Chinese immigration: Rethinking the “push and pull” paradigm

For the past thirty years, the cornerstone of immigration history has tended to rest on the “push and pull” paradigm, weighing up the factors that forced migrants from their homeland and drew them to a new world. However, I would suggest that the history of Chinese immigration to North America during the mid-late nineteenth century points to a need to build on the “push and pull”paradigm by focusing on the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they did not totally leave behind.

Recent studies have shown that the majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States during the mid-late nineteenth century came from the districts of Guangdong.^⁠1  Significantly these areas underwent an economic and social metamorphosis as the influence of Western capital began to infiltrate the local economy.  The resulting growth in free-market capitalism established a new economic order that not only altered the social fabric of China but the purpose of Chinese immigration to North America.

The Commercialisation of Traditional Chinese Agrarian Society

Traditional agrarian society centred on close family ties and connections.  At the hub of the system was the land itself.  Farming was a well-respected occupation and agriculture formed the core of subsistence living and family life.  Families subdivided the land amongst themselves, industriously harvesting their livelihoods from the soil.  By the turn of the nineteenth century though, access to the land came under strain from a burgeoning populace and the free-market’s expanding control over the land.  The population of the Guangdong region increased by 76 percent (from sixteen million in 1787 to twenty-eight million in 1850), causing the population to land ratio to decrease below the national average: 1.67 mou (0.15 acres) per person compared to 2.19 mou.^⁠2  As pressure upon the land increased, the resulting re-orientatation of small-peasant farming laid the foundation for despair and revolt.

Taiping Rebellion

From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion led by the self-proclaimed Son of God, Hong Xiuquan, swept across the Gunagdong districts, claiming the lives of between twenty and thirty million people.^⁠3 An official from the government, Yung Wing, travelling through countryside at the time witnessed the despair.  Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale), had been born to a poor family near Macao and knew the area well.  Recalling the experience, Yung Wing wrote, “As we ascended towards Taiping, the whole region presented a heartrending and depressing scene of wild waste and devastation.  Whole villages were depopulated and left in a dilapidated condition.  Out of a population of 500,000 only a few dozen people were seen wandering about in a listless, hopeless condition, very much emaciated and looking like walking skeletons.”  For Wing it was almost like a “storm” had “swept away the bulk of the population.”  Wing was not sure of the extent people had suffered.  However, “one significant fact” struck him; the “sparseness of the population,” was “at variance with my preconceived notions.”⁴  Those “swept away” from the land had lost the opportunity to make a subsistence existence.  Instead they were now part of a new landscape.  Addressing this issue Yung Wing wrote, “The labor question … has been so radically disorganized and broken up,” concluding that the changes had, “virtually taken the breath and bread away from nine-tenths of the people of China.”⁵  Many of those without “breath and bread” moved to the coastal ports to find employment. From 1842 to 1895, more than a hundred industrial enterprises were established.  The great majority of these, including shipyards, docks, silk filatures, bean mills, sugar refineries, and other export-import processing industries, were closely related to Western trade with China.^⁠6

Of course, there were winners and losers in this period of industrialization.  Those on the brink, faced a tough decision; to remain in China or to emigrate abroad where there was sanctuary from the domestic troubles and the possibility to work for a higher wage.^⁠7  An estimated 200,000 Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast of America between 1842 and 1882.^⁠8  One migrant gave his own account of the painful events led him to leave China:

There were four in our family, my mother, my father, my sister and me.  We lived in a two room house.  Our sleeping room and the other served as a parlor, kitchen and dining room.  We were not rich enough to keep pigs or fowls, otherwise, our small house would have been more overcrowded. How can we live on six baskets of rice which were paid twice a year for my father’s duty as a night watchman?  Sometimes the peasants have a poor crop then we go hungry … Sometimes we went hungry for days.  My mother and me would go over the harvested rice fields of the peasants to pick the grains they dropped … We had only salt and water to eat with the rice.^⁠9

A New Paradigm?

So “push and pull” factors were crucial in the decision to emigrate, but in the case of Chinese immigrants “push and pull” factors did not separate the new world from the old world. In fact, the new world became a means to support life in the old world. Wage rates for employment in North American appeared on leaflets distributed in Chinese port cities as well as newspaper advertisements placed by labour agents.  Comparatively, a North American based income could sustain a Chinese family.  As the Reverend Augustus Loomis observed the high pay was such that, “will support them and leave something over to send back to the father and mother, or to the wife and children, left at home.”^⁠10 So instead of a paradigm that separates old and new worlds, the experience of Chinese immigrants suggests a need to investigate the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they physically left behind but maintained strong ties with.

References

¹ Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 32; June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong to California, 1850-1882,” in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism Asian Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) , 232.

² Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 33

³ W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (London: Robson Books, 2003), 167.

⁴ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 126-127, 127, 93.

⁵ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 84-85.

⁶ Yen-p’ing Hao, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (California: University of California Press, 1986), 349.

7 John Newsinger, “The Taiping Peasant Revolt,” Monthly Review (Oct 2000) Online. Internet. 10 Apr. 2004. Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1132/5_52/66937933/p1/article.jhtml

⁸ Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 214.

⁹ Kil Young Zo, Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-1880 (New York, 1971), 62.

¹⁰ A.W. Loomis, “How Our Chinamen Are Employed,” Overland Monthly, Vol. 2 (March 1869), 231.

Henry George, John Stuart Mill, and solving the “knotty labor question”

In May 1869, the New York Tribune published an article by Henry George detailing his views on the “Chinese Question.”  Arguing that the introduction of Chinese immigrants into the labour market “[was] to the interest of capital and opposed to the interests of labor,” George initially detailed his objections to Chinese immigrants on economic grounds.  While others argued that the employment of Chinese immigrants would not harm the existing labour force, George suggested; “If this position is correct, then the knotty labor question is indeed solved; the interests of labor and capital are indeed identical.”  However, for the George the position did not seem correct.  Rather for George, the “Labor Question” remained unsolved.  The low wages that Chinese immigrants received and the assumption that all profits, rents, and alike would be reduced by the same proportion as the reduction in wages, was to George a manifestly absurd fallacy.  Instead, he argued that “when we speak of a reduction of wages in any general and permanent sense, we mean this, if we mean anything – that in the division of the joint production of labor and capital, the share of labor is to be smaller, that of capital larger.” Adding, “this is precisely what the reduction of wages consequent upon the introduction of Chinese labor means.”  From this juncture in the article, the meaning of Chinese labour took a racial turn. “The population of our country [is] welded into a homogeneous people,” George declared, preceding to note that, “to a certain extent the Chinese become quickly Americanized; but this Americanization is only superficial.”  The superficiality of Chinese Americanization implied a lack of willingness to become citizens and in general a transient and temporary nature of being.  This condition, in George’s eyes, was unwelcome in a nation being reconstructed.  “A population born in China, expecting to return to China, living here in a little China of its own, and without the slightest attachment to the country” declared George, were “utter heathens, treacherous, sensual, cowardly and cruel.”  For George the future of the United States looked bleak because of the Chinese.  He argued that, “they will bring no women with them (and probably will not for a little while yet) except those for the purposes of prostitution; and the children of these, of whom there are some hundreds in California, will exercise upon the whole mass but little perceptible influence, while they will be in all respects as essentially Chinese as though born and reared in China.”^⁠1  The solution to the “knotty labor question” was apparent to George; the Chinese must be excluded from the United States.

Henry George, who had been inspired by the work of British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, decided to sent a copy of his article to Mill.^⁠2  Mill responded to George in a letter published in the National Standard during July 1870.  The reply agreed in principle with the economic side of George’s polemic, but also laid out a plea to regard Chinese immigrants as citizens.  If an “overwhelming” influx of Chinese immigrants occurred, Mill believed that it would be “economically injurious to the mass population; that it must diminish their wages, and reduce them to a lower stage of physical comfort and well-being.”  In Mill’s mind, the severity of an influx was such that workers should rally against immigration, stating that, “if the working-men have not combined to prevent this, it is time they should.”  However, Mill also believed that granting immigrants citizenship was a principle that should be upheld, declaring that “every immigrant of every race must be admitted citizenship.”  In an appeal to George, Mill argued that admitted citizenship would strengthen the labour movement.  Mill insisted that, “all men equal, equally free to carve each his own career, and entitled to all the aid his fellows can give.”^⁠3

References

¹ New York Tribune, May 1, 1869.

² Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 100-103.

³ National Standard, July 30, 1870.