The No Place Project

The Chinese Expulsion Period (1850-1910)

In the 1850's a political upheaval in China known as the Taiping Rebellion, combined with a series of natural disasters, created catastrophic conditions that led to the deaths of at least 20 million people in that country.

 

When news of the discovery of gold in California reached China during this same

period, tens of thousands of desperate Chinese workers set out for America in

hopes of finding a better life. By 1855, 20,000 Chinese laborers were recorded

as living in California.

 

Most of the new immigrants did not speak English, and they often banded

together with their countrymen in work camps and in city neighborhoods.

Due to the hardships of travel and the uncertainties that awaited them, almost

all of the new Chinese coming to the U.S. were men. Their families and loved

ones were back in China, and the men here focused intently on their work in

order to make enough money to help those they left behind.

 

Chinese immigrants with particular skills settled in the cities where they established trade and service businesses, but many of the people who came to this country were laborers. Initially they set out for the mining camps in California and Idaho, but soon Chinese workers were in demand throughout the West by companies looking to hire reliable but cheaper labor.

 

As soon as they landed the Chinese were subjected to blatant racism by many of

the Euro-Americans in this country. At first there were only isolated incidents

of intimidations, threats and robberies. By 1850, however, organized mobs started

to chase off entire populations of Chinese, first in mining camps and later in cities.

 

Government officials not only tolerated the racism and violence, in most cases they

encouraged and abetted it. Beginning in 1852, when California enacted a “Foreign

Miners Tax”, elected officials openly targeted Chinese immigrants with many

repressive and discriminatory measures.

 

In many states the courts ruled that said no one "of Mongolian descent"  was

allowed to testify in court against any white person. Not surprisingly,  Euro-

Americans interpreted these decisions as meaning they could do anything they

wanted to the Chinese without fear of recrimination.

 

In spite of this institutionalized racism, many employers recruited Chinese workers

because the Chinese were not opposed to working long hours, were highly

productive and often accepted lower wages. During the 1860's the railroads hired

thousands of Chinese workers to help complete the Transcontinental Railroad.

They often worked where few white men would go, such as blasting out the long

and dangerous mountain passes in the Rocky Mountains Cascades and the Sierra

Nevada.

 

In 1869 the eastern and western sections of the railroad were joined in Utah, and within days as many as 12,000 Chinese railroad workers lost their jobs. Many of these men headed to the coal mines and rural areas of the West. The sudden influx of this unemployed workforce, coupled with an unrelated downturn in the nation's economy and the already vehement anti-Chinese racism in most of the country, set up a course of events that would be repeated throughout the last thirty years of the 19th century.

 

Almost immediately “the Chinese menace” was falsely blamed for economic problems in many areas, and prejudice soon turned to outright hatred that consumed much of the country. Labor unions and other organizations railed against the Chinese, with both the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) and the Knights of Labor at the forefront of verbal and physical attacks on Chinese immigrants.

 

An example of the AF of L's role in the Chinese Exclusion was a highly inflammatory report to Congress titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice - American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism - Which Shall Survive?. Although this report was not written until after most of the worst incidents of Chinese exclusion had already happened, it provides a sobering summary of the thinking that had driven much of the labor unions' activities during these times.

 

During the 1860's attacks on individual Chinese had become commonplace, but in 1871 the first major massacre of Chinese in the U.S. took place in Los Angeles when a mob stormed through Chinatown. They killed at least 18 Chinese and looted many of the businesses and residences in the area. Over the next decade dozens of other cities in California, including San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Chico, Eureka and Truckee, experienced anti-Chinese riots and/or efforts to expel all Chinese from the community.

 

By 1882 the anti-Chinese fanaticism had reached such proportions that a crowd of more than 5,000 people gathered in San Francisco to demand "relief from the Chinese plague". That same year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining" and other jobs from entering the country for ten years and denying naturalization rights to Chinese already in the country.