BY MILTON CHEE  
The fight by working people for immigrant rights today has led to renewed interest in the decades of discriminatory treatment faced by Chinese and Japanese laborers when they first came to the United States more than 100 years ago.

The first wave of Chinese to arrive here came in response to the California Gold Rush in the mid-1850s. Emigration from China in this period was organized as a replacement for the banned African slave trade. Facing displacement and unemployment at home, Chinese migrated to places as close as Singapore and Australia, and as far away as the United States, Cuba, and Peru. They faced horrendous conditions on the ships they sailed in, which were as hideous as the death ships of the slave trade.

Upon arrival, these Chinese laborers faced racial and even deadly discrimination in the gold fields. Amongst the many anti-Chinese laws to be passed was the Foreign Miners’ Tax. It gave the tax collector indiscriminate power to collect and re-collect the tax despite claims from miners born abroad that they had already paid up. Local ordinances, state laws, and court rulings were capped by the passage of the anti-Chinese act barring immigration by Chinese workers in 1882. This law, known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, remained in effect until 1943.

Among the many instances of discrimination, one that stands out to me is the case tried in 1854, People vs. Hall, of a California white man accused of murder in which the prosecution’s star witness was a Chinese. The murderer appealed his conviction based on the California statute that Blacks and Indians could not testify against a Caucasian. Hall’s defense extended this to cover all non-whites, arguing that the Chinese witness had no standing to testify against him. The California Supreme Court agreed and overturned the conviction. This became the legal basis of the saying, “You haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”  
 
Anti-Chinese pogroms
Anti-Chinese pogroms would sweep the West whenever we were seen as a threat in the job market, especially at times of economic depression and during elections. An important part of this movement was the California Workingmen’s Party, whose single platform plank was “The Chinese must go.” In July 1877 a three-day riot broke out in San Francisco in which a number of Chinese died and much property was destroyed.

Much is made of the cultural and racial differences setting Chinese apart from the rest of U.S. society, but in the end it was the economic needs of capital that drove down the wages and standard of living of all workers.

Chinese workers with experience in explosives and construction were used to lay the roadbed and rails of the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento eastward through the Sierra Nevada mountains and Utah, including during the dead of two winters. The agricultural skills and know-how of these workers were also used to drain the swamplands and carve out the winery caves.

After the Union Pacific Railroad was completed, Chinese rail builders were employed throughout the Pacific Northwest and other places in the United States to build railroads.

After the completion of these railroads, many moved back to San Francisco and other major cities with Chinese communities where they sought jobs in restaurants, laundries, and other small businesses. Or they went into fields as farm laborers. Some went to Cuba to fill the demand for sugar plantation labor.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, city authorities planned to rebuild by relocating Chinatown since it occupied highly valued real estate. The Chinese community quickly reoccupied its original area, forestalling the takeover attempt.

One positive outcome of the earthquake was the destruction of civil records, making it impossible to prove who was a citizen and who was not.

These fights by Chinese workers and small businessmen are little noted in U.S. history books, resulting in the false image of a docile, restrained community.  
 
Discrimination against Japanese
Similar forms of racial oppression and economic exploitation were used against other Asian immigrants.

Japanese immigrants arrived in the United States in large numbers between 1890 and 1915, seeking employment first in the fields and service jobs, and later spreading into specialized farming and other small businesses.

Leading up to World War II, Japanese immigrants had become successful in truck and chicken farming, with a few even becoming millionaires. However, like the Chinese, Japanese were outlawed from inter-marrying with Caucasians, in line with the existing miscegenation laws of the time.

In 1913, the state of California passed the Alien Land Law preventing land ownership by non-natives.

Resistance to anti-Asian discrimination included strikes by Japanese plantation workers in 1909 in Hawaii. Japanese workers also joined 3,000 Filipino workers on strike there in 1920, involving 8,300 workers, or 77 percent of the workforce.

With the outbreak of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 banning Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast states, supposedly to keep that portion of the population from being agents of Tokyo during wartime. Most of them were U.S. citizens, a large portion children, because a majority were born in the United States. The infamous concentration camps for Japanese-Americans were the result of Roosevelt’s order.

After the war not one case of treason or espionage was ever brought up. A major impact of the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was the loss of their lucrative farm holdings and businesses. These were sold off for fractions of their value, and were absorbed into the holdings of California’s capitalist class.

The ability and spirit to fight against racist oppression and exploitation—which the previous generations of Chinese and other Asian immigrants showed—is manifest even more today in the proletarian demonstrations for immigrants rights and recognition.

Reaching out for solidarity, getting it, and demanding more—including through political strikes demanding from the government legalization for all immigrants—shows the way forward for all working people.

It is this road—not that of the California Workingmen’s Party, which sought racist exclusion and ultimately relied on bourgeois politics—that can lead to the ending of national oppression and class exploitation of all workers and farmers.  
 
Cuba’s socialist revolution
In the book Our History Is Still Being Written, Sio Wong, one of the Chinese-Cuban generals, states, “What’s the difference in the experience of Chinese in Cuba and other countries of the diaspora? The difference is that here a socialist revolution took place. The revolution eliminated discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin. Above all, it eliminated the property relations that create not only economic but also social inequality between rich and poor.

“That’s what made it possible for the son of Chinese immigrants to become a government representative, or anything else. Here discrimination—against blacks, against Chinese, against women, against the poor—was ended. Cubans of Chinese descent are integrated.

“To historians and others who want to study the question, I say that you have to understand that the Chinese community here in Cuba is different from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, or Canada.

“And that difference is the triumph of a socialist revolution.”
 
 
Related articles:
Protesters in Boston area condemn cop attack on youth of Asian descent
‘Canada Day Is Humiliation Day’ say Chinese-Canadian protesters and supporters
Mayor in Pennsylvania city promotes anti-immigrant measures  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home