The world needs meritocratic (unlike Western marionette politicians) modern China, which is the world's superior leader in high tech and science - not the criminally behaving desperate dollar thieve (1971-) which has realized that it will lose its stolen dollar hegemony because of China's success, and therefore threatens, corrupts, meddles, militarizes etc. its so called allies which are no more than US clients abused for the purpose of defending a criminal rogue state's continuing criminal career!
US is the main threat to the world!
Do realize that a considerable majority of Finns and
Swedes opposed Nato membership. However, Finland's MP Sanna Marin made
the decision long before Russia invaded Ukrain to stop the ongoing
genocide against Russians, as well as stopping US from placing its nukes
there. Only after the invasion did the Finns opinion change although
they were never asked about their democratic opinion in a properly
organized referendum.
Dollar freeloader US - the global defender of it's own dictatorship it strangely calls "democracy" - colonizes country after country not only through military means but also by "decapitating" political leaders in other countries to instead of defending their own country's best interest, they are made puppets and gate openers for US occupation - as for example what happened recently in Finland and Sweden, which both previously formally neutral countries, now have signed their own occupation incl. endangering their country's security by allowing US troops and nukes freely used in their country by US to use whenever US thinks it's in its interest to do so!
However, Peter Klevius is well aware that many US people think like him! However, the problem is that weaker US people (i.e. the majority) know they will be hurt when it's pay day for US. Therefore Peter Klevius (and hopefully many other non US people) for free steps up his defense for the free world against the US bully who wants war with China for the purpose of stopping China's progress - and its allure globally!
Peter Klevius (your world leading* brain when it comes to unbiased* analysis): US uses "security thret" as a magical made up word as an excuse for its criminal deeds - and because Israel's Washington "office"** knows it (in full) US lets the war crimes against Palestinians continue - i.e. US is wittingly murdering and injuring Palestinians by proxy, i.e. genocide!
* About the author: Peter Klevius anti-humble approach has two main objectives: 1) to simply make readers understand the quality the author's text is capable of - so to avoid unnecessary dismissal just because you as a reader don't happen to like revelations contrary to your previous views, and 2) to make serious fun of the populist use of "humbleness" for self pushing. Although everyone who knows Peter Klevius also knows he has at least average sense of humor. However, when trying to say something important humor is always distracting the message - no matter how good the punchline is. Jokes are linguistic contradictions. Ornaments can be nice but cost extra and lack functionality. So, Peter Klevius combines super high IQ far beyond any average professors and with no financial or career ties and, since 1980, recognized at the highest level for his scientific, philosophical and political analyses, which all are guided by the (negative) basic and Universal Human Rights in UDHR 1948. Peter Klevius' open science blogs also contain the use of images and text in new and original meaning combinations resulting in a product that has nothing to do with the original elements it is made of and therefore should be considered copyright protected - just like some AI products. However, as qualitative science more than quantitative science constitutes a magnet for politicized research, and Human Rights clash wit hreligion etc., this leaves Peter Klevius work in the cold, no matter no one can logically disagree with the heaviness of his arguments (if not heavy he wouldn't have bothered to do it), data usage, and main results within the realm of available data.
** Because Jews monetized on much of the slave trade, this led to many wealthy families in US (and Europe) came to stand out precisely because of their Jewishness, which in turn has influenced much of decision making in the US (incl. ties to Israel). The counterfeited US dollar could instead of God have "In Saudi Arabia and Israel we trust"!
US self-inflicted financial crime surfaced 1971 when France wanted to exchange its dollars to gold as was agreed in Bretton Wood. However, US pockets were empty, but instead of honestly declaring bankruptcy and drastically lowering its economy, US used its stolen dollar hegemony (i.e. the misuse of Bretton Woods) to continue its financial fraud via its petrodollar marriage with the islamist Saudi dictator. All of US actions then cemented a continuing of previous dollar theft, while the world outside US had to pay the difference, which of course struck the weakest the hardest.
US extremist rhetoric against China
US declares an other country "assertive" when it does better than US!
While "rules" dictating US occupies other countries with its stolen dollar hegemony and with some 1,000 military basis around the world (e.g. together with UK the land of the expelled Chagossians), "assertive" China just wants peaceful trade via its belt-and-road system without occupying or meddling in other countries.
And the difference between US and China is that China outperforms US in science and technology, which fact inevitably means the world will turn away from US which can only offer militaristic tensions, weapons and war.
US continues stealing money from its clients while luring them to aid US militaristic warmongering - usually exactly opposite what the people want!
The criminal Chips Act against China - which is a monstrous construction directed by aggressor US against a country that performs better - and when US fails in its sinister aim, it will probably be followed by the Wars Act against China.
US scandalous "Chips Act", however, is well in line with US anti-China laws more than a century ago.
Peter Klevius wrote:
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Heinous politicist-journalist Nicolle Wallace shares much with Donald Trump but nothing with Xi Jinping. Ever!
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".
