Vol. 71/No. 48      December 24, 2007

More than 60 attended the next to last session of the class and public lecture series on “China Rising and the World,” sponsored by the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. The purpose of the 15-week program was “to examine the economic, social, political, and cultural changes taking place in contemporary China,” and the broad international implications of these developments.

The panel included three San Francisco State University faculty members: Marlon Hom, chair of the Asian American Studies department; David Lee of the political science department; Bernard Wong of the anthropology department; and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press.

In a series of drawings reproduced primarily from issues of Harper’s Weekly published between the 1860s and the 1890s, Hom documented the racist portrayal of Chinese immigrants in the United States, the discrimination they faced, and the exclusion laws and other measures that barred them from jobs, housing, citizenship, property ownership, and more.

Wong explained that substantial Chinese emigration began in the late 1840s due to severe economic pressure following China’s defeat in the British-instigated Opium Wars.

He contrasted conditions that Chinese faced in the United States compared to Peru. In the United States, he noted, exclusion laws and other legal measures against Chinese had a long-lasting effect, while in Peru, by the early 1970s, the Chinese who had arrived in large numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries had been largely assimilated. “The factors that affect integration emanate not from the ethnic group, but from the larger society,” he pointed out.

In her presentation on Chinese immigration in Cuba, Waters centered on the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, of which she is the editor.

The book chronicles the little-known facts about the significance and historical weight of Chinese immigration to Cuba from the 1840s on, and the role of Cuba’s large population of Chinese contract laborers in the wars for independence from Spain and the abolition of slavery and indentured servitude. Through the lives of three Chinese Cubans—Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong—the book provides an introduction to the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959. As youth, coming from different social backgrounds and areas of the country, the three joined the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in the 1950s.

“They refused to accept the brutalities and indignities of life under a hated military tyranny, took up arms, and joined with others to overthrow it, and against all odds triumphed,” she said. They didn’t start off as socialists, Waters noted. “They simply wanted a society with a greater degree of social justice—they wanted to reduce the gap between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor.” All three, who rose to be generals in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, continue to shoulder major responsibilities in Cuba today.

Explaining the broad integration of Cubans of Chinese ancestry on all levels of Cuban society today, Waters quoted Sío Wong’s observation that the greatest measure taken against discrimination was the socialist revolution itself. “Above all, it eliminated the property relations that create not only economic but also social inequality between rich and poor.”

David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee in San Francisco, spoke about the demographics of the city, whose population, he said, is 30 percent Chinese but whose voting rolls are only 18 percent Chinese. The purpose of the committee, he explained, is to “educate those who may be resistant to register and turn them out to vote.”

Following the panel presentations, numerous participants stayed to continue the wide-ranging discussions informally.  
 
Japanese Americans
Earlier in the day, Waters accepted the invitation of Professor Wesley Uenten to speak about the Cuban Revolution and the example of the three Chinese Cuban generals to two of his classes at San Francisco State University. The first class, “Asians in America,” was attended by more than 100 students.

About 50 took part in the second class “Japanese American Personality,” where Waters was joined by Patti Iiyama, who spoke about her experience as a Japanese American student in the 1960s radicalizing under the impact of the mass movement for Black rights, and the victory of the Cuban Revolution. She described how she, along with millions of others, organized against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and participated in the farm workers’ fight for unionization and the fight for ethnic studies at universities like San Francisco State.

Waters told the students at both classes “that the unexpectedly wide response to Our History Is Still Being Written has to do with what’s happening in the world today, with the new waves of immigration, the struggles by working people for rights and dignity, and the pride and interest in learning our own history. Working people are standing up and resisting.”
 
 
Related articles:
Chinese in N.Y. mark 1937 Nanjing massacre by Tokyo
How Chinese working people overthrew capitalism  
 
 
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