The Chinese Question

Author : Mae Ngai
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393634167

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The Chinese Question by Mae Ngai Pdf

Winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Cundill History Prize Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize How Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race. 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.

Author : Caroline S. Hau
Publisher : NUS Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2014-02-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9789971697921

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The Chinese Question by Caroline S. Hau Pdf

The rising strength of mainland China has spurred a revival of "Chineseness" in the Philippines. Perceived during the Cold War era as economically dominant, political disloyal, and culturally different, the "Chinese" presented themselves as an integral part of the Filipino imagined community. Today, as Filipinos seek associations with China, many of them see the local Chinese community as key players in East Asian regional economic development. With the revaluing of Chineseness has come a repositioning of "Chinese" racial and cultural identity. Philippine mestizos (people of mixed ancestry) form an important sub-group of the Filipino elite, but their Chineseness was occluded as they disappeared into the emergent Filipino nation. In the twentieth century, mestizos defined themselves and based claims to privilege on "white" ancestry, but mestizos are now actively reclaiming their "Chinese" heritage. At the same time, so-called "pure Chinese" are parlaying their connections into cultural, social, symbolic, or economic capital, and leaders of mainland Chinese state companies have entered into politico-business alliances with the Filipino national elite. As the meanings of "Chinese" and "Filipino" evolve, intractable contradictions are appearing in the concepts of citizenship and national belonging. Through an examination of cinematic and literary works, The Chinese Question shows how race, class, ideology, nationality, territory, sovereignty, and mobility are shaping the discourses of national integration, regional identification, and global cosmopolitanism.

Author : Maria Adele Carrai,Jennifer Rudolph,Michael Szonyi
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674270336

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The China Questions 2 by Maria Adele Carrai,Jennifer Rudolph,Michael Szonyi Pdf

The China Questions 2 assembles top experts to explore key issues in US–China relations today, including conflict over Taiwan, economic and military competition, public health concerns, and areas of cooperation. Rejecting a new Cold War mindset, the authors call for dealing with the world’s most important bilateral relationship on its own terms.

Author : Beth Lew-Williams
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2018-02-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674976016

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The Chinese Must Go by Beth Lew-Williams Pdf

Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited violence against Chinese workers, and how that violence provoked new exclusionary policies. Locating the origins of the modern American "alien" in this violent era, she makes clear that the present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

Author : Marlène Laruelle,Sébastien Peyrouse
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Asia, Central
ISBN : 023170304X

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The "Chinese Question" in Central Asia by Marlène Laruelle,Sébastien Peyrouse Pdf

Since the early 2000s, the People's Republic of China has become an increasingly key player in the fortunes of Central Asia, both diplomatically and strategically, particularly through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Economically, China has become one of the largest traders andinvestors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, drastically diminishing Russia's long-time dominance and the influence of the United States and Europe.Treating China as an external factor in the domestic ordering of Central Asia, this volume uniquely analyzes the changes that have revolutionized the systems and societies of Central Asia. It reveals how China has become a subject of public debate and academic and expert research, and it follows thenew cultural mediators, petty traders, lobbyists, migrants, and diasporas that have emerged in conjunction with the country's rise. China's ascendance has also triggered a number of anxieties and phobias across Central Asia, and the authors show how its dominance has brought Sinophobia andSinophilia into closer relation.

Author : Tani Barlow
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 502 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2004-03-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0822332701

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The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism by Tani Barlow Pdf

DIVBarlow documents the history of “woman” as a category in twentieth century Chinese history, tracing the question of gender through various phases in the literary career of Ding Ling, a major modern Chinese writer./div

Author : Najia Aarim-Heriot
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : History
ISBN : 0252027752

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Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 by Najia Aarim-Heriot Pdf

The first detailed examination of the link between the Chinese question and the Negro problem in nineteenth-century America, this work forcefully and convincingly demonstrates that the anti-Chinese sentiment that led up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is inseparable from the racial double standards applied by mainstream white society toward white and nonwhite groups during the same period. Najia Aarim-Heriot argues that previous studies on American Sinophobia have overemphasized the resentment labor organizations felt toward incoming Chinese workers. This focus has caused crucial elements of the discussion to be overlooked, especially the broader ways in which the growing nation sought to define and unify itself through the exclusion and oppression of nonwhite peoples. This book highlights striking similarities in the ways the Chinese and African American populations were disenfranchised during the mid-1800s, including nearly identical negative stereotypes, shrill rhetoric, and crippling exclusionary laws. traditionally studied, this book stands as a holistic examination of the causes and effects of American Sinophobia and the racialization of national immigration policies.

Author : Benjamin Mountford,Stephen Tuffnell
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520967588

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A Global History of Gold Rushes by Benjamin Mountford,Stephen Tuffnell Pdf

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

Author : Yuk Hui
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 347 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780995455009

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The Question Concerning Technology in China by Yuk Hui Pdf

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

Author : Vincent Goossaert,David A. Palmer
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226304182

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The Religious Question in Modern China by Vincent Goossaert,David A. Palmer Pdf

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

Author : Ann Hui
Publisher : Douglas & McIntyre
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781771622233

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Chop Suey Nation by Ann Hui Pdf

In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included—her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn’t yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how, after generations living in a poverty-stricken area of Guangdong, China, her family had somehow wound up in Canada. Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurantsweaves together Hui’s own family history—from her grandfather’s decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father’s path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest “Western” kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret—with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind “chop suey” cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like “ginger beef” and “Newfoundland chow mein,” and other uniquely Canadian fare like the “Chinese pierogies” of Alberta. Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, begins her journey with a somewhat disparaging view of small-town “fake Chinese” food. But by the end, she comes to appreciate the essentially Chinese values that drive these restaurants—perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family’s story as a touchstone, she explores the importance of these restaurants in the country’s history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine should be recognized as quintessentially Canadian.

Author : William Ging Wee Dere
Publisher : Douglas & McIntyre
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2019-03-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781771622196

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Being Chinese in Canada by William Ging Wee Dere Pdf

After the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885—construction of the western stretch was largely built by Chinese workers—the Canadian government imposed a punitive head tax to deter Chinese citizens from coming to Canada. The exorbitant tax strongly discouraged those who had already emigrated from sending for wives and children left in China—effectively splintering families. After raising the tax twice, the Canadian government eventually brought in legislation to stop Chinese immigration altogether. The ban was not repealed until 1947. It was not until June 22, 2006, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to the Chinese Canadian community for the Government of Canada’s racist legacy. Until now, little had been written about the events leading up to the apology. William Dere’s Being Chinese in Canadais the first book to explore the work of the head tax redress movement and to give voice to the generations of Chinese Canadians involved. Dere explores the many obstacles in the Chinese Canadian community’s fight for justice, the lasting effects of state-legislated racism and the unique struggle of being Chinese in Quebec. But Being Chinese in Canada is also a personal story. Dere dedicated himself to the head tax redress campaign for over two decades. His grandfather and father each paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax, and the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act separated his family for thirty years. Dere tells of his family members’ experiences; his own political awakenings; the federal government’s offer of partial redress and what it means to move forward—for himself, his children and the community as a whole. Many in multicultural Canada feel the issues of cultural identity and the struggle for belonging. Although Being Chinese in Canada is a personal recollection and an exploration of the history and culture of Chinese Canadians, the themes of inclusion and kinship are timely and will resonate with Canadians of all backgrounds.

Author : James Amaziah Whitney
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1888
Category : China
ISBN : UCAL:$B292747

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The Chinese, and the Chinese Question by James Amaziah Whitney Pdf

Author : Gloria Davies
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2007-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 0674026217

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Worrying about China by Gloria Davies Pdf

What can we do about China? This question, couched in pessimism, is often raised in the West but it is nothing new to the Chinese, who have long worried about themselves. In the last two decades since the “opening” of China, Chinese intellectuals have been carrying on in their own ancient tradition of “patriotic worrying.”As an intellectual mandate, “worrying about China” carries with it the moral obligation of identifying and solving perceived “Chinese problems”—social, political, cultural, historical, or economic—in order to achieve national perfection. In Worrying about China, Gloria Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.Davies explores the way perfectionism permeates and ultimately propels Chinese intellectual talk to the point that the drive for perfection has created a moralism that condemns those who do not contribute to improving China. Inside the heart of the New China persists ancient moralistic attitudes that remain decidedly nonmodern. And inside the postmodernism of thousands of Chinese scholars and intellectuals dwells a decidedly anti-postmodern quest for absolute certainty.

Author : Jia Lynn Yang
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393635850

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One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang Pdf

Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Shortlisted for the Arthur Ross Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A "powerful and cogent" (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post) account of the twentieth-century battle for immigration reform that set the stage for today’s roiling debates. The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before—and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined. Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.