A GROUP OF CHINESE COMMUNITY LEADERS FROM SAN FRANCISCO WROTE A LETTER TO THE CITY GOVERNMENT THAT SAID,

a group of Chinese community leaders from San Francisco wrote a letter to the city government that said,

“We wish now also to ask the American people to remember that the Chinese in this country have been.

The Chinese Exclusion Act

In 1874, a group of Chinese community leaders from San Francisco wrote a letter to the city government that said, in part:

“We wish now also to ask the American people to remember that the Chinese in this country have been for the most part peaceable and industrious. 

As a people we have the reputation, even here and now, of paying faithfully our rents, our taxes and our debts. 

In view of all these facts we are constrained to ask why this bitter hostility against the few thousands of Chinese in America! Why these severe and barbarous enactments, discriminating against us, in favor of other nationalities.”

Lai Yong and his fellow authors penned this petition in response to the politicians, labor unions, and other Americans—primarily on the West Coast—who were advocating excluding virtually all Chinese from gam saan (or “gold mountain,” as the United States was often referred to by the Chinese).

 Negative stereotypes of Chinese immigrants as diseased heathens and perverts combined with fears among labor unions and other West Coast residents that Chinese manual laborers represented unfair competition for jobs.

 The result was a growing anti-Chinese movement that rapidly gained social and political ground during the years after the Civil War.

 But other Americans, including Republicans, big business, and the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, pushed back against what they identified as the paranoia and racism of those on the West Coast.

 The debate over Chinese migration resulted in the passage in 1882 of the Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the first federal policies to restrict immigration, and this decision helped shape the course of American immigration policy in the early twentieth century.

The authors of the San Francisco petition were correct in believing that many initially valued the labor of Chinese migrants. 

After the Taiping Rebellion in China during the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese men from the Guandong Province arrived in the United States to work in mines in the mountainous regions of California and the Rockies or to dynamite mountains and build the Transcontinental Railroad linking various regions of the West and spanning the United States. 

After the Civil War, southern planters even turned to recruiting Chinese from the West Coast to work in agriculture as a means to replace the labor once demanded from slaves.

 Although the use of Chinese migrants to grow cotton and sugar cane in Mississippi and Louisiana was short-lived, southerners offered limited praise of Chinese workers, referring to them as a “mighty reservoir of labor.”

 The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 provided protections for Chinese migrants in exchange for American trading rights in China, and after its signing, the number of Chinese immigrants in the United States increased to approximately 12,000 by 1870.

As more Chinese arrived between the 1860s and 1880s, however, many Americans—particularly along the West Coast—moved from guarded tolerance to outward hostility. 

Many of the migrants were men who sent money home to wives, fiancées, or families and settled in relatively isolated communities throughout the West.

 These “Chinatowns” could be found in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other areas in the Rockies and were often self-sufficient, with restaurants, loan companies, and laundries run by and catering to the resident bachelors.

 Americans living nearby often interpreted the self-sufficiency of Chinatowns as self-imposed isolation and unwillingness to adapt to American culture and norms, ignoring the fact that, in many cases, Chinatowns were a result of de facto and de jure segregation.

 Racist caricatures of Chinese men as violent, opium-addicted predators of innocent white women also filled popular magazines and played out in political cartoons.

Thanks for reading, leave your thought in the comment section below.