I’m not surprised to learn that Chinatown had its own underground political system. However, I am surprised at how at how far they took the general American capitalistic system. Asian immigrants had many reasons to come to America. However, I assume that a major reason was the need for financial stability and the American right to compete in the economy. It’s interesting that the subculture of Chinatown included an economic system that was always trying to eliminate competition.

According to Kwong, Asian immigrants competed for space, or “territory” as they would call it, in Chinatown. This fact in itself is not particularly interesting. In fact, this type of behavior in our American society is very common. However, once a business took hold of a building, only their associates were able to use that space. It almost seems ridiculous that business owners would go to such extreme measures to ensure no one else had the right to property.

I understand wanting to maximize profit and minimize competition, but you can’t try to eliminate it all together. Isn’t this a form of monopolizing a markets? I suppose that because these deals included different types of affiliated businesses, nothing could have been done to stop it.  

With the way that Kwong described such affiliations in “The Defensive and Offensive Nature of the Associations,” it almost felt like there was some sort of economic war that happened in Chinatown. The fact that corporations fought to buy the most amount of buildings, only to exclude certain business owners from renting out property almost seems undemocratic. How were these corporations allowed to discriminate business owners based on affiliation with a certain social institution?

It was almost as if the rich were perpetually limiting the poor economically, even when immigrating to a new country. The wealthy would buy buildings, and would decide which smaller business owners would thrive based on their membership status.

-Christina Torossian