2
railroad workers, migrant farmers, and to work in other low-paying, labor-intensive
manufacturing jobs (Chan 1986; Wang 1994; Wong 1995). The combination of their
manner of entry and terms of employment as semi-contracted workers and hostility from
the white union and politicians (Saxton 1971; Sandmeyer 1973) as well as Sinophobia
rooted in the larger racial attitudes and practices of America as a whole (Aarim-Heriot
2003) precluded most from becoming permanent settlers. In fact, between 1882 and
1920s, the Chinese population in the United States was in a steady decline because of
immigration exclusion and the voluntary or forced departure of the Chinese. For those
who stayed, the combination of daily encounters with American racism and a growing
concern over China’s backwardness and vulnerability in the face of Western and
Japanese imperialism contributed to the rise of Chinese nationalism during the period of
exclusion (Armentrout Ma 1990; Yu 1992; Wang 1994; Chen 2002).
The declining population trend was slowly reversed in the 1920s because of the
entry of the exempt classes (i.e., merchants, students, diplomats, tourists, and their
spouses and children) and the birth of the U.S.-born. In addition, between 1920 and
1940, an estimated 71,000 Chinese or half of the total Chinese admission entered as
“paper sons”
1
after surviving ruthless interrogations at the immigration station or
successfully challenging the negative decisions made against their right to immigration
(Lai 1978, 1992a). In this second wave of Chinese migration, the new arrivals, especially
the economic and political elites, were conspicuously sympathetic to modern Chinese
nationalism and were thus constant targets of homeland government surveillance and
repression. With the repeal of the Chinese exclusion in 1943, a token 105 Chinese per
1
Because of the destruction of birth papers in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, many Chinese
immigrants claimed to be U.S.-born so as to circumvent immigration exclusion and bring in their China-
Convention