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Moments in Time with Bill Ong Hing

Anti-Chinese attitudes

The recent Committee of 100-sponsored poll revealing that 25 percent of Americans hold decisively negative views and another 43 percent hold “somewhat negative attitudes” toward Chinese Americans is disturbing, to say the least; especially as the poll was conducted before the two-week U.S. spy plane incident.

Unfortunately, negative views of this nature are common in U.S. history. Of course, the views were manifested more openly with anti-Coolie clubs, anti-Chinese demonstrations, anti-Chinese hate crimes, and anti-Chinese laws prevalent in the 1800s.

The recent poll is also reminiscent of the 1879 measure placed on the California ballot to determine public sentiment: 900 favored the Chinese, while 150,000 were opposed. Quite disturbing is the fact that this hateful sentiment made its way into legal reasoning of the courts.

For example, in People v. Hall (1854), the California Supreme Court decided that a state law prohibiting “Blacks, Mulattos, or Indians” from testifying for or against a white criminal defendant should be interpreted to include Chinese. In the court’s view, an opposite conclusion would produce an “anomalous spectacle.” After all, the court reasoned, Chinese were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point. … between whom and ourselves nature has placed an impassable difference.”

In 1878, a federal judge in California ruled that naturalization laws that were limited to aliens of African descent and “free white persons” should not be interpreted to include persons of the “Mongolian race.” So, Ah Yup, the first Chinese immigrant who applied to be a citizen, should be denied. In so ruling, the judge relied heavily on the hysteria raised by one U.S. Senator who warned against changing the citizenship laws to include Chinese: “This amendment involves the whole Chinese problem... the country has just awakened to the question and to the enormous magnitude of the question, involving a possible immigration of many millions, involving another civilization; involving labor problems that no intellect can solve without study and time. Are you now prepared to settle the Chinese problem, thus in advance inviting that immigration?”

One of the most disappointing endorsements of anti-Chinese sentiment was issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889). The court upheld a law that cancelled the validity of return certificates for Chinese laborers who had left the United States for visits to China, and also upheld the racist Chinese Exclusion Act.

In the process, the language of the court reveals the acceptance of stereotypical views of Chinese at the time. Chinese were “industrious and frugal.” Without families, “their expenses were small; and they were content with the simplest fare, such as would not suffice for our laborers and artisans.” Chinese “remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the customs and usages of their own country. It seemed impossible for them to assimilate with our people, or to make any change in their habits or modes of living. As they grew in numbers, each year the people of the coast saw, or believed they saw, in the facility of immigration, and in the crowded millions of China, where population presses upon the means of subsistence, great danger that at no distant day that portion of our country would be overrun by them unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration.”

The results of the recent survey remind us that, unfortunately, negative racial views toward Asian Americans continue. These views lie beneath the surface for many Americans, and they can seep into the psyche of many influential people.