History of Chinese in America

The Chinese in America (UC Riverside Speech)

            The Chinese in America are the largest Chinese community in the Western world. Their presence there dates back to the early years of the nation. American immigration policy, events in China, and US-China relations have been the main factors in the community’s growth in size and complexity.

            The discovery of gold in California in 1848 attracted thousands from all over the world, including many Chinese. From 1850 until 1882 when the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect, more than 322,000 Chinese, including reentrants, entered the United States. Some of the immigrants were merchants and craftsmen, but the overwhelming majority were unskilled laborers and peasants from the rural areas of  Guangdong. Most of them came from the Siyi (Sze Yap, Four Counties) on the delta’s west flank. The largest number originated from Taishan. A significant minority came from Zhongshan in the southern part of the delta and from the Sam Yap [Sanyi, or Three Districts: Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde] area surrounding Canton. The vast majority were Cantonese speakers, although a number spoke the Hakka dialect, and those from certain areas of the Zhongshan District spoke variants of the Southern Min dialect.

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 reduced the Chinese influx, but many still sought to enter the country, skirting around the Exclusion laws. Some were smuggled in or jumped ships. More entered claiming exempt status or citizen status. In order to determine the validity of such claims, immigration officials detained and interrogated Chinese applicants at entry ports, the best known of which was the detention facility on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.    

During this period many employers refused to hire Chinese. On the mainland, Chinese became concentrated disproportionately in service occupations as domestics and  laundrymen, callings that became the stereotyped occupations of Chinese in America. Others entered the restaurants and grocery stores. During this period there was an increasing American-born population, which was greatly influenced by Western institutions. Some Chinese, frustrated at the apparent lack of a future in America, empathized with rising nationalism in China and participated in the Chinese Reform and  Revolutionary movements, hoping to build a strong China that would help improve their status abroad.  Many supported the Nationalist Party of China (Kuomintang), which eventually became a  dominant political force in the community.

During World War II, the United States Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion acts, assigning to Chinese a token annual quota of 105, but they gained the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens.  This change in the immigration laws allowed many China-born wives to join their husbands in America after the war and the female population began to catch up with
As laborers died or departed for China, plus growth of an American born generation, led to a gradual decrease of the sex ratio on the mainland from a high of 26.79 in 1890 to 2.85 by 1940. After almost six decades of exclusion, the population of Chinese in America was 106,334 in the United States and its territories, with 77, 504 on the US mainland.          

            Chinese were in various pockets in a number of central cities all over the US. Conditions in different regions varied with the location. But simplistically one can divide the Chinese into several sub-communities: Hawaii, Pacific Coast, Northeast quadrant, and the South. The Pacific Coast, centering on California and the city of San Francisco, was where the earliest Chinese communities in continental US were established. In 1950, 39 percent of the Chinese population lived on the coast with the bulk in California. Because of their long history of development in the region, they were into a number of occupations, such as domestics, restaurants, laundries, meat markets, groceries, garment industries, wholesale produce, farming, shrimp camps, salmon canneries, farming and etc. There also was a slightly higher percentage of families as shown in the male/female ratio of 1.6, lower than the value of 1.896 for conterminous US.

San Francisco was the social, cultural, and economic center of Chinese America on the mainland. It had the most Chinese schools, the most Chinese newspapers, and the headquarters of most of the traditionist organizations. The northeastern quadrant had about 24 percent of the Chinese. They entered this area later and concentrated into laundries and restaurants. These were the prime examples of the bachelor society, with NYC having as high a ratio as  6.03 in 1940. It decreased to 2.89 by 1950, but it was still higher than the national average of 1.896. Only 6.4 percent lived in the economically undeveloped Southern US, where a number ran groceries serving Mexicans, Indians, and blacks, notably in places like Phoenix, San Antonio, SE Arkansas, western Mississippi, and Augusta. Their male/female ratios were slightly lower than the national value, indicating a fair number of families.

The population majority on the mainland was Sze Yup, possibly with greater percentage away from California.  27 percent of the Chinese lived in Hawaii. Here the population was about three fourths Zhongshan origin and one fourth Hakka origin. Chinese were into many sectors of the economy. There were also more families with the male/female ratio being 1.276 in 1940, dropping to  1.112 in 1950. The latter situation was not reached on the mainland until two decades later.  In many respects Hawaii Chinese led the way in Chinese participation in mainstream society. They entered local politics in the 1920s. The mainland had to wait until the mid-1940s when Wing Ong entered the Arizona legislature. Hawaiian Chinese established the bilingual Hawaii Chinese News a decade before Chinese Digest appeared in San Francisco. It commercialized the Chinese New Year with the Narcissus Festival, which was three years earlier than the first Chinese New Year festival in San Francisco.  

            From 1945 to 1965, this existing community was augmented by G.I. brides, family members, and relatives immigrating mostly from Hong Kong as well as some 30,000 refugees, many of whom were Cantonese. Most newcomers bypassed Hawaii and gradually the situation in Chinese communities in conterminous US approached that in California. Although many have  moved away from Chinatowns, Chinatown is still associated with the community.
Meanwhile, after World War II ended, the Communist revolu­tion swept over China and established the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland in 1949. Some five thousand students, mostly Mandarin-speaking, chose to remain in this country under the Displaced Persons Act.  Their ranks were soon swelled by the arrival of refugee profes­sion­als, entrepreneurs, intellectu­als, and ex-government bureaucrats and officials from Nationalist China.  Beginning in the late fifties, increasing numbers of Taiwan and Hong Kong students also entered institu­tions of higher learning in the United States.  Many matriculated in the sciences, technology, and the profes­sions, and more than 90 percent of them were able to stay permanently.  A series of congressional acts also allowed the entry of thousands of Chinese on refugee status.

            In 1965, Congress dropped the racially discriminatory immigra­tion policy that had been implemented since 1882 and revised the immigration laws to give immi­grants from all nations equal treat­ment.  Many students from Taiwan and Hong Kong studying in this country took advantage of the new law to adjust to permanent residency and then U.S. citizenship status. During the 1980s the Taiwanese community in the US grew more than tenfold from less than 20,000 to more than 118,000 in 2000. However, this figure may be low by a factor of two since many from Taiwan reported themselves as Chinese.  The Taiwanese are concentrated mostly in suburban areas, such as the San Gabriel Valley, Bellaire outside Houston, and Flushing in New York.

            Many of these were people had fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan from the China mainland after the collapse of the Nationalist government. The Taiwanese in America are estimated to be around 300,000 in population, with the majority being speakers of the Minnan dialect.  As most Taiwanese are recent immigrants, they are still closely in touch with events on the island.  China politics has an important influence on Taiwanese organizations, but in this case the focal point is internal politics on Taiwan.  The chief issue is the conflict and power struggle between the local Taiwanese and the mainland group who arrived in Taiwan with the Kuomintang government after 1945.  Often this conflict is expressed in issues of identity and regional feelings, which are reflected in different degrees in the various types of organizations found in the Taiwanese community.

            The scheduled return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 also impelled many to emigrate abroad, but most of these went to Canada. Hong Kong culture had a marked impact on the Cantonese Chinatown. This was especially notable in cuisine and in popular culture such as popular songs, fashion, and even customs.  

            Political and economic instability in other parts of the world contributed to the influx of other Chinese, the largest of which came from the Indo-China peninsula.  The South Vietnam regime collapsed in face of the Vietcong assault in the mid-1970s.  This was followed by the fall of Cambodia and Laos to Communist insurgents. Many supporters of the former governments fled abroad.  In 1978, the Vietnam government’s harsh rule after unification of the country touched off another exodus by land north to China and by sea to neighboring Southeast Asian countries.  More than 276,000 refugees entered the PRC. By the end of the 1980s, almost one million refugees from these countries had arrived in the United States.  About 30-40 percent were ethnic Chinese. A considerable percentage of these were ethnic Chinese speaking a variety of Chinese dialects, the five principal ones of which are Cantonese, Chaozhou, Minnan, Hakka, and Hainanese. These groups joined their compatriots already in the US, growing from insignificant small groups to become rather influential groups in the Chinese communities. There is also a Guangxi group that resulted mostly from the fact that a number of refugees came from a part in Southern China that used to be part of Guangdong, but is now under the administration of Guangxi 

            These ethnic Chinese had similar social origins as the earlier Cantonese and can merge easily into Chinatowns to compete with the Cantonese or even to revitalize existing Chinatowns. In LA their businesses have taken over the south end of the existing Chinatown; in Chicago they took over the Chinatown on the north side; in Houston, the dying Chinatown; and in Oakland,  they stimulated the vast growth of the existing small Chinatown.

            Those who were Cantonese joined the existing Cantonese organizations, sometimes causing apprehension among leaders of the existing groups, giving rise to tensions. However, the newcomers In many cases established their own organizations, such as Chinese schools, senior services, and religious groups, alongside the existing district associations to administer to their own needs.  In many cities they also established their own Chinese newspapers, usually weeklies. Thus the VCL represent another organizational system alongside the Cantonese. 

            There are also Chinese from other parts of the world.  One of the earliest and largest communities was that formed by Chinese refugees from Cuba.  Many Cuban Chinese were small entrepreneurs.  They joined the exodus of other Cubans when the Castro government nationalized commerce and industry in 1962. Many settled in cities on the East Coast. The Cuban Chinese population was estimated to be around 28,000 in 1949. Most left for the US during the 1960s.  In 1987 there was only around 3,700 Chinese left in Cuba, half of whom were Cuban-born.   After the exodus the number of Chinese dwindled. Most Cuban Chinese emigrated from the same area in China, i.e., the Pearl River Delta region, as did early Chinese immigrants in the United States and Canada and would be indistinguishable from the other Cantonese immigrants except for the spelling of their names.

            Another group consisted of Chinese who had left Burma due to the nationalization of Chinese businesses during the 1960s. Burma became independent in 1948.  After a military coup led by General Ne Win in 1962, the government ordered in the nationalization of certain businesses, about 15 percent of which were Chinese owned. Between 1962 and 1972, a number of Chinese immigrated to places such as Hong Kong and the PRC; some came to the United States.  Some of those who exited were born and raised in Burma and were well-educated. A number of these immigrants settled in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

            In 1954 the Philippines government passed the Retail Nationalization Act to eliminate aliens from the retail trade.  For all intents and purposes the law was targeted at the Chinese, who practically controlled that economic sector.  12,644 Chinese retail businesses were forced to close from 1954 to 1971. A number of Philippines Chinese left the Islands to escape these discriminatory economic policies.  Although the Filipino Chinese community in San Francisco was apparently large enough to begin discussions to forming an association as early as 1971, one did not appear until 1979. Similar communities also emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. More than 90 percent of these were of southern Fujian origin and the rest from Guangdong.

            Discriminatory policies against the Chinese minorities in Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s also encouraged migration to other countries, including some to the United States.  Due to government restrictions on the number of Chinese entering Malaysian institutions of higher learning, many Chinese students have had to matriculate abroad.  For example, during 1985–86 there were 23,020 Malaysians, including a high percentage of ethnic Chinese, studying in the United States.  In numbers they were second only to students from Taiwan.  Many of them stayed in this country after they completed their studies.  Still others came as tourists and visitors and stayed after their visas expired.  Since Malaysian Chinese generally know English and Mandarin, as well as Cantonese or another Chinese dialect, they were welcomed by Chinatown employers.

Indonesia has one of the largest Chinese populations of any country in the world outside China.  The Hokkien group is most numerous, followed by Hakkas, Cantonese, Teochiu, and others. After Indonesia became independent, the government passed several laws during the 1950s regulating and restricting the economic activities of the Chinese minority.  These efforts escalated in 1959, when a law was promulgated banning aliens from conducting businesses in small towns and villages.  This law affected about one third of the 75,410 Chinese-owned businesses in the country.  About 300,000 to 400,000 Chinese were deprived of the means to earn a livelihood. In the mid-1960s, the country began implementing a policy of forced assimilation against the Chinese by closing all Chinese schools and Chinese organizations and banning publications in Chinese.  An estimated 90,000 departed for the PRC.  Others left for the Netherlands and other countries.  Some arrived in the United States.  Although the United States was not the primary destination for emigrating Indonesian Chinese, an Indonesian Chinese community in America has slowly built up over several decades.  By 1995 it was claimed that there was already thirty thousand in Los Angeles.

            In the aftermath of the Korean War, many Koreans immigrated into the US. Among these were more than 10,000 Chinese, mostly concentrated in the San Francisco and Los Angeles area.  Relations between the United States and the PRC had been tense since the two had engaged in hostilities during the Korean War.  During the early 1970s, this tension began to ease. For almost three decades immigration from the PRC was down to a trickle. However, normalization of US-PRC relations and the relaxation of the PRC's emigration policy during the late 1970s led to a great increase in Chinese immigrants directly from mainland China.  As cultural exchanges between the US and the PRC developed, PRC students and visiting scholars also arrived to study alongside their counterparts from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Their number exceeded 40,000 during the early 1990s and ranked first among foreign students in 1992. After the June 4, 1989 Tian’anmen  Incident, Congress passed legislation enabling PRC students who arrived before April 11, 1990, to apply for permanent resident status. By the June 30, 1993 deadline, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service had received more than 50,000 applications. Increasing commercial and cultural ties between the two nations also led to the stationing of numerous representatives and staff members of PRC agencies and corporations in the US.  Many are Mandarin speakers from different parts of China. However, there are also many from the older emigration areas. For example, there has been a noticeable increase in Toishanese speakers in the streets of Chinatown.

            In parallel with Chinese students going abroad, peasants and working class Chinese also sought to go overseas to better their lots. A clandestine world-wide network was organized with the involvement of secret societies to smuggle aliens to various countries and during the 1980s, an estimated 100,000 Chinese, mostly from the area around Fuzhou, entered the US by this means.  

            During the first half of the twentieth century, small numbers of Fujianese, many of whom were ex-seamen from the Fuzhou area, also settled in a number of port cities. A Fuzhou Huiguan existed in New York City no later than the 1930s. By 1943 it had evolved into Fujian Tongxianghui (Fu Kien Association) to include all immigrants from Fujian Province. When the VCL refugee influx was beginning to accelerate at the end of the 1970s, immigration directly from China was also quietly picking up speed. By the early 1980s, the estimated Fujianese population in America reached 70,000, with about 40,000 in New York and an alleged 10,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area.  This development encouraged the Fukien Benevolent Association in San Francisco to embark on a fund-raising campaign to purchase a building for use as a clubhouse.  The goal was finally achieved five years later.

By the early 1990s, the Fujianese population in America had reached about 200,000, with eight tenths of Fuzhou origin.  A significant percentage of these had immigrated sans legal documents.  An estimated 80 percent of this Fuzhou population, especially newcomers, was concentrated in New York City and its vicinity.   

            One of the newest communities is that formed by immigrants and their families who trace their origins to the densely populated and hilly Wen­zhou region in southeastern Zhejiang. The people from this region speak the Wu dialect. Before World War II, emigration from the region was di­rected principally toward Europe. Only a few individuals, mostly seamen, managed to land in America by “jumping ship.” In the wake of the Com­munist victory on the China mainland, more Wenzhou people arrived in America as refugees or immigrants, among which were a number of intel­lectuals, professionals, and business people.

            A well-known immigrant was Zheng Manqing (Man-ch’ing Cheng), painter and calligrapher, who ar­rived during the early 1960s by way of Taiwan. He was best known as a pi­oneer in popularizing Taijiquan (T’ai-Chi Chuan) among non-Chinese. After China relaxed emigration restrictions in 1979, many Wenzhou peo­ple sought to immigrate to Europe without proper documentation. A clan­destine worldwide network facilitated this flow for smuggling immigrants that had arisen in response to the need. Beginning in the 1990s, this net­work also successfully helped many Wenzhouese to reach America. This increasing influx was what led the U.S. Department of State to declare that Wenzhou “has now become the second-largest Chinese source of illegal immigration,” with Fuzhou in first place.  Correspondingly, there has been a rapid growth of the Wenzhou community in America, especially in New York City. The population of the community in America was estimated to be 100,000 during the early years of the twenty-first century.

            In the mid-1990s there were no accurate counts of populations from different regions in China or speaking different dialects. Although the Cantonese had lost their once overwhelmingly dominant position in Chinese America, they remained the largest group. Taiwanese are next in population. The population with ancestries in the Fuzhou area are of the order of magnitude of 150,000-200,000. In the 100,000 range are Chinese from Guangxi and those belonging to the Chaozhou and Hakka dialect groups. The number of Hainanese and Minnan (excluding Taiwanese) are in the order of 30,000-40,000. The population of the remainder who trace their ancestries to other regions in China is probably around 150,000 to 200,000. 

            These new groups add to the complexity and diversity of the Chinese American community. Some of the more numerous ones such as those of the Taiwanese, Fuzhouese, and the IndoChinese do rival the existing Cantonese organizational structure in size and influence.

Him Mark Lai
February 26, 2004

        

Chinese Immigration and Population Growth, 1820-1990.