Chinese Americans
Chinese Americans, the largest Asian population group in the United States since 1990, are Americans whose ancestors or who themselves have come from China. Most of the early Chinese immigrants came directly from China. In recent decades, in addition to those from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, a large number of Chinese-ancestry immigrants also came from Southeast Asian and Latin American countries. The 2000 census counted nearly 2.9 million persons of Chinese ancestry in the United States.
Early Chinese Immigration and Labor
A small group of Chinese reached the Hawaiian Islands as early as 1789, about eleven years after Captain James Cook first landed there. Most of those who migrated to Hawaii in the early years came from the two Chinese southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Some of them were men skilled at sugar making. Beginning in 1852, Chinese contract laborers were recruited to work on sugar plantations, joined by other laborers who paid their own way. Between 1852 and the end of the nineteenth century, about 50,000 Chinese landed in Hawaii.
Chinese immigrants arrived in California shortly before the gold rush in 1849. The vast majority of them came from Guangdong. By the time the United States enacted the
After the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, thousands of Chinese found work as common laborers and farmhands in California, Washington, and Oregon. A small number of them became tenant farmers or landowners. In San Francisco and other western cities, the Chinese were especially important in the development of light manufacturing industries. They rolled cigars, sewed in garment shops, and made shoes and boots. A significant number of Chinese specialized in laundry businesses, although washing clothes was not a traditional occupation for men in China.
More than 90 percent of the early Chinese immigrants were men who did not bring their wives and children with them. This unbalanced sex ratio gave rise to prostitution. Before 1870, most female Chinese immigrants were young women who were imported to the United States and forced into prostitution. Chinese prostitutes were most visible in western cities and mining towns. In San Francisco, for example, prostitutes constituted 85 percent to 97 percent of the female Chinese population in 1860. In contrast, very few prostitutes were found in Hawaii and in the South. Prostitution declined gradually after 1870.
The transcontinental railroad facilitated the westward migration in the United States. As the western population increased, the presence of Chinese laborers aroused great antagonism among white workers. The anti-Chinese movement, led in part by Denis Kearney, president of the Workingmen'S Party, was an important element in the labor union movement in California as well as in the state's politics. Gradually Chinese workers were forced to leave their jobs in manufacturing industries. In cities as well as in rural areas, Chinese were subjected to harassment and mob violence. A San Francisco mob attack in 1877 left twenty-one Chinese dead, while a massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885 claimed twenty-eight lives.
In spite of strong prevailing sentiment against Chinese immigration, congressional legislation to suspend Chinese immigration was prevented by the
Community Organizations and Activities
Living and working in largely segregated ethnic neighborhoods in urban areas, Chinese Americans created many mutual aid networks based on kinship, native places, and common interests. Clan and district associations were two of the most important Chinese immigrant organizations. The clan associations served as the bases for immigration networks. With their own occupational specialties, they assisted members in finding jobs. Both the clan and district associations provided new immigrants with temporary lodging and arbitrated disputes among the members; the district associations also maintained cemeteries and shipped the exhumed remains of the deceased to their home villages for final burial.
Hierarchically above the clan and the district associations was the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), known to the American public as the Chinese Six Companies. The CCBA provided leadership for the community. It sponsored many court cases to challenge discriminatory laws. When the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco passed an ordinance to make it impossible for Chinese laundrymen to stay in business, the Chinese took their case to court. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the court decided that the ordinance was discriminatory in its application and therefore violated the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. In another landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the court ruled that anyone born in the United States was a citizen, and that citizenship by birth could not be taken away, regardless of that person's ethnicity.
Also important is the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA), organized by second-generation Chinese Americans who were born in the United States. In 1930, after several years of CACA's lobbying activities, Congress passed a law that allowed U.S. citizens to bring in their Chinese wives, if the marriage had taken place before 1924. In 1946 this privilege was extended to all citizens.
World War II and Postwar Development
During World War II, about 16,000 Chinese American men and women served in the U.S. military; 214 lost their lives. In addition, thousands of Chinese Americans worked in the nation's defense industries. For the first time in the twentieth century, a large number of Chinese Americans had the opportunity to work outside Chinatowns. In 1943, as a goodwill gesture to its wartime ally China, the United States repealed the exclusion acts. Although China was given only a token quota of 105 immigrants each year, the repeal changed the status of alien Chinese from "inadmissible" to "admissible" and granted Chinese immigrants the right of naturalization.
The most visible change after the war was the growth of families. After the repeal of the exclusion acts, new immigration regulations became applicable to alien Chinese. The 1945 War Brides Act allowed the admission of alien dependents of World War II veterans without quota limits. A June 1946 act extended this privilege to fiancées and fiancés of war veterans. The Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act of August 1946 further granted admission outside the quota to Chinese wives of American citizens. More than 6,000 Chinese women gained entry between 1945 and 1948. As women constituted the majority of the new immigrants and many families were reunited, the sex ratio of the Chinese American population underwent a significant change. In 1940 there were 2.9 Chinese men for every Chinese woman in the United States (57,389 men versus 20,115 women). By 1960 this ratio was reduced to 1.35 to 1 (135,430 men versus 100,654 women).
The postwar years witnessed a geographical dispersion of the Chinese American population, as more employment opportunities outside Chinatowns became available. But regardless of where they lived, Chinese Americans continued to face the same difficulties as members of an ethnic minority group in the United States.
The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 significantly altered U.S.-China relations and intensified conflict among Chinese American political groups. As the Korean War turned China into an archenemy of the United States, many Chinese Americans lived in fear of political accusations. In the name of investigating Communist subversive activities, the U.S. government launched an all-out effort to break up Chinese immigration networks. The investigation further divided the Chinese American community. When the Justice Department began the "Chinese confession program" in 1956 (it ended in 1966), even family members were pressured to turn against one another.
Post-1965 Immigration and Community
The 1965 Immigration Act established a new quota system. Each country in the Eastern Hemisphere was given the same quota of 20,000 per year. In addition, spouses, minor children under age twenty-one, and parents of U.S. citizens could enter as nonquota immigrants. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Chinese immigrants came largely from Taiwan, because the United States did not have diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China until 1979. Between 1979 and 1982, China shared with Taiwan the quota of 20,000 per year. Since 1982 China and Taiwan have each received a quota of 20,000 annually (later increased to 25,620). Hong Kong, a British colony until its return to China in 1997, received a quota of 200 from the 1965 Immigration Act. This number increased several times in subsequent years. From 1993 to 1997, Hong Kong received an annual quota of 25,620. With three separate quotas, more Chinese were able to immigrate to the United States than any other ethnic group. Beginning in the late 1970s, a large number of Chinese-ancestry immigrants also entered the United States as refugees from Vietnam. In addition, some immigrants of Chinese ancestry came from other Southeast Asian countries and various Latin American countries. The 1990 census counted 1,645,472 Chinese Americans. Ten years later, Chinese-ancestry population numbered near 2.9 million.
Because so many new immigrants arrived after 1965, a large number of Chinese Americans were foreign born in the year 2000. California had the largest concentration of Chinese Americans, followed by New York, Hawaii, and Texas. Unlike the early Cantonese-speaking immigrants from the rural areas of Guangdong province, the post-1965 immigrants were a diverse group with regional, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic differences. Many of them were urban professionals before emigrating. The new immigrants often found that their former education or skills were not marketable in the United States, and many of them had to work for low wages and long hours. A very high percentage of Chinese American women worked outside the home. New immigrant women often found work in garment industries, restaurants, and domestic services.
Scholars noticed that Chinese American families valued education very highly. Because of the educational achievements of Chinese Americans, and because the U.S. census counted a significantly higher proportion of professionals among the Chinese American population than among the white population, Chinese Americans have been stereotyped as a "model minority" group. According to a number of studies, however, even though a higher percentage of Chinese Americans were professionals, they were underrepresented in executive, supervisory, or decision-making positions, and the percentage of Chinese American families that lived below the poverty line was considerably higher than that of white families.
In addition to historical Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Honolulu, and other large cities, many suburban Chinatowns have flourished in areas with large Chinese American populations. New Chinese American business communities are most visible in the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles area, and the New York–New Jersey area.
Bibliography
Chen, Yong. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Fong, Timothy P. The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.
Glick, Clarence E. Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
—Xiaojian Zhao
