After the Chinese Presentation, I went home pondering over the two questions that came up during discussion. The first question being, how did the Chinese Exclusion Act affect other Asian races? After doing some more research, I learned that, at first, after the Act was established in 1882, only the Chinese were excluded and not the other Asian races. The Chinese were excluded because they were the main source of immigration and were targeted for job competition and minimum wage depletion on the west coast. But, shortly after, the exclusion was extended to encompass other Asian ethnicities. In 1898, the U.S. took control of the Philippines and refused them entrance into the mainland. Taiwanese immigrants weren’t that prevalent until after the 1950s when the Immigration Acts became more tolerant of Asians. The Koreans, on the other hand, came in small waves and were more populated in Hawaii. The other Asian ethnicities came for equivalent reasons why the Chinese were pulled to the States: to make a fortune or to gain an education as students. In contrast to the common belief that the Chinese Exclusion Act became a detrimental general exclusion that dragged down the other Asian ethnicities, the Chinese immigrants were actually the ones who took the first major blow of racism and hostility that was vital before the gradual tolerance that the other ethnicities (Taiwanese and Korean) experienced upon their late arrival after the 1950s.
The second question that came up in our late discussion was whether or not the Chinese reciprocated the racist and hostile sentiments towards American immigrants that entered China. After considering the comparison with the sentiments expressed during the Boxer Rebellion, a better example that I thought of after the presentation was the American missionaries who entered China shortly after the intrusion of foreign powers into China’s mainland. The main pull factor for the American missionaries was their hopes to spread Christianity in the lands that were previously inaccessible to them. The missionaries, for the most part, tried to assimilate/adapt to the Chinese culture by changing their hairstyle and their clothes with the objective of wanting the Chinese to not oppose them as head-on intruders. The missionaries tried to appeal to the lower social classes by sometimes even providing food and shelter for the poor. But, nevertheless, even under the traditional Chinese façade and clothing, the Chinese strongly opposed the missionaries as they were viewed as an outside unwanted influence to their society. More often than not, the Chinese would shut their doors to the presence of the missionaries and would even target them for torture in the forms of physical and verbal brutality. The Chinese even developed racist names for the missionaries including the notorious term “white ghost.” The missionaries weren’t even allowed to stay long, as the Communist party took over in 1950, the missionaries were fully eradicated, as they were a threat to the “sameness” ideology that the Communists upheld.
