The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

Ngai (Impossible Subjects), a professor of Asian American studies at Columbia University, delivers a painstaking study of Chinese immigration to the U.S., Australia, and South Africa as gold rush fever swept the globe in the last half of the 19th century. Detailing increasingly labor-intensive mining practices, policies of exclusion and racial segregation, and the entrenchment of the “racist coolie stereotype,” Ngai contends that “Chinese emigrants suffered marginalization, violence and discrimination but they also adapted and persevered.” Extensive archival work reveals the earnings, possessions, and sometimes tragic fates of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese men who left home to pursue their fortunes. The wave of migration forced imperial China to engage with the world to a degree it had not done in the modern era, combating exclusionary laws that lasted until WWII in the U.S., and well into the 1970s in Australia and South Africa. Descriptions of the Zongli Yamen, the Qing government’s foreign office, offer an intriguing, rarely seen perspective on the diaspora and China’s response to humiliating global bigotry, which fueled a sense of grievance still evident in the country’s nationalistic rhetoric. Though dense and scholarly, this impressive volume adds a vital chapter in the history of globalization. (Aug.)