The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Excludable Aliens vs. One National People:
The U.S. Chinese Exclusion Policy andthe Racialization of Chinese in
the United States and China

Motoe SASAKI*

INTRODUCTION
In 1905 Wang Jingwei, a Chinese student at the predecessor of Hosei
University in Tokyo and a member of the Tongmenghui, a revolutionary organization founded by Sun Yat-sen, categorized four different patterns of racial assimilation within the modern nation: (1) “races of equal
strength merge to form a new nation”; (2) “a majority conquering-race
absorbs the defeated minority”; (3) “a minority conquering-race assimilates a majority race”; and (4) “a conquering-minority is assimilated bya defeated majority.”1 Based on this typology, Wang argued that, up until
the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth century, China had belonged tothe second category, namely, the majority Han had absorbed various
minorities in China. After the Manchu conquest, in which a majority race(the Han) became in danger of being assimilated into a minority race (theManchu), China fell into the third category, namely, the majority had
been assimilated into a minority race. In Wang’s view, however, China
would soon move into the fourth category, given that recent years had*Associate Professor, Hosei University

27

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MOTOE SASAKI

seen a rapid increase in the momentum of Chinese nationalism propelledlargely by the Han.2 This prediction by Wang was driven by a desire,common to revolutionary partisans, to bring an end to China’s dynastic
history and establish a modern Chinese nation-state.
Wang basically articulated his analysis of race-nation linkage from theperspective of ideas of social Darwinism, which gained currency among
Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries beginning in the late nineteenth
century, especially after China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the suppression of the Boxer Uprising by foreign troops (1901).3
For certain intellectuals and revolutionaries apprehensive about the
future of China, social Darwinism offered both a bleak diagnosis of
China’s present ailments and a glimmer of hope for the future. According
to the principle of the survival of the ﬁttest, the existence of China
seemed to be in danger precisely because it was being approached andoccupied by imperial powers. At the same time, however, the future wasstill undecided, leaving room for China to change the course of its history
by the efforts of its people. With this understanding of the historical conditions surrounding China, Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries formulated discourses of the Chinese as one race and one national people
in order to build a new Chinese nation-state, and advocated strengthening China by establishing a republic and making its people enlightened
and productive.4
During this period in the United States popularized ideas of social
Darwinism were also generating a sense of unease and uncertainty about
the country’s future. These worries, moreover, helped deepen the perceived need in the United States for a reformulation of the notions ofrace, nation, and citizen. In the case of the United States, however, thedrive for reformulating these concepts did not come from the urge tointervene in the course of history, but largely from the fear that the UnitedStates would degenerate by absorbing undesirable elements. One such
undesirable element was thought to be Chinese immigrants. In order to
exclude them, the U.S. government passed a series of Chinese exclusion
laws beginning in 1882. Just like Chinese immigrants, African Americans
had also become objects of assimilation fears. In order to shut African
Americans out the public sphere and to segregate them, Southern states
began to enact a series of disfranchisement and segregation laws beginning in the late nineteenth century. As the United States became acontinental and transcontinental empire, moreover, new U.S. colonialsubjects became objects of surveillance to eliminate undesirables.

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

29

In newly acquired U.S. territories, such as Hawaii and the Philippines,
there were large populations of Chinese. Owing to new historical conditions, many overseas Chinese were caught up in U.S. immigration policy. As the overseas Chinese in both the United States and its territories
were treated as undesirable elements, the new notion of Chinese as one
race and one people was extended to include even Chinese living outside of China. In conjunction with this development, overseas Chinese
became more conscious of the new inclusive and expansive conceptionof the Chinese race. In other words, the Chinese exclusion policy was insome ways instrumental in spreading the new overarching notion of
being Chinese and building a sense of solidarity as Chinese, connecting
Chinese inside and outside China. The growing sense of oneness of Chinese
people culminated in a nationwide anti-American boycott movement in
China in 1905.
This article takes up the ﬁrst few decades of the Chinese Exclusion
era, a period in which the exclusion policy increased its severity bybroadening the range of “Chinese” who were subject to exclusion laws.5
By tracing this intensiﬁcation process, I show the way that the Chinese
exclusion policy was connected to and incorporated into the race-based
citizenship regulation system of the United States. I argue that Chinese,
as an unassimilable alien race, became a reference point for assessing
the eligibility for membership in the U.S. nation for those who were on
the margins of the category of U.S. citizenship, such as African Americans,colonial subjects in newly acquired territories, and immigrants from various parts of the world. I also explore the ways that the emerging notionof Chinese as one race and one people, which was promoted by Chinesereformers and revolutionaries, came to mobilize thousands of Chinese
to protest against U.S. immigration policy. Through this examination, I
elucidate how the two notions of Chinese—as an unassimilable alien racein the United States and as one national people in China—were transnationally linked by means of the notion of “race” in conjunction with thatof “survival,” both of which were informed by the ideas of social
Darwinism, linking internal and global relations.
MAKING CHINESE RACIALLY EXCLUDABLE ALIENS
Secretary of Commerce and Labor Oscar S. Straus, in his annual reportto the president in 1907, in regard to the Chinese exclusion policy in the
United States noted:

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MOTOE SASAKI[It] has never been the purpose of the Government; as would be appear fromits laws and treaties, to exclude persons of the Chinese race merely because
they are Chinese. . . . As the laws [are] framed, however, it would appear thatthe purpose was rigidly to exclude the persons of the Chinese race in general.6

As Straus observed, although the Chinese exclusion policy was aimed
at stopping the ﬂow of Chinese laborers, it was also utilized as a measure to prevent the Chinese from becoming a part of the nation. A congressional statement that accompanied the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882—the ﬁrst in a series of laws to ban the entry of Chinese laborers—
clearly declared that “the Chinese are peculiar in every respect.”7 This
sort of rendition of Chinese immigrants—as an alien race irreconcilable
with U.S. institutions and civilization—was, moreover, held well before
the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act.8 The racial component
behind issues of Chinese immigration to the United States became an
important subject with the enactment of the citizenship provisions of the
Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Chinese immigration was no longer just a labor problem but had become closely linked
to matters of citizenship and race.
The citizenship provisions in both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 andthe Fourteenth Amendment were directed primarily to secure citizenshipfor newly freed African American slaves. The ﬁrst sentence of the ﬁrst
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment codiﬁed the deﬁnition of citizenship: “All the persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State wherein they reside.”9 This deﬁnition indicates, however, that
U.S. citizenship was to be extended not only to African Americans but
also to others who were born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, regardless of race. By extension, then, a large number of Chinese who resided in and were born in the United States would
become U.S. citizens. Realizing this, Republican Senator Edgar Cowanof Pennsylvania opposed the citizenship provision, arguing against theassimilability of Chinese during the congressional debate on the Civil
Rights Act of 1866. He not only doubted the ﬁtness of Chinese to become
citizens but also raised the question of the meaning of U.S. citizenship:
Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? . . . If so, whatrights have they? Have they any more rights than a sojourner in the UnitedStates? . . . I should like to know, because really I have been puzzled . . . theEXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

31

lines and boundaries which circumscribe that phrase “citizen of the UnitedStates.” What is it?10

As this suggests, in the midst of the attempt to statutorily protect the citizenship status of recently freed African Americans, Chinese immigrants
were drawn into the debate over the eligibility for and deﬁnition of U.S.
citizenship.
In the eyes of some African Americans, however, such developments
appeared alarming. They worried that if the fortunes of African Americans
were tied to those of Chinese immigrants on the issues of citizenship,
African Americans’ fragile status as U.S. citizens would become evenmore tenuous. Such anxieties led them to make a clear demarcation
between themselves and the Chinese. As historian Helen H. Jun points
out, just when the anti-Chinese movement gained political momentum
nationwide, African Americans began increasingly to articulate theirown differences from Chinese immigrants by emphasizing their military
service, Christian morality, and nationalist identiﬁcation.11 An article
published in 1873 in the San Francisco Elevator, one of the premier
black weekly newspapers, claimed that while the “Negro seeks to be an
integral part of the nation,” the Chinese were “unlikely to become converted to the tenets of our religion, incapable to understand the systemof our government, to appreciate our civilization, morals and manners,
and persistently adhere to the doctrine of the inferiority of the races.”12
It is clear from this line of argument that the logic employed was identical to that employed by the anti-Chinese movement to disqualify the
Chinese as citizens of the United States. By describing Chinese as unassimilable aliens, African Americans tried not only to dissociate themselves from Chinese immigrants but also to defend their own eligibility
for U.S. citizenship. What they feared most was being lumped together
with Chinese and as a result losing their newly acquired rights.
Even though many African Americans attempted to dismiss any linkages or similarities between themselves and the Chinese, the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 did have an impact on African Americans. Section
14 of this act stipulates that “hereafter no state court of the United Statesshall admit Chinese to citizenship.”13 The act, in effect, barred Chinese
immigrants from naturalized citizenship. As race-based legislation
designed to exclude one prominent minority population, this act suggested to African Americans that they might be next in being deprivedof U.S. citizenship and many of the rights associated with it.

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MOTOE SASAKI

Given this worrying situation, the black press began raising their
voices against the Chinese Exclusion Act. African Americans, however,
did not move on to forming a united front with the Chinese in defenseof Chinese immigrants. Instead, they condemned the Chinese Exclusion
Act on the grounds that it distorted the principle of citizenship into arace-based policy, and thus endangered the ideal of liberal democracy in
the United States. Moreover, the black press maintained their previous
stance of drawing a clear demarcation between African Americans andChinese immigrants. While they criticized the Chinese Exclusion Act
from the standpoint of the principles of law and justice, they carefully
maintained and asserted the difference between African Americans,legitimate constituents of the United States, and the Chinese, a culturally and morally alien race.14
Such distinctions between African Americans and the Chinese werealso expressed, though not necessarily in the form African Americans
wished for, in the congressional debate over the Chinese Exclusion Act.
One signiﬁcant dissimilarity between the two groups that was pointed
out on the ﬂoor of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, was the fact thatwhile Chinese could be returned to their homeland, African Americans“were a part of the people here; [and thus] we could not send them
abroad.” Based on this reality, proponents of the bill asked “[since] wehave already one race problem unsettled in this country . . . should we
ﬂy to another? Shall we take more of that class into the body-politic?”
Their concern revealed their mode of thinking: the issue of Chinese
immigration was a race matter that the United States should not have totake on. Congress also questioned whether the United States had to “aidin the increase and distribution over the surface of our domain of adegraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men,to the exclusion of the highly civilized, progressive man of our own
race?” The promoters of the bill ardently stressed the magnitude andgravity of the issue and urged fellow members of Congress to support
the bill to prevent the ﬂow of “the stagnant blood of Asiatic servitude”
into the nation.15 As was apparent in their language, they bolstered theircontention that the Chinese were a degraded race harmful to the UnitedStates, and to do this they utilized ideas of social Darwinism supportedby Spencer’s then-popular maxim of the “survival of the ﬁttest.”16
Based on the logic of the same axiomatic law, Theodore Roosevelt,
then a member of the New York State Assembly, hailed the passage of
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He concluded that “the Chinaman

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

33

is kept out because the democracy, with much clearness of vision, hasseen that his presence is ruinous to the white race.” For Roosevelt, it wasdemocracy that defended the United States from possible decay. For“democracy, with the clear instinct of race selﬁshness, saw the race foe,and kept out the dangerous alien.” By bringing up an analogical comparison of the Chinese and African Americans, moreover, he argued that“the presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from thetime when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy,” and if theUnited States had not become a democracy, “Chinese immigration
would have been encouraged precisely as the slave trade . . . [and] theresult would in a few generations have been even more fatal to the whiterace.” In the view of Roosevelt, then, democracy functioned as a watchdog to discern which races were detrimental to the white race, the latter
consisting of “the best portions of the new world’s surface,” and thus
save the nation from racial degeneration by shutting out all destructive
races.17
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst decade of thetwentieth century anxieties about race degeneration were a driving force
behind the tightening of the Chinese exclusion policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just the beginning of this intensiﬁcation process.
Over the years, the U.S. Chinese exclusion policy increased in stringency
through efforts to plug loopholes in the exclusion laws.
INTENSIFYING THE EXCLUSION POLICY BY EXPANDING
THE CATEGORY OF “CHINESE”
When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came into practice theUnited States faced a new task of distinguishing personae grada fromexcludable aliens. This was because the bill did not provide a speciﬁc
deﬁnition as to who was a laborer, who belonged to the “exempt class,”
and who was Chinese. Roughly one year after the law took effect, thequestion of exactly who was to be counted as “Chinese” was raised in acase taken up by the U.S. circuit court in Massachusetts.
In 1883 the United States Attorney in Boston brought charges against
the master of a British ship for landing a Chinese laborer in that port inviolation of section 2 of the Chinese Exclusion Act.18 The man in question, Ah Shong, was shipped as a carpenter by the master in December
1882 from Manila and was to serve in that capacity until the return ofthe vessel to Britain. However, after the vessel arrived in Boston in June

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MOTOE SASAKI

1883, Ah Shong disappeared, taking all his belongings with him. Since
he never returned to the vessel, he was subsequently discharged of his
duties. In court, the defense argued that Ah Shong was born in Hong
Kong after its secession to Great Britain in 1843, and thus he had neverbeen a subject of the emperor of China but was and had always been asubject of the queen of Great Britain. After deliberation, in August 1883
Judge Thomas L. Nelson decided to dismiss all charges on the grounds
that the laborer in question was a subject of the British monarchy.19 In
Ah Shong’s case, the category of “Chinese,” namely someone subject to
the Chinese Exclusion Act, seems to have been limited to those with
Chinese nationality who were “subjects of the Emperor of China.”
This rendition of “Chinese” was, however, soon overturned in San
Francisco by Justice Stephen J. Field, Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States. In September 1883 Ah Lung, who had comefrom Hong Kong to San Francisco on the steamship Oceanic, claimed
his British nationality. Although this case was identical to the aforementioned Ah Shong case, the decision delivered by Justice Field was
precisely the opposite of that in Ah Shong’s case. Justice Field declaredthat Ah Lung had “all the peculiarities of the subjects of China” and,because he was also a laborer, his allegiance to Great Britain did notexempt him from the Chinese Exclusion Act. Behind this decision was
fear on the part of the defenders of the Chinese exclusion policy, which
included Justice Field, that “the Island of Hong Kong would pour Chineselaborers into our country every year in unnumbered thousands, unlessthey also were covered by the Restriction act.” In order to halt the mass
inﬂux of Chinese laborers from Hong Kong, Justice Field further insisted
that the wording in section 2 of the act—“any Chinese laborer from any
foreign port or place”—was “sufﬁciently broad and comprehensive toembrace all Chinese laborers, without regard to the country of which
they may be subjects.”20
Justice Field’s interpretation and decision was reﬂected in the 1884
amendment to the ﬁrst Exclusion Act. Section 15 of the amendment stipulated that “the provisions of this act shall apply to all subjects of China
and Chinese, whether the subjects of China or other foreign power.”21
All Chinese, regardless of their country of origin, became subject to theChinese exclusion laws. In the Scott Act of 1888, furthermore, the definition of “Chinese” was again amended by a slight switch of the words—
from “all subjects of China and Chinese” to “all persons of the Chinese
race” (emphasis added).22 Chinese, as the object of Chinese exclusion

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

35

laws, were now expressly mentioned as a race, thus making race openly
manifest as a determinant of the judgment of assimilability to the UnitedStates. With this new deﬁnition of the Chinese as a race, moreover,exclusionists moved on to resolving a pending problem: the citizenshipof native-born Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred
Chinese from naturalized citizenship, but citizenship for American-born
Chinese was still protected by section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The attempt to abrogate citizenship of native-born Chinese in the
United States was made in the case of Wong Kim Ark, born of Chinese
immigrant parents in San Francisco in 1873. When Wong came back to
San Francisco from a trip to China in 1895, his readmission to the UnitedStates was denied in spite of his status as a U.S. citizen, and he wasdetained on board the steamship Coptic. Wong ﬁled a writ of habeas corpus with the federal district court alleging that he was being unlawfully
conﬁned. He also claimed his right to enter the United States as a citizen. Arguing the case against Wong, U.S. District Attorney Henry S.
Foote insisted that Wong became a citizen “by accident of birth” on thesoil of the United States. Since his parents were Chinese, Foote continued, Wong had “been at all times, by reason of his race, language, color,and dress, a Chinese person” and thus could not possibly be considereda U.S. citizen. Based on the rationale expressed by exclusionists, moreover, Foote warned that “to force upon us as natural born citizens, persons who must necessarily be a constant menace to the welfare of ourcountry” would endanger the “very existence of our country.” Foote’s
arguments were, however, refuted by Judge Morrow in his ruling that “itis enough that he is born here whatever the status of his parents,” and“no citizen can be excluded from this country except in punishment for
crime. The petitioner must be allowed to land and it is so ordered.”23 The
birthright citizenship of Wong Kim Ark, a native-born Chinese, was thus
upheld by the court.
Yet other native-born Chinese were not as fortunate as Wong. Beginning in 1892, the U.S. Department of the Treasury mandate required that
two white witnesses verify claims of nativity in Chinese cases. For
native-born Chinese, to produce two white witnesses to testify as to theirbirth in the United States was a difﬁcult hurdle to overcome. Even thoughoverturned in court, the Chinese exclusion policy was, in real terms, extended to native-born Chinese by reason that they were descendents ofChinese immigrants and thus inherited the attributes of an unassimilable
race. By changing the criteria for determining Chinese from jus soli to

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MOTOE SASAKI

jus sanguinis, the Chinese exclusion policy expanded the range of excludable Chinese, eventually to the maximum extent possible.
At about the same time that the Chinese exclusion policy increased instringency, laws to disfranchise and segregate African Americans wereenacted in the Southern states. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S.
Supreme Court ofﬁcially formulated the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Justice John M. Harlan, the lone voice against this ruling, passionately
defended the civil rights of African Americans. In his dissent, Justice
Harlan cast grave doubt on the Court’s decision to deny African
Americans’ equal rights, by pointing out the paradoxical situation ofrace-citizenship relations between African Americans and Chinese
immigrants:
There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are,with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to theChinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same
passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of
the black race . . . who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the State and nation . . . are yet declared to be criminals . . . if they ridein a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.24

Harlan pleaded for equal rights for African Americans by highlighting
the distinction between Chinese as an excludable alien race and African
Americans as legitimate citizens. Harlan’s claim, however, did not draw
support from the defenders of the Chinese exclusion policy. On the contrary, the “one-drop rule” that deems anyone with African ancestry whatsoever (even one drop of African blood) as a member of the black race
was also applied to the Chinese via the exclusion policy.
Lawrence Klindt Kentwell, a twenty-two-year-old businessman andstudent at Columbia University Law School experienced “the mosthumiliating hold-up” when he returned from the Philippines to his homein Honolulu in 1904.25 Kentwell, born of an English father and a Chinese
mother, made several trips to San Francisco and New York in the 1890s
and the early 1900s, but he had never been questioned or detained at theports because he was a British subject and he looked like a white middle-class Westerner. In February 1904, however, an immigration inspector in Honolulu who knew that Kentwell “had Chinese blood in his veins”
singled him out from other passengers on the steamship and demanded

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37

that he show his papers. Immediately after this incident, Kentwell begana campaign protesting the U.S. government’s classiﬁcation of him as
Chinese. He claimed that “my father is an Englishman, and as I was bornin British territory and under the laws of nations, I am English, theExclusion Act notwithstanding.”26 His allegation was, however, disregarded by immigration ofﬁcials in Honolulu and Washington, D.C.,
solely because Kentwell was half Chinese by blood. As evidenced in
Kentwell’s case, the Chinese exclusion policy also operated according
to the “one-drop rule.” Moreover, the “exempt class,” which included
merchants, teachers, students, government ofﬁcials, and travelers, wasno longer exempt from the exclusion.
The escalation in the harshness of the Chinese exclusion policy wasin fact closely linked to the expansion of the United States in terms of
its constituents and territory, and also to the increasing fear of degeneration resulting from the incorporation of undesirable elements into thenation. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii and then attacked andacquired most of Spain’s colonies, including the Philippines, Puerto
Rico, and Guam. This expansion of U.S. territory evoked vigilance andanxiety among the exclusionists, for there was a large population ofChinese laborers in the newly acquired territories. They feared that these
Chinese would ﬂock to the U.S. mainland. Such fears, moreover, drove
them to press Congress to extend the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was
about to expire. They also pleaded with the government to even further
strengthen the Chinese exclusion policy in order to respond to the new
realities posed by the United States becoming an empire. In November
1901, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors called a Chinese exclusion convention to encourage Congress to extend and strengthen the
Chinese Exclusion Act. It brought together about three thousand delegates for the purpose of protecting the United States from the invasionof “a nonassimilative race,” who “have not in any sense altered their
racial characteristics, and have not socially or otherwise, assimilatedwith our people.”27
In 1902, to no one’s surprise, Congress passed the new law to extend
the Chinese Exclusion Act indeﬁnitely and “to prohibit the coming into
and to regulate the residence within the United States, its territories, andall territory under its jurisdiction . . . of Chinese and persons of Chinese
descent.”28 With the renewal of this act, the range of the excludable
Chinese was extended, literally, to anyone with Chinese blood coming
into or residing within all U.S. territories. Senator George Hoar of

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Massachusetts, one of a small minority who voted against the bill, gavea critical account of the way that the Chinese exclusion policy had been
intensifying over the years:
We have been going on with this sort of legislation, step by step. We could
not wash out this spot with water and so we took vinegar. We could not wash
it out with vinegar and so we tried a solution of cayenne pepper. And now
comes to the Paciﬁc Coast to us with a proposition of vitriol, which they hope
will work.29

Through gradual processes, as Senator Hoar described, the Chinese
exclusion policy enhanced the harshness, ﬁnally to the level that it had
become enforced in an almost indiscriminate manner.
Under the renewed Chinese exclusion law, in which the category of“Chinese” was stretched to the maximum possible range, many who fell
under this category were taken into custody. In 1904, three exhibitioners from Shanghai who had been invited to participate in the St. Louis
World’s Fair were detained in San Francisco. In 1905, Wah Sang, aProtestant minister who preached the Gospel to the Chinese under the
auspices of the Methodist Church, was arrested in Texas for having violated the Chinese Exclusion Law. In that year, T. King, who was on thetrip back to Shanghai from London after graduation from the Universityof London, was detained with her three brothers when they tried to land
at Boston to take a train for Vancouver.30 These incidents represented
just the tip of the iceberg. Ng Poon Chew (Wu Panzhao), a Chinese newspaper publisher in San Francisco, deplored the situation and stated: “TheExclusion Law has been carried out with such vigor that it has almost
become an extermination law.”31 As a result of concern over the unjust
treatment of Chinese, the backlash against the U.S. Chinese exclusion
policy grew rapidly among Chinese within and beyond China’s border,
which culminated in the anti-American boycott movement in 1905.
Behind this surge of anti-American sentiment and protests was a swellof Chinese nationalism fueled by the formation and spread of the new
notion of Chinese as one race and one national people.

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EMERGENCE OF THE CHINESE AS ONE RACE AND
ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE
There was no all-encompassing notion of the Chinese nation before
the beginning of the twentieth century in China. In his article written in
1899, Liang Qichao, a scholar and political reformer in exile, bemoaned
that “the Chinese people do not even know there is such a thing as anational people [guomin].”32 In the view of Liang, who was concerned
about a China whose sovereignty was being encroached on by imperial
powers, the notion of guomin was vital for the survival of China because
it was an idea that integrated and uniﬁed Chinese into one national people. Just a few years after the above comment was made, however, therevolutionary Zhang Shizhao noted that “the grandest term that has thegreatest attraction and impact on the country [China] is none other thanguomin.”33 As Zhang observed, guomin was gaining currency at an
amazing pace among intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries. The
rapid and extensive spread of the notion of guomin was not simply owing
to the historical situation in which China found itself but, as well, to thegrowing impact of the global discourse of social Darwinism, the latter
inciting a sense of urgency among many Chinese to strengthen theircountry.
The ideas of social Darwinism caught the wide attention of the Chinese
public through a series of short essays written by Yan Fu in 1895 that
introduced the work of Herbert Spencer. The doctrine of “the survivalof the ﬁttest” exercised a profound inﬂuence on certain reformers andrevolutionaries, prompting them to perceive the historical conditions ofChina from the perspective of global competition. Their bleak diagnosis for China utilizing the insights of social Darwinism took into accountrecent upheavals such as defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) andthe subsequent suppression of the Boxer Uprising by foreign troops(1899–1901). They saw China as having entered a period of wangguo(loss of the state), which traditionally meant a change of dynasties but
now gained a new connotation—national subjugation, or a condition of
being colonized by foreign powers.34 To overcome what they saw as
China’s colonization, or wangguo, reformers and revolutionaries wanted
Chinese to unite as one national people. Having been baptized in theideas of social Darwinism, which saw “race” as a fundamental element
for the survival of nations, many now sought racial unity and determination through the idea of consolidating all Chinese into one race. These

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ideas of a one-race China were divided into two different versions thatwere rooted in different interpretations of wangguo.
Reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who both advocateda constitutional monarchy for China, maintained that China had fallen
into a state of subjugation to imperial powers. The onset of foreign powers in China required nothing less than a new conception of China that
could deliver national cohesion. They promoted a conception of Chinesethat they hoped could unite the Han, the Manchu, and other minorities
as one “yellow race” (huangzhong) who were all descendents of the
Yellow Emperor. Their notion of the Chinese as a distinct race was basedon an imaginary lineage of the mystical ﬁgure purported to be the ancestor and progenitor of all Chinese. In contrast, however, revolutionaries
like Sun Yat-sen, who advocated a republic, forged a more racially puriﬁed notion of the Chinese as one race. They understood wangguo interms of Manchu rule in China, and for them it was the Qing government
rather than Western powers that was the source of the problem. Sun andothers thus promoted the idea of Chinese as the “Han” descendents of
the Yellow Emperor, a superior race that constituted an absolute majority
in China.35
Although reformers and revolutionaries embraced different visions ofracialized identity of Chinese as a “yellow race” and as a “Han race,”they were in agreement that race was indeed the single most importantand promising means to incorporate all Chinese, regardless of their age,class, or gender, into one Chinese nation as a community united by blood
ties. In this vein, Zou Rong, a young revolutionary who had just comeback from Japan, described how race could serve as a catalyst for uniting people to tackle wangguo. In 1903, he argued that “when men love
their race, solidarity will arise internally, and what is outside will be
repelled.” For Zou, a Han nationalist, what is foreign to the Chinese race
was ﬁrst and foremost the Manchu. Nevertheless, Zou did not ignore thethreat posed by foreign imperialists. Zou went as far as to claim that the
clash between China and Western powers was unavoidable if Western
powers kept harassing China, because “the yellow and white races . . .
are fundamentally incapable of giving way to each other.” From this conviction, he urged his “revered and dear 400 million compatriots” to standup for the great cause: “China is the China of the Chinese.”36
The new notion of Chinese as one race and one national people spreadquickly through the activities of the reformers and revolutionaries athome and abroad. One signiﬁcant trigger for mobilizing Chinese inside

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41

and outside of China, under the banner of Chinese as one race and one
people, was the U.S. Chinese exclusion policy. The harsh treatment ofChinese in the United States was regarded as demeaning Chinese to thelevel of “slaves” (nuli)—subjugated people who were considered to be
the antithesis of free and independent “national people” (guomin). Lin
Shu, a famous translator, lamented in 1901 in his notes for the translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that “recently thetreatment of blacks in America has been carried over to yellow people.”
He astutely recognized the race-based discriminatory system in the
United States that interlocked Chinese and African Americans. Lin,furthermore claimed that “the yellow people are probably treated evenworse than the blacks.” Nevertheless, he continued, “our country’s power is weak, and our envoys are cowardly and afraid of arguing with theAmericans.”37 As Lin claimed, the Qing government was not succeeding in securing the rights of Chinese in the United States. Given the situation, some reformers and revolutionaries began to seek resolution
through popular movements, such as organizing a boycott to end the U.S.
government’s Chinese exclusion policy. It was overseas Chinese communities that ignited waves of protest against the Chinese exclusion policy.
From the mid-nineteenth century, a number of Chinese began to crossthe Paciﬁc to places such as California and Hawaii. Most of them werehuagong, Chinese laborers from the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong
Province. They were engaged in digging mines, building railroads, andworking at sugarcane plantations, being incorporated into the capitalistcolonial world system as cheap labor. During the late nineteenth century, more Chinese laborers moved from rural to urban centers—somelooking for better opportunities, some escaping from anti-Chinese persecution in the Northwest, and some giving up the idea of becoming
farmers because the Chinese exclusion laws prohibited Chinese ownership of land. San Francisco’s Chinese community was one of those communities that grew rapidly by absorbing those inner migrants. Liang
Qichao, who visited in 1903, described the daily situation of this highlyvariable and patchy immigrant community by observing that “the Sanyi
and Siyi huiguan [regional associations] behave almost like enemy countries and bloody murders are constantly occurring.”38 As Liang argued,
the Chinese community in San Francisco was, like other Chinese communities in the United States, not a cohesive one.39 He went on to saythat “unless an issue touches the interests of the Chinese people as a

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whole, those huiguan will never sit down at the negotiating table in the
Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association [also known as the
Chinese Six Companies—the umbrella organization for Chinese mutual
beneﬁt associations].”40 The issue of a growing Chinese exclusion policy was one that led to uniting those belonging to different native-placeand clan associations, as one national people. Under the situation that,regardless of native place, clan, and occupation, Chinese were lumped
together as an inferior race to be excluded, overseas Chinese communities gradually moved on to organizing boycotts to tackle the discriminatory treatment of Chinese in the United States.
UNITING CHINESE UNDER THE BANNER OF RACE AND
THE 1905 ANTI-AMERICAN BOYCOTTThe ﬁrst ﬁres of the anti-American boycott movement were lit in
Hawaii in 1903, which had recently become a territory of the UnitedStates. The Chinese community in Hawaii cast a vigilant eye on thecourse of events surrounding their status under the new ruler. Theyobserved carefully the implications of the Chinese exclusion policy thatlinked it to the ambitious moves of the United States to extend its dominance to the Paciﬁc and Asia. The acute caution and wariness of theChinese in Hawaii toward the mainland largely resulted from their witnessing the harsh reality of the wangguo (loss of the state) of Hawaii,
caused by the encroachment of imperial powers—ﬁrst through the massive depopulation of native Hawaiian islanders by epidemics of diseases
brought by Westerners, and then with the end of the Hawaiian kingdom
as a consequence of colonization by the United States. An article in 1903
in Xin Zhonguo bao (New China Daily), a Chinese newspaper foundedin Hawaii in 1900, pointed out that the annexation of Hawaii and colonization of the Philippines was a stepping stone for the United States toexpand its sphere of interest in the Paciﬁc:
The United States kept the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, but it reversed
course and invaded Honolulu, attacked Cuba, and occupied the Philippines. . . .
Honolulu was an important place in the Paciﬁc. So the United States took it
over and made it into its second naval base to protect its business interests.
The Philippines were the strategic gateway to southeast China, so the UnitedStates occupied them . . . to control trade routes.”41

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

43

Some Chinese in Hawaii, in particular those who were involved in activism led by the Chinese Empire Reform Association (Baohuang hui),thought that one effective measure to check the expansion of the UnitedStates in the Paciﬁc region was to demonstrate the great might of theChinese people by pressuring the U.S. government to change its foreign
policy and lift the Chinese exclusion ban. The Xin Zhongguo bao suggested in 1903 that although “the United States is a strong country andChina is a weak country . . . [since] China has large population” it should
resort to mass protests by boycotting American goods.42 The ﬁrst beacon of an anti-American boycott that was lit in Hawaii traveled quickly
to other overseas Chinese communities as well as to China itself. In 1904,
newspapers such as the Shibao (Times) in Shanghai and the Zhongguo
ribao (China Daily) in Hong Kong ran articles calling for boycotting
American goods.43
In May 1905, a nationwide anti-American boycott movement erupted
ﬁrst in Shanghai and then spread to Guangzhou and other places throughnewspapers, handbills, speeches, plays, and songs. Novels like Ku shehui (The bitter society), which detailed “a history of blood and tears of
the lives of huagong [Chinese laborers]” were also published andaroused sympathy among many Chinese.44 The rising sentiment ofcompassion for overseas Chinese laborers furthermore mobilized theidea of Chinese as one national people. A boycott pamphlet publishedin Guangzhou in 1905 claimed that “if the gentry, peasants, artisans, andmerchants were all Chinese people, why is it that only laborers have tosuffer—aren’t they on a par with people from the other three classes?”45
Class barriers were now broken down by the all-inclusive notion of“Chinese.”
In addition to class barriers, gender divisions were also overridden by
the umbrella category of “Chinese.” Many handbills encouraging womento participate in the boycott were distributed. One of the handbills said
that although women had bound feet and were dependent for their livelihood on their husbands, “if they participate in the movement of boycotting American goods, they can carry out their duty as members of thenation.”46 Participating in the boycott was now regarded as working forthis national cause and was advocated as a citizen’s duty for all Chinese
people, including women. In a similar vein, a handbill entitled “Anappeal to the two hundred million compatriot sisters” called for Chinese
women to join the boycott based on the logic that if a woman boycotted
American goods, “a dozen of [her] family members [also end up] not

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buying American goods.”47 Women’s role as the guardians of the family was advocated as crucial in the boycott.
Moreover, the rhetoric of Chinese women as “mother of the nation”
was also mobilized in the boycott. A female character in a boycott novel,
who asked for the support for the boycott from other women, said:
Among the overseas Chinese, workers form the greatest numbers, and theyalso suffer the most. If workers can get out of the bitter sea onto the happy
land, merchants and students will automatically enjoy the same rights. If wejust revise the treaty in order to beneﬁt merchants and students alone, theworkers will not have the same rights. Sisters! Aren’t they our children too?48

Clearly the notion of Chinese as one race and one people was extended
to overseas Chinese, and the predicament of overseas Chinese wasassumed to belong to all Chinese, regardless of class and gender. Therewas even a song upholding the spirit of the boycott proclaiming that “wewould risk our lives to ﬁght against exclusion and to accomplish our goal.
My fellow one hundred thousand compatriots [in the United States], doyou hear me?” The boycott became a ground swell mass movement
involving thousands of Chinese nationwide. The imagined communityof the Chinese race thus extended beyond national borders.
In face of massive demonstrations against the Chinese exclusion
policy in the United States, William W. Rockhill, a U.S. government
minister to China, demanded that the Qing government suppress the antiAmerican protests. The Qing government, after having repeated perfunctory responses to the U.S. government, ﬁnally came to terms withthe leaders of the boycott. The participants of the boycott, as expected,
leveled their criticism at the action taken by the Qing government. The
merchants in Huai’an, Juangsu Province, for instance, published an open
letter of protest in the Xinwen bao (News Daily):
To boycott is the right of individuals, and the government does not have theright to interfere. . . . We want to let the world know that China has an incompetent government . . . but has competent national citizens. . . . The government cannot violate the people’s will.49

They claimed that the Qing government had violated the rights and thewill of the Chinese people in order to appease the U.S. government. They
also turned their ﬁre on the U.S. government that had pushed theirEXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

45“incompetent government” to quell the boycott movement: “If the U.S.
government under the Democratic Party could not stop the exclusion ofChinese laborers, how dare your government ask our [Chinese] government to stop our people boycotting American goods.”50
As they correctly observed, the U.S. government did not have any
intention of changing the Chinese exclusion policy. Although Theodore
Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, admitted that
“undoubtedly one of the chief causes of the boycott has been the shortcomings of the United States Government and people in the matter of
the treatment of Chinese here,” he nonetheless maintained that the exclusion policy reﬂected the American people’s will.51 In a similar vein,
Secretary of War William H. Taft also expressed empathy for the boycott
in his interview with the Shanghai-based Nanfang bao (Southern News),
noting that “there can be no doubt that the protest you did raise . . . called
the attention of the whole American people to the grave injustice andabuse of the laws of immigration by some of our immigration ofﬁcers.”
Yet, regarding the possibility of relaxing the Chinese exclusion laws,
Taft ﬁrmly replied that “at present it was impossible owing to the strong
sentiment against it.”52 As Taft stated, relaxing the Chinese exclusion
laws was not exactly an option for the United States, not simply because
it stood against public opinion, but also because the Chinese exclusion
policy was part of the ideological foundation for deﬁning and maintaining the boundaries of U.S. citizenship. In other words, the existence of
the Chinese functioned as a reference point for assessing the eligibility
for membership in the nation of those on the social margins or geographic
periphery, such as African Americans, U.S. subjects in newly acquired
territories, and immigrants from various parts of the world. Put differently, the concept of the Chinese as an unassimilable alien race had
become an indispensable pillar supporting the system of race-based U.S.
immigration and citizenship policies.
CONCLUSION
The conﬂict over the U.S. Chinese exclusion policy between the U.S.
and China highlighted the different notions of “Chinese”—one as an unassimilable alien race and one as a national people. These differences
reﬂected different historical conditions in the United States and China.
The United States—an expanding empire nation-state in terms of its constituents and territories—feared “degeneration” from absorbing undesirable

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elements into it. China—a country on the verge of being overrun byintruding imperial powers because of the weak Qing government—
feared wangguo, namely national subjugation. In order to tackle theirrespective predicaments, the United States and China each took advantage of their respective notions of “Chinese.” The logic behind thisparallel development of mobilizing notions of “Chinese” was the racenation linkage informed by the “survival of the ﬁttest” doctrine found insocial Darwinism. Based on this rationale, in the United States,“Chinese” became a benchmark for the race-based selective system of
immigration and citizenship. In China, conversely, “Chinese” became
the basis for the solidarity of one national people whose fates were linked
through blood.
The historical situation that brought these two notions of “Chinese”
into a head-on clash was the expansion of the United States and China
into the Paciﬁc region: one through territorial expansion across the
Paciﬁc and the other through population movements within the worldsystem network in the Paciﬁc region. The encounter between the two in
the Paciﬁc region led to the formation and intensiﬁcation of the Chinese
exclusion policy through the racialization of the Chinese. This development, moreover, also led to a momentum in China toward a different sortof racialization of the Chinese. These two directions in racializing the
Chinese eventually resulted in a collision: the anti-American boycott
movement. The movement revealed the reality of an increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of a world in which the notion of race
could be used as an ideological variable in the formation and development of the nation-state, in effect positioning the modern nation withina network of global relations.
NOTES
1
Quoted in Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 36.
2
Ibid., 36–37.
3
In this article, I take social Darwinism to be a global discourse that transformed thehistorical consciousness among intellectuals not only in Western countries but also in
non-Western countries, though in different ways, and generated an increasing sense ofinterconnectedness in the world. For the inﬂuences of Darwinism in China, see James
Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1983).
4
For the emergence of the conception of Chinese as one race and one people, see
Wang Lei, “The Deﬁnition of ‘Nation’ and the Formation of Han Nationality,” Social

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

47

Sciences in China Vol. 4, no.2 (June, 1983):167–88; Frank Dikötter, The Discourse ofRace in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Sung-chiao
Shen and Sechin Y. S. Chien, “Turning Slaves into Citizens: Discourses of Guomin and
the Construction of Chinese National Identity in the Late Qing Period,” in Dignity of
Nations: Equality, Competition, and Honor in East Asian Nationalism, ed. John Fitzgerald
and Yongxiang Qian (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006); and Rebecca
E. Karl, Stating the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
5
On U.S. Chinese exclusion policies from the 1880s to 1900s, see Erika Lee, At
America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kitty Calavita, “The Paradoxes of Race,
Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882–1910,” Law
and Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1–40; Lucy Sayler, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese andthe Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995); Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community
in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); and Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: Enforcing Chinese Exclusion, 1898–1924,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 377–403.
6
Quoted in Ng Poon Chew, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the
United States: A Statement from the Chinese in America (San Francisco: Chung Sai Yat
Po, 1908), 5.
7
Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 13, part 4, 2608.
8
For images of Chinese immigrants before the exclusion era, see Stuart Creighton
Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); and John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown:
Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999).
9
U.S. Const., Amendment XIV, Sec. 1.
10
The Congress Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., part 4, 2890.
11
Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S.
Citizenship,” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative
Racialization, ed. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011), 306. Among African Americans, there were those like
Frederick Douglass who expressed sympathy toward the Chinese.
12
Quoted in Jun, “Black Orientalism,” 313.
13
22 Stat. 61 (1882).
14
Jun, “Black Orientalism,” 309.
15
Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 13, part 4, 1713, 1519, 1645, 1977.
16
For the inﬂuence of social Darwinism in the United States, see Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1992);
Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Thought(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); and Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism
in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
17
Theodore Roosevelt, “National Life and Character,” in The Works of Theodore
Roosevelt: American Ideals with a Biological Sketch (New York: P. F. Collier & Son,
1897), 307.
18
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, section 2 (22 Stat. 59): “That the master of any
vessel who shall knowingly bring within the United States on such vessel, and land or
permit to be landed, any Chinese laborer, from any foreign port or place, shall be deemed

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guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a ﬁne of not
more than $500 for each and every such Chinese laborer so brought, and may be also
imprisoned for a term not exceeding one year.”
19“The Chinese Question: Judge Nelson Renders an Elaborate Decision in the Caseof Ah Shong,” New York Times, August 20, 1883, 5.
20“Chinese from Hong Kong,” New York Times, October 14, 1883, 8.
21
23 Stat. 115.
22
“That these provisions should apply to all persons of the Chinese race, whether the
subjects of China or other foreign power,” 25 Stat. 504.
23
Quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, 105.
24
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537, 561 (J. Harlan Dissenting).
25“Exclusion–Boycott: A Chinese-American Student Cries ‘Check’ in the Game,”
New York Times, February 26, 1906, 5.
26
Quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, 79–80.
27
For the Reenactment of the Chinese Exclusion Law: California’s Memorial to the
President and the Congress of the United States, Senate Document no. 191. 57th Cong.,
1st Sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1902), 4.
28
32 Stat. 176.
29
“Chinese Exclusion Bill,” New York Times, April 11, 1902, 3.
30
Ng Poon Chew, Treatment of the Exempt Class, 8–9, 11–12.
31
Ibid., 4.
32
Quoted in Karl, Stating the World, 69.
33
Quoted in Shen and Chien, “Turning Slaves into Citizens,” 50.
34
Karl, Stating the World, 15.
35
Dikötter, Discourse of Race in Modern China, 116–19.
36
Tsou Jung (Zou Rong), The Revolutionary Army: A Chinese Nationalist Tract of1903 (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1968), 106, 113.
37
Lin Shu, “Translator’s Notes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Land Without Ghosts:
Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. R.
David Arkush and Leo O. Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 78.
38
Liang Qichao, “Xin da lu you ji [Memories of travels in the New World],” in Jindai
zhongguo shiliao congkan [Compiled historical documents of modern China], ed. Shen
Yunlong, vol.10, (Taibei: Wenhai Chuban she, 1966), 389.
39
A large number of Chinese who came to North America in the latter half of thenineteenth century originally heralded from a region along the Pearl River Delta in
Guangdong Province and spoke Cantonese. Yet they were subdivided by subdialects
and regional groups, such as Sanyi [three counties] group who came from Nanhai,
Shunde, and Panyu Counties, and Siyi [four counties] group who came from Xinhui,
Taishan, Kaiping, and Enping Counties.
40
Qichao, “Xin da lu you ji,” 388.
41
“Ni dizhi jinli ce [A proposal for a boycott against the exclusion policy],” Xin
Zhongguo Bao [New China Daily] (1903), in Fan mei huagong jiuyue wenxue ji [A collection of the literature protesting against the U.S. exclusion of Chinese laborers], ed.
A. Ying (Beijing: Zhonghua shuji, 1960), 591.
42
“Ni dizhi junli ce,” in Ying, Fan mei huagong jiuyue wenxue ji, 591.
43
Local newspapers, many of which came into being at the turn of the century in China
and within overseas Chinese communities, along with the development of telegraphy
communication, played a signiﬁcant role in the creation of the 1905 anti-American boycott movement. See Youngming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, theInternet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006), chap. 4.

EXCLUDABLE ALIENS VS. ONE NATIONAL PEOPLE

49

44
A. Ying, “Guanyu fan mei huagong yue de wenxue [Concerning the literature
protesting against the U.S. exclusion of Chinese laborers],” Fan mei huagong jiuyue
wenxue ji, 11.
45“Tongbao shounue ji [A story of suffering of fellow Chinese],” in Ying, Fan mei
huagong jiuyue wenxue ji, 552.
46
Zhi Qun, “Zhengyue zhi jinggao er [Second warning about ﬁghting against Chinese
exclusion],” in Ying, Fan mei huagong jiuyue wenxue ji, 651.
47
Lin Guanhong, “Jinggao er wan wan tongbao jiemei [An appeal to two hundred million compatriot sisters],” in Ying, Fan mei huagong jiuyue wenxue ji, 649.
48
Quoted in Guanhua Wang, “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott: A Social andCultural Reassessment” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1994), 189.
49
Quoted in Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern
Chinese Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 125.
50
Ibid.
51
Roosevelt to T. C. Fieldlander, November 23, 1905, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The
Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol.5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953),
90–91.
52
W. K. Roberts, The Mongolian Problem in America: A Discussion of the Possibilityof the Yellow Peril, with Notes upon American Diplomacy in its Relation to the Boycott(San Francisco: Organized Labor Print, 1906), 24.