It was the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH that first attracted large numbers of Chinese people to the United States, and more particularly to the American West. Chinese emigration from Guangdong Province to “Gold Mountain,” as California was called, had begun in 1851 and reached substantial numbers in 1852, when perhaps as many as 25,000 Chinese came through San Francisco. The majority came as contract laborers, and from the beginning they were the most distinctive of the several groups that came from all over the world in response to the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Most of these sojourners—for they intended to return to their families and villages as soon as possible— arrived under a system of debt bondage that bound them to Chinese merchants for the price of their passage. They worked to pay this extended credit under such conditions and such terms that the indentured immigrants were slaves to well-to-do Chinese merchants.
Initially the new arrivals worked claims that were considered exhausted. That they would work for less and needed minimal subsistence gave them an advantage in the gold fields that soon generated hostility toward them. Since they worked for lower wages than Euro-Americans, and given the increasing competition in the California goldfields in the 1850s, the Chinese miners were targets for physical intimidation that could escalate into violence quickly. In addition to being mining competition, the Chinese were set apart from other foreign groups; they lived and worked together, they did not associate with other mining groups, they did not learn English, they made no attempts to assimilate, and they were non-Christian. Although they had come on a temporary basis, their financial bondage assured that their stay would be long. The California census of 1860 recorded almost 35,000 Chinese among the state’s population of some 380,000. Of the Chinese enumerated (and the number is probably an undercount because of the difficulty of listing Chinese names), three-fourths were found in the mining counties. The rest were in San Francisco, where they found work in laundries and restaurants or as servants. Indeed, as the rich claims played out, the numbers of Chinese miners probably grew in proportion to the whole, and this only increased the hostility toward them.
Beginning in the mid-1860s, as the mining opportunities diminished, the Chinese took jobs as contract laborers on the railroads under construction across the West. Anti-Chinese feelings then transferred from the mining districts to the cities, especially San Francisco, where they became the targets of xenophobic political campaigns that sought scapegoats for unemployment, low wages, and hard times. Politicians vied with one another to make the most anti-Chinese statements in the course of their campaigns. That San Francisco was a growing city with a seasonal surplus of laborers (especially in winter, when there was an influx of miners into the city) added weight to the charge that Chinese laborers were taking jobs from Americans.
Further reading: Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in America, 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
World History
