Vol. 77/No. 32      September 9, 2013

Much of the discussion during the panel centered on a turbulent and pivotal three decades in U.S. history that included the 1848-58 California gold rush, the 1861-65 Civil War, the postwar Radical Reconstruction governments across the states of the defeated slavocracy and, by 1877, the bloody crushing of those popular democratic regimes.

This history was contrasted with the revolutionary struggle for independence from Spain and for the abolition of slavery and all forms of indentured servitude. The place of Chinese immigrant workers in the class struggle in both countries was highlighted.

The event was chaired by ISSCO board member Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce. Leading off the five panelists was Setsuko Sonoda from Kobe Women’s University in Japan. Sonoda spoke about the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations formed in San Francisco and other cities to defend Chinese who were victimized under the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which initially halted all immigration from China for 10 years and ended up being extended all the way to World War II. Similar associations were formed in Canada, Peru and Cuba, she said.

Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, both from the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee, presented information on the history of Chinese women in Northwestern United States and Canada from 1860 to 1920. They highlighted the women’s resistance to both their oppression as a sex and to anti-Chinese racism.

The other two panelists presented sharply different views of the class forces behind the drive in 19th-century California to scapegoat and exclude immigrants from China.

Anti-Chinese agitation in California
Cao Yu, from Jinan University in China’s Shandong province, presented a paper on “Engagement and Conflict: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Irish Immigrants in California 1848-1882.” Facing severe discrimination on grounds of race or religion, he said, working people in the U.S. who had emigrated from Ireland and from China ended up in competition and conflict.

Yu focused on the role of the Workingmen’s Party of California under the leadership of Denis Kearney. During the post-Civil War economic crisis, the party scapegoated the Chinese in competition for jobs in California, pitting Irish-born workers against Chinese immigrants in particular.

Yu said the Workingmen’s Party and the Irish workers who supported it were the primary source of the violent racism faced by the Chinese. The “labor movement,” he said, “jeopardized Chinese immigration,” with the “most severe impact” often coming from “the bottom of society and the left-wing movement.”

In his written paper distributed to conference participants, Yu advised Chinese “to try to prevent the labor force and left-wing parties” from “taking power.” He called for an “alliance with other possible parties and capitalists,” with the aim of preventing “the left-wing parties from becoming the majority of parliament.”

Cuba and the U.S.
In her presentation on “The Struggle Against Anti-Chinese Racism in Cuba and the United States, 1865 to Today,” Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, presented views that were the polar opposite — in class terms — to Cao Yu’s. Waters is the editor of Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, published by Pathfinder Press in 2005.

Roughly equal numbers of Chinese arrived in the United States and Cuba between 1846 and 1875, Waters noted. They came to California searching for gold, and later as contract labor to build the transcontinental railroad. Meanwhile, Chinese were shipped to Cuba to work as indentured labor on the sugarcane plantations.

During that quarter century, Waters said, “both Cuba and the United States were swept by deep-going revolutionary struggles” in which the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude were settled in blood. In Cuba, Chinese indentured laborers by the thousands joined the armies fighting for independence from Spain and for an end to all bonded labor. In the United States, however, the workers who had emigrated from China were far from the political and military battlefields of the 1861-65 Civil War.

“In both countries, the rising capitalist class, together with plebeian and middle-class forces, eventually emerged victorious,” Waters said. “But the differences in the social and political weight of Chinese workers in the two countries deeply marked their future histories.”

In contrast to their counterparts in Cuba, then the largest sugar producer in the world, Chinese immigrants in the United States were not concentrated at the center of production for the world market, and did not have the opportunity to be at the center of the revolutionary struggles.

Waters noted one exception. In Louisiana and Mississippi of the immediate post-Civil War years, the defeated slavocracy imported several thousand Chinese workers from Cuba, hoping they would be a “docile” replacement for their former slaves.

Things turned out differently, said Waters. Not only had these workers “already experienced the hated contract labor system in Cuba, they had been infected by the revolutionary struggles beginning there,” she said. “Many joined forces with the freed slaves, poor farmers, and other toilers in the Mississippi Delta,” participating in the armed militias that confronted the rising counterrevolutionary terror of the planters’ White Knights and other armed squads.

It was precisely this kind of unity that “the northern industrial capitalist victors in the Civil War feared,” Waters said. “That’s the historical political and economic context in which we have to place the rise of organized anti-Chinese bigotry and violence in California and the adoption of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.”

While many workers were drawn into the anti-Chinese bigotry, Waters noted, “The Workingmen’s Party of California … was not a working-class organization. It was tied to the Democratic Party that led the bourgeois opposition to the revolutionary war that brought down the slavocracy. Its central leader was a small businessman.

“Anti-Chinese racism served the interests of the nascent financial capitalist class. It was not in the interests of the working class; it was a blow to workers’ solidarity; it weakened and divided the labor movement, and set back independent working-class political action and organization,” she emphasized.

Cuban Revolution’s example
Waters opened and concluded her remarks by contrasting the absence of discrimination and prejudice today against Cubans of Chinese descent with the racism Chinese and their descendants face in the United States and other countries where they have settled. She pointed to the reasons why this has become possible over the more than half century since the triumph of the 1959 revolution there.

“There is no ‘glass ceiling’ in Cuba, nor are there special Chinese occupations,” she stressed. “Chinatowns have basically disappeared in Havana and other cities, because there is no longer any need for those of Chinese ancestry to concentrate together for protection or in order to make a living.”

In the discussion period, conference convener Ho Khai Leong — a professor at Kuala Lumpur’s Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, members of whose faculty and student body collaborated with ISSCO to organize the gathering — asked Waters a question. What did she consider the “unique element in the political ideology in Cuba that actually makes discrimination against the Chinese completely absent in its policies,” Leong said. “Are we [also] talking about complete absence of discrimination against other ethnic groups in Cuba?”

Waters recalled that in 1999, at a regional conference of the Overseas Chinese association in Havana, Wang Gungwu, founding president of ISSCO, had asked a similar question of Moisés Sío Wong. Sío Wong, Waters explained, was “a general of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, both of whose parents were Chinese.” He was one of the authors of Our History Is Still Being Written.

Sío Wong had answered Wang Gungwu by first noting the important place of Chinese in Cuba’s revolutionary struggles going back to the independence wars from Spain of the latter 19th century. But that’s not “the most fundamental answer,” he had said. “Because before the revolution of 1959, Chinese were still discriminated against in Cuba.”

The difference in Cuba, Sío Wong noted, is what has happened since the revolution. “Here a socialist revolution took place.”

“Cuba has eliminated capitalism, the economic foundations on which the superexploitation of Chinese is based,” Waters said. “And that has made it possible to wage the kind of struggle that has been fought there to eliminate discrimination and prejudice based on the color of a person’s skin.

“Enormous strides have been made in Cuba,” Waters said, “but history has shown that it was easier to eliminate prejudice against Cubans of Chinese descent than Cubans who are black. That’s still an ongoing battle.”

Cuba’s ambassador to Malaysia, Rubén Pérez, who was in the audience together with two others from the Cuban Embassy, joined the discussion at the end of the session. “In my country,” he noted, “There are no people of only one race.

“It’s very important to take this into account,” Pérez emphasized. In Cuba, “your ancestors can come from Africa, from the Middle East, from Europe, or from China. To rationalize discrimination in Cuba means justifying discrimination against ourselves!”
 
 
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