The Cultural Clash: Chinese Traditional Native-Place Sentiment and the Anti-Chinese Movement

by Yucheng Qin

Overview

This book is a fresh approach to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Drawing on stunning evidence from newspapers and exciting currents in scholarship, Qin presents a new interpretation of the anti-Chinese movement. By examining Chinese native-place tradition in Chinese history, he shows that Chinese native-place sentiment was responsible for almost all important features of Chinese community in the nineteenth-century America. Qin further argues, the main lines along which the anti-Chinese movement ran had been all predetermined in the Chinese native-place rootedness which saw the problem originate and develop. This statement, however, should not cause us to overlook racial prejudice within the movement, which actually received an uninterrupted supply of ammunition from Chinese native-place sentiment and practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761866329
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	01/22/2016
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Yucheng Qin is associate professor of Asian history at the University of Hawaii-Hilo and the author of The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion, among others. He is also one of the winners of the 2012 University of Hawaii Board of Regents’ Medal for Teaching Excellence.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Moon is Rounder in the Native Place: Chinese Native-Place Tradition and Associations
2. Huiguan and Companies: Chinese Native-Place Associations in California
3. Canton of the West: Chinese Native-Place Sentiment and the Cantonese Cultural Enclosure in California
4. “Cheap Labor” Means “Coolie”: Chinese Native-Place Sentiment and the Economic Charges
5. An Imperium in Imperio: Charges against Chinese Native-Place Associations
6. Undesirable Members of Society: Social and Cultural Charges against Chinese Native-Place Sentiment
7. A Stone in the Stomach of the Body Politic: Chinese Native-Place Sentiment and the Non-Assimilation Charges
8. The Sound Grew into Thunder: A Cultural Clash Is Translated into Legislation

Conclusion
Bibliography