Chinese Exclusion in the Late 1800s

Cidette Rice
Mr.Roddy
IHSS
5/19/2020

Chinese Exclusion in the Late 1800s

In the mid 1800s, there was an economic crisis going on in China. It’s been theorized that this decline happened due to the sudden mass exporting of silver after decades of steady import of it. This decline started in 1820 and continued until the late 1850s and was called the Daoguang Depression. Not only was there a depression, but the Opium war and the Taiping rebellion also played big parts in influencing people to leave China. Many Chinese immigrants, mainly young single men, came to America to seek better financial opportunities that were popularized by the California gold rush. This led to an influx of chinese immigrants who either worked for other miners, or tried to find their own gold. After the initial craze of the California gold died down, many people moved on to jobs such as railroad workers, which led to the eventual construction of the transcontinental railroad by mainly immigrant chinese. In the 1870s, as more european immigrants came to America, they found that there was a shortage of jobs. Hostility against Chinese started to grow, and many Chinese people were driven out of their towns due to racial violence. The Chinese Massacre of 1871 occurred in Los Angeles, California, and it killed anywhere from 17 to 20 people. In 1882, congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all Chinese from immigrating to the U.S.

I find the whole situation really confusing, disrespectful, and disgusting. This is not only for the obvious reasons, such as the horrifying amount of racism prevalent in 1850s-1890s America, but because Americans were quick to throw out the Chinese (who had been there much longer and in my bigger numbers) rather than the Europeans. These new European guys come in and want jobs and the Americans rather take white strangers over the Chinese communities that they’ve known. While the Chinese Exclusion Act didn’t kick out American Chinese who already lived in the U.S, it still separated them from white Americans.

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