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Ngai, Mae

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics

W. W. Norton (New York)

2021



OUR SYNOPSIS: Mae Ngai tells the stories of the nineteenth century Chinese diaspora in the Anglo-American gold-producing regions of California, the Australian colony of Victoria, and South Africa’s Witwatersrand. Chinese relations with Anglo-Americans unfolded on these goldfields, inextricably shaped by race and labor. She argues, “The sudden increase in world gold production resulted from Anglo-American settler colonialism and capitalist development.” (24) The U.S. and the British colonies responded with exclusionary policies. Unlike the free labor prevalent in settler-colonial California and Victoria, the workers in South Africa were indentured. Nonetheless, their experiences and resistance show cross-regional similarities. In all these regions, Chinese people carved out spaces of cultural belonging through commercial and community development. Many built and preserved collective identity through work as well, creating mining cooperatives. Meanwhile, anti-Chinese sentiment and policies spread “beyond the goldfields” as Chinese people expanded their activities. (181)

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • What was the relationship between the gold rushes and Chinese exclusion? How did the work of gold mining itself shape processes of identity creation and belonging?

  • How did Chinese workers resist oppressive exclusionary policies?

  • How does a transnational approach encourage thinking differently about Chinese migration histories?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global capitalist economy but an integral part of it. The Chinese Question is the story of how the Chinese communities in the West were born of a powerful alchemy of race and money—colored labor and capitalism, colonialism and financial power—across the nineteenth century world.” (19)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

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