US spread of hateful Sinophobia to cover
up its own crime and failure, is easy considering the already existing
anti-Chinese racism created in the West first in the UK's opium wars and
US' racist "Yellow peril" laws more than 100 years ago!
And
it's all wrapped under the insidious and so misdirected connotations
about the modern China labelled "the Communist party dictatorship" which
could possibly pose a threat in the future if not now".
Peter
Klevius is 100% convinced the hate would continue even if China changed
to a Western system of "one party at the time democracy" - especially if
China would keep its well functioning meritocracy politics. After all,
China could change sometime in the future, right!
$-freeloader
and techno loser US' anti-China smear campaign has long since reached
sports - here's one of the latest effects of it from the enormous pile.
And is this BBC's contribution to sports Sinophobia?
The
only match in women's World Cup 2023 made impossible to see on Freeview
because of extreme picture distortion was when China played!
US used to abuse China and Chinese - now dollar freeloader US licks and threats!
Peter Klevius wrote:
Nicolle Wallace and Donald
Trump would both fail in Chinese meritocracy - is that why they both
hate China for no sane reason at all!
China
hating EU neo-fascist women adore militant Ursula von der Leyen and
want her to become next Nato Fuhrer attacking China. This program has
been repeated for days by Euronews after Macron's China visit.
MSNBC Nicolle Wallace: Xi Jinping is one of the world’s most heinous authoritarians!
This
caricature of a journalist - or rather algorithmed talk-machine -
seemingly also somehow puts Xi in the same category as Trump who
actually is much closer to Nicolle herself.
First of all Nicolle
Wallace ought to consider the horrifying situation US has put itself and
the world in because the chickens from the criminal dollar theft back
in 1971- are coming home to roost - which fact now with China's success
puts US in a situtation to give up its dirty game - or start trying to
shoot itself out!
Peter Klevius: Nicolle Wallace's heinous
"assessment" of the world's not only most powerful man in the most
powerful country, but also the by far most successful and trusted
leader, with a support from the people that exceeds everything US
politicians can dream of. Ever! And the way he got this position is as
far you can get from authoritarian, because he is a product of Chinese
meritocracy, which means that he at every stage has had a huge majority
of the people backing him. Dear Nicolle, just consider that Trump and
you would never have become a leader based on political merits. Ever!
Moreover,
do consider how Xi had to bow for his people's Confucian respect for
the elderly and, unlike in the West, protect them from Covid 2020,
despite this meaning less growth, and then 2022 bowed again when the
people demanded opening up!
Xi Jinping is not only the world's
most powerful and liked leader, he is also the most vulnerable for
criticism from the people - which is precisely his and the Chinese
political meritocracy's hallmark. And should stand as the most important
lecture for US. This, dear Nicolle, is not even close to "autharian"!
Ever!
And when stupidly and ignorantly demonizing China for
"censorship", try first to take a closer look at how US is censoring,
spying, militarizing and demonizing over the world thanks to its dollar
web dictatorship, and then consider what you would do as a Chinese
leadership if you were constantly negatively bombarded by the world's
biggest Goebbelian platforms, steered by CIA's attempts to saw
discontent and hate among your own people. Wouldn't you try to protect
your country from such evil - especially when knowing that your country
performs much better than the demonizer! Add to this how Chinese people -
unless, of course, they spit on their own country of origin ethnicity -
because of US hate- and warmongering have become the target of
appalling racism and hate crimes - which the media blinks.
Xi
Jinping is as far you can get from Mao - just look at China's progress
since he came to power in 2012! And the only "communist" in his ruling
is what every Western country admits ought to be the most important
political goal, namely a fairer distribution - which Xi has achieved on a
level never EVER seen before on the planet! This is Xi's "communism"
and seriously that part of Marxism that no one sane person can oppose.
Also
consider the extreme contempt US shows against the majority of the
world that doesn't believe in the ridiculous oxymoron "monotheism", and
how this medieval darkness is presented as "civilized".
So
Nicolle, to get some perspective inside your dark head: What if the
Chinese had been Jews or "blacks"? Can you even think that far by
yourself?
A modern high tech society
needs Confucianism much more than evil god-religions. But see what
hapened in the darkness of US - Confucianism was forbidden and kicked
out, just as US kicked out Chinese more than 100 years ago (see below),
while islamism is welcome in US universities and in US military state
terrorism campaigns. Shame on US!
Says anti-Maoist Peter Klevius
who can't see anything of Xi and his modern China resembling Mao and
his destructive peasantry Communism - which was a product of evil
Western interference (see below).
While Western journalists have
turned into political demonizers of easy targets while saying nothing
about real issues - such as e.g. US dollar theft 1971- and how it now
has made US a dangerous (d)evil feeding on the dollar hegemony and
warmongering.
Harry S. Truman on 24 June 1941 (two days after
the Nazi-German invasion of Russia) 'If we see that Germany is winning,
we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help
Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.'
Unlike
the wayward teenager US, China, the world's oldest civilization, and
now again by far the largest economy, has been fostered through constant
mongol attacks to build a double-sided wall, i.e. one that not only
protects China but also protects others against China. US should take
note.
March 10, 2023
A Very Brief History of Capitalism, Empire, and the Yellow Peril
by David Rovics
David
Rovics: Unlike the propagandists that publish most of the textbooks
that we brainwash our children with in the US, reality-based historians
have oft observed that the history of civilization is a history of the
ongoing conflict between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the
poor, the ruling class and those they would like to rule. One of the
main factors that continually makes this conflict a very dynamic one
that is forever unfolding in new ways is the obvious inequity of the
whole thing, with a small class of rulers, owners, and landlords always
trying to control a very large majority of subjects, workers and
tenants. In order to maintain such a state of constant inequality,
particularly in severely unequal societies/empires like the United
States, strategies of divide and rule are always in play, whether we’re
talking about maintaining domestic tranquility, or running the global
American empire.
From the time of British colonization of the
Americas, the colonial rulers and later the sovereign US rulers of this
land have sought to keep the bulk of the population — the tenant
farmers, the small landowners, the urban workers and renters, the
immigrant and the native-born, the enslaved and the free — at each
other’s throats, and thus distracted with fratricidal conflict, rather
than united in opposition to their common oppressors. The ways society
is divided and the ways the rulers seek to exploit those divisions
locally and globally evolves over time, just as other things evolve,
such as technology, and different forms of organization, such as
corporations, unions, parliaments, and developments such as the massive
US military industrial complex.
In light of these realities, it’s
not hard to understand scenes like President Biden going to Alabama to
remember those killed by white supremacists in a church bombing in 1963,
while having nothing to say about state-sanctioned pogroms being
committed by organized mobs of people against Palestinians — towns being
burned to the ground by mobs sanctioned by one of the biggest
recipients of US military aid on the planet. In light of these
realities, we can understand why the US Attorney General is once again
in Ukraine,
talking about prosecuting Russian war crimes in the
International Criminal Court, while saying nothing about prosecuting war
crimes committed by Americans, Saudis, or Israelis. In light of these
realities, we can see why the State Department can justify the
double-standard involved with publicly attacking the Chinese government
for allegedly considering selling arms to Russia on the same day as they
announce the sales of the US’s most advanced fighter jets to Taiwan.
Turning
on the news in the US today means hearing a constant drumbeat of
anti-Russian and anti-Chinese rhetoric that is completely detached from
any sense of history, and which involves less and less effort at
maintaining any semblance of objectivity.
Hearing our leaders
demonize Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party, one might think
the leaders of the free world have only had it out for the Russians and
the Chinese since Putin or Xi came to power. Or if not then, perhaps
since both countries had revolutions, in 1917 and 1949, respectively.
The historical reality is far more insidious.
The powers-that-be
in the US have been actively vilifying Russian and Chinese migrants,
while tremendously profiting from their labor, since the 19th century,
just as the US military and State Department has been actively working
to weaken and control Russia and China for most of the 19th, 20th, and
21st centuries.
Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric about specific
Russian or Chinese leaders or governments. US policies towards Russia,
China, and towards Russian and Chinese people has nothing to do with
that. It has to do with methods of divide and rule at home, and abroad,
with geopolitical concerns around how to effectively dominate the
world.
History, from the 19th century right up to today,
illustrates what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure this
is history that is entirely lost on the likes of Joe Biden, Antony
Blinken, Merrick Garland, or the supposedly, fashionably
“anti-globalist” leaders of the Republican Party, either. I’ll
highlight a little bit of this history.
In the 19th century the
US authorities and business owners actively solicited migration of
workers from Europe as well as from China, Japan, and elsewhere. In the
case of Chinese and Japanese migration, it was more about guest worker
programs — families not welcome. So when we talk about the US having a
whites-only immigration policy back then, this didn’t include those who
were brought in from China to build the railroads, and then deported
afterwards, which is what happened, on a huge scale.
Asian
workers were super-exploited, facing discrimination of all kinds, and
frequent massacres at the hands of desperate mobs of their fellow
workers, many of whom had swallowed the nonsense propaganda about the
Chinese as people who would always be willing to work for half the going
wage. Several different Exclusion Acts were passed, aimed specifically
at Asians, that prevented workers from bringing their families over,
and/or forced workers to go back to Asia after the corporate barons had
no more need of their labor. Exclusion laws against Asian emigration
were in place until 1943.
Meanwhile in China itself, the US
military participated in the Opium Wars, along with the British, the
French, and the Russians, among others, which involved imperial European
and American troops burning entire Chinese cities, killing tens of
thousands of people, and forcing the Chinese government of the time to
import addictive opium from the British-run farms in British-occupied
India. This invasion which forced China to open the gates to what
became a nationwide epidemic of opium addiction is what the British and
the American authorities referred to as the “opening” of China to “free
trade.” The deadly Opium Wars were known as “trade wars.”
On the
east coast in particular, as the US was flooded with migrants from
Ireland to Russia and most everywhere in between throughout the 19th
century — actively solicited by the kingpins of American industry —
those migrating from eastern and southern Europe in particular developed
a reputation for being especially subversive. This reputation, of
course, was actively promoted by the powers-that-be, as one more avenue
for creating division among the source of their profits, and their class
enemy, the working class.
In reality, the horrific conditions of
the factories, mines and mills of 19th-century America made radicals
out of most people who weren’t killed off by those conditions,
regardless of their race, gender, or national origin. But certainly the
ranks of the organized workers and rebels was indeed full of Italians,
Germans, and Russians, along with everybody else. So other exclusion
laws were passed to target eastern and southern Europeans, which were
not lifted until 1944. These laws meant that throughout the 1920s,
1930’s, and well into the 1940’s, Germans and Russians — Jews included —
were barred from migrating to the US directly. Germans, Russians
(Jewish or non-Jewish), along with Italians, were especially singled out
by those in power and their media mouthpieces as undesirable
subversives. The prejudice against these groups was only amplified by
events such as the Russian Revolution.
Meanwhile in Russia
itself, as World War 1 was coming to an end, after the Bolsheviks had
seized power, the US, the UK, and many other allied countries
participated in an invasion of the Soviet Union with hundreds of
thousands of soldiers, aimed at supporting the Czarist forces that were
attempting to take power back from the Red Army, an effort which failed.
After
the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the US and many other participating
forces from other countries invaded Korea, which was basically in the
course of having a popular national revolution against the dictator
which the Japanese Empire had put into power, a dictator which the US
backed. China supported the revolutionary forces in Korea, against the
US-supported dictator. In the course of three years of active conflict,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were killed, along with tens
of thousands of US soldiers.
The US empire has hundreds of
military bases around the world, which have strategically, intentionally
surrounded both Russia and China. The US is the only country with such
military bases around the world, that can transport large numbers of
troops wherever it wants to. The notion that the US authorities are
concerned with the lives of Ukrainians, Taiwanese, or people in Xinjiang
is just as laughable as the notion that the US authorities are
concerned with the lives of Palestinians, Yemenis, or Guatemalans. We
hear about the former and not the latter groups for purely cold,
geopolitical, strategic reasons. Anyone who thinks otherwise is
engaging in a futile exercise to put a human face on an entirely inhuman
set of imperial calculations — a set of calculations which has its
roots in centuries past.
I am a descendant of Russian Jewish
migrants who were subject to every form of discrimination, before they
left Minsk, and later in the northeastern United States. I am raising a
family with a Japanese woman, and our children look visibly Asian. One
doesn’t need to have any personal involvement in the history of abuse
of Russian or Asian migrants in this country, or the history of US
imperialism in Europe or Asia, to be worried about what the future might
look like, as the leadership of both parties in this country paint a
rising China as somehow threatening to the US, and we hear more and more
about Chinese expansionist intentions, Chinese coal plants causing
climate change, Chinese surveillance apps stealing our data, Chinese
subsidies to Chinese industries undermining American industry, Chinese
workers undercutting American workers, Chinese spies among us in
academia and in Silicon Valley, seeking to steal our secrets, and even
Chinese viruses.
One of the many things about Biden’s trip to
Alabama, and all his new-found rhetoric about racial equality, at least
when it comes to discrimination against Black Americans, is that out of
the other side of his mouth he is telling us to fear the Russians and
the Chinese out there in Russia and China, as well as the ones among us
who may fail to demonstrate the requisite loyalty to the American Way,
and loathing of their respective governments and everything they stand
for. This is how the politicians talk before the wars and the lynchings
begin.
The Yellow Peril
The anti-China Immigration Act of 1917 established the Asiatic Barred Zone from which the U.S. admitted no immigrants.
Under
nativist political pressure, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an
Asian Barred Zone of countries from which immigration to the U.S. was
forbidden. The Cable Act of 1922 (Married Women's Independent
Nationality Act) guaranteed citizenship to independent women unless they
were married to a nonwhite alien ineligible for naturalization.[67]
Asian men and women were excluded from American citizenship.[68][69]
In
practice, the Cable Act of 1922 reversed some racial exclusions, and
granted independent woman citizenship exclusively to women married to
white men. Analogously, the Cable Act allowed the government to revoke
the citizenship of an American white woman married an Asian man. The law
was formally challenged before the Supreme Court, with the case of
Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), whereby a Japanese–American man
tried to demonstrate that the Japanese people are a white race eligible
for naturalized American citizenship. The Court ruled that the Japanese
are not white people; two years later, the National Origins Quota of
1924 specifically excluded the Japanese from entering the US and from
American citizenship.
The religious racialism of The Yellow Peril
(1911, 3rd ed.), by G. G. Rupert, proposed that Russia would unite the
Oriental races to invade, conquer, and subjugate Christian civilization
in the Western world.
The eugenic racialism proposed in The Rising
Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard,
presents either China or Japan as uniting the Oriental races to invade,
conquer, and subjugate the white civilizations of the Western world.
Ethnic national character
To
"preserve the ideal of American homogeneity", the Emergency Quota Act
of 1921 (numeric limits) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (fewer southern
and eastern Europeans) restricted admission to the United States
according to the skin color and the race of the immigrant.[70] In
practice, the Emergency Quota Act used outdated census data to determine
the number of colored immigrants to admit to the U.S. To protect WASP
ethnic supremacy (social, economic, political) in the 20th century, the
Immigration Act of 1924 used the twenty-year-old census of 1890, because
its 19th-century demographic-group percentages favored more admissions
of WASP immigrants from western and northern Europe, and fewer
admissions of colored immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern
Europe.[71]
To ensure that the immigration of colored peoples did
not change the WASP national character of the United States, the
National Origins Formula (1921–1965) meant to maintain the status quo
percentages of "ethnic populations" in lesser proportion to the existing
white populations; thus, the yearly quota allowed only 150,000 People
of Color into the U.S.A. In the event, the national-origins Formula was
voided and repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965.[72]
Eugenic apocalypse
Eugenicists used the Yellow Peril
to misrepresent the U.S. as an exclusively WASP nation threatened by
miscegenation with the Asian Other by expressing their racism with
biological language (infection, disease, decay) and imagery of
penetration (wounds and sores) of the white body.[73]: 237–238 In The
Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident (1911), the end time evangelist G.
G. Rupert said that Russia would unite the colored races to facilitate
the Oriental invasion, conquest, and subjugation of the West; said white
supremacy is in the Christian eschatology of verse 16:12 in the Book of
Revelation: "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great
Euphrates River, and it dried up so that the kings from the east could
march their armies toward the west without hindrance".[74] As an
Old-Testament Christian, Rupert believed the racialist doctrine of
British Israelism, and said that the Yellow Peril from China, India,
Japan, and Korea, were attacking Britain and the US, but that the
Christian God himself would halt the Asian conquest of the Western
world.[75]
In The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World-Supremacy (1920), the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard said that either
China or Japan would unite the colored peoples of Asia and lead them to
destroy white supremacy in the Western world, and that the Asian
conquest of the world began with the Japanese victory in the
Russo–Japanese War (1905). As a white supremacist, Stoddard presented
his racism with Biblical language and catastrophic imagery depicting a
rising tide of colored people meaning to invade, conquer, and subjugate
the white race.[76]
Political opposition
In that cultural
vein, the phrase "yellow peril" was common editorial usage in the
newspapers of publisher William Randolph Hearst.[77] In the 1930s,
Hearst's newspapers conducted a campaign of vilification (personal and
political) against Elaine Black, an American Communist, whom he
denounced as a libertine "Tiger Woman" for her interracial cohabitation
with the Japanese-American Communist Karl Yoneda.[78] In 1931,
interracial marriage was illegal in California, but, in 1935, Black and
Yoneda married in Seattle, Washington, where such marriages were
legal.[78]
Socially acceptable Asian
In the 1930s, Yellow
Peril stereotypes were common to US culture, exemplified by the
cinematic versions of the Asian detectives Charlie Chan (Warner Oland)
and Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre), originally literary detectives in novels and
comic strips. White actors portrayed the Asian men and made the
fictional characters socially acceptable in mainstream American cinema,
especially when the villains were secret agents of Imperial
Japan.[79]: 159
American proponents of the Japanese Yellow Peril
were the military-industrial interests of the China Lobby (right-wing
intellectuals, businessmen, Christian missionaries) who advocated
financing and supporting the warlord Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a
Methodist convert whom they represented as the Christian Chinese savior
of China, then embroiled in the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937,
1946–1950). After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the China Lobby
successfully pressured the U.S. government to aid Chiang Kai-shek's
faction. The news media's reportage (print, radio, cinema) of the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) favored China, which politically
facilitated the American financing and equipping of the anticommunist
Kuomintang, the Chiang Kai-shek faction in the civil war against the
Communist faction led by Mao Tse-tung.[79]: 159
Pragmatic racialism
In
1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt
administration formally declared China an ally of the U.S., and the news
media modified their use of Yellow Peril ideology to include China to
the West, criticizing contemporary anti-Chinese laws as
counterproductive to the war effort against Imperial
Japan.[79]: 165–166 The wartime zeitgeist and the geopolitics of the
U.S. government presumed that defeat of the Imperial Japan would be
followed by postwar China developing into a capitalist economy under the
strongman leadership of the Christian Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and
the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party).
In his relations
with the American government and his China Lobby sponsors, Chiang
requested the repeal of American anti-Chinese laws; to achieve the
repeals, Chiang threatened to exclude the American business community
from the "China Market", the economic fantasy that the China Lobby
promised to the American business community.[79]: 171–172 In 1943, the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed, but, because the National
Origins Act of 1924 was contemporary law, the repeal was a symbolic
gesture of American solidarity with the people of China.
Science
fiction writer William F. Wu said that American adventure, crime, and
detective pulp magazines in the 1930s had many Yellow Peril characters,
loosely based on Fu Manchu; although "most [Yellow Peril characters]
were of Chinese descent", the geopolitics of the time led white people
to see Japan as a threat to the United States. In The Yellow Peril:
Chinese Americans in American fiction, 1850–1940 (1982), Wu said that
fear of Asians dates from the European Middle Ages, from the
13th-century Mongol invasion of Europe. Most Europeans had never seen an
Asian man or woman, and the great differences in language, custom, and
physique accounted for European paranoia about the nonwhite peoples from
the Eastern world.[80]
21st century
The American academic
Frank H. Wu said that anti-Chinese sentiment incited by people such as
Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel is recycling anti-Asian hatred from the
19th century into a "new Yellow Peril" that is common to White populist
politics that do not distinguish between Asian foreigners and
Asian-American U.S. citizens.[81] That American cultural anxiety about
the geopolitical ascent of the People's Republic of China originates in
the fact that, for the first time in centuries, the Western world, led
by the U.S., is challenged by a people whom Westerners viewed as
culturally backward and racially inferior only a generation earlier.[82]
That the U.S. perceives China as "the enemy", because their economic
success voids the myth of white supremacy upon which the West claims
cultural superiority over the East.[83] Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic
has facilitated and increased the occurrence of xenophobia and
anti-Chinese racism, which the academic Chantal Chung said has "deep
roots in yellow peril ideology".[84]
Australia
The White Australia
policy arose from the growth of anti-Asian (particularly Chinese)
sentiments that peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Pictured: The Melbourne Punch (c. May 1888)
In the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, fear of the Yellow Peril was a cultural feature of
the white peoples who sought to establish a country and a society in
the Australian continent. The racialist fear of the nonwhite Asian Other
was a thematic preoccupation common to invasion literature novels, such
as The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia
(1895), The Colored Conquest (1904), The Awakening to China (1909), and
the Fools' Harvest (1939). Such fantasy literature featured an Asian
invasion of "the empty north" of Australia, which was populated by the
Aboriginal Australians, the nonwhite, native Other with whom the white
emigrants competed for living space.[85] In the novel White or Yellow?: A
Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1887), the journalist and labor
leader William Lane said that a horde of Chinese people legally arrived
to Australia and overran white society and monopolized the industries
for exploiting the natural resources of the Australian "empty
north".[85]
The Yellow Peril was used to justify the White Australia
Policy, which excluded dark-skinned Melanesians from immigration to
Australia.
White nation
As Australian invasion literature of
the 19th-century, the future history novel White or Yellow? (1887)
presents William Lane's nationalist racialism and left-wing politics
that portrayed Australia under threat by the Yellow Peril. In the near
future, British capitalists manipulate the Australian legal system and
then legislate the mass immigration of Chinese workers to Australia,
regardless of the socioeconomic consequences to White Australian
society. Consequent to the British manipulation of Australia's economy,
the resulting social conflicts (racial, financial, cultural, sexual)
escalate into a race war for control of Australia.
The Yellow
Peril racism in the narrative of the novel White or Yellow? justifies
White Australians' killing Chinese workers as a defensive, existential
response for control of Australia.[53]: 26–27 Lang's story of White
racial replacement appeals to the fears that labor and trade union
leaders exploited to oppose the legal immigration of Chinese workers,
whom they misrepresented as racial, economic, and moral threats to White
Australia. That Asian libertinism threatens White Christian
civilization, which theme Lang represents with miscegenation (mixing of
the races). The fear of racial replacement was presented as an
apolitical call to White racial unity in among Australians.[53]: 24
Culturally,
Yellow Peril invasion novels expressed themes of the White man's sexual
fear of the supposed voracious sexuality of Asian men and women. The
stories feature Western women in sexual peril, usually rape-by-seduction
facilitated with the sensual and moral release of smoked opium.[85] In
the patriarchal world of invasion literature, interracial sexual
relations were "a fate worse than death" for a white woman, afterwards,
she was a sexual untouchable to white men.[85] In the 1890s, that
moralistic theme was the anti-Chinese message of the feminist and labor
organizer Rose Summerfield who voiced the White woman's sexual fear of
the Yellow Peril, by warning society of the Chinese man's unnaturally
lustful gaze upon the pulchritude of Australian women.[53]: 24
Racial equality thwarted
In
1901, the Australian federal government adopted the White Australia
policy that had been informally initiated with the Immigration
Restriction Act 1901, which generally excluded Asians, but in particular
excluded the Chinese and the Melanesian peoples. Historian C. E. W.
Bean said that the White Australia policy was "a vehement effort to
maintain a high, Western standard of economy, society, and culture
(necessitating, at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the
rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples)" from Australia.[86] In 1913,
appealing to the irrational fear of the Yellow Peril, the film Australia
Calls (1913) depicted a "Mongolian" invasion of Australia, which
eventually is defeated by ordinary Australians with underground,
political resistance and guerrilla warfare, and not by the army of the
Australian federal government.[87]
In 1919, at the Paris Peace
Conference (28 June 1919), supported by Britain and the U.S., Australian
Prime Minister Billy Hughes vehemently opposed Imperial Japan's request
for the inclusion of the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the
Covenant of the League of Nations (13 February 1919):
The
equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations,
the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to
all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just
treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in
fact, on account of their race or nationality.[88]
Aware that the
British delegation opposed the racial equality clause in Article 21 of
the Covenant, conference chairman U.S. President Woodrow Wilson acted to
prevent de jure racial equality among the nations of the world, with
his unilateral requirement of a unanimous vote by the countries in the
League of Nations. On 11 April 1919, most countries in the conference
voted to include the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the
Covenant of the League of Nations; only the British and American
delegations opposed the racial equality clause. Moreover, to maintain
the White Australia policy, the Australian government sided with Britain
and voted against Japan's formal request that the Racial Equality
Proposal be included to Article 21 of the covenant of the League of
Nations; that defeat in international relations greatly influenced
Imperial Japan to militarily confront the Western world.[89]
France
Colonial empire
In
the late 19th century, French imperialist politicians invoked the Péril
jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low
birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries.[90] From that
racist claim arose an artificial, cultural fear among the French
population that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France, which
could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French
women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual
flood of immigrants from Asia.[90] From that racialist perspective, the
French press sided with Imperial Russia during the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), by representing the Russians as heroes defending the white
race against the Japanese Yellow Peril.[91]
French postcard captioned
"Make way for the yellows" shows Japanese imperialism running over four
great nations of Europe—Russia, Britain, France, and Germany
French Indochina: In the oriental French Empire, the country and people of Vietnam were renamed French Indochina. (1913)
In
the early 20th century, in 1904, the French journalist René Pinon
reported that the Yellow Peril were a cultural, geopolitical, and
existential threat to white civilization in the Western world:
The "Yellow Peril" has entered already into the imagination of the
people, just as represented in the famous drawing [Peoples of Europe,
Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions,1895] of the Emperor Wilhelm II: In a
setting of conflagration and carnage, Japanese and Chinese hordes
spread out over all Europe, crushing under their feet the ruins of our
capital cities and destroying our civilizations, grown anemic due to the
enjoyment of luxuries, and corrupted by the vanity of spirit.
Hence, little by little, there emerges the idea that even if a day must
come (and that day does not seem near) the European peoples will cease
to be their own enemies and even economic rivals, there will be a
struggle ahead to face and there will rise a new peril, the yellow man.
The civilized world has always organized itself before and against a
common adversary: for the Roman world, it was the barbarian; for the
Christian world, it was Islam; for the world of tomorrow, it may well be
the yellow man. And so we have the reappearance of this necessary
concept, without which peoples do not know themselves, just as the "Me"
only takes conscience of itself in opposition to the "non-Me": The
Enemy.[32]: 124
Despite the claimed Christian idealism of the
civilizing mission, from the start of colonization in 1858, the French
exploited the natural resources of Vietnam as inexhaustible and the
Vietnamese people as beasts of burden.[92]: 67–68 In the aftermath of
the Second World War, the First Indochina War (1946–1954) justified
recolonization of Vietnam as a defense of the white West against the
péril jaune — specifically that the Communist Party of Vietnam were
puppets of the People's Republic of China, which is part of the
"international communist conspiracy" to conquer the world.[93]
Therefore, French anticommunism utilized orientalism to dehumanize the
Vietnamese into "the nonwhite Other"; which yellow-peril racism allowed
atrocities against Viet Minh prisoners of war during la sale guerre
("dirty war").[92]: 74 In that time, yellow-peril racism remained one
of the ideological bases for the existence of French Indochina, thus the
French news media's racialist misrepresentations of Viet Minh
guerrillas being part of the innombrables masses jaunes (innumerable
yellow hordes); being one of many vagues hurlantes (roaring waves) of
masses fanatisées (fanatical hordes).[94]
Contemporary France
In
Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the
Parisian Vietnamese Community (1991) Gisèle Luce Bousquet said that the
péril jaune, which traditionally colored French perceptions of Asians,
especially of Vietnamese people, remains a cultural prejudice of
contemporary France;[95] hence the French perceive and resent the
Vietnamese people of France as academic overachievers who take jobs from
"native French" people.[95]
In 2015, the cover of the January
issue of Fluide Glacial magazine featured a cartoon, Yellow Peril: Is it
Already Too Late?, which depicts a Chinese-occupied Paris where a sad
Frenchman is pulling a rickshaw, transporting a Chinese man, in 19th c.
French colonial uniform, accompanied by a barely dressed, blonde French
woman.[96][97] The editor of Fluide Glacial, Yan Lindingre, defended the
magazine cover and the subject as satire and mockery of French fears of
China's economic threat to France.[97] In an editorial addressing the
Chinese government's complaint, Lindingre said, "I have just ordered an
extra billion copies printed, and will send them to you via chartered
flight. This will help us balance our trade deficit, and give you a good
laugh".[97]
Italy
In the 20th century, from their
perspective, as nonwhite nations in a world order dominated by the white
nations, the geopolitics of Ethiopia–Japan relations allowed Imperial
Japan and Ethiopia to avoid imperialist European colonization of their
countries and nations. Before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
(1934–1936), Imperial Japan had given diplomatic and military support to
Ethiopia against invasion by Fascist Italy, which implied military
assistance. In response to that Asian anti-imperialism, Benito Mussolini
ordered a Yellow Peril propaganda campaign by the Italian press, which
represented Imperial Japan as the military, cultural, and existential
threat to the Western world, by way of the dangerous "yellow race–black
race" alliance meant to unite Asians and Africans against the white
people of the world.[98]
In 1935, Mussolini warned of the
Japanese Yellow Peril, specifically the racial threat of Asia and Africa
uniting against Europe.[98] In the summer of 1935, the National Fascist
Party (1922–43) often staged anti–Japanese political protests
throughout Italy.[99] Nonetheless, as right-wing imperial powers, Japan
and Italy pragmatically agreed to disagree; in exchange for Italian
diplomatic recognition of Manchukuo (1932–45), the Japanese puppet state
in China, Imperial Japan would not aid Ethiopia against Italian
invasion and so Italy would end the anti–Japanese Yellow Peril
propaganda in the national press of Italy.[99]
Mexico
Two men in
sombreros riding in a donkey-cart with a line of feet sticking out the
back. They are riding down a dirt street away from the camera, with a
line of buildings on the right. Dated 15 May 1911.
In Revolutionary
Mexico (1910–20) a wagonload of Asian corpses is en route to a common
grave after fear of the Yellow Peril fear provoked a three-day massacre
(11–15 May 1911) of 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese) in the
city of Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico.
During the Mexican
Revolution (1910–20), Chinese-Mexicans were subjected to racist abuse,
like before the revolt, for not being Christians, specifically Roman
Catholic, for not being racially Mexican, and for not soldiering and
fighting in the Revolution against the thirty-five-year dictatorship
(1876–1911) of General Porfirio Díaz.[100]: 44
The notable
atrocity against Asian people was the three-day Torreón massacre (13–15
May 1911) in northern Mexico, wherein the military forces of Francisco
I. Madero killed 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese), because
they were deemed a cultural threat to the Mexican way of life. The
massacre of Chinese- and Japanese-Mexicans at the city of Torreón,
Coahuila, was not the only such atrocity perpetrated in the Revolution.
Elsewhere, in 1913, after the Constitutional Army captured the city of
Tamasopo, San Luis Potosí state, the soldiers and the town-folk expelled
the Chinese community by sacking and burning the Chinatown.[100]: 44
During
and after the Mexican Revolution, the Roman Catholic prejudices of
Yellow Peril ideology facilitated racial discrimination and violence
against Chinese Mexicans, usually for "stealing jobs" from native
Mexicans. Anti–Chinese nativist propaganda misrepresented the Chinese
people as unhygienic, prone to immorality (miscegenation, gambling,
opium-smoking) and spreading diseases that would biologically corrupt
and degenerate La Raza (the Mexican race) and generally undermining the
Mexican patriarchy.[101]
Moreover, from the racialist
perspective, besides stealing work from Mexican men, Chinese men were
stealing Mexican women from the native Mexican men who were away
fighting the Revolution to overthrow and expel the dictator Porfirio
Díaz and his foreign sponsors from Mexico.[102] In the 1930s,
approximately 70 per cent of the Chinese and the Chinese–Mexican
population was expelled from the Mexican United States by the
bureaucratic ethnic culling of the Mexican population.[103]
Turkey
In
1908, at the end of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) the Young Turk
Revolution ascended the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power,
which the 1913 Ottoman coup d'état reinforced with the Raid on the
Sublime Porte. In admiration and emulation that the modernization of
Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868) was realised without the
Japanese people losing their national identity, the CUP intended to
modernize Turkey into the "Japan of the Near East".[104] To that end,
the CUP considered allying Turkey with Japan in a geopolitical effort to
unite the peoples of the Eastern world to fight a racial war of
extermination against the White colonial empires of the
West.[105]: 54–55 Politically, the cultural, nationalist, and
geopolitical affinities of Turkey and Japan were possible because, in
Turkish culture, the "yellow" color of "Eastern gold" symbolizes the
innate moral superiority of the East over the West.[105]: 53–54
Fear
of the Yellow Peril occurs against the Chinese communities of Turkey,
usually as political retaliation against the PRC government's
repressions and human-rights abuses against the Muslim Uighur people in
the Xinjiang province of China.[106] At an anti–PRC political protest in
Istanbul, a South Korean woman tourist faced violence, despite
identifying herself: "I am not Chinese, I am Korean".[106] In response
that Yellow Peril racism in Turkey, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the
extreme right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, rhetorically asked: "How
does one distinguish, between Chinese and Koreans? Both have slanted
eyes".[106]
South Africa
The Randlord's (mine owners') exploitive
employment of Chinese labor contributed to the Liberal Party victory in
the 1906 elections. (Punch magazine, 1903)
In 1904, after the
conclusion of the Second Boer War, the Unionist Government of the
Britain authorized the immigration to South Africa of approximately
63,000 Chinese laborers to work the gold mines in the Witwatersrand
basin.
On 26 March 1904, approximately 80,000 people attended a
social protest against the use of Chinese laborers in the Transvaal held
in Hyde Park, London, to publicize the exploitation of Chinese South
Africans.[107]: 107 The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union
Congress then passed a resolution declaring:
That this
meeting, consisting of all classes of citizens of London, emphatically
protests against the action of the Government in granting permission to
import into South Africa indentured Chinese labor under conditions of
slavery, and calls upon them to protect this new colony from the greed
of capitalists and the Empire from degradation.[108]
The mass
immigration of indentured Chinese laborers to mine South African gold
for wages lower than acceptable to the native white men, contributed to
the 1906 electoral loss of the financially conservative British Unionist
government that then governed South Africa.[107]: 103
After
1910, most Chinese miners were repatriated to China because of the great
opposition to them, as "colored people" in white South Africa,
analogous to anti-Chinese laws in the US during the early 20th
century.[109][110] In the event, despite the racial violence between
white South African miners and Chinese miners, the Unionist government
achieved the economic recovery of South Africa after the Second Boer War
by rendering the gold mines of the Witwatersrand Basin the most
productive in the world.[107]: 103
New Zealand
In the late
19th and the early 20th centuries, populist Prime Minister Richard
Seddon compared the Chinese people to monkeys, and so used the Yellow
Peril to promote racialist politics in New Zealand. In 1879, in his
first political speech, Seddon said that New Zealand did not wish her
shores "deluged with Asiatic Tartars. I would sooner address white men
than these Chinese. You can't talk to them, you can't reason with them.
All you can get from them is 'No savvy'".[111]
Moreover, in 1905,
in the city of Wellington, the white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered
Joe Kum Yung, an old Chinese man, in protest against Asian immigration
to New Zealand. Laws promulgated to limit Chinese immigration included a
heavy poll tax, introduced in 1881 and lowered in 1937, after Imperial
Japan's invasion and occupation of China. In 1944, the poll tax was
abolished, and the New Zealand government formally apologized to the
Chinese populace of New Zealand.
The
Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by
President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration
of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law excluded merchants, teachers,
students, travelers, and diplomats.[1] The Chinese Exclusion Act was the
first and only major U.S. law ever implemented to prevent all members
of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States.
Passage
of the law was preceded by growing anti-Chinese sentiment and
anti-Chinese violence, as well as various policies targeting Chinese
migrants.[3] The act followed the Angell Treaty of 1880, a set of
revisions to the U.S.–China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that allowed the
U.S. to suspend Chinese immigration. The act was initially intended to
last for 10 years, but was renewed and strengthened in 1892 with the
Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. These laws attempted to stop all
Chinese immigration into the United States for ten years, with
exceptions for diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers.
They were widely evaded.
The law remained in force until the
passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943, which repealed the exclusion and
allowed 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year.
Chinese immigration later increased with the passage of the Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished direct racial barriers, and
later by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished
the National Origins Formula.
The first significant Chinese
immigration to North America began with the California Gold Rush of
1848–1855 and it continued with subsequent large labor projects, such as
the building of the first transcontinental railroad. During the early
stages of the gold rush, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese
were tolerated by white people, if not well received.[6] However, as
gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity toward
the Chinese and other foreigners increased. After being forcibly driven
from mining by a mixture of state legislators and other miners (the
Foreign Miner's Tax), the immigrant Chinese began to settle in enclaves
in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low-wage labor, such as
restaurant and laundry work.[7] With the post-Civil War economy in
decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor
leader Denis Kearney and his Workingman's Party[8] as well as by
California governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies"
for depressed wage levels. Public opinion and law in California began to
demonize Chinese workers and immigrants in any role, with the latter
half of the 1800s seeing a series of ever more restrictive laws being
placed on Chinese labor, behavior and even living conditions. While many
of these legislative efforts were quickly overturned by the State
Supreme Court,[9] many more anti-Chinese laws continued to be passed in
both California and nationally.
In the early 1850s, there was
resistance to the idea of excluding Chinese migrant workers from
immigration because they provided essential tax revenue which helped
fill the fiscal gap of California.[10] The Xianfeng Emperor, who ruled
China at the time, was supportive of the exclusion, citing his concerns
that Chinese immigration to America would lead to a loss of labor for
China.[11] But toward the end of the decade, the financial situation
improved and subsequently, attempts to legislate Chinese exclusion
became successful on the state level.[10] In 1858, the California
Legislature passed a law that made it illegal for any person "of the
Chinese or Mongolian races" to enter the state; however, this law was
struck down by an unpublished opinion of the State Supreme Court in
1862.[12]
The Chinese immigrant workers provided cheap labor and
did not use any of the government infrastructure (schools, hospitals,
etc.) because the Chinese migrant population was predominantly made up
of healthy male adults.[10] In January 1868, the Senate ratified the
Burlingame Treaty with China, allowing an unrestricted flow of Chinese
into the country.[13] As time passed and more and more Chinese migrants
arrived in the United States and California in particular, violence
would often break out in cities such as Los Angeles. The North Adams
strike of 1870, broken by the replacement of all workers by 75 Chinese
men was the trigger that sparked widespread working-class protest across
the country, shaped legislative debate in Congress, and helped make
Chinese immigration a sustained national issue.[citation needed]
Numerous
strikes ensued, notably Beaver Falls Cutlery Company in Pennsylvania
and others[14][15] After the economy soured in the Panic of 1873,
Chinese immigrants were blamed for depressing workmen's wages.[13] At
one point, Chinese men represented nearly a quarter of all wage-earning
workers in California,[16] and by 1878 Congress felt compelled to try to
ban immigration from China in legislation that was later vetoed by
President Rutherford B. Hayes. The title of the August 27, 1873, San
Francisco Chronicle article, "The Chinese Invasion! They Are Coming,
900,000 Strong", was traced by The Atlantic as one of the roots of the
2019 anti-immigration "invasion" rhetoric.[17]
In 1879, however,
California adopted a new Constitution which explicitly authorized the
state government to determine which individuals were allowed to reside
in the state, and banned the Chinese from employment by corporations and
state, county or municipal governments.[18] Three years later, after
China had agreed to treaty revisions, Congress tried again to exclude
working class Chinese laborers; Senator John F. Miller of California
introduced another Chinese Exclusion Act that blocked entry of Chinese
laborers for a twenty-year period.[19] The bill passed the Senate and
House by overwhelming margins, but this as well was vetoed by President
Chester A. Arthur, who concluded the 20-year ban to be a breach of the
renegotiated treaty of 1880. That treaty allowed only a "reasonable"
suspension of immigration. Eastern newspapers praised the veto, while it
was condemned in the Western states. Congress was unable to override
the veto, but passed a new bill reducing the immigration ban to ten
years.[19][20] The House of Representatives voted 201–37, with 51
abstentions, to pass the act.[21] Although he still objected to this
denial of entry to Chinese laborers, President Arthur acceded to the
compromise measure, signing the Chinese Exclusion Act into law on May 6,
1882.[19][20]
Anti-Chinese Wall cartoon in Puck
After the act
was passed, most Chinese workers were faced with a dilemma: stay in the
United States alone or return to China to reunite with their
families.[22][4] Although widespread dislike for the Chinese persisted
well after the law itself was passed, of note is that some capitalists
and entrepreneurs resisted their exclusion because they accepted lower
wages.[23]
Content
For the first time, federal law proscribed
entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the
good order of certain localities. The earlier Page Act of 1875 had
prohibited immigration of Asian forced laborers and sex workers, and the
Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibited naturalization of non-white
subjects.
The Chinese Exclusion Act excluded Chinese laborers,
meaning "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining",
from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment
and deportation.[24][25]
Front page of The San Francisco Call from November 20, 1901, discussing the Chinese Exclusion Convention
The
Chinese Exclusion Act required the few non-laborers who sought entry to
obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were
qualified to emigrate. However, this group found it increasingly
difficult to prove that they were not laborers[25] because the 1882 Act
defined excludables as "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese
employed in mining". Thus very few Chinese could enter the country under
the 1882 law. Diplomatic officials and other officers on business,
along with their house servants, for the Chinese government were also
allowed entry as long as they had the proper certification verifying
their credentials.[26]
The Chinese Exclusion Act also affected
the Chinese who had already settled in the United States. Any Chinese
who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and
the act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from
U.S. citizenship.[24][25] After the act's passage, Chinese men in the
U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of
starting families in their new abodes.[24]
Amendments made in
1884 tightened the provisions that allowed previous immigrants to leave
and return and clarified that the law applied to ethnic Chinese
regardless of their country of origin.[27] The 1888 Scott Act expanded
upon the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting reentry into the U.S. after
leaving.[28] Only teachers, students, government officials, tourists,
and merchants were exempt.[21]
Constitutionality of the Chinese
Exclusion Act and the Scott Act was upheld by the Supreme Court in Chae
Chan Ping v. United States (1889); the Supreme Court declared that "the
power of exclusion of foreigners [is] an incident of sovereignty
belonging to the government of the United States as a part of those
sovereign powers delegated by the constitution". The act was renewed for
ten years by the 1892 Geary Act, and again with no terminal date in
1902.[25] When the act was extended in 1902, it required "each Chinese
resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a
certificate, he or she faced deportation."[25]
Between 1882 and
1905, about 10,000 Chinese appealed against negative immigration
decisions to federal court, usually via a petition for habeas
corpus.[29] In most of these cases, the courts ruled in favor of the
petitioner.[29] Except in cases of bias or negligence, these petitions
were barred by an act that passed Congress in 1894 and was upheld by the
U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. vs Lem Moon Sing (1895). In United States v.
Ju Toy (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that the port
inspectors and the Secretary of Commerce had final authority on who
could be admitted. Ju Toy's petition was thus barred despite the fact
that the district court found that he was a U.S. citizen. The Supreme
Court determined that refusing entry at a port does not require due
process and is legally equivalent to refusing entry at a land crossing.
All these developments, along with the extension of the act in 1902,
triggered a boycott of U.S. goods in China between 1904 and 1906.[30]
There was one 1885 case in San Francisco, however, in which Treasury
Department officials in Washington overturned a decision to deny entry
to two Chinese students.[31]
One of the critics of the Chinese
Exclusion Act was the anti-slavery/anti-imperialist Republican senator
George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts who described the act as "nothing
less than the legalization of racial discrimination".[32]
The
laws were driven largely by racial concerns; immigration of persons of
other races was not yet limited.[33] On the other hand, most people and
unions strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, including the U.S.
Federation of Labor and Knights of Labor, a labor union, who supported
it because it believed that industrialists were using Chinese workers as
a wedge to keep wages low.[34] Among labor and leftist organizations,
the Industrial Workers of the World were the sole exception to this
pattern. The IWW openly opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act from its
inception in 1905.
For all practical purposes, the Chinese
Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the
Chinese community in place in 1882. Limited immigration from China
continued until the repeal of the act in 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the
Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel Island State Park
in San Francisco Bay served as the processing center for most of the
56,113 Chinese immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning
from China; upwards of 30% more who arrived there were returned to
China.[36] The Chinese population in the U.S. declined from
approximately 105,000 in 1880, to 89,000 in 1900, and to 61,000 in
1920.[21]
The act exempted merchants, and restaurant owners could
apply for merchant visas beginning in 1915 after a federal court
ruling. This led to the rapid growth of Chinese restaurants in the 1910s
and 1920s as restaurant owners could leave and reenter along with
family members from China.[37]
Later, the Immigration Act of 1924
restricted immigration even further, excluding all classes of Chinese
immigrants and extending restrictions to other Asian immigrant
groups.[24] Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the
twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life
separated from their families, and to build ethnic enclaves in which
they could survive on their own (Chinatown).[24] The Chinese Exclusion
Act did not address the problems that whites were facing; in fact, the
Chinese were quickly and eagerly replaced by the Japanese, who assumed
the role of the Chinese in society. Unlike the Chinese, some Japanese
were even able to climb the rungs of society by setting up businesses or
becoming truck farmers.[38] However, the Japanese were later targeted
in the act of 1924, which banned immigration from east Asia entirely.
In
1891, the Chinese government refused to accept U.S. senator Henry W.
Blair as U.S. minister to China due to his abusive remarks regarding
China during negotiations of the Chinese Exclusion Act.[39]
The U.S. Christian George F. Pentecost spoke out against Western imperialism in China, saying:[40]
I personally feel convinced that it would be a good thing for America
if the embargo on Chinese immigration were removed. I think that the
annual admission of 100,000 into this country would be a good thing for
the country. And if the same thing were done in the Philippines those
islands would be a veritable Garden of Eden in twenty-five years. The
presence of Chinese workmen in this country would, in my opinion, do a
very great deal toward solving our labor problems. There is no
comparison between the Chinaman, even of the lowest coolie class, and
the man who comes here from Southeastern Europe, from Russia, or from
Southern Italy. The Chinese are thoroughly good workers. That is why the
laborers here hate them. I think, too, that the emigration to America
would help the Chinese. At least he would come into contact with some
real Christian people in America. The Chinaman lives in squalor because
he is poor. If he had some prosperity his squalor would cease.
The "Driving Out" period
Following
the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a period known as the
"Driving Out" era was born. In this period, anti-Chinese Americans
physically forced Chinese communities to flee to other areas. Large
scale violence in Western states included the Rock Springs massacre
(1885) and the Hells Canyon massacre (1887).[41]
Rock Springs massacre of 1885
Main article: Rock Springs massacre
The
massacre was named for the town where it took place, Rock Springs,
Wyoming, in Sweetwater County, where white miners were jealous of the
Chinese for their employment. White miners expressed their jealous
frustration by robbing, bullying, shooting, and stabbing the Chinese in
Chinatown. The Chinese tried to flee but many were burned alive in their
homes, starved to death in hidden refuge, or exposed to carnivorous
animal predators in the mountains. Some were rescued by a passing train,
but by the end of the event at least twenty-eight lives had been
taken.[42] In an attempt to appease the situation, the government
intervened by sending federal troops to protect the Chinese. However,
only compensations for destroyed property were paid. No one was arrested
nor held accountable for the atrocities committed during the riot.[42]
Hells Canyon massacre of 1887
Main article: Hells Canyon Massacre
The
massacre was named for the location where it took place, along the
Snake River in Hells Canyon near the mouth of Deep Creek. The area
contained many rocky cliffs and white rapids that together posed
significant danger to human safety. 34 Chinese miners were killed at the
site. The miners were employed by the Sam Yup company, one of the six
largest Chinese companies at the time, which worked in this area since
October 1886. The actual events are still unclear due to unreliable law
enforcement at the time, biased news reporting, and lack of serious
official investigations. However, it is speculated that the dead Chinese
miners were not victims of natural causes, but rather victims of gun
shot wounds during a robbery committed by a gang of seven armed horse
thieves.[43] Gold worth $4,000–$5,000 was thought to have been stolen
from the miners. The gold was never recovered nor further investigated.
The aftermath
Shortly
following the incident, the Sam Yup company of San Francisco hired Lee
Loi who later hired Joseph K. Vincent, then U.S. Commissioner, to lead
an investigation. Vincent submitted his investigative report to the
Chinese consulate who tried unsuccessfully to obtain justice for the
Chinese miners. At around the same time, other compensation reports were
also unsuccessfully filed for earlier crimes inflicted on the Chinese.
In the end, on October 19, 1888, Congress agreed to greatly
under-compensate for the massacre and ignore the claims for the earlier
crimes. Even though the amount was greatly underpaid, it was still a
small victory to the Chinese who had low expectations for relief or
acknowledgement.[43]
Issues of the act
The Chinese Exclusion
Act lasted for about thirty years,[44] and it caused the U.S. economy to
suffer a great loss.[44] Some sources cite the act as a sign of
injustice and unfair treatment to the Chinese workers because their jobs
were mostly menial.[45]
Impact on education in the U.S.
Recruitment
of foreign students to U.S. colleges and universities was an important
component in the expansion of U.S. influence. International education
programs allowed students to learn from the examples provided at elite
universities and to bring their newfound skill sets back to their home
countries. As such, international education has historically been seen
as a vehicle for improving diplomatic relations and promoting trade. The
US Exclusion Act, however, forced Chinese students attempting to enter
the country to provide proof that they were not trying to bypass
regulations.[46] Laws and regulations that stemmed from the act made for
less than ideal situations for Chinese students, leading to criticisms
of U.S. society.[46] Policies and attitudes toward Chinese U.S.s in the
US worked against foreign policy interests by limiting the ability of
the U.S. to participate in international education initiatives.[47]
The
Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act when China
had become an ally of the U.S. against Japan in World War II, as the
U.S. needed to embody an image of fairness and justice. The Magnuson Act
permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become
naturalized citizens and stop hiding from the threat of deportation. The
act also allowed Chinese people to send remittances to people of
Chinese descent living in mainland China, Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
and other countries or territories, especially if the funding is not
tied to criminal activity. However, the Magnuson Act only allowed a
national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year and did not repeal the
restrictions on immigration from the other Asian countries. The
crackdown on Chinese immigrants reached a new level in its last decade,
from 1956 to 1965, with the Chinese Confession Program launched by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, that encouraged Chinese who had
committed immigration fraud to confess, so as to be eligible for some
leniency in treatment.[citation needed] Large-scale Chinese immigration
did not occur until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act
of 1965.
The first Chinese immigrants who entered the United
States under the Magnuson Act were college students who sought to escape
the warfare in China during World War II and study in the U.S. The
establishment of the People's Republic of China and its entry into the
Korean War against the U.S., however, created a new threat in the minds
of some U.S. politicians: U.S.-educated Chinese students bringing U.S.
knowledge back to "Red China". Many Chinese college students were almost
forcibly naturalized, even though they continued to face significant
prejudice, discrimination, and bullying. One of the most prolific of
these students was Tsou Tang, who would go on to become the leading
expert on China and Sino-U.S. relations during the Cold War.[48]
Although
the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, the law in California
prohibiting non-whites from marrying whites was not struck down until
1948, in which the California Supreme Court ruled the ban of interracial
marriage within the state unconstitutional in Perez v. Sharp.[49][50]
Some other states had such laws until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws
across the nation are unconstitutional.
Even today,[when?]
although all its constituent sections have long been repealed, Chapter 7
of Title 8 of the United States Code is headed "Exclusion of
Chinese".[51] It is the only chapter of the 15 chapters in Title 8
(Aliens and Nationality) that is completely focused on a specific
nationality or ethnic group. Like the following Chapter 8, "The Cooly
Trade", it consists entirely of statutes that are noted as "Repealed" or
"Omitted".
