Chinese Question

CHINESE QUESTION. The immigration of Chinese workers into the United States was the first serious test of American socialists’ adherence to the principle of the international solidarity of the working class. From the birth of the First International in the 1860s to the death of the Socialist Party after World War I, though many principled socialists stood by their internationalism, American socialist organizations opted to support the trade union movement’s demand for a racial ban on the immigration of Chinese workers to the United States.

Arising first in California in the 1860s, the demand for an end to Chinese immigration was soon taken up by trade unions and labor congresses throughout the nation. The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) divided on the issue. Those who followed Marx’s advice of focusing their energies on supporting and radicalizing existing trade unions, such as Friedrich Sorge and most German American socialists, echoed labor’s demand for the exclusion of the Chinese, while Yankee veterans of the movements for abolition and women’s rights stood by the principles of internationalism and egalitarianism.

In California during the late 1870s, where the anti-Chinese agitation was most powerful, socialists threw in their lot with the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC)—a violently racist organization whose credo was “The Chinese Must Go!”—and succeeded in steering the WPC into line with the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). During the Greenback Labor Party’s national campaign in 1878, the WPC’s vitriolic leader, Denis Kearney, rode the hustings with the SLP’s P. J. McGuire and ranted before socialist rallies throughout the East. In 1880 the National Executive Committee of the SLP recommended that the two organizations unite. Seven years later the SLP voted to unite with the WPC’s successor, the newly founded Pacific Coast IWA, in spite of the fact that this ersatz IWA had assumed the leadership of California’s anti-Chinese labor movement and had gone on record as favoring the forced expulsion of Chinese from San Francisco.

Likewise, a strong trade unionist faction steered the Socialist Party toward an anti-Chinese stance. Socialist Party delegates to the Amsterdam Congress of 1904 introduced a resolution calling on the Second International to declare against the immigration of “backward races.” Three years later the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee endorsed an anti-immigration resolution and again fought against the Stuttgart Congress’s plank in favor of the free migration of workers. Not all socialists acquiesced to nativism, however; that same year the Industrial Workers of the World took a strong public stand in defense of the equal rights of Asian workers.

Gyory, Andrew. “Rolling in the Dirt: The Origins of the Chinese Exclusion Movement and the Politics of Racism, 1870–1882.” Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1991.

Hill, Herbert. “Anti-Oriental Agitation and the Rise of Working-Class Racism.” Social Science and Modem Society 10, no. 2 (January–February 1973).

Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 New York. Monthly Review Press, 1952.

Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against the Chinese. New York: Random. House, 2007.

Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.