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Overview
In Chinese American Transnational Politics, Lai traces the shadowy history of Chinese leftism and the role of the Kuomintang of China in influencing affairs in America. With precision and insight, Lai penetrates the overly politicized portrayals of a history shaped by global alliances and enmities and the hard intolerance of the Cold War era. The result is a nuanced and singular account of how Chinese politics, migration to the United States, and Sino-U.S. relations were shaped by Chinese and Chinese American groups and organizations.
Lai revised and expanded his writings over more than thirty years as changing political climates allowed for greater acceptance of leftist activities and access to previously confidential documents. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources and echoing the strong loyalties and mobility of the activists and idealists he depicts, Lai delivers the most comprehensive treatment of Chinese transnational politics to date.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252035258 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2010 |
| Series: | Asian American Experience |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Madeline Y. Hsu is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
Read an Excerpt
Chinese American Transnational Politics
By HIM MARK LAI
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07714-2
Introduction
Him Mark Lai and the Politics of Chinese America Madeline Y. Hsu
When, and if, most people think of a historian, they imagine a stoop-shouldered old man peering nearsightedly at musty, dusty, old tomes. Despite the small kernels of truth engrained in this image, it fails to convey the dedication and occasional bravery required of scholars who use their painstaking research to recover and recount the stories of forgotten peoples and unpopular truths. It requires genuine courage to write about subjects and from perspectives—such as that of women and peoples of color and the poor—that society wishes to overlook. In some instances, state governments have intervened to wield their considerable authority to protect the status quo by silencing such dissenting narratives. In times of war, when even questioning official accounts could be interpreted as enemy action, the risks multiply. Scholars who write about the Chinese in the United States face particular dangers, for their subjects are physically marked with ancestry from a country that figures in the American mind as an impossibly populous, fundamentally different, and largely hostile place. Too often, regardless of their place of birth, citizenship, or cultural affiliations, by virtue of being in America, ethnic Chinese are seen as threats. In this introduction, I explore the difficulties Chinese Americans have faced in trying to reconcile their multiple, seemingly incompatible heritages, and the battles waged by the pioneering scholar Him Mark Lai, who "legitimated" the study of their minority realities. Despite prevailing images of Chinese Americans as model minorities, such relatively benign perceptions date back only to the mid-1960s, when the sociologist William Petersen first articulated the qualities of this group in "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," which appeared in a 1966 issue of the New York Times Magazine and was quickly extended to include Chinese in a U.S. News and World Report article that appeared later that same year. Other articles followed and reached a virtual crescendo during the mid-1980s with pieces such as Fortune's "America's Super Minority" that trumpeted the educational and economic success of "Asian immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren" in "crowd[ing] America's top universities" and "tower[ing] above the rest of the population in both dollars and sense." A chorus of national publications such as Time, the New Republic, and Newsweek celebrated the immigrant success stories of a once ostracized group that had become "Those Asian-American Whiz Kids." This celebration of achievements arrived, however, only after more than a century of institutionalized hostility had systematically confined Asians to the margins of American life in terms of employment options, immigration and citizenship, voting rights, residential choices, and marriage options. For the bulk of their history, Asians have been considered and treated as intrinsically un-American.
According to the historian Mae Ngai, "two major elements of twentieth-century American racial ideology evolved from the genealogy of the racial requirement to citizenship: the legal definition of 'white' and the rule of racial inassimilability." In the second year of the American Republic, Congress had already passed legislation that defined Asians as racially incompatible. The Nationality Act of 1790 restricted the right to citizenship by naturalization to free white persons. Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Indian people all failed in their court challenges to this racial criterion for citizenship, which would not be lifted until 1943 when America's World War II alliance with China forced Congress to support its claims of friendship by finally permitting members of the Chinese race to gain naturalization rights. This late-eighteenth-century racialization of Asians as unassimilable echoed in the late-nineteenth-century passage of America's earliest immigration laws.
Congress's first decisions to impose controls on the United States' borders were based on widespread beliefs that Chinese people constituted a "yellow peril" that would overwhelm and destroy the civilization of white European Americans unless their numbers were restricted. The Chinese Exclusion Laws (1882-1943) defined Chinese by race and attempted to severely limit their presence in the country. The laws permitted entry to only six strictly defined categories, such as merchants, diplomats, and students. After 1892 the laws also required all Chinese to carry Certificates of Residence or be liable for deportation. Chinese people became the first targets of federal attempts to enforce immigration restrictions and to consistently frustrate these efforts through sophisticated systems of immigration fraud. As such, they confronted constant immigration bureau hostility and harassment as suspected lawbreakers and criminals. The racialization of Chinese as illegal, unassimilable aliens extended to American-born generations, for birthright citizens of Asian ancestry "remained subject to enormous cultural denial by the mainstream of American society, which regarded 'Asian' and 'America' as mutually exclusive concepts."
Systematic discrimination against Chinese Americans extended far beyond such border controls to their daily lives within the United States. By the 1890s, whether they were immigrant or American-born, Chinese could find employment primarily in the dead-end fields of laundries, restaurants, Chinatown stores, and domestic service. Most lived in clearly demarcated urban ghettoes. Finding more permanent purchase on American soil by establishing families was difficult, because laws inhibited the migration of Chinese women and prohibited miscegenation. Through the 1920s and 1930s, America's rejection of Chinese people forced even the growing ranks of American-born Chinese to look toward China for marriage and families, retirement plans, and political involvements. The community that resulted was predominantly male, poorly acculturated, and preoccupied with Chinese affairs, thereby confirming stereotypes of Chinese people as intrinsically foreign. Although second- and third-generation Chinese Americans held American citizenship by birth and were better educated and more acculturated, they were unable to escape the employment and residential ghettoes imposed on their immigrant parents and grandparents. Many felt trapped between the American and Chinese worlds, because they did not really belong in either.
World War II and the cold war complicated this already difficult position. Before World War II, Chinese were primarily a domestic concern for the United States, which focused on purifying the nation of incompatible persons. Over the course of World War II, however, foreign policy concerns gained urgency, as the importance of fostering wartime alliances led the United States to emphasize "America as a racially, religiously, and culturally diverse nation." To bolster this new emphasis on racial integration rather than exclusion, Congress began abolishing more than a century and a half of laws that had segregated employment, residence, voting rights, and marriage. According to Christina Klein, "these legal reforms allow us to see the double meaning of integration in the postwar period: the domestic project of integrating Asian and African Americans within the United States was intimately bound up with the international project of integrating the decolonizing nations into the capitalist 'free world' order." As America turned its attention to a global rather than domestic stage, it sought to enfold more nations and more peoples into its political, economic, and social systems. In this reordering of American political agendas, and thus society and national culture, Asians moved from being unassimilable aliens to become model minorities whose successes exemplified the integrating powers of the American nation.
As a 1947 graduate in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and thirty-one-year employee of the Bechtel Corporation, the American-born Him Mark Lai was part of the earliest generation of Asians permitted to embark on what would become known as the model minority path. Although far from being the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (an honor held by Yung Wing, who graduated from Yale University in 1854), he was among the earliest to gain professional employment commensurate with his educational credentials. In contrast to the experiences of their exclusion-era counterparts, after World War II the diminishing of discriminatory conditions permitted college-educated Chinese Americans of Him Mark Lai's generation to gain white-collar and professional careers and also purchase homes outside of Chinatown. For a community long ostracized as "coolies" and "rat-eaters" and confined to crowded, urban ghettoes, it was a considerable achievement.
Grateful for their new levels of prosperity and acceptance, many Chinese Americans basked in the seeming equality that they had gained and celebrated the advantages of living in a democratic, capitalist nation. Such views were articulated most forcefully by the sociologist Rose Hum Lee, who claimed in her influential 1960 monograph, The Chinese in the United States of America, "this is the most auspicious time for the persons of Chinese ancestry to seek integration, because the social climate of the United States has changed since the end of World War II. Racial ancestry is no longer a barrier to full citizenship and social acceptance." This idealistic view of race relations required that Chinese Americans acquiesce to the idea that the United States had indeed become a truly democratic society. In return for their political compliance, they would gain economic prosperity and the secure status of model minorities.
Parallel to the doctrine of integration, however, ran the doctrine of containment. As described by Christina Klein, "containment and integration constituted the two ideological foundations of postwar foreign policy.... Containment held that ... the expansion of communism anywhere in the world posed a direct threat to the U.S. share of world power." In the case of Chinese Americans, the cold war offered not only the opportunity to integrate in unprecedented ways into the American mainstream, but also the considerable danger that they would be contained as potential agents representing the interests of Communist China. America's long history of considering Asians to be inimically foreign was cast into stark relief by the recent incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
The cold war generated its own anxieties and excessive employment of government power in the name of national security. The McCarthy era's persecution of famous writers and intellectuals such as Dashiell Hammett resonate to this day. A lesser known story concerns the even greater vulnerability of Chinese Americans as the Communist threat posed by the immensely populated People's Republic of China (PRC) exacerbated concerns about the already uncomfortably foreign presence of Chinese living in the United States: "Domestic containment policies revived latent 'yellow peril' fears of a combined Chinese threat from both within and outside the nation." While the Chinese could now claim a place in America if they embraced democratic and capitalist ideologies and the idea of America as a truly multiracial society, any divergence from these norms was threatening. Under such conditions, even to suggest that the PRC had legitimate claim to being China's government, or to maintain contact with relatives there was considered politically suspect.
The situation of Chinese Americans was complicated by the reality that many were immigrants who had entered the United States fraudulently in order to circumvent the highly restrictive exclusion laws. Although most pursued highly ordered and law-abiding lives—regularly paying taxes and serving in the U.S. military during World War II—they had only recently gained naturalization rights and the protections of citizenship status. When Chinese Americans fell under government suspicion for leftist activities or sympathies, they could not only be investigated and jailed but also deported for political deviance. As recounted in Renqiu Yu's To Save China, To Save Ourselves, the leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance disappeared in the 1950s, as much of its leadership was cast out of the United States only to meet persecution and sometimes death in China. The most notable deportee was the aerodynamicist Qian Xuesun, who had helped to pioneer America's space program as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Cold war hysteria led to accusations that he was a Communist despite his recent application for American citizenship and the close ties between his wife's family and the Nationalists. After five years of imprisonment and constant FBI surveillance, Qian was deported in 1955 to the PRC, where he pioneered China's first missile institute. Many more Chinese Americans remained in the United States but suffered constant FBI scrutiny and persecution. Tung-pok Chin, a laundry man and occasional writer for the leftist newspaper China Daily News, vividly described how even his children received visits from FBI agents while in school, on top of the constant surveillance of his laundry premises.
Chinese Americans faced the scrutiny not only of the American government but of the "free" Chinese one as well. The Kuomintang had been the United States' ally during World War II but had retreated to the island of Taiwan after losing the Chinese mainland to the Communists. This seemingly inexplicable defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong's bedraggled troops exacerbated American fears of communism. The earliest victims of the McCarthy era were members of the Dixie Mission, U.S. government observers who had visited Mao in his wartime headquarters at Yan'an and analyzed accurately the potential of the Chinese Communist Party to lead China. In the hardening lines of wartime confrontation, anybody who was "soft" on communism could be accused of helping the enemy, alleged betrayals for which careers were destroyed.
Cold war exigencies also led the United States to defend Taiwan from Communist attack and to insist that the ousted KMT government on Taiwan hold China's seat in the United Nations. In their common war against communism, the U.S. government permitted the KMT's secret police to extend their reach into Chinese American communities, which were forced to uphold even stricter standards of orthodoxy by supporting the KMT's claim to represent China's legitimate government. Alternative agendas, such as attempts to further develop Chinese American community organizations and consciousness, met with hostility and suspicion. If the KMT held a more narrowly defined conception of correct belief and behavior, it was prepared to wield power more autocratically as in the case of Henry Liu, a journalist assassinated in 1984 in his Daly City, California home for having written an unauthorized biography of Taiwan's president, Chiang Chingkuo.
And so, the cold war was a time of unprecedented acceptance but also considerable risk for Chinese Americans. Unlike most others of his generation, who relaxed into their educational and economic accomplishments and long-delayed acceptance into the American mainstream, Him Mark Lai chose to go against the grain. He participated in such leftist organizations as the student youth group Mun Ching [Chinese Democratic Youth League] and pursued his interests in Chinese current affairs by writing newspaper articles and hosting a radio show. He also developed his research into Chinese American history. His scholarship not only recovered the stories of a once excluded and vilified group, it also picked at the scab of America's discrimination against Chinese people.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chinese American Transnational Politics by HIM MARK LAI Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois . Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Roger Daniels vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Him Mark Lai and the Politics of Chinese America Madeline Y Hsu 1
1 China and the Chinese American Community: The Political Dimension 9
2 Anarchism, Communism, and China's Nationalist Revolution 53
3 Organizing the Community: Communists during the Great Depression 77
4 The War of Resistance against Japan 100
5 The Birth of a New China 123
Notes 155
Glossary of Chinese Characters 219
Bibliography of Published Works of Him Mark Lai, 1967-2008 239
Selected English-Language Readings on Chinese American History Madeline Y. Hsu 251
Index 255
What People are Saying About This
Received an honorable mention for the Book Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2012.