (1952). Asian women marrying American servicemen were allowed entry into the country (1945, 1950). Prohibitions against Asian immigration were lifted in 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), with preference for those trained in science, technology, and medicine. The refugee crisis that followed the fall of Saigon (1975) drove humanitarian policies that brought evacuees from Southeast Asia and others from throughout the world seeking freedom from persecution (Refugee Act, 1980). Hundreds of thousands from China, South Asia, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia thus settled in the United States, changing American society and medicine.

Changes in the Treatment of Chinese Americans

The COVID-19 epidemic is spreading worldwide, especially in the United States. Since the large-scale outbreak of the epidemic in the United States in March 2020, Asian Americans have also faced the secondary threat of "racism" and "Asian hatred" due to the COVID-19 virus. They have become the targets of persistent harassment and attacks by diehard Asian haters. Discriminatory words and deeds against Asian Americans have also spread in American society like the covid-19 virus and become an event sweeping across the United States. The rising anti-Asian incidents in the United States not only focused the attention of American society, but also attracted the worlds attention. At the same time, it is not difficult to recall the anti-Asian situation in the United States at the end of the 19th century. The Opium War broke out in China in 1840. Therefore, many Chinese citizens chose to make a living in the more developed United States. At first, Asian workers were welcomed by industrialists because of their low wages and hard-working characteristics. They were regarded as "exceptional cultures from a distant land". However, with the increasing number of Asian Americans during the gold rush, American citizens and officials gradually changed their attitudes towards Asian Americans. Finally, in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was established to restrict Asians from entering their territory. This article will analyze the changes in Americans' attitudes towards Asian Americans at the end of the 19th century to explore the reasons behind them, and take this opportunity to hopefully shed some light on how we should face racism today during the pandemic.

“Paper More Precious Than Blood”: Chinese Exclusion Era Identity Documentation Processes and Racialization of Identity Data

ABSTRACT This project interrogates the United States’ national fixation on the answer to the question: Who are you? In this article, it is posed that identity documentation practices arising out of the Chinese Exclusion Act era cast identity as an empirical and immutable phenomenon, specifically in response to the racialization of American-born Chinese settlers as duplicitous, through the mechanisms that information is collected, the actual information itself, and the cross-references or connections created between cases. Through tracing this lineage, racialized identification data is identified and theorized as part of hegemonic data regimes.