Chapter Three Reference

(right) Chinese Historical Society of America; (below) from the collection of Philip P. Choy.

To literary scholar Colleen Lye, anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. in the 19th century spawned these portrayals of Chinese immigrants as a threat to the economic well-being of American workers. Popular media depicted the Chinese body in paradoxically opposite sizes: it illustrated both the gigantism of monopoly capital that had small industry and unions in its grip, and the flood of cheap Lilliputian immigrant labor that was blamed for depressing working-class wages. In both cases, the structural conditions of economic crisis were deemed un-American in origin.

Back to Lye essay

(above) The Chinese shown as monopolizing the cigar and laundry industries.
(left) A man wielding the New Chinese Treaty (soon followed by the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) tries to stem a flood of Chinese immigrants off a ship in San Francisco.

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(right) Chinese Historical Society of America; (below) from the collection of Philip P. Choy.

To literary scholar Colleen Lye, anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. in the 19th century spawned these portrayals of Chinese immigrants as a threat to the economic well-being of American workers. Popular media depicted the Chinese body in paradoxically opposite sizes: it illustrated both the gigantism of monopoly capital that had small industry and unions in its grip, and the flood of cheap Lilliputian immigrant labor that was blamed for depressing working-class wages. In both cases, the structural conditions of economic crisis were deemed un-American in origin. Back to Lye essay
	(above) The Chinese shown as monopolizing the cigar and laundry industries. (left) A man wielding the New Chinese Treaty (soon followed by the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) tries to stem a flood of Chinese immigrants off a ship in San Francisco.