From ABC-CLIO's American History website https://americanhistory-abc-clio-pnw.orc.scoolaid.net/

CHINESE IMMIGRANTS Chinese immigrants played a crucial role in the westward expansion of the United States, particularly in the building of the transcontinental railroad in the second half of the 19th century. Despite the fact that the Chinese lled an important labor need and proved to be extremely hard workers, white laborers resented their presence, and anti-Chinese riots took place in such western cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Bowing to heavy political pressure, the federal government stepped into the fray with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and the U.S. Supreme Court supported the government's stance in subsequent rulings.

Immigration during the Gold Rush

For most of the rst half of the 19th century, Chinese immigration to the United States was next to nonexistent. However, in the 1820s and 1830s, China's prosperous economy took a turn for the worse, in large part because its trade balance was disrupted by the massive importation of opium into the country by Great Britain. After China's crushing defeat in the Opium War during 1839–1842, the devastated economy—combined with a series of natural disasters like drought, famine, and oods—prompted many Chinese to look abroad for work. The welcoming shores of the United States intrigued the Chinese, and the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848 proved to be too much of a temptation for thousands of Chinese to resist.

The California gold rush of the mid-19th century led to a tremendous inux of people into California, and many of them were from China. California quickly became known as "Gum San" (Gold Mountain) in China, and by 1852, an estimated 25,000 Chinese had made it to Gold Mountain, although few of them struck it rich. Some decided to return home, but many remained behind and found employment as miners. They quickly earned reputations as hard workers who were willing to toil long hours for low pay. White miners resented the presence of these foreigners and did their best to drive them away. In 1852, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miner's Tax in an attempt to limit the amount of Chinese and Mexican miners in the state.

The Chinese were forced to live in segregated communities, where they created a vibrant culture centered in San Francisco's Chinatown district. During that time, several family and district organizations, known collectively as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, were founded to improve organization within the local Chinese communities. Many workers frustrated by the Foreign Miner's Tax became merchants in Chinatown or turned to domestic work like cooking, gardening, or housekeeping to make a living. Discrimination against the Chinese continued throughout the 1850s and included such measures as denying them legal rights and excluding them from attending public schools. Still, the Chinese community thrived in San Francisco and built a Chinese theater and temple to make Chinese immigrants feel more at home. In addition, more and more Chinese were crossing the Pacic to America as the devastating Taiping Rebellion in China claimed millions of lives.

Working on the Railroad

During the early 1860s, tax collectors and antagonistic white miners made life miserable for Chinese miners, and many were forced to look for other jobs. Coincidentally, a massive project that would require thousands of hardened laborers was getting under way—the building of the transcontinental railroad. By 1865, the Central Pacic Railroad, later known as the Southern Pacic Railroad, had begun work in earnest on the western portion of the transcontinental railroad but was suering from a labor shortage. The pay for working on the railroad was low, and white workers were deserting the railroad in droves for more lucrative opportunities in mining, particularly after new silver strikes were unearthed in nearby Nevada. Charles Crocker, the chief contractor for Central Pacic, decided it was time to hire "coolies," a derogatory name for Chinese laborers.

From the moment the Chinese began working on the transcontinental railroad, they performed well and willingly took on the most demanding and dangerous jobs. Just as important, as far as the Central Pacic was concerned, was their reliability. The Chinese workers almost always showed up on time, rarely took breaks, and stayed in excellent health, hardly ever taking sick days. As they gained the trust of Crocker, one of the railroad company's founders, the Chinese were called on more and more to undertake the most dicult tasks, including working on a hazardous gorge along the American River known as Cape Horn. The Chinese laborers, who had become adept at using explosives, blasted a roadbed on the side of the sheer clis and laid the track around the gorge. Many Chinese lost their lives working at Cape Horn and in other areas, but no one kept track of Chinese casualties, so the exact count is unknown.

Buoyed by their exceptional performance working on the transcontinental railroad, the stock of Chinese laborers went up in the late 1860s, culminating in the Burlingame Treaty, an agreement on friendship, trade, and mutual rights of immigration signed by China and the United States on July 28, 1868. Many more Chinese immigrants began to come to the West Coast of the United States and were now competing for jobs with railroad workers, many of whom found themselves out of a job after the golden spike ceremony signaled the completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869. According to the 1870 U.S. census, 71,328 of the 550,247 people living in California at the time were Chinese. However, that same year, Congress deliberately denied Chinese the right to be naturalized as citizens because of their "undesirable qualities."

Anti-Chinese Sentiment

The large inux of Chinese immigrants vying for jobs with white workers led to a rapid increase in violence against the Chinese in the 1870s. On October 24, 1871, after a white man was accidentally killed during a dispute between two Chinese men, an angry white mob rampaged through Los Angeles' Chinatown. When the Los Angeles race riot of 1871 ended, 19 Chinese men and boys were dead, either from being shot, lynched, or stabbed. In San Francisco, acts of violence against Chinese immigrants and businesses escalated throughout the decade. The leader of the Workingmen's Party of California, Irish-born Denis Kearney, continually stirred up violence against the Chinese community, leading to riots in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1877. Although Kearney was arrested later in the year, the Workingmen's Party became a major player in San Francisco politics over the next two years and helped pass several anti-Chinese laws.

On the national level, the Greenback Party was lobbying for restrictions on Chinese immigration, and Congress responded to the pressures from the growing anti-Asian movement by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which halted further immigration of Chinese into the United States for 10 years. Despite the ban, violence against Chinese Americans continued in the 1880s, most notably the massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885. On September 2, a mob of white miners invaded the Chinese section of Rock Springs and opened re on the Chinese population of about 600 people. By the time the violence ended, 28 Chinese were dead. The following February in Seattle, violence erupted when an anti-Chinese group tried to deport most of the city's Chinese community by forcefully loading them onto a steamship. Anti-Chinese violence was reported in several other western states during the 1880s, including Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon.

As discrimination and violence continued against the Chinese in America, some Chinese attempted to use the U.S. legal system to ght back. One of the most famous instances was a legislative battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court as the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). At issue was a San Francisco ordinance designed for the regulation of laundries that had been strictly enforced against Chinese launderers but not white launderers. Although the landmark Supreme Court ruling noted that the Fourteenth Amendment protected all persons in the United States and not simply citizens, in reality, the Court's ruling did nothing to protect Chinese Americans from continued widespread prejudice and discrimination.

Near the end of the decade, the U.S. Supreme Court was faced with a challenge to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In the case of Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Court upheld the act, noting that Chinese laborers were aliens, not U.S. citizens. Three years later, the Geary Act (1892) extended the Chinese Exclusion Act ban on immigration for another 10 years, and it was extended again in 1902 before being extended indenitely in 1904. It was nally repealed in 1943 during World War II, when China and the United States found themselves ghting together as allies against Japan.

Padraic Carlin Further Reading

Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000; Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking, 2003; Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882- 1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Miscevic, Dusanka and Peter Kwong. Chinese Americans: The Immigrant Experience. Southport, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 2000.

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Image Credits

Anti-Asian boycott yer (1898): National Archives

Chinese camp on the Central Pacic Railroad, Nevada, ca. 1867: Library of Congress

Chinese man mining for gold: Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley/BANC PIC 1996.001:88--ALB

Chinese immigrant and son: National Archives

MLA Citation Carlin, Padraic. "Chinese Immigrants." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2019, americanhistory-abc-clio- pnw.orc.scoolaid.net/Search/Display/551889. Accessed 6 Feb. 2019. http://americanhistory-abc-clio-pnw.orc.scoolaid.net/Search/Display/551889? sid=551889&cid=0&view=print&lang= Entry ID: 551889