Chinese, white and Indigenous groups worked and lived alongside one another peacefully enough in the early years of the gold rush. The lines of racial division began to harden with the popularisation of the myth that Chinese workers were slave-like ‘coolies’. Bigler, the governor of California, claimed that these workers were controlled by ‘Chinese masters’ who held their families hostage by force. Preying on white miners’ fears of declining wages, he tried to associate Chinese migrants with enslaved Black and Hawaiian people or networks of Asian indenture in the Atlantic – the implication being that all ‘coloured’ races were inherently unfree.
Another figure whose ideas shaped the politics of Asian exclusion was the American political economist Henry George, a firm critic of monopoly capital. (Ironically, his work later inspired Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Kuomintang.) In 1869 he published an essay on ‘The Chinese in California’. The split between labour and capital, George wrote, was a zero-sum game, and cheaper wages paid to Chinese workers meant ‘the share of labour is to be smaller, that of capital greater.’ George’s critics – including John Stuart Mill – argued that Chinese migrants would inevitably earn higher wages over time and assimilate into the workforce. But George continued to insist on what Ngai calls ‘anti-coolieism’s central fiction’: the idea that Chinese workers were, and would continue to be, unfree.
In 1852 California introduced its first anti-Chinese law, a tax on foreign miners that targeted Chinese migrants in particular. In order to work, foreigners had to pay three dollars a month; before long, these fees provided up to a quarter of state revenues. As the mines were slowly exhausted, big capital took over the industry, and, in the wake of the Civil War, the Californian economy went into recession. White workers ‘found in the Chinese Question a racial scapegoat and a racial theory ready at hand’. They were led not by miners themselves but by white craftsmen – masons, metalworkers, carpenters – spooked by the fate of their peers in the cigar-making industry, who had been supplanted by Chinese labourers.
Earlier legislation merely tried to make it harder for Chinese immigrants to work, but the Page Act of 1875 explicitly sought to keep them out of the country. It targeted unfree ‘coolies’ and ‘slave girls’, banning contract labourers, criminals and prostitutes from immigrating to the US. This effectively barred all Chinese women, entrenching the sexual imbalance in Chinese migration (women made up between 3 and 7 per cent of the Chinese American population until the 20th century), and codifying racial and sexual tropes. The wave of legislation culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all immigration by Chinese workers, the first such law to name a specific racial group. A wave of white violence against Chinese communities followed, with 439 anti-Chinese attacks – murders, lynchings, arson – recorded across Oregon, Wyoming and the Puget Sound between 1885 and 1887.