The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics
Mae M. Ngai
4.07
221 ratings39 reviews
In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over “the Chinese Question”: would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?
This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold, and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world. Out of their encounters with whites, and the emigrants’ assertion of autonomy and humanity, arose the pernicious western myth of the “coolie” laborer, a racist stereotype used to drive anti-Chinese sentiment.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and the British Empire had answered “the Chinese Question” with laws that excluded Chinese people from immigration and citizenship. Ngai explains how this happened and argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it. The Chinese Question masterfully links important themes in world history and economics, from Europe’s subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that persist to this day.
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464 pages, Hardcover
First published August 24, 2021
Literary awards
Bancroft Prize (2022), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for History (2021), Cundill History Prize Nominee (2022)
Characters
Louis Botha, Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, John Bigler, William Palmer, 2nd Earl of Selborne, Frederic Creswell, Huang Zunxian, Lowe Kong Meng, Yuan Sheng
This edition
Format
464 pages, Hardcover
Published
August 24, 2021 by W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN
9780393634167 (ISBN10: 0393634167)
ASIN
0393634167
Language
English
About the author
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Mae M. Ngai
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Mae Ngai is a professor of Asian American Studies and History at Columbia University.
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Peter Tillman
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August 15, 2021
Interesting WSJ review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chin... (Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
Excerpt:
"Consider a fascinating chapter titled “Talking to White People,” which explores the sometimes intractable complexities posed by the language barrier dividing Chinese immigrants from Anglo employers, merchants and legal officials. In casting light on how Chinese both abroad and at home resisted their persecution, Ms. Ngai reports that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s seminal antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in translation in China in 1901 as “A Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven.” In its review, one Shanghai newspaper asserted that “the book is not really about the sufferings of the black race as it is about all races under the whites.”
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Chris Miller
577 reviews
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September 24, 2021
Through most of this book, I thought what a great follow-up to Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon Chang, On Gold Mountain by Lisa See, and The Chinese in America by Iris Chang, and it is. But it also provides a close connection to more recent relationships between the Chinese and the West. Ms. Ngai's work is detailed, thorough, and profound. Her research is deep and rigorous, her writing concise and clear, and her worldview adds new dimensions to the subject. The racism, violence, and unfairness perpetrated on Chinese workers in other countries, compounded with exclusionary laws, has many consequences that must be worked out in our current world and interrelationships between rivals and competitors. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in international politics, trade, and relations.
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Aydan
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October 8, 2025
Biggest flex was reading this book in 3 hours and pissing Yoni off.
history
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JiaJia Jin
35 reviews
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November 8, 2021
It's easy to conjure up preconceived notions of what the first waves of Chinese immigrants looked like, how they lived, what motivated them -- submissive coolies, forced labor, against will, no agency, passive onlookers. The picture is always too neat to make sense (except in Hollywood fictions). Ngai artfully punctured these one-dimensional, paper-thin stereotypes with a tapestry of carefully researched characters, with their violent protests, scholarly petitions, tireless negotiations, spanning three continents and five decades. A few things specifically stood out to me:
1. Most Chinese laborers were not coolies. Lured by the riches of the gold, they came at will, like most other immigrants at the time. Nonetheless, fabricating the lie that most Chinese laborers were indentured slaves was good for politics, reinforcing the Chinese laborers' foreign-ness, which in turn lent power to the exclusionist policy.
2. The Qing dynasty -- crumbling and incompetent as it was, did put up fight against the abuse its people received abroad. It was fascinating to read the intellectual arguments made by Qing diplomats and bureaucrats: they were no stranger to the principles of western democracy and equality, and used these cannons to deftly expose the hypocrisies in the young republics of America and Australia.
3. The "Chinese Question" is never just about the Chinese immigrants. It's a prism through which the political struggles of white laborers vs. capitalists unfurled, and the republic's identity was formed. This lesson is still more than relevant than ever, as the identity of whiteness in the era of Trump is precisely defined by the exclusion of others.
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Amanda
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September 12, 2021
Mae Ngai has done important work putting the California, Australia, and South African gold rushes in a Chinese-Pacific context and a British and American Imperial context. This is not a truly Pacific history, as only slight mention is made of other Asian and Latin American groups involved in this world. That wasnt clear in the description, but takes nothing away from the work. This is about Anglo (American and British) - Chinese relations, on small and grand levels.
That said, this is eye opening for many students of US History and I plan to incorporate portions into my US history survey. I learned so much that I did not already know.
That said, the weakness here is tying the three sections together. The US and Australia works, but could be tighter. I get US and Australia for background of South Africa, but it is left there when there were many more connections to explicitly make. The debate about Chinese as enslaved and its relation to other rhetoric was not as complete as I needed it to be, and would require additional context in order to assign to students. This did make it drag a bit in the middle.
Overall, this is a great addition to scholarship in multiple fields, and if you're interested in any of the topics, you should pick it up.
Thank you to Mae Ngai, W W Norton & Company, and Netgalley for an advanced ecopy in exchange for an honest review.
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Jake Losh
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July 5, 2022
This is a good book and a worthwhile one. It also happens to be very timely, though I suspect it will be a low key evergreen text on the topics of immigration, integration (aka globalization) and assimilation. It is comprehensive (authoritative?) not a primer, so be aware going in that it will have a lot, a lot of details.
Coming from the US, I greatly appreciated the cross-country contrasts and comparisons between the Chinese immigrant / migrant worker experiences in the US and Australia. My read is that this is chiefly a sociological and historical text. The economic theories are mainly Marxist. The macroeconomics discussed are a bit off the mark, but I found most of the microeconomics to be pretty on point.
australia
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Bookworm
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November 30, 2021
Borrowed this book on a whim as I saw it was available at the library. The San Francisco Gold Rush was something I had learned about in school but I was curious to learn more about the same or similar Australia, and South Africa and how that affects immigration with these questions echoing down through the decades (centuries, really) to the work of today.
As the upshot, gold was discovered in parts of the world and the Chinese people were brought over for labor. This leads to greater questions about immigration, labor practices, the segregation and racism, the question of how to integrate these people as many of them will never ever go home again, only to die on foreign soil far away from everything they've ever known.
It was well-researched but extremely dull. There's definitely a lot here that should blow away lots of preconceptions one may have about the role of Chinese people and the Gold Rush (especially if you're in the US like me and therefore probably don't know much, if anything, about similar experiences in Australia in South Africa). But I'm not really sure it works as a cohesive narrative.
Is there something to be said about the treatment of Chinese laborers that's probably universal in some way? Yes. However, I'm not really sure the point really gets through under the mound of research author Ngai has put into this. That is not to say that this is not without value but rather it may be a tough slog for many.
Borrowed from the library and that was best for me.
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Craig Werner
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May 27, 2023
Comparing the experience of Chinese migrant laborers in the American West, Australia and South Africa, Ngai demonstrates how the local conditions were shaped by and helped shape global economic relationships. I learned a lot about the Qing dynasty's weak position vis a vis the Western powers, the attempts of Chinese diplomats educated in Western systems to advocate decent, if not really equitable treatment. Exclusion, which I'd thought of primarily in American terms, is clearly better understood in relation to broader patterns. Deeply researched in legal records, correspondence, newspapers. Deserved its Bancroft.
asian-american
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Wang
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February 13, 2023
Mae M. Ngai can writer another book twenty years on.
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Daniel Farabaugh
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March 17, 2022
This book does a nice job of framing three separate events into one context that shows an intricate interrelationship. It also does a very good job of evaluating the differences in the three areas as well.
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