Chinese Americans

Harvey Dong

CHINESE AMERICANS. The introduction of Marxism in China and a more inclusive Marxism in the US labor movement at the dawn of the twentieth century together shaped a Chinese immigrant Left with a transnational character. Activists searched for theories that could be used to liberate homeland China from colonialism. A liberated China, they believed, would also mitigate the racial oppression that Chinese immigrants faced in the United States. The embrace of Marxism thus provided the means to address the unique conditions of the Chinese laboring classes in America.

Translations of Marxist writings --reprinted in Chinese nationalist publications affiliated with the Chinese Empire Reform Association (Zhongguo Weixinhui) led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qiqiao-- found a ready readership. Later, the Revolutionary Alliance (Zhongguo Tongmenghui, led by Sun Yat-sen) continued to publish Marxist writings. Much of their activism, at first isolated within the Chinese immigrant community, eventually expanded to connect with the non-Asian American Left.

Chinese American workers had early and often shown a willingness to join established labor unions but were turned away by racist leaders and workers. During the late-nineteenth century, the American labor movement treated Chinese workers as a direct threat to their well-being. Labor leaders such as Denis Kearny of the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC, 1877-1880) and Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, fostered this ruinous division. The WPC considered itself socialist yet dismissed Asian labor as a tool of capitalism. Gompers never abandoned his view that Chinese workers not only competed with white workers but also menaced Western civilization at large

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) broke through this racist exclusionism. The labor shortage of World War I and the upsurge of union activity prompted the IWW to organize among Chinatown workers in 1919. The Unionist Guild or Workers League of San Francisco (Sanfanshi Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui) developed IWW branches in New York, San Francisco and Oakland. Later, organizing advanced among Chinese agricultural workers in Suisun, California, prompting a change of name to the Workers League of America (Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui), which began with a thousand members. Wobbly influence declined in the Chinese community, however, following a wave of employer strikebreaking, police harassment, and arrest. The weak legal status of Chinese activists left them prone to deportation. Yet Wobblies remained a propaganda force urging organization of all, holding on to some scattered Chinese American members and sympathizers.

The Russian Revolution had a huge impact on the Chinese American Left. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China and the KMT, urged Sino-Soviet cooperation to unify the country fragmented by warlord control. Communist activists within the first years of the KMT Party included Zhou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung. This amity ended with the death of Sun in 1925 and the rise of his protege, Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang sought to cleanse the KMT of all communist influence and in 1927 organized an anti-communist, anti-left coup in Shanghai that left hundreds under arrest or dead. By1928, all KMT-Soviet Union relationships had ended, with a wide impact abroad, including the United States.

The KMT quickly purged all Communists and leftists from its American offices. Leftist-controlled KMT newspapers such as Kuo Min Yat Po were shut down. In 1926, the crackdown spread to college students and workers who had founded the San Francisco Chinatown Sanminzhuyi Yanjiushe (Three People’s Principles Research Society), which focused on developing the left wing of the KMT. Activities continued after the 1927 coup, but the group name changed to the Kung Yu Club (After Hours Club) and the following year to Huaren Gongrenhui (Chinese Workers Club).

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), encouraged by its CPUSA supporters, accepted Chinese and Asian workers into their membership. (The American Federation of Labor, by contrast, largely continued to exclude Asians.) Outside the CIO, Chinese labor organizations grew rapidly during the late 1930s. Labor rights organizations such as the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association in San Francisco claimed a membership in the hundreds. Many Chinese workers also joined the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Alaskan Cannery Workers Union.

Nor were Left activities limited to employed workers and unions. Members of the Chinese Unemployed Councils in San Francisco and New York of the early 1930s participated in the larger citywide unemployment marches. The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (CHLA) gathered a thousand-member cadre of Chinese shop owners and workers to stand against discriminatory ordinances against Chinese hand laundries. The New York Board of Aldermen had proposed citizenship requirements, including a $1,000 yearly bond that essentially would have driven many Chinese hand laundries out of business. The CHLA successfully fought the ruling through public protests and legal action: the citizenship requirement was withdrawn, and the bond requirement lowered to $100.

The awakening of the Left and social movements during the Great Depression did not end the Chinese Exclusion Laws or racism against Asians. But the new politics of solidarity offered an opening for participation. Chinatown labor groups, for example, eagerly joined the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants.

After Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and the US entry into World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, China and the United States forged an alliance to defeat Japan and defeat Fascism world-wide. At the beginning of the war, 85 percent of the US military forces were engaged in Europe, compelling the United States to rely on China for the bulk of the fighting in Asia. Americans worked with both the KMT and CCP to defeat Japan in a united front. Domestically, alliances emerged among various elements in the Chinese American community, yielding coalitions such as the China War Relief Association.

Towards the end of the war, Chinese immigrant organizations extended their China Salvation work to support for the ongoing Chinese Revolution. China Daily News of New York, a newspaper published by the CHLA, and the China Youth League in San Francisco, a patriotic youth organization engaged in wartime relief work, both gained strength and influence. The China Youth League changed its name in 1946 to the Chinese American Democratic Youth League (Sanfanshi Minzhu Qingniantuan, or Ming-Qing), and sponsored social and cultural activities and study groups that followed the events in China.

The defeat of the Axis Powers also generated increased tension and conflict over what would become the People’s Republic of China. McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare led to the targeting of many Chinese American organizations now considered subversive. The staff of China Daily News of New York was charged with violating the Trading with the Enemy Act. Staff members were taken to federal court, jailed and fined in non-jury trials. A local gang or Tong assaulted the CWMAA of San Francisco event commemorating the founding of the People's Republic of China. Death lists with fifteen names were posted on Chinatown street corners. The attackers aligned with the KMT but quietly encouraged by authorities, now began to dominate the politics of Chinatowns in the United States.

Harassment, coupled with the stripping of US citizenship from hundreds of activists, led to a decline of leftwing activities within the Chinese American community during the 1950s and 1960s. The pressures did not let up until the later 1960s. The influence of the civil rights movement, Black Power, and anti-Vietnam war movement encouraged a younger generation to pursue anti-imperialist and anti-racist causes. The revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panther Party that began in Oakland, California seemed allied with the Chinese liberation led by Mao Tse-tung. The Black Panthers propagated Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, selling it on street corners, and promoted the idea of “serve the people.” This slogan translated into programs and alternative community services, such as breakfast for children, clothing and food drives, health care, and youth education.

Student and youth organizations became politically active in San Francisco’s Chinatown. These organizations included the International Collegiate Chinese For Social Action (1967-1970), the Asian American Political Alliance (1968-1970), and the Red Guard Party (1969-1971). In August 17, 1968, many activists participated in a March Against Poverty to undermine the myth that no poverty or oppression existed within the community. These groups supported the strikes for Third World studies at San Francisco State in 1968 and at UC Berkeley in 1969. The strikes led to the establishment of an Asian American Studies curriculum that emphasized community activism. As a result, an Asian Studies Field Office was established on the International Hotel block. Meanwhile, Everybody’s Bookstore offered a radical pro-China venue. After years of struggle, the International Hotel became an Asian American renaissance center that housed the Asian Legal Services, Kearny Street Workshop, Asian Community Center, Chinese Progressive Association, and the Chinatown Cooperative Garment Factory.

This pattern of agitation for Asian American and ethnic studies programs on the campuses spread to other locales. Struggles for space for political activism played a major role throughout Chinatowns in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia and Vancouver. By the mid-1970s, avowedly leftist organizations, most of them Maoist, had established themselves in Chinatowns across the United States. Influenced by the current revolutionary politics of China, these groups took part in mass-based organizing and expounded Marxist political theory. At the forefront were: I Wor Kuen (1969-1978), which became a nationwide organization with the incorporation of the Red Guard Party; and the Asian Study Group, which evolved into the Workers Viewpoint Organization (1973-1979); the Asian Community Center (1969-1977) and its collective body Wei Min She (formed in 1971) on Kearny Street in San Francisco Chinatown-Manilatown.

Coalitions formed to save the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown, a working-class Filipino and Chinese residential hotel threatened by development. Activists also advocated friendly relations between the United States and China to break the hold of the KMT on the Chinese American community. US-China friendship events coincided with Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979. In 1974, in New York’s Chinatown, the Asian Study Group helped form Asian Americans for Equal Employment to demand the hiring of Asian workers in the construction of a Confucius Plaza housing development. Activists worked with Chinese immigrant workers in union drives in the garment and electronics assembly industries and helped them prepare applications for citizenship.

Sectarian conflicts among the various Left organizations prevented unity on common issues and grew more intense over time. Suddenly, China could no longer be regarded as a model system, prompting disagreements concerning China’s turn towards capitalism. Differences also grew over the relationship between nationalism and class and the means to build solidarity among workers of different nationalities. Activists sought a way to engage the established labor movement without becoming bureaucrats themselves. Taken together, the end of the Vietnam War, the discouragement accompanying China’s turn toward capitalism, and battle fatigue from long years of sectarian struggle all had an exhausting effect. The Chinese American new left could not sustain itself.

In time, community non-profits took up much of the work addressing familiar issues, including labor exploitation, housing rights, and access to healthcare. Reformist aspirations replaced revolutionary ideologies. New mobilizations nevertheless energized activists and included LGBTQ rights, labor resistance, prisoner rights, and the movement against deportations of Southeast Asian refugees. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, new coalitions formed to resist Covid 19 “yellow peril racism” and to build Asian American community support for Black Lives Matter.

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