The Chinese Question

This chapter, by Mae M. Ngai, locates the origins of the Chinese Question as a global racial discourse in the gold rushes of the nineteenth century and the broader context of the globalization of trade, credit, labor, and the rise of Anglo-American power. The gold rushes launched into motion hundreds of thousands of people from the British Isles, continental Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and China. Notably, they were the first occasions of large-scale contact between Westerners (Europeans and Americans) and Chinese. The chapter traces the development of anti-Chinese politics as it arose in the United States, Australia, and South Africa from conditions that were specific to gold rushes and gold mining in these regions, as well as how politics borrowed from each other and evolved into a global political discourse.