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IMPERIAL OPENINGS: CIVILIZATION, EXEMPTION, AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF MOBILITY IN THE HISTORY OF CHINESE EXCLUSION, 1868–1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Paul A. Kramer
Paul A. Kramer*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
*
email: paul.a.kramer@vanderbilt.edu
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By most measures, Daniel Augustus Tompkins was a highly unlikely opponent of totalized Chinese exclusion. The owner of three cotton mills and a New South booster editor, Tompkins presided over a racially segregated labor force and had much to say about the necessity of white supremacy for the progress of the South, the nation, and the world. So why, on March 14, 1906, did he testify before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressing his opposition to immigration officials' overzealous enforcement of legal barriers against Chinese immigration? Existing approaches to the racial politics of migration to the United States, which have emphasized the interchangeability of anti-black and anti-Chinese racisms in the nineteenth century, make it difficult to account for Tompkins' actions: they would lead us to expect that he would defend both complete Chinese exclusion and black subordination on similar racial grounds. This essay presents a new framework for conceptualizing migration, empire, and the politics of social differentiation that, among other things, will make sense of this seemingly unlikely intervention by a New South industrialist and racial ideologue in U.S. immigration politics. This framework brings together two traditionally separated fields of inquiry: migration history and imperial history. By revisiting Chinese exclusion (and its seemingly odd critics) through an imperial lens, it hopes to demonstrate the value—indeed, the necessity—of connecting these two approaches in the larger effort to entangle U.S. and global histories.

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Essays
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 317 - 347
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Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 On Tompkins' dialogues with European colonialists over the relationship between white rule and cotton production, see Clune, Erin, “From Lightest Cooper to the Blackest and Lowest Type: Daniel Tompkins and the Racial Order of the Global New South,” Journal of Southern History 76 (May 2010): 275–314Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). It is clear that many nineteenth-century commentators drew equivalences and comparisons between African Americans and the Chinese, especially when it came to questions of racialized dependent labor; my argument here is that in specific contexts—such as debates about the relationship between exports to China and Chinese exclusion—these visions could also diverge.

3 For a discussion of empire as an analytic category in U.S. historiography, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review (Dec. 2011): 1348–91. Efforts to link histories of migration, empire, and U.S. foreign relations are developing rapidly. For some recent, exciting works that point the way forward, see Donna Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U. S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press, 2012); Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jung, Moon-Ho, “Seditious Subjects: Race, State Violence, and the U.S. Empire,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14 (June 2011): 221–47Google Scholar; McGreevey, Robert C., “Empire and Migration: Coastwise Shipping, National Status, and the Legal Origins of Puerto Rican Migration to the United States,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (Oct. 2012): 553–73Google Scholar; Meredith Leigh Oyen, “The Diplomacy of Migration: Migration and U.S.-Chinese Relations, 1940–1965 (Cornell University Press, forthcoming); David Atkinson, The Burdens of White Supremacy: Asian Immigration Restriction and White Supremacy in the British Empire and the United States, 1897–1924 (work in progress). I map out ways to connect histories of U.S. immigration policy and U.S. global power in “The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and US Global Power” (work in progress).

4 For two different suggestions to bridge these historiographies, which inspire my own efforts, see Gordon H. Chang, “Asian Immigrants and American Foreign Relations” in Pacific Passage: The Study of American-East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, eds. Warren Cohen and Akira Iriye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 103–18; Sanchez, George J., “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18:4 (Summer 1999): 66–84Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

6 For a methodological discussion of transnational paradigms for U.S. immigration history, see Gabaccia, Donna, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (Dec. 1999): 1115–34Google Scholar. For the social sciences, see Nina Glick-Schiller, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration” in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, eds. Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Blanc-Szanton (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992), 1–24. For a powerful historicizing of scholarly treatments of immigration, see Wimmer, Andreas and Schiller, Nina Glick, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 2 (Oct. 2002): 301–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Among the key summons were Tyrrell, Ian, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991): 1031–55Google Scholar; Thelen, David, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79 (Sept. 1992): 432–62Google Scholar; Thelen, David, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (Dec. 1999): 965–75Google Scholar; Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–22. For discussions of transnational history for both the United States and globally, see, respectively, Rodgers, Daniel T., “American Exceptionalism Revisited,” Raritan 24 (Fall 2004): 21–47Google Scholar; AHR Conversation, “On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (Dec. 2006): 1441–64Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000); Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

9 For an elaboration of this critique, see Kramer, “Power and Connection.”

10 These estimates were by Smyth, Ellison A., a South Carolina textile industrialist, speaking before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Journal of the American Asiatic Association 6 (Apr. 1906): 83Google Scholar. On this trade, see Kang Chao, “The Chinese-American Cotton-Textile Trade, 1830–1930” in Ernest May and John K. Fairbank, America's China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance (Cambridge: Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Department of History, 1986), 103–50. On Chinese merchants and U.S.-Chinese trade, see Yong Chen, “Understanding Chinese American Transnationalism During the Early Twentieth Century: An Economic Perspective” in Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources, and Ideas between China and America During the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 156–73; Eve Armentrout Ma, “The Big Business Ventures of Chinese in North America, 1850–1930” in The Chinese American Experience, ed. Genny Lim (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1984), 101–12.

11 “Statement of Mr. D. A. Tomkins, of Charlotte, N.C., Representing the National Association of Manufacturers,” Journal of the American Asiatic Association, April 1906, 74.

12 Among the key works in a rich historiography of Chinese restriction as law, politics, and social experience are Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Estelle T. Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For recent works that place Chinese restriction in global contexts, see Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Marilyn Lake and David Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lee, Erika, “Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8 (Oct. 2005): 235–56Google Scholar; Chang, Pacific Connections; Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

13 While the fact of class-based exemption is noted descriptively in most existing historiography, its analysis has been limited. For one treatment, see Lee, At America's Gates, 87–92. For an older account that contains much material on the diplomatic politics of exemption but approaches class-based restriction as the proper solution to Chinese-U.S. tensions, and therefore fails to submit it to historical analysis, see Delber McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, 1900–1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977). For one exception, which centers on the politics of exemption in the lives of Chinese merchants in the 1890s, see Thornton, Brian, “Exceptions to the Rule: Chinese Merchants and the Exclusion Laws, 1890–1894,” Pacific Northwest Forum 6 (1992): 50–59Google Scholar.

14 Helen Chen, “Chinese Immigration into the United States: An Analysis of Change in Immigration Policies” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1980), 181.

15 “Statement of Mr. D. A. Tomkins, of Charlotte, N.C., Representing the National Association of Manufacturers,” 73.

16 While my focus here is the relationship between the United States and China, the British Empire faced similar dilemmas in squaring imperial diplomacy and white settler anti-Chinese exclusionism in Australia and Canada; it developed its own variants of imperial anti-exclusion as a result. See, especially, Lake and Reynolds, Drawing a Global Colour Line; R. A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Coloured Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).

17 Rev. William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States (Hartford, CT, S. S. Scranton and Company, 1870). For U. S.-China relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally, see Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

18 On the United States and the treaty ports, see Eileen Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On U.S. missions in China, see Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Xi Lian, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Paul A. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

19 On the Burlingame Treaty, see Schrecker, John, “'For the Equality of Men—For the Equality of Nations': Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States, 1868,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 17 (Mar. 2010): 9–34Google Scholar.

20 For this approach, which hailed China's role in the unfolding of a Pacific-centered Manifest Destiny and affirmed the role of Chinese laborers in building of the West, see Chang, Gordon, “China and the Pursuit of America's Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long,” Journal of Asian American Studies 15 (June 2012): 145–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cole, Cheryl L., “Chinese Exclusion: The Capitalist Perspective of the ‘Sacramento Union,’ 1850–1882,” California History 57 (Spring 1978): 8–31Google Scholar. On the contracting of Asian laborers in the Pacific Northwest, see Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections.

21 For this argument, see Esther Baldwin, Must the Chinese Go? An Examination of the Chinese Question (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1970 [1890]).

22 On the figure of the “coolie,” see Moon-ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). On the Chinese exclusion movement and the regional and national politics of Chinese exclusion see, especially Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Elmer Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939); Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). On the role of mass violence in the making of Chinese exclusion, see Beth Lew-Williams, “The Chinese Must Go: Immigration, Deportation, and Violence in the 19th-Century Pacific Northwest” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2011).

23 On the diplomatic politics of the Angell Treaty, see Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868–1911 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1983); Anderson, David L., “The Diplomacy of Discrimination: Chinese Exclusion, 1876–1882,” California History 52 (Spring 1978): 320–45Google Scholar.

24 On the politics of the 1882 act, see Gyory, Closing the Gates; Patrick, and Fisher, Shane, “Congressional Passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” Immigrants and Minorities 20:2 (2001): 58–74Google Scholar; Hune, Shirley, “Politics of Chinese Exclusion: Legislative-Executive Conflict, 1876–1882,” Amerasia Journal 9 (Summer 1982): 5–27Google Scholar.

25 I elaborate on the broader question of civilization and its varied and contested meanings across modern global history in “The Global Politics of Civilization,” work in progress, presented as “The Global Politics of Civilization,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 2012. For more on absolutizing and civilizing distinctions, see Paul A. Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty: Racialized Power, the United States and the World,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd edition, eds. Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

26 The remaining migrants were either native-born U.S. citizens of Chinese descent, or returning laborers, both of which had entry rights alongside the “exempt classes.”

27 On Chinese women's migration and restriction, see Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 94–146; George Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Migration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). On the role of gender in debates about Chinese immigration, see Karen J. Leong, “A Distant and Antagonist Race: Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869–1878,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, eds. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau (New York: Routledge, 2000), 131–48. On the key role of heteronormative, anti-homosexual politics in twentieth-century U.S. immigration regimes more generally, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

28 For a discussion of the problems of enforcing categories within Chinese restriction, see Calavita, Kitty, “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910,” Law and Social Inquiry 25 (Winter 2000): 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States.

30 On Chinese perceptions of the United States in the nineteenth century, see R. David Arkush and Leo Oufan Lee, Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-19th Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Wong, K. Scott, “The Transformation of Culture: Three Views of America,” American Quarterly 48 (June 1996): 201–32Google Scholar; Chang-fang Chen, “Barbarian Paradise: Chinese Views of the United States, 1784–1911,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1985); Curti, Merle and Stalker, John, “'The Flowery Flag Devils': The American Image in China, 1840–1900,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96 (Dec. 20, 1952): 663–90Google Scholar.

31 On Chinese diplomacy and Chinese migrants in the United States, see Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868–1911; Desnoyers, Charles, “'The Thin Edge of the Wedge’: The Chinese Educational Mission and Diplomatic Representation in the Americas, 1872–1875,” Pacific Historical Review 61 (May 1992): 241–63Google Scholar. On the CCBA, which both defended and surveilled Chinese migrants, and the practices of which were in many cases adopted by Chinese diplomats, see Yucheng Qin, The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China's Policy toward Exclusion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

32 Quoted in Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese, 84.

33 Hsueh memorial, quoted in Qinghuang Yan, Coolies and Mandarins: China's Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch'ing Period (1851–1911) (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985), 262–66. On Chinese diplomatic approaches to migration, see Yan, Coolies and Mandarins; Wang, Sing-wu, “The Attitude of the Ch'ing Court Toward Chinese Emigration,” Chinese Culture 9 (Dec. 1968): 62–76Google Scholar; Ching-hwang, Yen, “The Overseas Chinese and Late Ch'ing Economic Modernization,” Modern Asian Studies 16 (April 1982): 219–21Google Scholar. On Chinese diplomacy during this period more generally, see Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, China's Entrance into the Family of Nations: The Diplomatic Phase, 1858–1880 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

34 Wu Ting-Fang, “Mutual Helpfulness between China and the United States,” North American Review (July 1900): 10–11.

35 Wu Ting-Fang, “Mutual Helpfulness between China and the United States.” On Wu, see Linda Pomerantz-Zhang, Wu Tingfang (1842–1922): Reform and Modernization in Modern Chinese History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992); Yen Ching-hwang, Wu T'ing-Fang the Protection of the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1897–1903 (Working Papers No. 12, University of Adelaide, Center for Asian Studies, 1981).

36 On the Powderly/Sargent era, see McKee, Delber L., “'The Chinese Must Go!’: Commissioner General Powderly and Chinese Immigration, 1897–1902,” Pennsylvania History 44 (Jan. 1997): 37–51Google Scholar; McKeown, Melancholy Order, chapter 8; Lee, At America's Gates, 64–68.

37 The literature on Chinese resistance to restriction laws, by means of law, social protest, and subversion, is extensive. See Charles McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers; Lee, At America's Gates, esp. chapters 5–6; eds. K. Scott Wong and Suchen Chang, Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Christian Fritz, “Due Process, Treaty Rights, and Chinese Exclusion, 1882–1891” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Pomerantz, Linda, “The Chinese Bourgeoisie and the Anti-Chinese Movement in the United States, 1850–1905,” Amerasia 11 (Spring/Summer 1984): 1–34Google Scholar.

38 Ng Poon Chew, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the United States (San Francisco: The Author, 1908).

39 Ng Poon Chew, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the United States. On Ng, see Corrine K. Hoexter, “Dr. Ng Poon Chew and the History of the Chinese in America” in The Life, Influence and Role of the Chinese in the United States, 1776–1960 (San Francisco, 1976). On his newspaper, see Yumei Sun, “San Francisco's Chung Sai Yat Po and the Transformation of Chinese Consciousness, 1900–1920” in Print Culture in a Diverse America, ed. James Philip Danky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 85–100.

40 The New York Journal of Commerce, representing the city's exporting interests, came out as an opponent of Chinese exclusion as early as the first national exclusion laws. See, for example: “A Blow at Sectionalism,” April 10, 1882; “The Chinese Question,” April 13, 1882; “Congressional Insincerity,” May 1, 1882.

41 On the AAA generally, see JLorence, ames J., “Organized Business and the Myth of the China Market: The American Asiatic Association, 1898–1937,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 71 (1981): 1–112Google Scholar. On AAA activism on Chinese exclusion, see Lorence, James J., “Business and Reform: The American Asiatic Association and the Exclusion laws, 1905–1907,” Pacific Historical Review 39 (Nov. 1970): 421–38Google Scholar.

42 The exemplary subjects here were migrating students. On student migration in U.S. geopolitical imaginaries, see Kramer, Paul A., “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 33 (Nov. 2009): 775–806Google Scholar. On Chinese students in the United states in the early twentieth century, see Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Wang, Edward Qingjia, “Guests from the Open Door: The Reception of Chinese Students into the United States, 1900s–1920s,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 3 (Spring 1994): 55–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 “The Profit of Broad-Mindedness,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 1908, 1.

44 On Protestant missions and Chinese converts on the West Coast, see Derek Chang, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

45 Luella Miner, “American Barbarism and Chinese Hospitality,” Outlook (Dec. 27, 1902), 984–85.

46 Many missionaries took the goal of changing American images of the Chinese more seriously than their corporate counterparts. See Jennifer C. Snow, Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850–1924 (New York: Routledge, 2007).

47 “Statement of Mr. D. A. Tomkins, of Charlotte, N.C., Representing the National Association of Manufacturers,” 72.

48 Barrett, John L., “Our Interests in China—A Question of the Hour,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 21 (Jan. 1900): 43Google Scholar.

49 Hanford, quoted in Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women,” 116.

50 John Foord, “The Business Aspects of Chinese Exclusion,” New York Times, February 9, 1902, 24.

51 Address by Wu, “Dinner for Mr. Wu Ting-Fang,” Journal of the American Asiatic Association (Dec. 1902): 307.

52 On Chinese restriction and merchant communities in the Philippines, see Irene Jensen, The Chinese in the Philippines during the American Regime, 1898–1946 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975); Andrew R. Wilson, Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

53 Parsons, Journal of the American Asiatic Association, February 8, 1902, 24.

54 Cary, Journal of the American Asiatic Association, February 8, 1902, 28.

55 Hamlin, Journal of the American Asiatic Association, February 8, 1902, 27.

56 Webb, Journal of the American Asiatic Association, February 8, 1902, 29.

57 Foord, Journal of the American Asiatic Association (April 1906), 71. The record shows that Foord was interrupted prior to finishing his sentence: “We are not pleading any altruistic principles, but we—”

58 Quoted in McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, 96.

59 By spring 1905, migration diplomacy and hopes for civilized, treaty-based restriction had collapsed. McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, p. 101

60 On the boycott, see Sin-Kiong Wong, China's Anti-American Boycott Movement in 1905: A Study in Urban Protest (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); McKeown, Melancholy Order, chapter 11; Tsai, Chinese and the Overseas Chinese, chapter 5; Linda Pappageorge, “American Diplomats Response to Chinese Nationalism: China's Anti-American Boycott, 1905–1906; for Patriotism or Profit?” in Proceedings and Papers of the Georgia Association of Historians (1983): 98–110; Jane Leong Larson, “The Chinese Empire Reform Association (Bao-huanghui) and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott: The Power of a Voluntary Association” in The Chinese in America: From the Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, ed. Susie Lan Cassel (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2002); McKee, Delber, “The Chinese Boycott of 1905–1906 Reconsidered: The Role of Chinese-Americans,” Pacific Historical Review 55 (May 1986):165–91Google Scholar. On public opinion and “civil society” in late Qing society, see Rowe, William T., “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 19 (April 1993): 139–57Google Scholar; Akira Iriye, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Case of Late Ch'ing China” in Approaches to Modern Chinese History, eds. Albert Feuerwerker, Rhoads Murphey and Mary C. Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 216–37.

61 Wu Woyao, quoted in Wang, In Search of Justice, 153.

62 Golden World, in A. Ying, ed., Huagong Jinyue Wenxue Ji [A Collection of Literature against the United States Treaty Excluding Chinese Labor] (Shanghai, 1962), 176. Translation from the original Chinese by Belinda Huang.

63 McKee, “The Chinese Boycott of 1905–6 Reconsidered,” 182–83.

64 McKee, Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door, 138.

65 Quoted in McKee, Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door, 167.

66 McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, 128.

67 Department Circular No. 81, Bureau of Immigration, “Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws—General Instructions,” June 24, 1905, File No. 51881/85 and 51881/85A, RG85, Stack Area 17W3, Row 14, Compartment 11, Shelf 5, Box 275, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

68 Chinese diplomats held out the hope that Congressional action might break the deadlock. McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, p. 168.

69 Theodore Roosevelt, Annual Message to the President transmitted to Congress, December 5, 1905 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906).

70 Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, December 5, 1905.

71 Foord, March 14, Journal of the American Asiatic Association.

72 Denby, , Journal of the American Asiatic Association 6 (April 1906): 71Google Scholar.

73 Tompkins, Journal of the American Asiatic Association (April 1906): 72.

74 Moore, Journal of the American Asiatic Association (April 1906): 78.

75 On the congressional struggle over the Foster Bill, see McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door, chapter 11.

76 Oscar S. Straus, “The Spirit and Letter of Exclusion,” North American Review (Apr. 1908): 481.

77 “Speech of the Hon. Wm. H. Taft,” Journal of the American Association of China, November 1907, 23.

78 “Move to Revive Boycott,” Washington Post, January 1, 1907, 12.

79 On Angel Island, see Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lee, At America's Gates, 127–31; Barde, Robert and Bobonis, Gustavo J., “Detention at Angel Island: First Empirical Evidence,” Social Science History 30 (Spring 2006): 103–36Google Scholar.

80 “Two Reforms at Angel Island,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 1910, 15.

81 On the disciplinary politics of proceduralism see, especially, McKeown, Adam, “The Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 377–403Google Scholar; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers.

82 Ng, The Treatment of the Exempt Classes, 4, 14.

83 “Chinese Exclusion,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1911, II4. Similarly, a February 9, 1909, telegram from the CCBA to the president protested against the treatment of “the citizens of Chinese descent, domiciled Chinese merchants, their families, the privileged classes of Chinese under the treaty,” contrasting it unfavorably with the treatment of the Japanese. File No.: 52363/14, RG85, Stack Area 17W3, Row 14, Compartment 16, Shelf 6, Box 498, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

84 On tensions over Japanese immigration and the Gentleman's Agreement, see Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).

85 For works that explore the ways geopolitical forces placed pressure on U.S. exclusionary regimes, see Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrant; Chang, Pacific Connections; Davis, Michael G., “Impetus for Immigration Reform: Asian Refugees and the Cold War,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 7 (Fall–Winter 1998): 127–56Google Scholar.