ASIAN IMMIGRATION
TO NORTH AMERICA RECONSIDERED
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHINESE
Jing Ye
University of Toronto
2005
1
Asian Immigration to North America Reconsidered
With Special Reference to Chinese
For many years the melting-pot ideology had dominated American thinking about
immigration history. The events that took place during the 1960s and 1970s - from the Vietnam
War to the black civil rights movement - shattered the melting-pot ideology, and American
scholars in the field began to turn away from the classical assimilationist school and embrace the
new social history perspective in their study of immigration and ethnicity. In 1970 Rudolph
Vecoli, one of the first American scholars to challenge Oscar Handlin’s assimilation thesis,
published a paper entitled “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of American History,”
reproaching historians for having ignored “the multicultural character of the American people.”
However, before the decade ended Vecoli found himself “inundated by a virtual flood” of new
publications on race and ethnicity. “Conferences, learned papers, and courses on ethnic themes
proliferate at an amazing rate.”1 According to A. William Hoglund, of a total of 3,534 doctoral
dissertations on immigration produced between 1885 and 1982, well over half were written after
1970.2
Howard Palmer’s 1990 survey showed similar developments in Canadian immigration and
ethnic studies. According to Palmer, until the late 1960s, Canadian historians virtually ignored
“the other ethnic groups” (groups other than British, French or native), and this neglect,
according to him, was largely due to the prevailing ethnocentric attitudes towards minority
groups, coupled with “a dearth of language skills, scholarly incentive, archival resources and
publisher interest.”3 Despite these problems, the field of Canadian ethnic history flourished
2
during the 1970s as a result of growing concern with social history, revived personal interest in
ethnic roots, as well as the multicultural policies introduced in the early 1970s that sponsored
many research projects focusing on ethnic groups. The founding in the 1960s and 1970s of
academic journals such as Canadian Ethnic Studies and Polyphony, the Canadian Ethnic Studies
Association, and the Multicultural History Society in Ontario were all key developments in the
field.4 What was most encouraging to Palmer was that most research in ethnic history had been
done by scholars of ethnic origin whose link with a particular group gave them “a special sense
of insight, understanding and empathy.” Chinese Canadian scholars such as Peter Li, Anthony
Chan and Kwok Chan were all active in the field of Asian Canadian studies.5
Similarly, since the late 1960s Asian American scholars have entered the field in increasing
numbers. According to L. Ling-Chi Wang, by the 1980s fifty American colleges and universities
had Asian American studies programs.6 The establishment of Asian American study centers at
various universities as well as the founding of the Association for Asian American Studies in
1979 fully indicated the maturation of Asian American studies as an academic discipline.7 Over
the past few decades numerous scholarly works have been published exploring the Asian
American experience. According to Suchang Chan, although writings about Asian Americans
have appeared ever since the first Asian group - the Chinese arrived on the West Coast in the
mid-19th century, most studies published before the 1960s almost always portrayed them as
“deficient or deviant” because of their alleged inability and unwillingness to assimilate.8
Rejecting the assimilation paradigm and negative portrayals of Asian groups, the writings
produced during the 1970s tended to focus on racial discrimination and oppression.9 This
prompted historian Roger Daniels later to remark that much of the scholarship on Asian
Americans was “negative history,” focusing on “the excluders rather than the excluded.”
3
Meanwhile, Daniels pointed out that part of the problem was due to the lack of immigrant
materials, as well as the inability of many scholars to utilize Asian languages.10
In his review article on Roger Daniels’ 1988 book Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in
the United States since 1850, Peter Kwong challenged Daniels’ contention, arguing that it was
wrong to think that Asian American studies was “still confined to a narrow racism
perspective.”11 According to Suchange Chan, since the early 1980s scholars of Asian Americans
have taken a new theoretical stance: Asian Americans are not merely victims of white racism,
but also “agents of history…who make choices that shape their lives” despite the hardships and
discrimination they often face.12 Peter Kwong also took issue with Daniels’ statement that Asian
American studies “suffers from the ‘relative paucity of written immigrant materials, such as
“America letters” and newspapers’.” According to Peter Kwong and L. Ling-Chi Wang, as early
as the 1960s and 1970s research projects had been initiated by Asian American studies centers at
several universities as well as by local Japanese and Chinese community organizations to collect
primary source materials, and their bibliographic publications reveal “the wealth of information
awaiting scholarly research.” 13
In the 1990s, “trans-nationalism” began to enter the lexicon of immigration scholars. As
early as 1960, historian Frank Thistlethwaite in a paper presented at the Stockholm International
Congress of Historical Sciences challenged the concept of “American-centeredness” in the study
of immigration history. Instead of viewing the United States as the “final destination of all
immigration,” Thistlethwaite treated the subject of migration as “a multiplicity of interlocked
movements occurring over one vast international and intercontinental ‘field.’”14 Haiming Liu
considers Madeline Hsu’s recent publication Dreaming of Gold and Dream of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (2000) a
4
breakthrough about Chinese trans-nationalism and a challenge to the current American-centered
and nation-based Chinese American historiography.15 Further, according to Edgar Wickberg, one
of Hsu’s contributions is to “stretch Chinese trans-nationalism back beyond the confines of
contemporary globalization, all the way to 1900,” as it is well known that for centuries overseas
Chinese have sent remittances to home in China and “gone back and forth when possible.”16
The above section of the paper has briefly discussed recent developments in Asian
American/Canadian studies. Great strides have been made over the past three decades. And yet
much remains to be done. At the Regional China Colloquium held in Simon Fraser University,
British Columbia in 2000, Canadian scholar Edgar Wickberg made some suggestions for further
research, particularly in Chinese Canadian studies. He noted that although much research had
been done in such areas of Chinese Canadian history as local community studies, oral histories of
Chinese women, as well as studies on the 19th-century Chinese railroad workers, Chinese
Canadian veterans of World War II, and the post-1960s immigrants, more scholarly attention
needed to be given to, for example, Chinese education and religion in Canada, Chinese Canadian
trans-nationalism, and comparisons between Chinese Canadians and Chinese Americans.17
Since the 1970s numerous scholarly works have been published about the Chinese in the
United States and Canada; however, few of them are devoted to comparing the Chinese
experience in these two countries. In many respects the United States and Canada share
similarities though there are also major cultural and structural differences between them owing to
their different historical experiences.18 One of the similarities they share, according to Roger
Daniels, was their attitudes of white supremacy towards Asians and other non-white minority
groups.19 In their treatment of Asian immigrants, until World War II both countries had adopted
various measures to restrict Asian immigration.20Although their post-war immigration policy
5
toward Asians has become gradually liberalized, Peter Li points out that racial discrimination
against non-whites dies hard. Li’s 1978 survey in a western Canadian city showed that close to
10 percent of the respondents believed that Canada had been harmed by Chinese immigrants and
27 percent were opposed to their immigration to Canada.21 Sucheng Chan’s study of Asian
Americans also indicates that discrimination against Asian Americans still exists on the job
market, in schools and that the 1980s saw renewed violence against Asians, with incidents
reported in dozens of American cities.22
According to Anthony Chan et al., the current mass media and school textbooks have played
an
important
role
in
reinforcing
and
perpetuating
racial
stereotypes
of
Asian
Americans/Canadians, as demonstrated by the 1979 CTV-W5 program “Campus Giveaway”
portraying Chinese Canadians as “foreign intruders” who took places of white Canadians in jobrelated college programs.23 Albert Lee’s 1970s survey of 300 social studies textbooks used in
California public schools found that 75 percent of the texts made no mention of the Chinese; of
those that did mention them, the majority “gave token representation” with a picture or two, or
with a few lines about Chinese railroad workers, the laundry and their culinary skills. Meanwhile,
there were such statements in the textbooks: “The best American citizens have come from
Ireland, Scotland and England,” supported by showing how many presidents and congressmen
had come from these places.24 Connie Young Yu’s 1970s study also showed that the textbooks
continued to promote Anglo-conformity: those who “learned to speak English well, wore
American clothes, cut off [their pigtails], and became [Christians]” were good Chinese while
those who did otherwise were bad.25
Stereotyped views about Asian immigrants also appear in contemporary historical
scholarship. Marion T. Bennett, for example, wrote in his American Immigration Policies, A
6
History (1963): “One of the saddest phases of early Chinese immigration was the fact that most
of the immigrants, male and female, were actually brought to this country for forced labor and
prostitution.”26 Gunther Barth’s Bitter Strength (1964) expressed similar views arguing that the
Chinese were “sojourners” who came to the U.S. only to make money and that their immigration
was virtually “a disguised slave trade,” thus justifying the anti-Chinese movement as an
expression of white Californians longing for a free, democratic society.27.Such negative
portrayals of the Chinese are by no means new –they appeared in numerous speeches and print
materials soon after the arrival of the Chinese in the mid-19th century and have since shaped the
perspectives of several generations of North American scholars.28 This paper is a comparative
study of Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada, with special reference to Chinese. In
comparing their experiences in these two countries, the paper will focus on those issues that have
been or are being currently debated in the field of Asian American/Canadian studies. Based on
some of the best scholarship available to date, this essay attempts to add to or modify some of
the omissions and distortions in the history of the Chinese in North America.
********
Sucheng Chan wrote in Entry Denied (1991) that of a total of more than 50 million
immigrants admitted to the United States before 1965, only one million of them were Asians.
One reason that so few Asians came before 1965 is that the four major groups – the Chinese,
Japanese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos were each excluded by the American legislation two or
three decades after their arrival.29 The Chinese came during California gold rush, but soon antiChinese agitation arose, and Congress passed a series of legislation between 1882 and 1904 to
exclude Chinese laborers. Japanese immigration began around the mid-1880s. Despite the
7
exclusionists’ clamor for Japanese exclusion, the U.S. government, aware of Japan’s growing
military prowess, negotiated a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Japan in 1907/08 requiring Japan
to stop issuing passports to laborers but allowing the entry of those laborers already in America,
as well as their wives and children. Japanese immigration was finally ended when the general
Immigration Act of 1924 denied entry to any alien ineligible to citizenship.30 Asian Indians first
came to the United States around 1907, and Californians were alarmed by the “waves of different
Asian immigrants entering and threatening American society.” Immigration from India was later
prohibited by a “barred zone” clause in the general 1917 immigration law that denied entry to
people “living within a triangular area that included most of the Asian continent.”31 The first
major influx of Filipinos into the American mainland occurred during the 1920s, and they
“presented California with her ‘latest race problem’.” The 1924 immigration law could not be
applied to them because they were American nationals. Therefore, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie
Act was passed promising future independence to the Philippines and meanwhile reducing
Filipinos’ immigration quota to 50 a year.32
Chan argued that although the 1924 Immigration Act also limited the number of European
immigrants, their immigration history “was never truncated in the same drastic manner as was
that of Asians.” Asian immigration history “shows more distinct ‘breaks’ than that of Europeans,
periodized not so much by social developments within the immigrant communities as by the
enactment of exclusion laws.”33 Thus, according to Chan, Chinese immigration to the U.S. can be
divided into four periods: 1) years of relatively free immigration from 1849 to 1882; 2) the
exclusion period from 1882 to 1943; 3) the period of limited entry under special legislation from
1943 to 1965; and an era of renewed immigration from 1965 to the present.34
8
Similarities and parallels can be found in the history of Asian immigration to Canada.
According to Daniel Kubat, the major Asian groups immigrating to Canada before the 1960s
were Chinese, Japanese and Asian Indians. They were small in number, and like their
counterparts in the U.S. were initially concentrated on the Pacific coast.35 Chinese immigration
to Canada began during the gold rush of 1858, and remained unrestricted till 1885 when the
federal government began to impose the head tax on the Chinese seeking entry to Canada.
Chinese immigration was finally ended by the Chinese Immigration Act in 1923. The Japanese
entered Canada around the 1890s, and were soon perceived by white British Columbians to be
even more “dangerous” to their welfare than the Chinese because of their allegedly aggressive
economic pursuit and high birthrate. Like the United States, Canada “had to be more careful in
dealing with Japan than with China” not merely because Japan was a rising military power but
because after 1902 Japan “allied with Britain and thus with Canada.” A similar “gentlemen’s
agreement” was negotiated in 1908 limiting Japanese immigration to 400 a year, not including
returning immigrants and their families. The quota was cut down to 150 a year in 1923, and
understandably, World War II completely stopped Japanese immigration to Canada.36 The
immigration of Asian Indians to Canada started around 1903 and by 1908 there were about 5,000
Asian Indians in Canada. As they were British subjects, overt discrimination should be avoided.
The Canadian government finally solved the “Indian problem” by two orders-in-council in 1908
excluding those immigrants who did not have $200 in their possession or did not come by
“continuous journey” from their country of birth. Since at that time there was no direct steamship
service between India and Canada, these measures effectively checked Indian immigration to
Canada.37
********
9
Although as early as the 15th century there were Chinese traveling to Southeast Asia to trade
or settle, large-scale Chinese emigration did not occur until the 19th century. According to Edgar
Wickberg and Yong Chen, between 1840s and 1900, about 2.4 million Chinese went to SE Asia,
the Western Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand, and Chinese emigration to North America
that started in the mid-19th century “represents only a trickle of the massive Chinese overseas
migration.”38 From the mid-19th century to the 1880s, the decade when both the United States
and Canada passed legislation to restrict Chinese immigration, more than 300,000 Chinese
entered North America, with the majority remaining on the Pacific coast.39 Like immigrants from
other countries, most Chinese in California during the gold rush were gold-miners, accounting
for about 80% of the state’s total Chinese population.40 When later gold was discovered in the
Fraser Valley of British Columbia in 1858, Chinese from California were among the first to get
there, and they were soon joined by other Chinese from Hong Kong.41 Studies by C.Y. David Lai
and June Mei have shown that most of the early Chinese immigrants came from the Pearl River
Delta in Guangdong Province, South China. Lai’s study also reveals that over half of the
immigrants who had migrated to Canada before the 1880s belonged to ten large clans and that
the majority of the members in each clan were from one county or even from one village.42 This
suggests the process of a chain migration, which also characterized the early immigration
patterns of other groups such as the Jews and Italians.43
The socio-economic origin of early Chinese emigrants to North America is one of the issues
that have aroused much debate among Asian North American scholars. Yong Chen points out
that the conventional interpretation of the mid-19th-century Chinese emigration to North
America as chiefly prompted by over-population, severe land shortage, social and political
unrests such as the Opium War (1839-42) and the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), coupled with
10
natural disasters is incomplete, failing to explain why massive Chinese emigration to North
America began in the mid-19th century and why the overwhelming majority of emigrants came
from the Delta region.44 Chen argues that although socio-economic difficulties were a reality for
people in the Delta region “there is no evidence that life was more difficult there than elsewhere”
in China.45 In fact, from 1757 till the end of the first Opium War in 1842, Canton, the capital of
Guangdong Province, was designated as China’s sole port for foreign trade and its welldeveloped market-oriented economy constituted the foundation of the region’s prosperity.46
Thanks to long-time exposure to Western influence, this area had developed close ties with
American traders and missionaries who first arrived in China around 1780s and 1830s
respectively. Chen argues that it was through these Americans, as well as those local residents
who had traveled to America that people in the Delta region were among the first Chinese in
China to learn about California gold.47 Chen concludes that “it is the longstanding trans-Pacific
connections that offer a key reason why Chinese emigration occurred in the mid-19th century and
why an overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants came from the Canton area.”48
To Haiming Liu, Chen’s study meanwhile is a refutation of the stereotyped view of Chinese
society as isolated and stagnant and of Chinese emigrants as illiterate poor peasants from the
lowest social class in China. Liu argues that the Delta region in Guangdong was a place with a
long tradition of overseas migration and diversified commercial activities, and its people were
highly motivated, “with considerable literacy.” Liu takes issue with Ronald Takaki, who
describes the 19th-century Chinese emigrants as generally illiterate, having received very little
schooling. Liu points out that China has traditionally valued education, and by the time the
massive migration started there had existed in Guangdong many county or clan schools, which
not only helped aspiring young scholars to obtain official positions through the civil service
11
examination that had existed for centuries in China until 1905 but also enabled the rural
population in Guangdong to achieve a functional literacy.49 Evelyn S. Rawski’s research
suggests that 30-45 percent of men and 2-10 percent of women in China could read and write;
and Hawaii’s 1896 census found 25 percent of Chinese female immigrants were literate.50 Liu
points out that Chinese immigrants also brought their value of education to America: they not
only established Chinese language schools, but their community organizations usually invited
Chinese scholars who had passed the civil service examination to serve as their leaders 51
Another controversial issue related to early Chinese emigration is the century-old allegation
of Chinese immigrants to North America as “coolies.” Daniels points out that some scholars tend
to regard Chinese immigrants as somewhat different from other groups, which “has its roots in
perceptions and misconceptions of this coolie trade.”52 Even the well-known historian John
Higham wrote in 1975 that “the Chinese did not come to the United States as free men.
Transported and largely controlled by certain Chinese societies, they awakened fears of a new
kind of slavery in a nation already convulsed by the struggle over African slavery.”53 This
misunderstanding, as K. Scott Wong et al. point out, is the result of their failure to distinguish
between the two different migration systems: one was the contract or “coolie” labor system, in
which laborers were recruited under contract (often involving deception and kidnapping) to work
for specific periods of time on plantations or in mines in Southeast Asia and Latin America; the
other was the “credit ticket” system, in which local merchants, returned immigrants, or fraternal
associations provided emigrants with the passage ticket on the understanding that they would
repay their debt from their future earnings after arrival at their destination. According to Mei,
those who migrated to North America most often used the credit-ticket system to finance their
passage.54
12
The abolition of slave trade in the early 19th century created a great demand for cheap labor,
and Western imperialists turned to Asia for human supply. According to Philip Curtin et al,
before large numbers of Chinese were involved in the coolie trade in the 1840s, the main labor
supply for the British colonies was from India, then under British rule.55 In China, the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) prohibited emigration in 1672 fearing that those loyal to the previous Ming
Dynasty (1368-1644) might “foment anti-Qing activities” abroad.56 The notorious “coolie trade”
began to thrive after China’s defeat in the Opium War with Britain. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842)
forced China to open five treaty ports to foreign trade, cede Hong Kong to Britain, pay huge
indemnities, allow continued influx of opium into China, and grant Britain and its allies
extraterritoriality; this extraterritorial privilege, according to Shin-Shan H. Tsai, not only enabled
Western recruiters and their Chinese agents to kidnap Chinese laborers with impunity, but also
made it difficult for the Qing government to stop the coolie traffic.57
European and American ships, as well as some Western diplomats were involved in the
coolie trade. Tsai’s study finds that from 1847 until1862, the year when U.S. Congress passed a
law forbidding Americans’ involvement in the coolie traffic, American shippers monopolized the
coolie trade between Macao (a Portuguese colony since the 16th century) and Cuba, shipping an
average of over 6,000 Chinese coolies each year to Cuba.58 Robert J. Schwendinger reproaches
some scholars for downplaying the role of American involvement in the trade, and according to
him at least 32 American vessels participated in the human traffic. During the three decades of
the coolie trade (1847-1878), three quarters of a million Chinese coolies were shipped abroad.59
Chinese reaction to the coolie trade, according to Tsai et al., was far more intense than
commonly recognized. The gentry in the coastal cities warned the Chinese laborers not to be
fooled by the crimps and meanwhile put pressure on local governments to take action. For
13
example, at Fuzhou (one of the five treaty ports), the local government once forcibly released
nearly 2,000 Chinese from coolie ships, and in Shanghai several kidnappers were beheaded and
the local government organized an Anti-Coolie Trade Commission in 1859. The Qing
government finally legalized Chinese emigration in 1860, which led to diminished coolie traffic
in the treaty ports, but the trade continued in Macao until the late 1870s when under international
pressure the Portuguese government finally outlawed the coolie traffic.60
June Mei argues that since the coolie trade had aroused “an angry fear” among the Chinese,
would-be emigrants must have had some knowledge of “the different countries where they might
go”: the “gold mountains” like North America were attractive enough that little coercion was
needed to bring Chinese there.61 As a Chinese witness testified in 1876 before the U.S. Senate,
If they [Chinese] have means they pay their own passages; if not, they borrow from others. They
sell their farms and property to get here. If they have no property and can’t borrow they don’t
come.62
Given the importance of the kinship in Guangdong, would-be emigrants could expect help from
their families, friends, and returned emigrants, or through clan and district associations. Mei
argues that if all these channels were exhausted, then emigrants could turn to the credit-ticket
system, and seldom resorted to coolie brokers.63
Scholars Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, like earlier writers such as Persia Campbell
and Gunter Barth, claim that Chinese emigrants who came under the “credit-ticket” system were
virtually indentured servants, bound to and controlled by Chinese district associations, which
imported Chinese laborers for American businesses for profits.64Charles J. McClain Jr.
challenges this thesis, arguing that ever since their establishment in the 1850s the district
associations (huiguan) offered valuable services to their members from providing temporary
shelter for newly arrived immigrants to arranging for shipping the remains of the deceased back
14
to China for proper burial. In the early 1860s, the six district associations formed a loose
federation, referred to by the white society as the “Six Chinese Companies.” Twenty years later
when the 1882 Chinese exclusion law was passed, a formal umbrella association- the Chinese
Consolidated Benevolence Association (CCBA) - was organized to fight discriminatory
legislation.65 According to Lai, Canada’s first CCBA was founded in Victoria in 1884 by a group
of merchants in response to the massive unemployment among the Chinese caused by the
completion of the transcontinental railroad, the growing anti-Chinese agitation from the larger
society, as well as internal troubles in the Chinese community. It performed similar functions as
the CCBA in the U.S. Before the Chinese consulate was set up in the United States in 1878 and
in Canada in 1908, the CCBA acted as the chief spokesman for the Chinese communities in
North America.66
The charge that the Six Companies trafficked in bound servants was first raised in the 19th
century by anti-Chinese agitators, and, according to Najia Aarim-Heriot, even President Ulysses
S. Grant insisted that “the great proportion of the Chinese immigrants who come to our shores do
not come voluntarily,…but come under contracts with headmen, who own them almost
absolutely.”67 McClain points out that all the while the Chinese Six Companies persistently
denied this charge, “We never, singly or collectively,…ever brought one of our countrymen to
this free country, under or by any contract or agreement, made anywhere, as a servant or
laborer.” They even wrote to President Grant in 1876 about the various charges against the
Chinese. McClain contends that the very denial, so frequently and earnestly made throughout the
19th century, is evident enough to prove their noninvolvement.68 He doubts if the shrewd Chinese
merchants in San Francisco would have been willing to take the risk of advancing funds
amounting to about half a million a year to would-be emigrants…when there were numerous
15
private Chinese employment agencies in California “seeking to make a profit by doing exactly
the same thing.” 69 June Mei’s study adds support to McClain’s argument when she writes:
… two distinctions must be drawn here – that between individual merchants or companies and the
Six Companies collectively, and that between offering assistance to new immigrants and active
recruitment….certain merchants and firms did recruit workers from China and act as laborcontractors; since they were also members of the Six Companies, their operations may have been
erroneously attributed to the latter.70
********
Although the majority of Chinese in North America during the era of gold rush were gold
miners, there were some Chinese, who quickly “[filled] other economic niches” as merchants,
cooks, laundrymen, vegetable gardeners, domestic servants, and laborers.71 In British Columbia,
for example, Chinese were extensively used for various labor-intensive jobs such as lumbering,
coalmining, and road construction. Many wagon roads that connected the numerous mining
towns and fields were built by Chinese laborers.72 L. Eve Armentrout-Ma blames scholars for
having neglected the fact that as early as 1850 the Chinese pioneered California’s first salt-water
fishing industry, to which they contributed several hundred thousand dollars each year by the
1880s. They were also the major work force in the salmon canning industry along the Pacific
Coast until the 1880s when Chinese exclusion diminished their numbers and their places in the
industry were replaced by the Japanese and later by Filipinos.73
Chinese Canadian scholar Jin Tan challenges the commonly-held belief that there was little
overt white hostility towards Chinese in British Columbia during the gold rush, arguing that
racial hostility and violence against Chinese occurred soon after their arrival in British Columbia
and that “repeated calls for a Chinese head tax were heard” as early as 1860.74 Anti-Chinese
sentiment intensified during the economic recession of the late 1860s-1870s when the yields in
the mines declined. As Ward points out, after British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871,
16
the Chinese question, once a matter of private prejudice, became a public issue and provincial
politicians became “Sinophobes’ leading spokesmen.”75 Beginning in 1875, British Columbia
passed various bills to restrict the political and civil rights of the Chinese: they were denied the
right to vote, and prohibited from working on provincial public works, acquiring Crown lands,
performing skilled jobs in coal mines, and holding a liquor license. Since the Chinese could not
vote, they were also excluded from nomination for public office, and jury service, as well as
from such professions as law, pharmacy and accounting, which used the provincial voters’ list as
a qualification.76
According to Stanislaw Andracki and Peter Li, before 1885, the year the transcontinental
railroad was completed, Canadian government had resisted any attempt to limit Chinese
immigration for fear that a labor shortage might jeopardize the completion of the railroad. Prime
Minister John MacDonald argued during the 1882 debates of the House of Commons:
I share very much the feeling of the people of the United States and the Australian Colonies against a
Mongolian or a Chinese population in our country as permanent settlers. I believe it is an alien race in
every sense, that would not and could not be expected to assimilate with our Aryan population, and
therefore, if the temporary necessity had been overcome and the railway constructed across the
continent with the means of sending the European settlers and laborers into British Columbia, then it
would be quite right to join to a reasonable extent in preventing the permanent settlement in this
country of Mongolian, Chinese or Japanese immigrant … at present… it is simply a question of
alternatives: either you must have this labor or you cannot have the railway.77
The first federal Chinese Immigration Act was passed in 1885, imposing a $50 head tax on all
Chinese entering Canada except a few exempted classes. The tax was raised to $100 in 1900 and
$500 in 1904. Later, seeing the head tax did not have the desired effect of restricting Chinese
immigration, the federal government passed a new act in 1923 that abolished the head tax and
prohibited the entry of all Chinese except “diplomatic corps, children born in Canada to parents
of Chinese race or descent, merchants and students.” This act effectively checked Chinese
immigration to Canada for the next 24 years until 1947 when it was repealed.78
17
As in Canada, in the United States there was no “Golden Age” of race relations between
whites and racial minority groups. According to Ping Chiu, the first anti-Chinese rioting took
place as early as 1849, in which 60 Chinese were driven off the gold mine by white miners. More
anti-Chinese riots followed California’s Governor John Bigler’s special message to the
legislature in April 1852 that charged Chinese with being “coolies’ and incapable of
assimilation.79 In the same year 20,000 Chinese entered California to join the Gold Rush, and
Bigler recommended using the state’s police power and tax legislation to stem the “tide of
Asiatic immigration.”80 Between 1850s and 1880s California passed various anti-Chinese bills
designed to restrict or exclude the Chinese from the state. For example, the 1852 foreign miners’
tax imposed a monthly license fee of $3 on all foreign miners who did not desire to become a
citizen, and Takaki points out that this aimed mainly at the Chinese since the 1790 American law
had rendered non-whites ineligible to citizenship. The capitation tax act of 1855 required the
ship-owner to pay $50 for each alien he brought to California. As early as 1854, the Chinese, like
blacks and Indians, were denied the right to testify for or against a white man in court, and the
state’s 1860 statute excluded Mongolians, together with blacks and native Indians from public
schools; it was not until 1885 that San Francisco built a separate school for Chinese children.81
By the late 1860s anti-Chinese sentiment intensified, when large numbers of Chinese began
to “move into the cities and into manufacturing” after profits in gold mining declined. Further,
according to Aarim-Heriot, the opening of the steamship service between San Francisco and
China in 1867 as well as the Burlingame Treaty that the U.S. negotiated with China in 1868 to
solve its labor shortage in the West and to promote the China trade served as a stimulus to
Chinese immigration to California. Over 11,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in 1868, almost the
total number for the previous four years, followed by 15,000 new arrivals in 1869. The release of
18
Chinese by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869 further contributed to “a greater Chinese
visibility” in California’s urban manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.82 Scholars also
point to the negative impact of the transcontinental railroad on California’s economy and labor
market as among the major causes of the rise of anti-Chinese agitation. Ronald Takaki et al.
argue that the railroad not only brought in thousands of whites, swelling “an already congested
labor market” - by 1871, there were three or four workers for every job in San Francisco - but
also opened California markets to Eastern competition.83
According to Neil Shumskey, before 1869, California markets had been served by local
manufactures who could “charge high prices for goods in short supply” and pay high wages, but
the influx of mass-produced, low-priced products from the East forced manufacturers to price
locally produced goods competitively and to reduce workers’ wages since low cost of labor was
essential to the survival of the industries.84 When the economic depression finally hit California,
anti-Chinese sentiment intensified, and white workers identified “land monopoly, capitalistic
domination, and Chinese labor [as] all parts of one great evil.” Anti-Chinese clubs proliferated,
and mass meetings were held demanding the discharge of Chinese workers. A sand-lot meeting
of 6,000 workingmen held in the summer 1877 led to a riot in Chinatown, with dozens of
buildings and laundries being burnt or sacked.85
On first sight, economic competition appeared to be the chief cause of white workers’
agitation against the Chinese. However, studies by Ping Chiu and others show that Chinese labor
in California seldom, if ever, was in direct competition with white labor - they were primarily
concentrated in agriculture and in low-wage manufacturing industries. For example, cigarmakers earned only $287 a year in 1870, and 92 percent of the labor force in the industry was
Chinese while tailors/ seamstresses earned twice as much, and only 9 percent of them were
19
Chinese. Within individual industries, the Chinese worked in low-paying firms: in garment
industry, for instance, Chinese were usually employed by firms that produced women’s clothing
and were paid an average annual wage of $364, as compared to $597 paid to white workers in
factories making men’s clothing; in firms with a racially mixed labor force, whites usually
monopolized the foremen’s or skilled positions and Chinese held the menial ones. Even when
assigned to the same tasks, under the ethnically split wage system, Chinese were frequently paid
less than Euro-Americans.86 Aarim-Heriot joins Chiu arguing:
Following the incorporation of California’s economy into the national market in 1870s, …white
workers fell victim not to Chinese competition but to ‘a long-run shift to the mass-produced and
mass-distributed goods.’… the post-bellum economic depressions were also too complex for workers
to understand and the presence of Chinese laborers offered a readier explanation for the gap between
expectation and reality.87
Stuart Miller argues that racism against the Chinese was by no means confined to the west
coast as commonly believed and that American anti-Chinese attitude had existed long before
their arrival, largely due to the numerous 19th-century stereotyped accounts of American traders,
missionaries and diplomats who had been to China.88 According to Miller, as early as the 1850s
the eastern newspapers expressed their “grave fears” over Chinese immigration. The Chinese,
Greesley’s Tribune advised its readers, “are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all
conception….lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest
order” and the Herald considered the Chinese to be such a low cast people that “the vilest dregs
that come into New York from the vilest holes in Europe are refined and attractive people.”
While Californians were shouting “The Chinese must go!” mass rallies were held in eastern
cities as early as 1870 to show their support and the participants included important politicians.
Even President R. B. Hayes wrote such words in his diary in 1879, “”this ‘labor invasion’ was
‘pernicious and should be discouraged’… ‘I should consider with favor any suitable measures to
20
discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.’”89 Roger Daniels points out that Miller’s
study helps us to understand the ultimate success of the American anti-Chinese movement - in
1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring the entry of all Chinese laborers,
followed by 14 pieces of legislation to modify it. The act was not repealed until1943.90
********
The anti-Chinese sentiment did not subside with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act,
and the 1880s and 1890s saw violent outbreaks against the Chinese throughout the American
West. As Victor Nee remarks, simply to check the new influx of Chinese to their shores failed to
satisfy exclusionists who desired to rid the Pacific Coast entirely of the Chinese presence. This
forced many Chinese to go back to China or to the East Coast; others fled the rural areas and
sought refuge in the Chinatown of the larger cities.91 In urban areas, the anti-Chinese movement
and subsequent legislative controls forced Chinese out of many manufacturing industries into
marginal sectors of the economy and ethnic businesses. For example, by the turn of the century,
two-thirds of the Chinese in San Francisco worked as laundrymen or domestic servants.92 In
1901, the mayor of San Francisco explained why the Chinese should be excluded:
Has there been any change in the nature of the evil, or in the sentiments of the people?
Certainly not on the Pacific Coast, where the lapse of time has made still more evident the nonassimilative character of the Chinese and their undesirability as citizens.…whatever they are paid,
they are paid too much, because they made no contribution by service or citizenship or family life to
93
the permanent interest of the country.
Of the various negative stereotypes of the Chinese, the most enduring one was their alleged
inability and unwillingness to assimilate. According to Gunter Baureiss et al., the Chinese were
usually portrayed as “sojourners,” who had come not to stay but to “strike it rich” and then
would return to their native land. Closely associated with the sojourner image were the frequent
accusations that Chinese men came without their women, kept their own customs and social
21
structures, congregated in crowded unsanitary living quarters, and always sent remittances back
to China. To many whites, the Chinese were a “menace” to a white civilization.94 Between 1875
and 1885, the Chinese in British Columbia were denied the voting right in both provincial and
federal elections, and Prime Minister John MacDonald justified their disfranchisement on the
grounds that “the Chinese have no ‘British instinct’ and their mind was not suited for
democracy.”95
Roger Daniels and Sucheng Chan point out that for many scholars the words “European”
and “immigrant” were almost interchangeable whereas Asians were regarded as “sojourners,”
and “with the single word, some oft-quoted scholars have banished Asians completely from the
realm of immigration history.”96 In 1964 Oscar Handlin wrote in his foreword to Gunter Barth’s
Bitter Strength whose blame-the-victims thesis aroused much controversy and antagonism
among Chinese American scholars:
The Chinese newcomers differed significantly from other arrivals in the United States both in motives
and in experience. These people did not intend to form a permanent part of the American population,
but were sojourners who expected before long to return to the place of their birth.97
The longstanding view of the Chinese as “sojourners” has also influenced members of the
Chinese community. In 1953 sociologist Paul Siu published his well-known article “The
Sojourner,” and his ideas were later borrowed by another sociologist R. H. Lee for her influential
book The Chinese in the United States of America (1960). Both Siu and Lee believe that early
Chinese immigrants were sojourners, who regarded their host country simply as a place to earn
money and fight for social status at home. Despite the hardships and discrimination they
encountered, the dream of an honorable return served as a source of strength.98
Asian American writer Frank Chin challenged the sojourner thesis in his 1972 article:
The logic of the myth of the Chinese sojourner duplicates the logic Nazis used to justify antiSemitism in Europe. We came to America without our women (a sign we had no intention of settling
22
here), refused to assimilate, were alien and incapable of accommodating the democratic,
individualistic manly ideals… , established our own clannish social structures in defiance of the laws
of the land, robbed America of her wealth and took it home…; therefore, we deserved the exclusion
99
laws, the anti-Chinese riots, the lynchings….
In 1981, Chinese Canadian scholar Anthony Chan joined the debate. In an article entitled
“‘Orientalism’ and Image Making,” Chan attacked politicians, journalists, scholars, and members
of the Chinese community for keeping the image of the Chinese as sojourners “alive and well.”
He argues that Chinese did not come to Canada as voluntary sojourners; rather, it was
institutional racism, embodied in the Canadian immigration policies that rendered them
“virtually unassimilable”:
[They were] excluded from certain occupations, exposed to violence,…assessed head taxes, denied
the franchise, and segregated in schools; they were forced to live in Chinatowns and to establish such
institutions as the Chinese Benevolent Association for their own protection and survival. Most of the
local inhabitants were not inclined to have a Chinese friend… since white Canadians perceived the
Chinese as inferior species….100
Yuen-fong Woon disagrees with the argument made by Chan and Li (Peter Li’s 1980 article on
the Chinese family in Canada supports Chan’s argument). He points out that Chinese emigrated
abroad as voluntary sojourners because historically people in China, especially Chinese
merchants in southeastern China, had often sojourned in Chinese cities as well as abroad. He
further points out that Chinese tradition tended to discourage men from bringing their women to
Canada. Even before 1923 when it was still possible for them to bring their wives, few of them
did so. He suggests that cultural preference rather than institutional racism largely “accounted for
the sojourner phenomenon among overseas Chinese.”101
Li considers Woon’s contention seriously flawed, arguing that there is no evidence that
Chinese immigrants chose to remain foreign and marginal in Canadian society or willingly left
their wives and children behind. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence that Chinese in
23
Canada were discriminated against and mistreated, and such treatment would only have
encouraged their allegiance and attachment to the homeland, as is evident in their active
participation in their national politics. Li points out that while before 1923 the Chinese were
allowed to bring their families, financial difficulties prevented many from doing so, given the
low income of rural workers in China at the time and the heavy head tax they had to pay in order
to enter Canada after 1885. Apart from legal restrictions, hostile social environment in Canada
also discouraged Chinese from bringing their families along. Chinese and their quarters were
frequent targets of racial hatred, as in the Vancouver’s anti-Oriental riots of 1887 and 1907.
After 1923, the exclusion act practically barred all Chinese from immigrating to Canada, thus
creating many separate families.102
In her study on Chinese women in British Columbia, Tamara Adilman argues that the “head
tax” in fact effectively checked the immigration of Chinese women to the country - many
Chinese men eventually sponsored their male rather than female relatives (sons or nephews)
since Canada’s economic demand for male labor would enable them to enter the paid labor force
and to repay the head tax whereas women were considered expensive economic liabilities.103
Adilman further argues that white Canada never really wanted the Chinese to settle permanently
in the country. While the Prime Minister King said that the 1923 act was intended to protect
white labor, a closer look at the 1923 Parliamentary debates revealed more than mere fear of
labor competition. Canadian legislators were convinced of the need to bar the entry of Chinese
women in order to control the growth of the Chinese population. During the debates only
merchant wives were discussed as to whether they should be granted the “privilege” of entry.
Concerned about the “supposed polygamous practices of Chinese merchants” who might bring
the “best-looking and the youngest … that can best bear children,” some legislators suggested
24
that “only wives of fifty and over be admitted, because ‘there would be less danger of the
Chinese population increasing.’” Policy-makers hoped that Chinese men deprived of wives
would go back to China, thus once for all solving the “Chinese problem.”104 According to
Adilman, J.S. Woodsworth was the only one among the MPs who spoke on behalf of the Chinese:
…it seems to me we are nothing less than hypocritical if we talk about the immoralities of the
Chinese and yet permit them to come under conditions that would breed immorality. We object to
their coming because they make poor citizens, and then take from them the very things that are
necessary to make them good citizens – that is, the presence of their wives and children with them.105
The Chinese community strongly protested against the 1923 bill, arguing that Chinese
already in Canada should be allowed to bring their families and should receive the same
treatment given to the Japanese; however, their protests went unheeded.106 The so-called
“gentlemen’s agreement” concluded between Canada and Japan in 1908 limited Japanese
immigration to Canada to 400 a year, not including returnees and their families; the quota was
cut down to 150 in 1923, and beginning in 1928, wives and children of returning migrants were
included in the quota.107 The 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act aggravated the already imbalanced sex
ratio among the Chinese in Canada. According to Li, throughout the 1920s and 1930s Chinese
men outnumbered women by 12-15 times, and the sex ratio did not become balanced until the
1980s. The absence of Chinese women also delayed the growth of the Canadian-born Chinese
population. While in 1931 48 percent of the Japanese in Canada was Canadian-born, the
comparable figure for the Chinese was only 12 percent, slowly increasing to about 20 percent in
1941 and 31 percent in 1951.108
Similar skewed sex ratio existed among the Chinese in the U.S, and not until the mid-20th
century did it achieve “an approximate balance.”109 George Peffer, in his study on Chinese
female immigration to America, argues that many scholars, in explaining the “bachelorhood”
phenomenon among the Chinese, usually cite as the major factors Chinese immigrants’ sojourner
25
mentality and Chinese tradition that required wives to remain home fulfilling filial duties.
Consequently, not unlike the 19th-century opponents of Chinese immigration, these scholars
tend to believe that the few Chinese women who came before the exclusion era of 1882-1943
were mostly prostitutes since at the time “decent” women did not travel afar, thus rendering
invisible other classes of Chinese women who came to America before 1882.110 Peffer argues
that legal restrictions on Chinese female immigration rather than cultural restraints or sojourner
mentality were mainly responsible for the shortage of women among the Chinese in the U.S.
Sucheng Chan supports Peffer’s argument, pointing out that long before the passage of the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act, efforts had been made by various levels of government to try to keep
Chinese women out. Despite the presence of large numbers of prostitutes from all countries,
Chinese women were singled out for special treatment - between 1866 and 1905 California
passed at least eight codes to suppress Chinese prostitution.111
According to Aarim-Heriot, President Ulysses Grant “provided significant impetus to the
anti-Chinese movement.” In his December 1874 annual message to Congress he attacked both
Chinese contract laborers and Chinese women brought in “for shameful purposes,” urging
Congress to pass legislation against these evils.112 The Page Law passed in March 1875 banned
the entry of “Mongolian” contract laborers, felons, and women for the purpose of prostitution.113
Peffer reproached historians for having dismissed the 1875 Page Law as ineffective, arguing that
while the law failed to bar Chinese laborers - this ultimately led to the passage of the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Law, it effectively restricted Chinese female immigration. From 1876-1882,
the number of Chinese women entering the U.S. declined by 68 percent from 4,142 for the
previous seven years to 1,338.114 Suspecting all Chinese women of prostitution, immigration
officials, in attempting to exclude prostitutes, also made the entry of other groups of Chinese
26
women extremely difficult - even the wives of U.S. citizens could be labeled as prostitutes and
denied entry.115
Lucie Cheng Hirata’s study also reveals a drastic decrease of Chinese prostitutes in San
Francisco from 1,426 in 1870 to 435 in 1880, but to Peffer, the number of Chinese prostitutes
was exaggerated whereas that of other classes of Chinese women was underestimated. He argues
that census-takers brought their own prejudices with them and tended to ignore the existence of
Chinese women who were not prostitutes.116According to Jo Ann Williamson, the quality of the
census varies because of the kinds of questions each enumerator asked and the care he gave in
taking the census. Williamson cites Butte County, California as an example. The 1880 censustaker listed all Chinese living in the county’s Chico Public School District, including a Chinese
physician, as being unable to read and write since stereotypes viewed most early Chinese
immigrants as illiterate.117 Silva S. Minnick’s study also shows Euro-Americans’ prejudice
against Chinese: those women with unbound feet were usually thought to be from the lower class,
and since most Chinese prostitutes were believed to come from this class, the 1870 census-taker
for Stockton, California listed 36 out of 40 Chinese female residents as prostitutes.118
Peffer argues that while sojourner mentality, family obligations and other constraints such as
financial cost of the journey did discourage Chinese female immigration, there is substantial
evidence that some women overcame these barriers to join their husbands in the U.S. before the
exclusion period.119 Ronald Takaki points out that Chinese families gradually increased as men
began to leave mining and railroad construction and to enter more stable occupations such as
farming, shop-keeping and fishing industry.120 Sucheng Chan’s research on Chinese in California
agriculture finds that as early as 1860 there were 59 Chinese wives living with their husbands in
Sacramento County, and studies by L. Eve Armentrout-Ma et al. reveal that many of the early
27
fishermen had their wives with them. For example, in the Chinese fishing village of Point Alones,
as early as 1870, nearly half of the villagers were female. The fishing villages began to expand in
the 1870s and 1880s when the former miners and railroad workers moved in. These new comers
had originally planned to stay in this country only for a few years, but once they took up fishing
they began to think of sending for wives. However, Chinese exclusion after 1882 barred the
immigration of Chinese laborers and their wives to the U.S.121 In 1898 the secretary of the
Treasury redefined “laborer” to include as many categories of work as possible - even, for
example, clerks, accountants, physicians, ministers, and missionaries all became “laborer” under
the new stipulations122
Sucheng Chan argues that while many Chinese immigrants were initially indeed sojourning
laborers, the question is “whether to be sojourning laborers was their intention and aspiration, or
whether it was a condition thrust upon them by external forces”123 From 1882 to 1904, Congress
passed a series of acts to exclude Chinese laborers; although the primary purpose of the general
Immigration Act of 1924 was to limit the number of immigrants from eastern, southern and
central Europe, its Section 13 (c) “[n]o alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the
United State” virtually banned entry of all Asians since the 1790 law limited naturalization to “a
free white person” and the revised 1870 naturalization statute extended naturalization only to
“aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” 124
The “alien ineligible to citizenship” clause also greatly affected U.S.-born Chinese men.
According to Vincente Tang et al., prior to 1924, many such men of marriageable ages would
return to China to find wives because there were few Chinese women in the U.S. to choose as
spouses. Between 1920 and 1924, 1,610 Chinese women came as wives of American citizens,
but after 1924 no such women were allowed to enter. The hardship of Chinese men in the U.S.
28
was compounded by the fact that anti-miscegenation laws in many states made the interracial
marriage impossible.125 According to Stanford Lyman, 39 states and territories at one time
prohibited intermarriage between whites and other races, and in 14 states the laws specifically
designated Chinese/Mongolians as ineligible to marry whites.126 Further, in 1922 Congress
passed an act, known as the Cable Act, that stripped U.S. citizenship from any female citizen
who married an alien ineligible for citizenship.127 Partial relief came only in 1930, when
Congress amended the 1924 law permitting the immigration of Chinese women who married
American citizens before May 26 1924 - the approval date of the 1924 Immigration
Act.128According to Constance Backhouse, although there was no legislation prohibiting
interracial marriage in Canada, other barriers were set up to prevent such unions. In some cases,
the church simply denied the couples marriage rites; in 1911 Lethbridge police locked up a
Chinese man from Alberta when they learned that he had proposed marriage to his white female
employee. White anxiety over interracial mixing led to Saskatchewan prohibiting in 1912 the
employment of white women in any businesses owned by Asians, and similar legislation was
passed in Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia in 1913, 1914 and 1919.129
Handicapped by the shortage of women in the Chinese community and by antimiscegenation laws, many Chinese men sought wives from Chinese mission homes. According
to Peggy Pasco, who has studied the Presbyterian Mission Home for Chinese women in San
Francisco, missionaries in the Home carefully screened applicants and quizzed them about their
previous marital status, religious convictions, and their financial prospects, in the belief that “he
who would win a member of the Mission Home family for his wife must present the very best
credentials.”130 David Chan angrily points out that the mere mention of old Chinatown to any
29
Euro-American would evoke images of tong wars, prostitution, gambling and opium smoking.
There is no denying the fact that they were “an integral part of life in Chinatown,”
[b]ut did anyone ask why such things occurred in Chinatown? … most of Chinatown’s men did not
enjoy a normal family life. Consequently such alternative outlets were needed to occupy these men in
their spare time. It is ironic that white America pointed to the involvement of Chinese in [these vice
activities] as evidence of the undesirability of the Chinese race, when it was white America’s laws
which made these activities the only diversions for the lonely men of Chinatown.131
In his Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki has noted the relatively rapid growth
of Chinese female population and families in Hawaii. According to him, of the 25,767 Chinese in
1900 in Hawaii, 3,471 (13.5 percent) were female, but of the 89,863.on the continental United
States, only 4,522 (5 percent) were female.132 Takaki points to Hawaii’s open-door policy
towards female immigration as one of the major reasons for the more balanced sex ratio among
Hawaiian Chinese. Instead of keeping Chinese women out, Hawaiian government and planters
saw wives as a stabilizing influence among their male workers, and from very early days
included married women in their recruitment of Chinese contract laborers. Planters paid for their
passages to Hawaii and provided work for both husband and wife on the same plantation.
However, Takaki points out, employers in California viewed the Chinese as a temporary, migrant
labor force “ready to move to the next construction site or the next harvest.” They only needed
Chinese labor, but not their women because the presence of their women would only encourage
Chinese men to demand higher pay and better working and living conditions.133
Furthermore, according to Takaki, there was a widespread intermarriage between Asian men
and Hawaiian women. As early as 1871, of the 1,201 Chinese men in the islands, 121 married
Hawaiian women and produced 91 boys and 76 girls, and by 1900, about 1,500 Chinese men
married or lived with Hawaiian women. The more balanced sex ratio as well as a large number
of families in the Chinese community, according to Takaki, helped explain why “generally,
30
Chinese prostitutes were absent in Hawaii.”134 Peffer also points to the political activism among
the Chinese in Hawaii as another contributing factor to the steady increase of nuclear families in
the Chinese community. According to him, when the U. S. enacted the Chinese exclusion act in
1882, the Chinese in Hawaii responded by forming the United Chinese Society, actively
lobbying against all attempts to restrict their immigration to the islands. Throughout the 1880s,
despite limited immigration restrictions against male laborers, Chinese female immigration to
Hawaii continued. Immigration from China was made “a difficult ordeal” only after the U.S.
annexed Hawaii in 1898 and brought its Chinese exclusion to the islands.135
.
********
The militancy of the Chinese in Hawaii is a challenge to the popular image of the Chinese as
passive victims of white racism. In their 1986 study of the Chinese in Timmins, Ontario, Kwok
Chan and Lawrence Lam observed:
In an attempt to cope with ethnic insults and hostile confrontations in interethnic transactions, the
Chinese in Timmins have chosen to accommodate by withdrawal and self-isolation, not counterarguments or attacks. … The Chinese had never organized themselves to combat any discriminatory
practices on the part of any majority or minority group either.136
Carol Lee’s work on Asian voting rights in British Columbia echoed this view:
In facing second-class citizenship,… the [Chinese] appeared contended with their low economic
position, accepted discrimination imposed upon them with almost no public protest, and made little
effort to assimilate.137
Sucheng Chan argues that despite the popular view of the Chinese as docile there is substantial
evidence to show that “when their sense of justice was violated, they rose in revolt” though their
efforts were often hampered by their lack of political rights as well as of a strong modern “home
country” to protect their interests138 According to Chan, the principal ways the Chinese often used
to fight their lowly status were strikes, litigation, and involvement in homeland politics. One of the
31
largest strikes by the Chinese in the 19th-century America took place in 1867 during the
construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, which employed about 12,000 Chinese. Chinese
workers were paid $30 a month without board whereas white workers received the same amount of
money with board. In June 1867, 2,000 Chinese digging tunnels in the Sierras went on strike,
demanding $40 a month, a reduction to 8-10 hours of work a day, and an end to corporal
punishment by foremen. However, their strike lasted only a week when the railroad company cut
off their food supply, and threatened to bring over 10,000 blacks from the East to replace them.139
Albert Yee angrily points out:
The Chinese [were often accused of ] taking low wages, [b]ut why did those who force slave standards
upon them go without criticism? Who really does fit the role of victim and oppressor? Under [their]
logic, blacks should have been attacked for being slaves.140
As Gillan Creese has shown, despite many impediments to Chinese labor militancy, such as the
lack of political rights and the hostility of white labor towards Asians, Chinese workers did
organize themselves into labor unions and trade associations to combat discrimination, and in some
instances they successfully challenged their subordination. The Chinese Canadian Labor Union
(CCLU) was established in 1916 in British Columbia, and staged a number of strikes in the lumber
industry. The Chinese Shingle Workers’ Union was formed during a strike in March 1919 that
involved 50 shingle mills in the Vancouver area, and as many as 1,200 Asian workers, ¾ of whom
were Chinese. The workers resisted a 10% wage reduction, and the strike lasted one month until
the mill owners finally gave in.141 Chinese vegetable dealers in British Columbia also organized
themselves into unions, and in Vancouver in late 1919 they withdrew their services for three
months in protest against the city’s by-law that required them to pay a license fee twice that of
other vegetable dealers because they were presumed to be making profits much more than other
dealers. Although their strike finally failed, their counterparts in Los Angeles staged a successful
strike that left the city’s residents without vegetables for weeks.142
32
Chinese workers fought not just against white bosses but also against sweatshop owners or
labor contractors of their own race whenever they felt themselves unjustly treated. For example,
the Chinese Workers’ League of San Francisco, formed in 1919, aimed its first action against
Chinese shirt factories in San Francisco and Oakland. The League presented nine demands to the
factory owners, and after strike threats and several negotiations, 32 shirt factories conceded to the
demands and signed an agreement with the League.143 Ronald Takaki’s study on Asians in Hawaii
has found that in 1891, 300 plantation workers quit work, marching to the courthouse to demand
the arrest of a Chinese labor contractor whom they claimed had cheated them.144 As Wickberg et al.
have shown, fighting against discrimination sometimes involved the entire Chinese community,
and the merchant elite, or the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) usually took
the lead organizing the protests and resistance. For example, in August of 1878 British Columbia
passed an act requiring every Chinese over 12 years of age to pay a license fee of $10 quarterly.
The Chinese in Victoria immediately took action – the community leaders engaged a lawyer, and
sent petitions to the Governor General and to the Chinese ambassadors in London and the United
States. In late September the entire Chinese community went on strike for several days: stores
closed, and Chinese workers and domestic servants staying away from work. Finally the act was
voided by the B.C. Supreme Court.145
In his work on the Chinese contribution to the development of American law, Charles
McClain has challenged the conventional view that the Chinese in the 19th-century America had
“neither knowledge of nor interest” in the U.S. political institutions. He argues that on the contrary
substantial evidence shows that Chinese were keenly interested in American political institutions
and did not hesitate to use them to promote their interests. He points out that from very early days
the leaders of the Chinese community in California regularly interacted with the local government.
33
For example, as early as 1852 when the state passed a tax act aiming primarily at Chinese gold
miners, the heads of the Chinese district associations presented a series of grievances before the
state legislators, and in the subsequent years they made several appearances in the state legislature
to argue for their rights.146According to Christian Fritz, in the 1870s those seeking to restrict
Chinese immigration found the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between China and the U.S. a major
obstacle in their path because the treaty recognized the “free migration and emigration” of people
of both countries and guaranteed Chinese in the U.S. “the same privileges, immunities, and
exemptions in respect to travel or residence, as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of
the most favored nations.” The federal courts often used the treaty to invalidate California’s
restrictive measures. Pressured by anti-Chinese agitators, in 1880 the federal government revised
the 1868 treaty with China, and the new treaty, known as the Angell Treaty, allowed the U.S. to
“regulate, limit, or suspend entry of Chinese laborers,” thus paving the way to the 1882 Chinese
exclusion.147
According to Takaki, the Chinese Six Companies played a key role in the inclusion of those
protective provisions in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty. During the 1868 negotiations, the Companies
contacted a San Francisco lawyer who served as adviser to the federal officials involved in the
treaty negotiations, explaining to him that federal legislation was very much needed to protect the
Chinese in the U.S. and that this would in turn encourage Chinese investments in this country and
promote American trade with China. “The outcome of the negotiations,” as Takaki has remarked,
“was a major victory for the Chinese Six Companies.”148 The next year saw the Chinese score
another major victory in their fight for civil rights. As McClain and Takaki have shown, in June
1869, the leaders of the Chinese community, accompanied by several prominent white merchants
and bankers, met with the congressional delegation in San Francisco. The Chinese leaders
34
complained about California’s discriminatory laws such as the foreign miners’ tax that targeted the
Chinese for taxation and the ban on Chinese testimony in court, and asked Congress to give the
Chinese just and equal protection guaranteed by the 1868 treaty. This meeting proved helpful - in
1870 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Although the primary purpose of the act was to protect
southern blacks’ political and civil rights, section 16 of the act stated that all persons within the
jurisdiction of the United States shall have “full and equal benefits of all laws and proceedings for
the security and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1870
disallowed the state’s foreign miners’ tax, California had collected $5 million from the Chinese.
The ban on Chinese testimony in court was removed in 1872, when California revised its penal and
civil codes.149
In protesting discriminatory laws, the Chinese community did not confine its action to
petitions and lobbying. The CCBA usually took responsibility engaging attorneys to fight antiChinese legislation in court. As McClain has observed, individual states’ powers were
circumscribed by federal laws, Constitution, and the judiciary system, and from an early date the
Chinese recognized the importance of courts and lawyers and resorted to them whenever their
interests were threatened by hostile local legislation.150 According to Sucheng Chan, between 1854
and 1882, over 100 Chinese cases were heard in the supreme courts of California and other
western states/territories, and during the Chinese exclusion 1882 -1943, nearly 1,300 Chinese cases
were heard in federal courts, of which around 170 cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court.151
McClain points out that the numerous Chinese cases not only challenged the legislation enacted by
three levels of American government, but some of them “established important precedents and
contributed significantly to the legal and constitutional history of the United States, a fact that has
gone largely unrecognized.”152
35
Lin Sing v. Washburn is an important test case ending in a victory for the Chinese. In 1862
California enacted an act to “protect free white labor against competition with Chinese coolie
labor,” imposing a monthly tax of $2.5 on all Chinese in the state except those licensed to work in
the mines or those operating businesses or engaged in the production of produce specified in the
act. In June 1862, Lin Sing brought suit before a magistrate for a refund of the tax levied on him.
Because the magistrate and the county court ruled in favor of the state, the matter was appealed to
the California Supreme Court. Frank Pixley, the state’s attorney general, argued that the act was a
legitimate exercise of the state’s police power and that it did not interfere with the federal power
over foreign commerce since the act affected the Chinese only after they had landed. The court
rejected his argument and used the 1827 case of Brown v. Maryland to support its proposition that
the tax on the Chinese was similar to a tax that discriminated against foreign commerce. By
targeting the Chinese for special taxation in order to discourage their immigration, California
interfered with foreign commerce. McClain points out that the case of Lin Sing v. Washburn is
important in that it was the first case in which that a Chinese in the U.S. sought to invalidate a state
enactment on the grounds that it violated the U.S. Constitution.153
According to Chan, between 1873 and 1884, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed 14
ordinances to restrict the Chinese laundries. One ordinance required all washhouses in wooden
buildings to obtain a license from the board or be subjected to a fine of $1,000 or six months’
imprisonment of the owners. In 1885, the board rejected every Chinese license application but
approved all non-Chinese’s except one.154 The Chinese laundry guild hired a well-known San
Francisco lawyer to fight the case in court, and Yick Wo was the perfect litigant for mounting a
challenge to the constitutionality of the city ordinance. When he applied for his license in the
summer of 1885, Yick Wo already had permits from the city’s fire and health officials certifying
36
that his laundry had met all the health and safety regulations, but the board denied his
application.155 The case finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The city argued that regulating
laundries was part of its police power and that the ordinance was not discriminatory because unlike
the non-Chinese laundries, Chinese laundries all had scaffolds on their roofs for drying clothes which were “fire hazards.” The Court ruled against the city, declaring that “to divide laundries
arbitrarily into two classes was a denial of equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th
Amendment, which covered not only all citizens but all persons, including Chinese aliens.”156 The
laundry case, as McClain has pointed out, has ever since become one of the most cited court
decisions in discussions of the “equal protection” clause of the Constitution.157
Chinese immigrants, like other “colored” people, were also subject to discrimination in
housing and education. Takaki quotes Ng Poon Chew, editor of Chung Sai Yat Po, a most
successful Chinese language newspaper of the early 20th century in San Francisco, “A Chinaman
cannot secure a residence outside of Chinatown, in San Francisco, no mater how much he may
offer for it.... ”158 The color line was applied to public schools as well. In 1860 California’s school
law excluded “Negroes, Mongolians, and American Indians” from public schools and authorized
the superintendent of education to withhold funds from any schools that violated this prohibition
though San Francisco’s Chinese taxpayers paid over $42,000 annually to support the public
education.159 In 1884, Joseph and Mary Tape sued the San Francisco school board when their
daughter Mamie Tape was denied the admission to a local school because of her Chinese descent.
The court ruled in the Tapes’ favor, based on the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment.
“To deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this State, entrance to the public schools… would be a
violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States.” Despite the court’s
ruling, the school board adopted a “separate but equal” policy, establishing a separate school for
37
the Chinese children in 1885.160 In 1905, the San Francisco school board decided to place all
Japanese and Korean students in the separate “Oriental School,” and Japan immediately protested.
Realizing that the real purpose of the school board’s action was Japanese exclusion, President
Roosevelt reached a compromise with San Francisco’s officials: the school board rescinded its
decision and the federal government would work out an agreement with Japan to limit its
immigration. The 1907 “gentlemen’s agreement” required Japan to stop issuing passports to
laborers, but the returnees and the wives and other family members of the Japanese already in the
U.S. were still allowed to enter.161
California was not the only state that practiced school segregation. According to Robert
O’Brien, in the Mississippi delta, by the 1940s there lived about 900 Chinese, running over 300
stores in the area. In the caste system of Mississippi, the Chinese were what James Loewen called
“middlemen between white and black.”162 Until the mid-1920s their children attended white
schools and churches though occasionally racial conflicts did occur. In 1925 a Chinese student
named Joe Tin Lun was expulsed from a white school in Dublin, Mississippi, and the Chinese
community took the case to court. The state supreme court declared that
the dominant purpose of the segregated school system in Mississippi was to preserve the purity and
integrity of the white race, and prevent amalgamation;…Under the constitution [sic] the Negro is an
American citizen; then how can an alien Chinaman complain when he is assigned to a school provided,
under our law, for the colored races? 163
Chinese parents refused to accept the court’s decision to send their children to Negro schools, and
ten years later a compromise reached - separate schools were set up for the Chinese children in the
area.164
Chinese also fought vigorously immigration exclusion. According to Sucheng Chan, over 90
percent of their legal cases “arose from efforts to gain entry into the U.S.”165 The federal official
responsible for implementing the exclusion laws in San Francisco was the collector of customs
38
who detained many thousands of Chinese new arrivals. Between 1882 and 1891, over 7,000 habeas
corpus cases were filed in the federal courts at San Francisco to challenge the collector’s decisions,
and the judges allowed over 85 percent of the petitioners to enter the country. As Jucy Salyer et al.
have observed, while the judges may have agreed with or even supported the Chinese exclusion
policies, they were, however, “captured” by law: all individuals, whatever their race or color, “had
the right to seek liberty through a habeas corpus proceeding.”166 The 1882 exclusion act prohibited
the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years but allowed those residing in the U.S. before
November 17, 1880 - the date of the last treaty with China- to remain, and to leave and return to
the country. so long as they obtained a “return certificate” from the collector before leaving. As
David Chan has remarked, this law proved unsatisfactory to the anti-Chinese forces who expected
to see Chinese disappear overnight. Consequently, a more restrictive act, known as the Scott Act
was passed on October 1, 1888, prohibiting the return of any Chinese laborers once they had left
the country; thus, 20,000 Chinese laborers with return certificates who were out of the country at
the time were denied re-entry.167
Chae Chan Ping, a laborer, who had obtained a return certificate before leaving for China in
1887, arrived a week after the passage of the 1888 act and was denied entry. Chae took his case to
the U.S. Supreme Court after the circuit court decided against him. In Chae Ping v. United States,
the Supreme Court ruled that the 1888 act was entirely valid and that even if the 1888 law
conflicted with the previous acts, “the later document superceded the earlier ones.” Moreover, as
an alien, the right to enter or stay in the country “was held at the will of the government, revocable
at any time.”168When the 1882 act expired in 1892, the Geary Act took its place, which, as David
Chan has remarked, was “the ultimate of insults” in that all Chinese laborers were required to
register and be photographed or face deportation.169 The CCBA led a nationwide boycott against
39
the registration and retained three leading New York lawyers to contest the Geary Act in court.
The test case involved three Chinese who had been arrested and about to be deported. In Fong Yue
Ting v. United States (1892) the Supreme Court held that since “a sovereign state has plenary and
unconfined power over immigration” – the right to decide who to expel or deport and “who to let
within its borders,” it, therefore, has the right to “compel aliens to register.” 170 McClain has noted
the conflicting outcomes of the two cases -Yick Wo and Fong Yue Ting. In the former, the
Supreme Court held that the lower-level governments were subject to the constraints of the due
process and equal protection provisions in the 14th amendment when dealing with aliens whereas
in the latter it decided that the federal government had virtually unlimited constitutional power
when dealing with the same class of persons.171
In 1903, the Bureau of Immigration was transferred from the Treasury to the newly created
Department of Commerce and Labor, and gained full control over the enforcement of the Chinese
exclusion laws.172 As Roger Daniels has observed, unlike most other federal bureaucracies, which
served as advocates for their constituencies - e.g. agriculture for farmers, labor for workers - the
immigration service saw its primary task as protecting America from harmful effects of
immigrants. Beginning with President McKinley who appointed Terence V. Powderly, the Grand
Master of the Knights of Labor, as the Commissioner General of Immigration (1897-1902), all
subsequent Republican presidents until Nixon appointed labor leaders for this position. Like most
labor leaders of the time, Powderly was a persistent advocate of immigration restriction, and
particularly hostile to Asian immigrants: 173
No graver danger has ever menaced the workingmen of America than that which faces them when the
possibility of lowering the bars at our seaports and border-lines to the Chinese is presented.174
Desperate to gain entry, some Chinese looked for loopholes in the law. According to Madeline
Y. Hsu et al., some laborers changed their status to “merchant” by faking a partnership with
40
business firms; others entered the country by crossing the land border from Canada or Mexico. The
1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed the city’s birth records, thus enabling “many alien
Chinese to claim American nativity and citizenship.” Being American citizens, they could bring in
their wives, as well as foreign-born children, as the American law conferred derivative citizenship
on foreign-born children of American citizens. It was not unusual for a Chinese-American to have
a wife in China, and every time his visit produced a child, he would report the birth of the child to
the immigration authorities. He could register a false birth, and sold the “slot” to those who were
willing to pay.175 Immigration officials responded by subjecting all Chinese seeking entry to a
close scrutiny at entry points.
Until 1910, Chinese immigrants arriving at San Francisco were detained in a shed at the
Pacific Mail Steamship wharf, known as “wooden house.” After Chinese community leaders’
frequent complaint about its crowded and unsanitary conditions, in 1910 the immigration station
was relocated to Angel Island.176 As Huping Ling et al. point out, unlike Ellis Island, Angel Island
was used as a detention center for Asian immigrants, chiefly Chinese, where they were forced to
wait for long periods of time, sometimes up to 2-3 years before being allowed entry or deported.
While detained on the island, they were forbidden to receive visitors. Even husbands and wives
could not see or talk to each other. Some detainees became so unhappy or depressed that they
committed suicide whereas many others expressed their sorrow and anger by writing or carving
Chinese poems on the walls of the detention center. Nearly 140 poems have been recorded, and 69
are included in the book by Him M. Lai et al. These poems are a testimony to the bitter past of the
Chinese immigrants in the United States.177
Protesting the maltreatment of the Chinese in the U.S. found its fullest expression in the
nationwide boycott of American goods in China in 1905. According to Shin-shan Tsai, what
41
angered Chinese was not just that Chinese laborers were barred from entry but that those exempted
classes such as merchants, visitors, and even Chinese diplomats and officials were abused by
immigration officials. For example, Chinese delegates to the 1904 St. Louis Exposition were
shocked to find that they had to “travel under 61 special rules that did not apply to the participants
from other countries.” Corinne Hoexter’s study shows how a Chinese diplomat in Washington was
abused by American officials who arrested him for lacking visa or registration and tied his queue
to a fence. The humiliation was too much for him to bear that he committed suicide.178
Furthermore, in 1904, when the 1894 Gresham-Yang Treaty expired, the Chinese government
refused to renew it because the treaty sanctioned the exclusion of Chinese laborers for ten more
years and the registration of all Chinese laborers in the U.S. In retaliation, in 1904 the U.S.
extended all Chinese exclusion laws indefinitely and made them applicable to its insular territories.
By June 1905, the attempt of the Chinese government to negotiate “a less onerous agreement” with
the U.S. failed because the American side wanted not only to continue to exclude all Chinese
laborers but to “introduce new registration of non-laborers admitted to the United States.”179
As Larson has suggested, most studies of the boycott have neglected the contribution of
overseas Chinese, especially such organizations as the Emperor Protection Association (EPA),
founded in 1899 by Kang Youwei - a leading reformer in the abortive 1898 Reform Movement in
China, that provided much of the boycott’s initial inspiration and substantial organizational and
financial resources.180 By 1905, the EPA had over 160 chapters stretching from SE Asia and
Australia to North America and Japan. In early 1905, Kang arrived in the U.S., and sent a telegram
to his followers in China urging people there to hold rallies and flood the Foreign Ministry with
petitions to fight against the exclusion treaty. His most famous follower Liang Qichao had frequent
mail and telegram exchanges with people in Shanghai and Hong Kong to discuss the
42
matter.181According to Larson, it was the EPA’s newspaper Shi Bao, established in Shanghai in
1904, that spearheaded the boycott in China. After receiving Kang’s telegram, its staff members
contacted local influential people, all belonging to the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce (SCC),
which held two rallies in May 1905 calling for a boycott and sent their resolutions to 30 cities
across China.182 Meanwhile, in North America a united front was formed in San Francisco to raise
money in support of the boycott.183
The boycott started in July 1905 in Shanghai, and extended to several provinces, but Shanghai
and Guangdong province were “the most actively involved.”184 Businessmen canceled orders for
American goods, including cotton cloth from Southern mills and kerosene, students withdrew from
schools run by Americans, and even Chinese Christians switched from American churches to
English or German churches.185 Although scholars such as Sucheng Chan consider that “the
boycott had only a negligible impact on America’s trade with China,” Larson and Hoexter have
argued that “the economic impact on U.S.-China trade was considerable,” as reported by the U.S.
Secretary of Commerce and Labor in 1908 who said that American exports to China were $57
million in 1905 but fell to $26 million in 1907. Standard Oil “with its oil for the lamps of China”
also reported a drastic decrease in its oil sale from 90,000 cases a month in Guangzhou (Canton)
before May 1905 to only 19,000 cases in November of that year.186 Pressured by the boycott and
by various American interest groups, President Roosevelt issued an executive order instructing
immigration officials to stop their abusive treatment of Chinese immigrants and to be “more liberal
in their interpretation of who could enter.” To appease the Chinese and continue the China trade, in
1908 Congress passed legislation to return part of the Boxer indemnity to China as scholarships
for Chinese students to study in the U.S.187 The boycott was important in that it not only forced the
U.S. to make some, though small, concessions to Chinese demands but it also for the first time
43
united “a broad spectrum of Chinese” in a common cause.188 Such unity for a common end would
manifest itself most vividly in the succeeding republican revolution of 1911, the May 4 movement
of 1919, as well as in the struggle against Japan during World War II.
********
World War II was a turning point for Chinese North Americans. In late 1943 the U.S.
government repealed the Chinese exclusion acts, and granted the Chinese the right of
naturalization, and an annual immigration quota of 105. Similar rights were extended to Filipinos
and Asian Indians in 1946. In contrast, the Japanese, identified as “enemy aliens” during the war
and locked in “relocation camps,” received no immigration quota or the right of naturalization until
1952.189 The Canadian government revoked the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act in 1947, and in the
same year British Columbia gave the vote to Chinese and Asian Indians, but the Japanese had to
wait for two more years before getting the franchise190 As Sucheng Chan et al. have shown, the
image of Chinese held by the general public also improved. A 1942 Gallup poll revealed that the
Chinese were characterized by the respondents as “hardworking, honest, brave, religious and
intelligent” whereas the Japanese were said to be “treacherous, sly, cruel and warlike.” Even those
British Columbian politicians who had been ardent anti-Chinese elements now “suddenly” found
Chinese to be “people of honesty and integrity, which is something different from the Japanese.”191
The war also opened new job opportunities for the Chinese. Ivan Light’s study shows that by
1920, over 50 percent of the Chinese in the United States worked in restaurants or laundries, and
the majority of the rest were domestic servants. Light argues that Chinese were not by nature
content to do the low-status laundry or restaurant work which required long hours of hard work
with low profits. Once higher-paying wage/salary jobs became available they took them, as is
44
evident during WWII when the labor shortage led many Chinese to abandon Chinatown
occupations for the higher-paying industrial jobs. 192 In 1942 several restaurants in New York’s
Chinatown had to shut down for lacking waiters, and in Los Angeles 300 Chinese laundrymen
closed their shops to build the ship China Victory.193 Chinese women also made some economic
advances. According to Lee and Takaki, for the first time college-educated Chinese women in B.C.
could obtain a job in an office rather than in a fruit or vegetable store, and a 1942 issue of the
Chinese Press proudly reported that Chinese women aircraft workers “help build B-24 bombers in
San Diego.”194 Discrimination against Chinese also decreased in other areas of public life. In
Vancouver, British Columbia, some Chinese residents began to move out of Chinatowns into white
neighborhoods, and in late 1945 the Vancouver Parks Board desegregated the city-owned
swimming pool “after a unanimous protest by Vancouver high school principals.” 195
According to Takaki et al., several factors contributed to the changes in Chinese immigration
laws as well as in white attitudes toward the Chinese, such as the improved image of China as a
Western ally during WWII, Chinese communities’ contributions to the war effort, and the
compliance of the United States and Canada with the charter of the United Nations.196 Further,
according to Takaki and Daniels, Japanese propaganda had been using Chinese exclusion to appeal
to Asia to unite in a race war against white America; thus, in President Roosevelt’s words, “[by]
the repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws, we can correct a historic mistake and silence the distorted
Japanese propaganda.”197 With the changes in white attitudes as well as in the social climate
towards the Chinese, the long struggle of the Chinese community against racial discrimination
gained broader public sympathy and support. Such pressure groups as the Citizens Committee to
Repeal Chinese Exclusion and Place Immigration on a Quota Basis, formed in May 1943 by a
group of prominent American whites, and the Toronto-based Committee for the Repeal of the
45
Chinese Immigration Act, set up in November 1946 and with a predominantly non-Chinese
membership, were instrumental in the final repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws in both
countries.198
Although the U.S. and Canada reopened their doors to Asian immigration following WWII,
many scholars have argued that “the significance of this historic accomplishment was more
symbolic than real,” for in the two decades after the war their immigration policy remained little
different from their historical position of favoring European immigrants and discouraging
immigrants from Asian and other non-white countries.199 The 1943 repeal act gave an annual
immigration quota of 105 to the Chinese, but those Chinese born and resident outside of China
were also charged to the small Chinese quota - “a stipulation that applied to no other group.”200
Roger Daniels further points out that the repeal act ignored the issue of family reunification among
the Chinese, and according to Madeline Hsu, in 1940 about two-fifths of Chinese men in America
were married men living in separation from their wives in China.201
This problem was partly alleviated when the War Brides Act of 1945 allowed veterans of the
American armed forces to bring their alien spouses, fiancées or fiancés, and minor children to the
U.S. as non-quota immigrants. Later, a 1946 statute extended this privilege to non-veteran Chinese
American citizens. However, the War Brides Act still retained the “aliens ineligible to citizenship”
bar that affected most Asians, who did not get their immigration quotas and the right of
naturalization until the 1952 when McCarran-Walter Act removed racial bars to immigration and
naturalization.202 Despite the liberalizing elements in the 1952 act, many scholars have argued that
the act continued to treat Europeans and non-whites differently. For example, previously excluded
Asian countries were allowed only a quota of 100 each, and the total annual quota for Asia was
around 2,990, as compared to about 158,000 for Europe and 1,400 for Africa. Further, according to
46
Daniels and Bennett, all but Asian immigrants were charged to the quotas of the countries of their
birth whereas those of Asian ancestry, no matter where they were born and resided, had to be
charged to the quotas of their country of racial origin.203
The 1965 Immigration Act abolished the national origins system, allowing the annual
admission of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western
Hemisphere. It established preferences for close relatives, workers with skills needed in the U.S.,
and refugees, with spouses, minor children and parents of U.S. citizens exempted from the
quota.204 As Chan et al. point out, the 1965 law, partly a necessity of the Cold War to compete with
the Communist bloc for “the hearts and minds of non-white peoples,” worked quite differently
than its proponents had anticipated. They “had predicted that European immigration would
continue to predominate” since Asians accounted for only one-half of one percent of the U.S.
population; therefore, very few of them were “qualified to bring relatives here.”205 Ironically, the
1965 law “opened the way for the second wave of Asian immigration”: while European economic
prosperity, as well as Soviet control of eastern European countries deterred large waves of
immigration from Europe, Asian Americans made wide use of the “family reunification”
provisions of the new law to sponsor the immigration of their relatives. According to Takaki, one
out of every two immigrants to the U.S. was now from Asia, and their numbers soared from one
million in 1965 to five million by the mid-1980s – nearly four times more Asian immigrants came
during this 20-year period than during the entire period of over 100 years between the gold rush
and the passage of the new law.206
In Canada, according to Peter Li et al., despite the repeal of Chinese exclusion laws following
WWII, until 1962 Chinese immigration, as well as that of other Asian groups, continued to be
severely restricted because, in Mackenzie King’s words, “the people of Canada do not wish, as a
47
result of mass immigration, to make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population.”
From1947 to 1962 the only immigration category open to Asians was that of sponsored dependents
of Canadian citizens.207 According to Kay J. Anderson, by 1941 only 5 percent of the Chinese in
Canada were naturalized Canadian citizens and 19.3 were citizens by birth. As Peter Li et al. have
noted, although Chinese were not legally barred from naturalization after 1931 those applying for
Canadian citizenship were required to obtain consent from the Chinese government. Further, in
British Columbia, discrimination against Asians made their naturalization “a scrape of paper” –
none of them, including Canadian citizens, could vote, and they were denied many other rights just
because of their Asiatic race.208
The 1962 immigration policy reduced the importance of country of origin as a major selection
criterion for the admission of immigrants to Canada, and allowed those with educational and
professional skills to apply as independent immigrants. However, it was not until new regulations,
introduced in 1967, selected immigrants on a universal point system primarily based on their
education, occupational skills and financial resources rather than on racial origins that, in Tan and
Roy’s words, Asians were “put on an equal footing with other prospective immigrants.”209 While
Louis Parai agrees that the 1967 immigration regulations opened up opportunities for those whose
immigration to Canada had traditionally been restricted, he, however, rejects the idea of its being
totally free of racial biases. Parai argues that the adoption of the new policy had much to do with
the country’s economic and manpower needs because the demand for highly skilled labor could
not now be met from traditional sources of immigrants due to increasing prosperity in post-war
Europe.210 The 1966 White Paper on Immigration was explicit about Canada’s changing economic
conditions in the post-war era and the resultant demand for skilled labor:
We do not have a frontier open to new agricultural settlement. Despite its low population density,
Canada has become a highly complex industrialized and urbanized society. And such a society is
increasingly demanding of the quality of its work force.211
48
The new immigration policy led to a shift in the source of immigrants to Canada away from
European countries towards those of the Third World. According to Donald Avery, in 1966, 76
percent of all immigrants to Canada came from Europe and only 6 percent from Asia; by 1973
the proportion of European immigrants declined to 39 percent while immigration from Asia
increased to 23 percent.212 Immigration regulations were further revised in the 1970s and 1980s
encouraging family reunification, as well as the admission of refugees and business immigrants,
and many Asians, including thousands of Indochinese refugees, benefited from these changes.213
Between 1979 and 1980, for example, Canada accepted over 60,000 Indochinese refugees;
from1988 to 1993, a total of 170,276 Chinese, in anticipation of the return of Hong Kong to
China in 1997, left Hong Kong and settled in Canada. In the mid-1980s the Business
Immigration Program was expanded to encourage foreign entrepreneurs and investors with
substantial capital to immigrate to Canada, and people from Hong Kong and Taiwan constituted
well over half of the 56,491 business immigrants admitted between 1986 and 1996.214 These
changes in immigration laws resulted in a sharp increase in the Chinese-Canadian population;
according to Peter Li, by 1991 the Chinese, totaling 633,933, had become the largest visible
minority group in Canada.215
********
The post-war immigration policy has brought in a new type of Chinese immigrant that
differs in many respects from the immigrants of the past. According to Wickberg et al., while the
old Chinese immigrants were mostly single males from the rural areas in Guangdong, South
China, the majority of new immigrants, especially those who came after the 1960s, are well-
49
educated urban-dwellers from diverse source societies such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
mainland China, and many of them have brought families along, intending to make North
America their permanent home.216 With the arrival of large numbers women and families in the
post-war Chinese immigration, the sex ratio has become much more balanced, and by 1981 it
reached equilibrium among the Chinese in both the United Sates and Canada.217
Daniel Kubat observes that unlike early Asian immigrants who came mainly as laborers, the
post-war immigrants to Canada intend to “work in jobs near the top of the occupational scale.”
While many of them do not enjoy high occupational ranking, especially those brought to Canada
under family reunification programs and Indochinese refugees, Asians generally “fare better
occupationally” than other immigrant groups.218 In the United States since the1960s numerous
reports and scholarly studies have poured out, acclaiming Asian Americans, especially the
Japanese and Chinese, as “high achievers” ranking considerably above average in terms of
educational level, proportion in high-status occupations and median family income. The “model
minority” thesis has raised much controversy and criticism, especially among Asian American
scholars, who argue that while undoubtedly the socio-economic status of Asian Americans has
improved since WWII, these studies give the false impression that they are all doing well and
that Asian Americans continue to encounter poverty and inequalities.219
According to Chan, in 1970, 25 percent of all employed Chinese males in the U.S. worked in
menial jobs as cooks, waiters, busboys or janitors. W.S. Chow 1976 study found a similar
proportion of Chinese in Canada engaged in restaurant work, and according to Chow, these
people entered the service work either because of their kinship tie with the restaurant owner who
sponsored them to Canada or because of their language problem which locked them in
Chinatown occupations where they were paid below the minimum wage.220 Although the 1970
50
U.S. census indicated that the proportion of Chinese males in professional and managerial
occupations was the highest (about 40 percent) among all ethnic groups, Sucheng Chan et al.,
argue that they were unevenly distributed in the economy: managers were usually self-employed
rather than employees of big companies, and professionals tended to cluster in accounting,
dentistry, nursing, and engineering but were underrepresented in law, teaching, administration,
and the higher levels of medical professions, and they were often paid less than whites doing
comparable work.221
Chan further points out that in most Chinese American families more than one person work,
which helps to account for their higher family income. If per capita income is considered,
Chinese Americans earn much less than the national average. Takaki’s study has found that in
1980 Chinese men on average earned only 68 percent of the income of white men in California
and that 25 percent of New York Chinatown population lived below the poverty level. According
to Peter Li et al., while occupationally, Chinese Canadians have done as well as other Canadians
– for example, in 1971, 30 percent of all employed Chinese in Canada were engaged in
professional and clerical occupations, Chinese Canadians generally earn less than other
Canadians. By the early 1970s only 20 percent of them earned more than $11,000.222 To help the
family get by but unable to speak English well, many Chinese immigrant women are compelled
to work in Chinatown garment sweatshops. A study of garment workers in San Francisco
Chinatown found 72 percent of them were secondary wage-earners. Although there have been
instances of Chinese garment workers fighting for higher wages and better working conditions,
the high unemployment rate in Chinatown due to the continuing influx of new immigrants
“disciplines the workers and keeps their labor ‘cheap.’”223 As Takaki and Li. have observed,
within the Chinese American/Canadian communities, “affluent families and low-income families
51
co-exist” - in New York City, there are the “Downtown Chinese” of waiters and garment
workers, as well as rich and professional “Uptown Chinese.”224
Like early Chinese immigrants, the new-comers tend to settle in major cities – for example,
by the 1980s nearly 98 percent of the Chinese Americans/Canadians were urban-dwellers and
concentrated in such states/provinces as New York, California, Ontario and British Columbia; 225
most of them, however, do not reside in Chinatowns. As Peter Li et al. point out, with the
dismantling of discriminatory laws after WWII and improved public attitudes towards nonwhites, recent immigrants, especially those with capital and professional skills, choose to live in
suburbs and middle-class white neighborhoods, leaving downtown Chinese quarters to the oldtimers and the working-class immigrants employed in Chinatown. Toronto, now home to the
largest Chinese community in Canada, has witnessed the emergence of several new Chinese
residential enclaves in its suburban areas such as Scarborough, Markham and Richmond Hill,
where “million dollar homes” and big malls cluster.226 However, Chinatown still retains its
appeal as a commercial center, where Chinese foodstuffs and other commodities can be
purchased, and as a tourist attraction. According to Jack Chen, each year San Francisco
Chinatown attracts tourists from all over the world with its exotic Oriental foods, shops, as well
as cultural activities presented by Chinatown’s “dance and music groups, singers and choruses, a
first-rate children’s orchestra, an outstanding group of artists.”227
The traditional associations that once played an important role in the lives of early Chinese
immigrants have declined in importance. According to Chow et al., recent immigrants from
Hong Kong and other places as well as native-born Chinese do not cling to the old concepts of
clan or territorial ties since they can rely on their immediate families for support and
companionship. Further, with the rise of the welfare state, the government now provides most of
52
the welfare services the old clan and district associations once provided for their members.228
New community organizations have emerged to meet the needs of the post-war Chinese
communities, and according to Bernard Luk, by 2000, Toronto had over 100 Chinese
organizations, including 25 social service agencies.229 One such organization is the Mon Sheong
Foundation, formed by a group of Chinese-Canadian professionals, which in 1975 built a home
for the aged in downtown Toronto - the first of its kind in North America run by and for the
Chinese.230 The Toronto-based Chinese-Canadian National Council emerged out of the 1979
Chinese protest against a TV program “Campus Giveaway” which portrayed Chinese Canadians
as “foreign intruders” depriving qualified Canadians of places in universities. By 1993, the
Council had 30 chapters across the country, and since the mid-1980s it has been lobbying the
federal government for redress over the head tax imposed on the Chinese between 1885
and1923.231
This paper has examined Asian immigration to North America, with a focus on Chinese. As
the first large Asian immigrant group to settle on the Pacific Coast during the gold rush, the
Chinese, like other immigrant groups, played an important role in the region’s economic growth.
However, despite their contributions to their host country, the Chinese, as well as other Asians
were the first and only group whose immigration to North America was restricted by numerous
discriminatory laws for many decades and who was subjected to constant racial discrimination
and prejudice. Indeed, the history of Asians in North America, as Sucheng Chan argues, can be
fully understood only if they are regarded as both immigrants and members of non-white
minority groups. As immigrants, they shared many experiences with European immigrants, but
53
unlike their European counterparts, their immigration and upward mobility were restricted by
laws because of their race.232
Compared with their treatment before the war, the situation for Asian Americans/Canadians
today is a great improvement. The increasingly liberalized policies and social attitudes in the
post-war era towards non-whites have enabled these previously disadvantaged groups to actively
participate in the political and socio-economic life of the host society, as evidenced by the
increasing numbers of Asians granted citizenship each year. Between 1969 and 1978, 75 percent
of Chinese became naturalized American citizens within 5-8 years of their arrival, and in Canada
80 percent of Chinese who came between 1970 and 1977 had obtained their citizenship by
1981.233 However, the removal of legal barriers and the improvement of social status for AsianAmericans/Canadians do not mean that racial discrimination against them has disappeared: it still
exists in the job market, on college campuses, as well as in other areas of public life though it is
no longer as blatant and intense as it used to be.234 People often say that the Unites States and
Canada are nations of immigrants and that their strength lies in their cultural diversity. Canada
and the United States should further encourage this diversity, and at the same time make greater
efforts to combat any remnants of racial discrimination and to make social equality a reality for
everyone who has come and contributed to their history.
54
NOTES
1. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Resurgence of American Immigration History,” American Studies
International 17, no.2 (1979): 46-66; idem, “From the Uprooted to the Transplanted: The Writing
of American immigration History, 1951-1989,” in From ‘Melting Pot’ to Multiculturalism: The
Evolution of Ethnic Relations in the United States and Canada, ed. Valeria G. Lerda (Rome:
Bulzoni, 1990), 25-26; idem, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” Journal of
American History 51 (December 1964): 404-417; idem, “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of
American History,” in The State of American History, ed. Herbert Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle,
1970), 70-88; Philip Gleason, “Crevecoeur’s Question: Historical Writing on Immigration,
Ethnicity, and National Identity,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past,
eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S.Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1998), 120-139;
Gordon H. Chang, “Writing the History of Chinese Immigrants to America,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 98, nos. 1-2 (1999): 139-140.
.
2. Cited in Vecoli, “From the Uprooted,” 28.
3. Howard Palmer, “Recent Studies in Canadian Immigration and Ethnic History: the 1970s
and 1980s,” in From ‘Melting Pot’ to Multiculturalism, 56-57.
4. Ibid., 57-58.
5. Ibid., 60-63.
6. L. Ling-Chi Wang, “Asian American Studies,” American Quarterly 33, no.3 (1981): 339,
349; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, c1991), 181.
7. Wang, “Asian American Studies,” 339, 349-350; Roger Daniels, “American Historians and
East Asian Immigrants,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1974): 471-472.
8. Sucheng Chan, “Asian American Historiography,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no.3
(1996): 363-369; Chan, Asian Americans, xiii.
9. Ibid., 369-370.
10. Roger Daniels, “American Historians,” 458-459; idem, Asian America: Chinese and
Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988), 46.
11. Peter Kwong, “The Challenge of Understanding the Asian-American Experience.” Ethnic
and Racial Studies 13, no. 4 (October 1990): 584.
12. Chan, “Asian American Historiography,” 375-380; idem, Asian Americans, xi, xiii-xiv.
55
13. Kwong, “The Challenge,” 584-585; Wang, “Asian American Studies,” 339, 349-352; Him
Mark Lai, “The Chinese Language Sources Bibliography Project: Preliminary Findings,” Amerasia
Journal 5, no. 2 (1978): 95-107; idem, A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of
Chinese Language Materials on the Chinese in America (Los Angeles: University of California,
Asian American Studies Center, 1986).
14. Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in
Population Movements in Modern European History, ed. Herbert Moller (New York: Macmillan,
1964), 73-92; Virginia Yans-Mclaughlin, “Introduction,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History,
Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 7.
15. Haiming liu, “Transnational Historiography: Chinese American Studies Reconsidered,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no.1 (2004): 136-137, 141-143; Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of
Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South
China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
16. Edgar Wickberg, “Overseas Chinese: The State of the Field,” Chinese America: History
and Perspectives (Annual 2002): 1-9 [Online resource 57659].
17. Wickberg, “Overseas Chinese.”
18. Seymour M. Lipset, “Canada and the United States Compared,” in Canada, ed. Mel
Watkins (New York: Facts on File, 1993), 651-663.
19. Roger Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American
Experiences Compared,” Canadian Review of American Studies [Canada] 17, no. 2 (1986): 177.
See also Anthony B. Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver: New Star
Books,1983), 15-16.
20. Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 177; Chan, Asian Americans, chaps.1- 7; Ronald T.
Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin
Books, 1990), chaps.1-9; W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public
Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).
21. Peter Li, The Chinese in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 144.
22. Chan, Asian Americans, chap. 9.
23. Chan, Gold Mountain, chap. 9; Albert Lee, “Ethnocentric Textbooks and Perceptions of
Culture: The Case for the Chinese-Americans,” in The Life, Influence and the Role of the Chinese
in the United States, 1776-1960 (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1975),
158-168; Connie Young Yu, “Textbook Distortions and Historical Realities,” in ibid., 155-157.
24. Lee, “Ethnocentric Textbooks,” 158, 164-165;
56
25. Yu, “Textbook Distortions,” 155-156.
26. Marion T. Bennett, American Immigration Policies, A History (Washington: Public
Affairs Press, 1963), 16.
27.Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-70
(Cambridge Harvard University Press 1964). See also Robert Li, “The Origins of Chinese
Immigration to the United States, 1848-1882,” in The Life, Influence and the Role, 184-185.
28. Ward, White Canada Forever, 7-14; Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in
California (Foreword and supplementary bibliographies by Roger Daniels, Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 1991), chap. 2.
29. Sucheng Chan, ed, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in
America, 1882-1943( Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), vii; idem, Asian
Americans, 25
30. Chan, Entry Denied, vii-viii; idem, Asian Americans, chap. 3; idem, “European and Asian
Immigration into the Unites States in Comparative Perspective, 1820s to 1920s,” in Immigration
Reconsidered, 42-48, 61-68; Yuji Ichioka, “Amerika Nadeshiko: Japanese Immigrant Women in
the U.S., 1900-1924,”Pacific Historical Review 49 (1980): 339-357; Takaki, Strangers, chaps, 3, 5;
Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 254-255.
31. Chan, Entry Denied, viii; Takaki, Strangers, chap 8; Gary R. Hess, “The Forgotten Asian
Americans: The East Indian Community in the United States,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no.
4 (1974):576-596.
32. Chan, Entry Denied, viii; Takaki, Strangers, chap. 9; H. Brett Melendy, “Filipinos in the
United States,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1974): 520-547.
33. Chan, Entry Denied, viii.
34. Ibid., viii-ix.
35. Daniel Kubat, “Asian Immigrants to Canada,” in Pacific Bridges: The New Immigration
from Asia and the Pacific Islands, eds. James T. Fawcett and Benjamin V. Carino (Staten Island, N.
Y.: Center for Migration Studies, 1987), 229, 231, 233. See also Donald Avery, Reluctant Host:
Canada’s Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 43.
36. Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 231-234; Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 181; H. F. Angus,
“Underprivileged Canadians,” Queen’s Quarterly 38 (1931): 446. See also Ward, White Canada
Forever, chaps 1-4; 6-8; Li, The Chinese in Canada, chap. 3; Edgar Wickberg, ed., From China to
Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1982), chaps 2, 4-6, 10; Stanislaw Andracki, Immigration of Orientals into Canada, with Special
Reference to Chinese (New York: Arno Press, 1978), chaps 1-2; Avery, Reluctant Host, chap. 2.
57
37. Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 233-235; Hess, “The Forgotten Asian Americans,” 578-579;
Chan, Asian Americans, 22-23; idem, “European and Asian Immigration,” 54-55; Angus,
“Underprivileged Canadians,”446-447; Ward, White Canada Forever, chap.5; Avery, Reluctant
Host, chap. 2.
38. Yong Chen, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,”
Western Historical Quarterly 28 (Winter 1997): 529-531; Edgar Wickberg, “Localism and the
Organization of Overseas Migration in the 19th Century,” in Cosmopolitan Capitalists, ed. Gary
Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 35.
39. Roger Daniels, Asian America, 73; idem, “Chinese and Japanese,” 176; Chuen-Yan Lai,
“The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Vancouver: Its Origins and Functions,” BC
Studies 15 (Autumn 1972): 54.
40. Thomas Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in California, A Syllabus (San Francisco, CA:
Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), 22.
41. Chuen-Yan Lai, “Chinese Immigrants into British Columbia and Their Distribution, 18581970,” Pacific Viewpoint 14, no 1 (1973):102; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 13-14; Chinn,
33; Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 176.
42. Chuen-Yan David Lai, “Home County and Clan Origins of Overseas Chinese in Canada in
the Early1880s,” BC Studies 15 (Autumn 1975): 5-18; June Mei, “Economic Origins of Emigration:
Guangdong to California, 1850-1882,” Modern China 5, no. 4 (October, 1979): 464.
43. See, for example, Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks,” in Immigration Reconsidered,
79-95; Robert F. Harney, “Toronto’s Little Italy, 1885-1945,” in Little Italies in North America, ed.
Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario,
1981), 43-45; Robert F. Harney and Harold Troper, Immigrants: A Portrait of the Urban
Experience, 1890-1930 (Toronto: Van Nostrand, 1975), chap 1; Ronald T. Takaki, A Different
Mirror: A History of Multicultural America( Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.,1993), 283-285.
44. Chen, “The Internal Origins.” See also Liu, “Transnational Historiography,” 144-148 and
his “The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants: A Revisionist Perspective,” in The Chinese
in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, ed. Susie L. Cassel (Walnut
Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002), 21-36.
45. Chen, “The Internal Origins,” 524.
46. Ibid., 531.
47. Ibid., 538-540.
48. Ibid., 541.
58
49. Liu, “Transnational Historiography,” 144-148; idem, “The Social Origins,” 23-28. See
also Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 45, 127, 220.
50 Cited in Liu, “The Social Origins,”29.
51. Ibid., 29. See also Renqiu Yu, “‘Exercise Your Sacred Rights’: The Experience of New
York’s Chinese laundrymen in Practicing Democracy,” in Claiming America: Constructing
Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era, eds. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 79.
52. Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 175.
53. Quoted in Charles McClain, “Chinese Immigration: A Comment on Cloud and Galenson,”
Explorations in Economic History 27 (1990): 366.
54. K. Scott Wong, “Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Responses to the Anti-Chinese
Movement,” in Claiming America, 5-6, 33-34; Mei, “Economic Origins,” 499;Wickberg,
“Localism,” 36; Harry H.L. Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans, Emerging Minorities
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 23.
55. Philip Curtin, “Migration in the Tropical World,” in Immigration Reconsidered, 31-36.
See also Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 175; Chan, “European and Asian Immigration,” in ibid.,
54.
56. Chan, Asian Americans, 5; idem, “European and Asian Immigration,” 43; Chan, Gold
Mountain, 38.
57. Shih-Shan H. Tsai, “Preserving the Dragon Seeds: The Evolution of Ch’ing Emigration
Policy.” Asian Profile 7, no. 6 (December 1979): 497-506; Mei, “Economic Origins,” 469-470;
Chan, Asian Americans, 4-8; idem, “European and Asian Immigration,” 43.
58. Mei, “Economic Origins,” 478; Shih-Shan H. Tsai, “Chinese Immigration through
Communist Chinese Eyes: An Introduction to the Historiography,” Pacific Historical Review
43(1974): 401.
59. Robert J. Schwendinger, “Investigating Chinese Immigrant Ships and Sailors,” in The
Chinese American Experience, ed. Genny Lim (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society, 1980),
16 – 17. .
60. Tsai, “Preserving the Dragon Seeds,” 501-502. See also Persia C. Campbell, Chinese
Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London: King, 1923), 118-120.
61. Mei, “Economic Origins,” 478, 493; Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration, 118.
62 Quoted in Mei, “Economic Origins,” 482.
59
63. Ibid., 482-484. See alsoYuen-fong Woon, “‘The Voluntary Sojourner among the Overseas
Chinese: Myth or Reality?’” Pacific Affairs 56, no. 4 (1983): 688; Liu, “The Social Origins,” 27.
64. Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the
Late19th Century,” Explorations in Economic History 24 (1987): 22-42; Campbell, Chinese Coolie
Emigration, 26-56; Barth, Bitter Strength, 67-68.
65. McClain, “Chinese Immigration,” 364-365; Chinn, A History, 64-66; Chan, Asian
Americans, 65-66.
66. Lai, “The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association,”58-61; Yu, “‘Exercise Your
Sacred Rights’,” 78-79.
67. McClain, “Chinese Immigration,” 365; Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African
Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2003), 173.
68. McClain, “Chinese Immigration,” 367.
69. Ibid., 372-375.
70. Mei, “Economic Origins,” 499-450.
71. Ward, White Canada Forever, 16; Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese,” 176.
72. Lai, “Chinese Immigrants,” 102-103; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 16-20.
73. Eve Armmentrout-Ma, “Chinese in California’s Fishing Industry, 1850-1941,”
California History: The magazine of the California Historical Society LX no. 2 (1981):142; Chinn,
A History of the Chinese, 41-42.
74. Jin Tan, “Chinese Labor and the Reconstituted Social Order of British Columbia.”
Canadian Ethnic Studies XIX, no. 3 (1987): 74-75.
75. Ward, White Canada Forever, 29-31; Li, The Chinese, 27-28.
76. Charles J. Woodsworth, Canada and the Orient: A Study in International Relations
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1941), 25-26; Li, The Chinese, 32-33.
77. Andracki, Immigration of Orientals, 26-27; Peter Li, “Chinese Immigrants on the
Canadian Prairie, 1910-1914,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 19, no. 4 (1982):
530.
78. W.S. Chow, “The Chinese Community in Canada before 1947 and Some Recent
Developments,” in Ethnicity in the Americas, ed. F. Henry (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 117;
Dora Nipp, “The Chinese in Toronto,” in Gathering Place: Peoples and Neighbourhoods of
60
Toronto, 1834-1945, ed. R. F. Harney (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1985),
151; Jin Tan and Patricia E. Roy, The Chinese in Canada (Ottawa: the Canadian Historical
Association, 1985), 8; Andracki, Immigration of Orientals, 10-11.
79. Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880, An Economic Study (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin, 1963), 12-14.
80. Takaki, Strangers, 81-82; Chinn, A History, 18.
81. Takaki, Strangers., 82; Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement, chap. 3; Mary Roberts
Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Arno Press, 1909 [Reprint 1969]), chap. 5; Sucheng
Chan, Asian Americans, chap. 3.
82. Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 104, 108-112.
83. Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development:
Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap.3; Takaki,
Strangers, 87, 105, 108-112; Chinn, A History, 24-25; Neil L. Shumsky, “San Francisco’s
Workingmen Respond to the Modern City,” California Historical Quarterly 55 (1976): 46-57.
84. Shumsky, ibid., 48.
85. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement, 46, 57-77.
86. Chiu, Chinese Labor, xi-xii, 54,107; Takaki, Strangers, 88; Paul Ong, “Chinese Labor in
Early San Francisco: Racial Segmentation and Economic Expansion,” in The Chinese American
Experience, 94-95.
87. Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 3-4. See also Chiu, Chinese Labor, xi-xii, 15, 52-54,
107, 137-138.
88. Stuart C. Miller, “An East Coast Perspective to Chinese Exclusion, 1852-1882,” Historian
33 (1971):183-201; idem, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 17851882 (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University of California Press, 1969).
89. Miller, “An East Coast Perspective,” 185, 190, 196. 200.
90. Roger Daniels, foreword to The Anti-Chinese Movement by E. Sandmeyer, 4-5; idem,
foreword to Chinese Immigrants by N. Aarim-Heriot, xi.
91. Victor Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (NY:
Pantheon Books, 1973), 21-22, 54-55; Chan, Asian Americans, 49-54; Jing Ye, “The Chinese in
Early Orange County, 1870s-1930s: With a Focus on the Placentia/Fullerton Area,” Welebaethan
[CSUF Annual Historical Journal] (Spring 2002):32-35.
92. Mei, “Socioeconomic Developments,” 378.
61
93. Wong, “Cultural Defenders,” in Claiming America, 6-7.
94. Gunter Baureiss, “Chinese Immigration, Chinese Stereotypes, and Chinese Labor,”
Canadian Ethnic Studies XIX, No 3 (1987): 22-23; Chow, “The Chinese Community,” 118; Ward,
White Canada Forever, 7-13; Anthony B. Chan, “‘Orientalism’ and Image Making: The Sojourner
in Canadian History,”Journal of Ethnic Studies 9, no. 3 (1981): 40; Patricia Roy, “The Oriental
‘Menace’ in British Columbia,” in Studies in Canadian Social History, eds. Michiel Horn and
Ronald Sabourin (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 288.
95. Baureiss, “Chinese Immigration,” 23; Patricia Roy, “Citizens without Votes: East Asians
in British Columbia,” in Ethnicity, Power and Politics in Canada, ed. Jorden D. and Tissa
Fernando (Toronto: Methuen, 1981), 151-152.
96. Daniels, Coming to America, 238; Chan, “European and Asian Immigration,” 38.
97. Oscar Handlin, foreword to Bitter Strength by G. Barth, vii-viii.
98. Paul C.P. Siu, “‘The Sojourner’,” American Journal of Sociology 58 (1953): 34- 44; Rose
H. Lee, The Chinese in the United States (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1960), chap.5.
99. Quoted in Chan, “‘Orientalism’ and Image Making,” 40.
100. Ibid., 37-46.
101. Woon, “‘The Voluntary Sojourner,” 677-681; Peter S. Li, “Immigration Laws and
Family Patterns: Some Demographic Changes among Chinese Families in Canada,
1885-197,” Canadian Ethnic Studies XII, no. 1 (1980):58-73.
102. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 64-65, 161; idem, “Chinese Immigrants,” 536-537; idem,
“Immigration Laws,” 61-63. See also Baureiss, “Chinese Immigration,” 22-23.
103. Tamara Adilman, “A Preliminary Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in B.C.,
1858-1950,” in Not Just Pin Money, eds. Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro (Victoria:
Camosun College Press), 55.
104. Ibid., 63-67.
105, Quoted in ibid., 65.
106. Ibid., 67; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 139-140.
107. Wickberg, From China to Canada, 84-87; Ward, White Canada Forever, 67-75;
Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 234.
108. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 65, 72; idem, Li, “Immigration Laws,” 68-69; Carol F. Lee,
“The Road to Enfranchisement: Chinese and Japanese in B.C,” BC Studies 30 (1976): 45.
62
109. George A. Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration
before Exclusion (Urbana, CA: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 4.
110. Ibid., Preface; Idem, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese
Women under the Page Law, 1875-1882,” in Chinese Immigrants and American Law, ed. Charles
McClain (NY: Garland Pub., 1994), 318-336.
111. Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870-1943,” in Entry Denied:
Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1991), 95-97; Lucie C. Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved:
Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society
5, No.1 (Autumn 1979): 5, 27.
112. Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 173-174.
113. Chan, “The Exclusion,” 105.
114. Peffer, If They Don’t, 8-9; idem, “Forbidden Families,” 29-44; Aarim-Heriot, Chinese
Immigrants, 178.
115. Peffer, If They Don’t, 9; idem, “Forbidden Families,” 332.
116. Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved,” 24; Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women
Here, 6-7, 9-10, 100.
117. Jo Ann Williamson, “Chinese Studies in Federal Records,” in The Life, Influence and
the Role, 12.
118. Cited in George A. Peffer, “From Under the Sojourner’s Shadow: A Historical Study of
Chinese Female Immigration to America, 1852-1882,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11,
no.3 (Spring 1992): 54.
119. Peffer, “From Under,” 55, 57, 59; idem, “Forbidden Families,”43.
120 Takaki, Strangers, 124.
121. Ibid. Sucheng Chan, “The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1900,” in The
Chinese American Experience, 70; Armmentrout-Ma, “Chinese in California’s Fishing
Industry,” 151, 156; Peffer, “From Under,” 51.
122. Nee, Longtime Californ’, 56; David R. Chan, “The Tragedy and Trauma of the
Chinese Exclusion Laws,” in The Life, Influence and the Role, 194.
123. Chan, “The Chinese in California Agriculture,” 68.
63
124. Chan, “The Exclusion,” 109-114; Vincente Tang, “Chinese Women Immigrants and
the Two-Edged Sword of Habeas Corpus,” in The Chinese American Experience, 48.
125. Tang, “Chinese Women,”53-54; Chan, “The Tragedy,” 194-195; Chan, “The
Exclusion,” 125-127; Sue Fawn Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights: A History of the
Chinese American Citizens Alliance,” in Claiming America, 108-109.
126. Lyman, The Asian in North America, 69.
127. Chan, “The Exclusion,” 128; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 96; Choy, Coming Man, 170.
128. Tang, “Chinese Women,” 54; Chan, “The Tragedy,” 195; Chung, “Fighting for Their
American Rights,” 109; Chan, “The Exclusion,” 127.
129. Constance Backhouse, Color-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 19001950 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, University of Toronto Press, 1999),
136, 145-147.
130. Peggy Pascoe, “Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of Mission –Educated
Chinese American Women, 1874-1939,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S.
Women’s History, eds. Ruiz, Vicki L. and Ellen C. DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 143147.
131. Chan, “The Tragedy,” 196.
132. Takaki, Strangers, 38.
133. Ibid., 38-41.
134. Ibid., 41, 169.
135. Peffer, If They Don’t, 20-21.
136. Kwok B. Chan and Lawrence Lam, “Chinese in Timmins, Canada, 1915-1950: A
Study of Ethnic Stereotypes in the Press,” Asian Profile 14, no 6 (December 1986): 581-582.
137. Lee, “The Road to Enfranchisement,” 45.
138. Chan, Asian Americans, 81; idem, “European and Asian Immigration,” 62.
139. Chan, Asian Americans, 81-82; Takaki, Strangers, 85-86; Jack Chen, The Chinese o f
America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 74-75.
140. Yee, “Ethnocentric Textbooks,” in The Life, Influence and the Role, 161-162.
141. Gillian Creese, “Organizing Against Racism in the Workplace: Chinese Workers in
Vancouver before the Second World War,” Canadian Ethnic Studies XIX, No 3 (1987): 38-41.
64
142. Wickberg, From China to Canada, 114, 130; Ye, “The Chinese in Early Orange County,”
27.
143. H. Mark Lai, “A Historical Survey of the Chinese Left in America,” in Counterpoint:
Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles, CA: Asian American Studies
Center, UCLA, 1976), 65.
144. Cited in Chan, Asian Americans, 83.
145. Ward, White Canada Forever, 33; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 47; Tan, “Chinese
Labor,” 84-85.
146. Charles J. McClain and Laurene Wu McClain, “The Chinese Contribution to the
Development of American Law,” in Entry Denied, 3-4.
147. Christian G. Fritz, “Due Process, Treaty Rights, and Chinese Exclusion, 1882-1891,”
in Entry Denied, 25-27; Philip Choy et al., eds., Coming Man: 19th-Century American Perceptions
of the Chinese (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), 168.
148. Takaki, Strangers, 113-114.
149. Ibid., 82, 114; Charles McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against
Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
36-42.
150. McClain, “The Chinese Contribution,” 5.
151. Chan, Asian Americans, 90-91.
152. McClain, “The Chinese Contribution,” 5.
153. Ibid., 5-8; Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 67, 72.
154.Chan, Asian Americans, 94.
155. McClain, “The Chinese Contribution,” 13-14.
156. Chan, Asian Americans, 95.
157. McClain, “The Chinese Contribution,” 15.
158. Takaki, Strangers, 246.
159. McClain, In Search of Equality, 133-136.
160. Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams,159-160.
65
161. Chan, Asian Americans, 57-59; Takaki, Strangers, 201-204;Yuji Ichioka, “Amerika
Nadeshiko: Japanese Immigrant Women in the U.S., 1900-1924,” Pacific Historical Review 49
(1980): 344.
162. Robert W. O’ Brien, “Status of Chinese in the Mississippi Delta,” Social Forces 19
(March 1941): 387; Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, 53.
163. O’ Brien, “Status of Chinese,” 387-388.
164. Ibid., 388.
165. Chan, Asian Americans, 90.
166. Ibid., 91; Lucy E. Slayer, “‘Laws Harsh as Tigers’: Enforcement of the Chinese
Exclusion Laws, 1891-1924,” in Entry Denied, 58-60.
167. Chan, Asian Americans, 91; Chan, “The Tragedy,”194.
168. Chan, Asian Americans, 91; McClain, “Chinese Contribution,”16-19.
169. Chan, “The Tragedy,”194.
170. McClain, “Chinese Contribution,” 18; Chan, Asian Americans, 91-92; Qingsong
Zhang, “The Origins of the Chinese Americanization Movement: Wong Chin Foo and the Chinese
Equal Rights League,” in Claiming America, 52-54; L. Eve Armentrout, “Chinatown
Organizations and the Anti-Chinese Movement, 1882-1914,” in Entry Denied, 155.
171. McClain, “Chinese Contribution,” 19.
172. Chan, Asian Americans, 92; Slayer, “‘Laws Harsh as Tigers’,” 77; Bennett, American
Immigration Policies, 24.
173. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and
Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 35-36.
174. Stanford M. Lyman, “The ‘Chinese Question’ and American Labor Historians.” New
Politics 7, no.4 (2000): 113-148. [http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue28/lyman28.htm]
175. Takaki, Strangers, 234-237; Chan, “The Tragedy,” 198-200; Huping Ling, Surviving o
the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany, NY: State
University of New York,1998), 28; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 68-87; Lee, The Chinese in the
United States, 301-304.
176. H. M. Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 13.
66
177. Lai, Island, 8-28; Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, 29-39.
178. Cited in Chan, Asian Americans, 96; Jane L. Larson, “The Chinese Empire
Reform Association and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott: The Power of a Voluntary
Association,” in The Chinese in America, 205; Corinne K. Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew and the
History of the Chinese in America,” in The Life, Influence and the Role, 96.
179. Chan, Asian Americans, 97; Larson, “The Chinese Empire Reform Association,”
200; Salyer, “‘Laws Harsh as Tigers’,” 60; Charles Chan, “Chronology of Treaties and Major
Federal Laws Affecting Chinese Immigration to the United States,” in The Life, Influence and the
Role, 16.
180. Larson, “The Chinese Empire Reform Association,” 195-196.
181. Ibid., 196-202.
182. Ibid., 203-204.
183. Ibid., 208. See also Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew,” 96; Chan, 97.
184. Larson, “The Chinese Empire Reform Association,” 209.
185. Ibid., 204; Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew,” 96.
186. Chan, Asian Americans, 97; Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew,” 96; Larson, “The Chinese
Empire Reform Association,” 209.
187. Chan, Asian Americans, 97; Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew,” 96-97; Larson, “The
Chinese Empire Reform Association,” 209. * The year 1900 saw the outbreak of the antiimperialistic Boxer Uprising in China. Eight Western powers joined forces and invaded China,
forcing the Qing government to sign an unequal treaty with them in 1901 and to pay an indemnity
of 450 million taels of silver. See Huping Ling, “A History of Chinese Female Students in the U.S.,
1880s-1990s,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no.3 (1997): 82, 105-106; Qingjia E. Wang,
“Guests from the Open Door: The Reception of Chinese Students into the U.S., 1900s-1920s,”The
Journal of American East Asian Relations 3, no. 1 (1994): 58.
188. Larson, “The Chinese Empire Reform Association,” 195.
189. Chan, Asian Americans, 121-139; Takaki, Strangers, 362, 369, 376.
190. Wickberg, From China to Canada, 208- 209; Li, The Chinese in Canada 91, Ward, White
Canada Forever, 165; Roy, “Citizens without Votes,” 164.
191 Chan, Asian Americans, 121; Lee, “The Road,” 64.
67
192. Ivan Hubert Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese,
Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), 7-8; Takaki, Strangers, 374.
193. Takaki, Strangers, 374.
194. Ibid., 375; Lee, “The Road,” 51.
195. Wickberg, From China to Canada 201; Lee, “The Road,” 51.
196. Takaki, Stranger, 372-378; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 90-91; Wickberg, From China to
Canada, 200-201; Lee, “The Road,” 50.
197. Takaki, Strangers, 376-377;Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 92.
198. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 91; idem, “Chinese and Japanese,” 184; Chan,
The Chinese of America, 206; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 205-206; Nipp, “The Chinese in
Toronto,” 171.
199. Wing Chung Ng, The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 19; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 92; Baureiss, “Chinese
Immigration,”19.
200 Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 92.
201. Ibid., 93; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 99.
202. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 94, 97; Takaki, Strangers, 417; Chan, Asian
Americans 140; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 181.
203. Takaki, Strangers, 417-18; Chan, Asian Americans 146; Daniels, 118-19; Bennett,
American Immigration Policies, 153; Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 118-119; Thomas J.
Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free Press, 1983), 181-2.
204. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 134-136; Chan, Asian Americans, 146-147;
Takaki, Strangers, 419.
205. Chan, Asian Americans, 145-146; Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 136-137;
Takaki, Strangers, 419.
206. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 137-139, 150; Chan, Asian Americans, 147-148;
Takaki, Strangers, 420-422.
207. Wickberg, From China to Canada, chap.15; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 91-95; Jin
Tan and Patricia E. Roy, The Chinese in Canada, 14-16; Roy, “Citizens without Votes,” 155;
Vivien Lai, “The New Chinese Immigrants in Toronto,” in Minority Canadians, ed. Jean
68
Leonard Elliot (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 120-123; Anthony B. Chan, “Chinese
Canada: Recollections on Historical Eras and Watersheds,” Polyphony 15 (2000): 7; Keith Lock
and Dora Nipp, “From Ontario to ‘Oblivion’: War Veterans,” Polyphony 15 (2000): 35. See also
Harold Troper, “Canada’s Immigration Policy since 1945,” International Journal 48, no.2 (Spring
1993): 255-256, 259-260, 265-266; Louis Parai, “Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1962-74,”
International Migration Review 9 (1975): 451-452.
208. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 35; Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial
Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 175; Tan
and Roy, The Chinese in Canada, 15; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 207 and his “Chinese
and Canadian Influence,” 38; David C.Y. Lai, Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 103; Andracki, Immigration of
Orientals, 213; Roy, “Citizens without Votes.”
209. Tan and Roy, The Chinese in Canada, 16. See also Li, The Chinese in Canada 94;
Baureiss, “Chinese Immgration,”19; Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 236.
210 Parai, “Canada’s Immigration Policy,” 457-463, 469. See also Li, The Chinese In
Canada, 137-138; Avery, Reluctant Host, 178-186;
211. Quoted in Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 235-236.
212. Avery, Reluctant Host, 189.
213. Ibid., 186-196; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 94-96; Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,”
231, 236-237.
214. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 94-95; Chan, “Chinese Canada,” 8-9; Bernard H.K.
Luk, “The Chinese Communities of Toronto: Their Languages and Mass Media,” Polyphony
15 (2000): 47-48; Avery, Reluctant Host, 196.
215. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 3, 141.
216. Ibid., 96-99; Tan and Roy, The Chinese in Canada, 15-21; Wickberg, From China
to Canada, 245-246; Chan, “Chinese Canada,” 8-10; Luk, “The Chinese Communities,” 47-49;
Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 237-242; Takaki, Strangers, 420-422; Chan, Asian Americans,
151-152.
217. Takaki, Strangers, 423; Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 151; Li, The Chinese
in Canada, 94-95 and his “Immigration Laws,” 61, 63-64; Ling, Surviving on the Gold
Mountain, 114-115.
218. Kubat, “Asian Immigrants to Canada,” 240-241.
219. Chan, Asian Americans, 167-170; Li, The Chinese in Canada,136.
69
220. Chan, Asian Americans, 168-169; Chow, “The Chinese Community,” 130-131.
221. Chan, Asian Americans,170; Chan, The Chinese of America, 225.
222. Chan, Asian Americans, 168; Takaki, Strangers, 428, 475; Li, The Chinese in Canada,
119-120, 136; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 249.
223. Takaki, Strangers, 427-428.
224. Ibid., 425; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 136.
225. Takaki, Strangers, 421-422; Chan, Asian Americans, 168; Chen, The Chinese of
America, 243; Baureiss, “Chinese Immigration,” 21.
226. Li, 112-117, 135; Tam Goosaen, “Political and Community Activism in Toronto:
1970- 2000,” Polyphony 15 (2000): 29-31.
227. Chan, The Chinese of America, 229; Li, The Chinese in Canada, 115; Chow, “The
Chinese Community,” 131-132.
228. Chow, “The Chinese Community,” 132; Tan and Roy, The Chinese in Canada, 18-19;
Li, The Chinese in Canada, 115-116.
229. Luk, “The Chinese Communities of Toronto,” 53-54. See also Tan and Roy, The
Chinese in Canada, 19.
230. Wickberg, From China to Canada, 255-256.
231. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 116; Goossen, “Political and Community Activism,” 2829.
232. Chan, Asian Americans, 61, 187.
233. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 89-90; Kubat, “Asian Immigrants,” 241; Chow, “The
Chinese Community,” 132-133; Takaki, Strangers, 423.
234. Li, The Chinese in Canada, chap. 10; Chan, Asian Americans, chap 9, 187-188;
Takaki, Strangers, chap. 12.
70
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United
States, 1848-82. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Almaguer, Tomas. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Anderson, Kay J. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991.
Andracki, Stanislaw. Immigration of Orientals into Canada, with Special Reference to Chinese.
New York: Arno Press, 1978.
Archdeacon, Thomas. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. New York: Free Press, 1983.
Avery, Donald. Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995.
Backhouse, Constance. Color-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950.
Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Baldwin, Esther E. Must the Chinese Go? NY: Press of H. B. Elkins, 1890 [reprint 1970].
Barth, Gunther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-70.
Cambridge Harvard University Press 1964.
Bennett, Marion T. American Immigration Policies, A History. Washington: Public Affairs
Press, 1963.
Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, c1985.
Campbell, Persia C. Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire.
London: King, 1923.
Cassel, Susie L., ed. The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New
Millennium. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002.
Chan, Anthony B. Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World. Vancouver: New Star
Books,1983.
71
Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston, MA: Twayne, c1991.
________, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991.
Chen, Jack. The Chinese of America. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.
Cheng, Lucie and Edna Bonacich, eds. Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in
the U.S. before WWII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Chinese Historical Society of America. The Life, Influence and the Role of the Chinese in the
United States, 1776-1960. San Francisco: The Author, 1975.
Chinn, Thomas, ed. A History of the Chinese in California, A Syllabus. San Francisco,
CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969.
Chiu, Ping. Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880, An Economic Study. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin, 1963.
Choy, Philip, et al., eds. Coming Man: 19th-Century American Perceptions of the Chinese.
Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts, Chinese Immigration. New York: Arno Press, 1909 [Reprint 1969].
Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850.
Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988.
________. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life.
New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990.
________. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants
since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Daniels, Roger and Harry Kitano. American Racism: Exploration of the Nature of Prejudice.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Gee, Emma, et al., eds. Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America. Los Angeles, CA: Asian
American Studies Center, UCLA, 1976.
Gennaro Lerda, Valeria, ed. From ‘Melting Pot’ to Multiculturalism: The Evolution of Ethnic
Relations in the United States and Canada. Rome: Bulzoni, 1990.
Harney, Robert F. and Harold Troper. Immigrants: A Portrait of the Urban Experience, 18901930. Toronto: Van Nostrand, 1975.
72
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the
American People. NY: Grosset’s Universal Library, 1951.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University of Press, 1988.
Hsu, Madeline Y. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration
between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000.
Kazuko, Ono. Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1978.
Kelley, N. and M. Trebilcock. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration
Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Kitano, Harry H.L. and Roger Daniels. Asian Americans, Emerging Minorities. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Lai, D. C. Chinatown: Towns within Cities in Canada. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 1988.
Lai, Him Mark. A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Language
Materials on the Chinese in America. Los Angeles: University of California, Asian
American Studies Center, 1986.
Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants
on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.
Lee, Rose Hum. The Chinese in the United States. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1960.
Li, Peter. The Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Light, Ivan Hubert. Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese,
Japanese, and Blacks. Berkeley: University of California, 1972.
Lim, Genny, ed. The Chinese American Experience. San Francisco: Chinese Historical
Society, 1980.
Ling, Huping. Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and
Their Lives. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998.
Lyman, Stanford. The Asian in North America. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio Books, 1977.
McClain, Charles. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in
73
Nineteenth- Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Miller, Stuart C. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882.
Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University of California Press, 1969.
Mink, Gwendolyn.Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development:
Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Nee, Victor. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. NY:
Pantheon Books, 1973.
Ng, Wing Chung. The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power.
Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999.
Okihiro, Gary. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle,
WA: University of Washington Press, 1994.
Peffer, George A. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before
Exclusion. Urbana, CA: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Ruiz, Vicki L. and Ellen C. DuBois, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S.
Women’s History. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Sandmeyer, Elmer C. The Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Foreword and supplementary
bibliographies by Roger Daniels. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in
California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York:
Penguin Books, 1990
________. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown
& Co.,1993.
Tan, Jin and Patricia E. Roy. The Chinese in Canada. Ottawa: the Canadian Historical
Association, 1985.
Thompson, Richard H. Toronto's Chinatown : The Changing Social Organization of an
Ethnic Community. New York: AMS Press, 1989.
Ward, W. Peter. White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward
Orientals in British Columbia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.
Wickberg, Edgar, ed. From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities
in Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
74
Wong, K. Scott and Sucheng Chan, eds. Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American
Identities during the Exclusion Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Woodsworth, Charles J. Canada and the Orient: A Study in International Relations. Toronto:
Macmillan, 1941.
Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, ed. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and
Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Articles
Adilman, Tamara. “A Preliminary Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in B.C., 1858-1950.”
In Not Just Pin Money, eds. Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro, 53-78. Victoria:
Camosun College Press.
Anderson, Kay. “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the
Making of a Racial Category.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77
(1987): 580-598.
Angus, H.F. “Underprivileged Canadians.” Queen’s Quarterly 38 (1931): 445-460.
Armmentrout-Ma, L. Eve. “Chinese in California’s Fishing Industry, 1850-1941.” California
History: The magazine of the California Historical Society LX no. 2 (1981):142-157.
Baureiss, Gunter. “Chinese Immigration, Chinese Stereotypes, and Chinese Labor.” Canadian
Ethnic Studies XIX, No 3 (1987):15-33.
Black, Isabella. “American Labor and Chinese Immigration.” Past and Present XXV (1963):
59-76.
Brouwer, R.C. “A Disgrace to ‘Christian Canada’: Protestant Foreign Missionary Concerns
about the Treatment of South Asians in Canada, 1907-1940.” In A Nation of Immigrants:
Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, 1840s-1960s, ed. Franca
Iacovetta, 361-383. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998
Chan, Anthony B. “‘Orientalism’ and Image Making: The Sojourner in Canadian History.”
Journal of Ethnic Studies 9, no. 3 (1981): 37-46.
Chan, Kwok B. and Denise Helly. “Coping with Racism: A Century of the Chinese Experience
in Canada.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 19, no 3 (1987): 1-14.
Chan, Kwok B. and Lawrence Lam. “Chinese in Timmins, Canada, 1915-1950: A Study of
Ethnic Stereotypes in the Press.” Asian Profile 14, no 6 (December 1986): 569-583.
Chan, Sucheng. “Asian American Historiography.” Pacific Historical Review 65, no.3 (1996):
75
363- 399.
________. “Asian American Struggles for Civil, Political, Economic, and Social Rights.”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 2002: 56-70.
Chang, Gordon H. “Asian Americans and the Writing of Their History.” Radical History
Review 53 (1992): 105-114.
________. “Writing the History of Chinese Immigrants to America.” South Atlantic Quarterly
98, nos. 1-2 (1999): 135-142.
Chen, Yong. “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered.”
Western Historical Quarterly 28 (Winter 1997): 521-546.
Chow, W.S. “The Chinese Community in Canada before 1947 and Some Recent
Developments.” In Ethnicity in the Americas, ed. F. Henry, 115-135. The Hague: Mouton,
1976.
Cloud, Patricia and David W. Galenson. “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late
19th Century.” Explorations in Economic History 24 (1987): 22-42.
Creese, Gillian. “Organizing Against Racism in the Workplace: Chinese Workers in Vancouver
before the Second World War.” Canadian Ethnic Studies XIX, No 3 (1987): 35-46.
________. “Class, Ethnicity, and Conflict: The Case of Chinese and Japanese Immigrants,
1880-1923.” In Workers, Capital, and the State in British Columbia, Selected Papers,
eds. Rennie Warburton and David Coburn, 55-85. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia, 1988.
Daniels, Roger. “Westerners from the East: Oriental Immigrants Reappraised.” Pacific
Historical Review 35, (1966): 373-383.
________. “American Historians and East Asian Immigrants.” Pacific Historical Review 43,
no. 4 (1974): 449-472.
________. “Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American Experiences
Compared.” Canadian Review of American Studies [Canada] 17, no. 2 (1986): 173-187.
Dieren, Karen V. “The Response of the WMS to the Immigration of Asian Women, 18881942.” In Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women’s Work in
British Columbia, eds. B. K. Latham and R.J. Pazdro, 79-97. Victoria, B.C.: Camosun
College, 1984.
Gleason, Philip. “Crevecoeur’s Question – Historical Writing on Immigration, Ethnicity, and
National Identity.” In Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds.
Anthony Molho and Gordon S.Wood, 120-143. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1998.
76
Goossen, Tam, “Political and Community Activism in Toronto: 1970-2000.” Polyphony 15
(2000): 24-31.
Harney, Robert F., “Toronto’s Little Italy, 1885-1945.” In Little Italies in North America, ed.
Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of
Ontario, 1981.
Hess, Gary R. “The Forgotten Asian Americans: The East Indian Community in the United
States.” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1974): 576-596.
Hill, Herbert. “The Racial Practices of Organized Labor: The Age of Gompers and After.” In
Employment, Race, and Poverty, eds. Arthur M. Ross and Herbert Hill, 365-402. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Hirata, L.C. “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America.”
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, No.1 (Autumn 1979): 3-29.
Houchins, Lee and Chang-su Houchins. “The Korean Experience in America, 1903-1924.”
Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1974): 548-575.
Ichioka, Yuji, “Amerika Nadeshiko: Japanese Immigrant Women in the U.S., 1900-1924.”
Pacific Historical Review 49 (1980): 339-357.
Ireland, Ralph R. “Some effects of Oriental Immigration on Canadian Trade Union Ideology.”
American Journal of Economics and Sociology 19 (1960): 217-20.
Jain, Prakash. “Racism in Canada: Some Recent Surveys.” Indian Quarterly [India] 39, no. 2
(1983): 193-198.
Kubat, Daniel. “Asian Immigrants to Canada.” In Pacific Bridges: The New Immigration from
Asia and the Pacific Islands, eds. James T. Fawcett and Benjamin V. Carino, 229-245.
Staten Island, N. Y.: Center for Migration Studies, 1987.
Kwong, Peter. “The Challenge of Understanding the Asian-American Experience.” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 13, no. 4 (October 1990): 584-590.
Lai, Chuen-Yan. “The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Victoria: Its Origins
and Functions.” BC Studies 15 (Autumn 1972):53-67.
________. “Chinese Immigrants into British Columbia and Their Distribution, 1858-1970.”
Pacific Viewpoint 14, no 1 (1973): 102-108.
________. “Home County and Clan Origins of Overseas Chinese in Canada in the Early
1880s.” BC Studies 15 (Autumn 1975):3-29.
77
Lai, H. Mark. “The Chinese Language Sources Bibliography Project: Preliminary Findings.”
Amerasia Journal 5, no. 2 (1978): 95-107.
Lai, Vivien. “The New Chinese Immigrants in Toronto.” In Minority Canadians, ed. Jean
Leonard Elliot. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Lee, Carol F. “The Road to Enfranchisement: Chinese and Japanese in B.C.” BC Studies
30 (1976): 44-76.
Lee, Rose Lee. “The Decline of Chinatown in the U.S.” American Journal of Sociology 54
(1948-49): 422-432.
Lee, Sharon M. “Asian Immigration and American Race-Relations: From Exclusion to
Acceptance? Ethnic Racial Studies 12, no. 3 (1989): 368-390.
Lee, Yan Phou, “The Chinese Must Stay.” The North American Review 148 (1889): 476-483.
Li, Peter S. “Immigration Laws and Family Patterns: Some Demographic Changes Among
Chinese Families in Canada, 1885-197.” Canadian Ethnic Studies XII, no. 1 (1980):58-73.
________. “Chinese Immigrants on the Canadian Prairie, 1910-1914.” Canadian Review of
Sociology and Anthropology 19, no. 4 (1982): 526-540.
Light, Ivan. “From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American
Chinatowns, 1880-1940.” Pacific Historical Reviews 43 (1974): 367-394.
Ling, Huping. “A History of Chinese Female Students in the U.S., 1880s-1990s.” Journal of
American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (1997): 81-109.
Lipset, Seymour M. “Canada and the United States Compared.” In Canada, ed. Mel Watkins,
651-663. New York: Facts on File, 1993.
Liu, Haiming. “Transnational Historiography: Chinese American Studies Reconsidered.”
Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no.1 (2004): 135-153.
Luk, Bernard H.K. “The Chinese Communities of Toronto: Their Languages and Mass
Media.” Polyphony 15 (2000): 46-56.
Lyman, Stanford M. “The ‘Chinese Question’ and American Labor Historians.” New Politics 7,
no.4 (2000): 113-48.
McClain, Charles. ”Chinese Immigration: A Comment on Cloud and Galenson.” Explorations
in Economic History 27 (1990): 363-378.
Mei, June. “Economic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to California, 1850-1882.” Modern
China 5, no. 4 (October, 1979): 463-501.
78
Melendy, H. Brett. “Filipinos in the United States.” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1974):
520-547.
Miller, S. C. “An East Coast Perspective to Chinese Exclusion, 1852-1882.” Historian 33
(1971): 183-201.
Munro, J A. “British Columbia and the ‘Chinese Evil’: Canada’s First Anti-Asiatic
Immigration Law.” Journal of Canadian Studies (1970): 42-51.
Nipp, Dora. “The Chinese in Toronto.” In Gathering Place: Peoples and Neighbourhoods of
Toronto, 1834-1945, ed. R. F. Harney, 147-175. Toronto: Multicultural History Society
of Ontario, 1985.
________. “Family, Work and Survival: Chinese Women in Toronto.” Polyphony 15 (2000):
36-40.
O’ Brien, Robert W. “Status of Chinese in the Mississippi Delta.” Social Forces 19 (March
1941): 386-390.
Palmer, Howard. “Patterns of Racism: Attitudes towards Chinese and Japanese in Alberta
1920-1950.” Hs – SH XIII, no. 25 (May 1980): 137-160.
Parai, Louis. “Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1962-74.”International Migration Review 9
(1975): 449-477.
Pascoe, Peggy. “Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of Mission-Educated Chinese
American Women, 1874-1939.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S
Women’s History, eds. Ruiz, Vicki and Ellen C. DuBois. NY: Routledge, 1994.
Paupst, K. “A Note on Anti-Chinese Sentiment in Toronto before the First World
War.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 9 (1977): 54-59.
Peffer, G.A. “From Under the Sojourner’s Shadow: A Historical Study of Chinese Female
Immigration to America, 1852-1882.” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, no.3
(Spring 1992): 41-67.
________. “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page
Law, 1875-1882.” In Chinese Immigrants and American Law, ed. Charles McClain, 318336. NY: Garland Pub., 1994.
Pon, Madge. “Like a Chinese Puzzle: The Construction of Chinese Masculinity in Jack
Canuck.” In Gender and History in Canada, eds. Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld, 88-100.
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996.
Roy, Patricia. “Educating the ‘East’: British Columbia and the Oriental Question in the
79
Interwar Years.” BC Studies 18 (Summer 1973): 50-69.
________. “The Oriental ‘Menace’ in British Columbia.” In Studies in Canadian Social
History, eds. Michiel Horn and Ronald Sabourin, 287-297. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1974.
________. British Columbia’s Fear of Asians, 1900-1950.” Social History XIII, no.25 (May
1980)
________. “Citizens without Votes: East Asians in British Columbia.” In Ethnicity, Power and
Politics in Canada, ed. Jorden D. and Tissa Fernando. Toronto: Methuen, 1981.
Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1,
no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83-99.
Shankman, Arnold. “Black on Yellow: Afro-Americans View Chinese-Americans, 18501935.” Phylon XXXIX, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 1-17.
Shumsky, Neil L. “San Francisco’s Workingmen Respond to the Modern City.” California
Historical Quarterly 55 (1976): 46-57.
Siu, Paul C.P. “‘The Sojourner’.” American Journal of Sociology 58 (1953): 34-44.
Tan, Jin. “Chinese Labor and the Reconstituted Social Order of British Columbia.” Canadian
Ethnic Studies XIX, no. 3 (1987): 68-88.
Thistlethwaite, Frank. “Migration from Europe Overseas in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” In
Population Movements in Modern European History, ed. Herbert Moller, 73-92. New
York: Macmillan, 1964.
Tilly, Charles. “Transplanted Networks.” In Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and
Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, 79-95. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990
Trauner, J.B. “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905.” The
Magazine of the California Historical Society, San Francisco 57, no.1 (Spring 1978):7087.
Troper, Harold. “Canada’s Immigration Policy since 1945.” International Journal 48, no.2
(Spring 1993): 255-81.
Tsai, Shih-Shan H. “Chinese Immigration through Communist Chinese Eyes: An Introduction
to the Historiography.” Pacific Historical Review 43(1974): 395-408.
________. “Preserving the Dragon Seeds: The Evolution of Ch’ing Emigration Policy.” Asian
Profile 7, no. 6 (December 1979): 497-506.
Vecoli, Rudolph. “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted.” Journal of American
80
History 51 (December 1964): 404-417.
________. “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of American History.” In The State of American
History, ed. Herbert Bass, 70-88 Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970.
________. “The Resurgence of American Immigration History.” American Studies
International 17, no.2 (1979): 46-66.
Wang, Qingjia Edward. “Guests from the Open Door: The Reception of Chinese Students into
the U.S., 1900s-1920s.” The Journal of American East Asian Relations 3, no. 1 (1994):
55-75.
Wang, L. Ling-Chi. “Asian American Studies.” American Quarterly 33, No.3 (1981): 339-354.
Wickberg, Edgar. “Chinese and Canadian Influences on Chinese Politics in Vancouver, 19001947.” BC Studies 45 (Spring 1980): 37-55.
________. “Overseas Chinese: The State of the Field.” Chinese America: History and
Perspectives (Annual 2002): 1-9 [Online resource 57659].
Woon, Yuen-fong. “‘The Voluntary Sojourner among the Overseas Chinese: Myth or
Reality?’” Pacific Affairs 56, no. 4 (1983): 673-690.
Wynne, Robert E. “American labor Leaders and the Vancouver Anti-Oriental Riot.” Pacific
Northwest Quarterly 57, no. 4 (1966): 172-179.
Ye, Jing. “The Chinese in Early Orange County, 1870s-1930s: With a Focus on the
Placentia/Fullerton Area.” Welebaethan [CSUF Annual Historical Journal] (Spring 2002):
13-36.
Yen, Ching-Hwang. “Ch’ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644-1912).” Modern
Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 261-285.
________. “The Overseas Chinese and Late Ch’ing Economic Modernization.” Modern Asian
Studies 16, no. 2 (1982): 217-232.
Yu, Connie Toung. “The World of Our Grandmothers.” In Making Waves – An Anthology of
Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California,
33-42. Boston: Beacon press, 1989.
Yung, Judy. “The Social Awakening of Chinese American Women as Reported in Chung Sai
Yat Po, 1900-1911.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S Women’s History,
eds. Ruiz, Vicki and Ellen C. DuBois. NY: Routledge, 1994.
81
82