For this reason I find it less helpful to stress the in-betweenness of the migrants; they do not so much move between two fully-formed nations as their movement causes the two places to overlap such that the internal politics of one become the internal politics of the other. They are central to the self-definition of each nation. Scholarship in Asian American Studies in particular has shown the importance of Chinese Exclusion to the twentieth century idea of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants . And this is even clearer in the Chinese case, since the treatment of Chinese in the U.S. is the occasion of the first social movement making claims on behalf of national unity. While support for the boycott was strongest in the coastal province of Guangdong , where a majority of overseas Chinese were from, its ideological center was Shanghai, the treaty port that saw the most overseas trade and the most exposure to Western ideas, and it was here that most of the novellas in favor of the boycott were published. The importance of literary publishing for conceiving of the relationship with the U.S. can be seen in the influential 1900 Chinese translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin under the more pointed title A Black Slave’s Cry of Freedom. In Lin Shu’s preface to the translation he proposes the black slave as a model for understanding the treatment of Chinese in the world at the time. He thus invokes an early interracial solidarity in the face of white supremacy. In fact some proponents of the Exclusion Acts had compared Chinese coolie immigration to the slave trade in order to demonize it,container size for blueberries while proponents of Chinese immigration tried to demonstrate that this was free labor.
Lin uses the slavery comparison not to argue against Chinese labor in the U.S. but to assert the universal humanity of the coolie, following the slave, and call for their full emancipation . Furthermore, he connects the history of American slavery to the position of Chinese not just in the U.S. but in the world as a whole. As with the boycott five years later, the Chinese situation in the U.S. is taken as the starting point to understand the status of China as a whole. In the proboycott literature of these years, moreover, special attention was given to the indignity of Chinese arriving in San Francisco being held in “wooden barracks” awaiting processing and deportation, and these barracks were compared to Tom’s wooden cabin.Moreover, the boycott discourse helps to show the manner in which Chinese writers interpreted and transformed Western ideas. As we saw above, Social Darwinism was the central theory with which American writers supported the Exclusion Acts—it was also the lens through which Chinese writers approached it. Chinese writings on evolution at the turn of the twentieth century presented it less as a revolutionary theory than as an interpretation of classical Chinese philosophy that addressed the pressing social issues of the day. Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays , more than any other work popularized the idea of evolution. While the translation itself was obscure, the reading public quickly applied the central idea to China’s position in the world. Historian Guanhua Wang reports that “At this time, even some grade school and high school students were familiar with the phrase ‘wujing tianze; shizhe shengcun’ ” . This formulation appears in the couplet form of a classical aphorism, an invitation to memorize and invoke it as conventional wisdom in a wide range of situations.
Chinese writers specifically linked this idea of competition to the classical philosophers Mozi and Mencius’s emphasis on self-improvement. This is then how it is used in much of the literature and speeches in support of the boycott: not as biological race but in the need to act in such a way as to become more competitive. In these examples we see that Social Darwinism was largely interpreted in social and political terms: unlike the rhetoric of Chinese Exclusion in the U.S. it is not racial bodies that are more or less fit, but instead forms of political organization. Nevertheless, what the two sides share is this: both feel A. that in the past they themselves were the most fit, but that B. the environment has recently shifted radically to the point that they are now less fit, and so C. they must rally together as their only chance of survival. As we saw above, in the white supremacist logic of the AFL, the physically dominant white body was less adaptable to the feminizing modern work than the smaller, more efficient Chinese body. The difference is that because the white Americans think in term of biological race, change is out of the question, and they have no choice but to reject open competition . Because the boycott activists think in terms of political forms, which are by definition historically mutable, there is much greater hope for the future. To understand the special drama of food products in this discourse, we can examine two songs composed to popularize the boycott. As most people were illiterate, popular songs and plays were the chief means through which supporters spread their ideas to the urban population.
Compare the different tone in these two excerpts, one from a song focused on cigarettes and the other on flour. The lyrics playfully mock the consumer’s attachment to the disposable, superfluous commodity, while the form of the love song evokes such a situation of conflicting feelings. It moreover places the U.S. and China in a relationship of give and take that depends on mutual respect and consent. Cigarettes are largely imported at this time, and associated with modern, urban life. Furthermore, while the cigarette has done the singer wrong, this is a kind of fickleness on the part of the American beloved, and there might yet be a happy ending. By contrast, in another song, also in Cantonese but focused on food, the tone is much more serious. This song encourages patriotic Chinese to use rice flour, produced in China, rather than wheat flour imported from the U.S. The song begins by locating the hearer on a specifically Chinese holiday, the Mid-Autumn Festival,raspberry grow in pots when people traditionally eat moon cakes, small pastries filled with bean paste that resemble the full moon. Both songs refer to the relations between heavenly bodies, but in the second this is for dramatic rather than ironic effect. For the boycott to take on the stakes of life and death, it needs a more fundamental commodity than the cigarette. To eat wheat flour is to eat at the expense of the Chinese in the U.S., and so this is figured as cannibalism.The idea of Chinese blood connects the hearer to the Chinese in the U.S. with both nationalist and racial overtones. Where the cigarette was an individual romantic relationship, moon cakes bring the family and the extended family of the nation together for the Mid-Autumn Festival. The asymmetrical contrast between “American flour” and “rice flour” naturalizes wheat as American and rice as Chinese. Like these popular songs, the novellas in support of the boycott were hastily written, and are generally considered to be of little to no aesthetic value; as such literary criticism on them is scant. Historians have rather used the texts as archives both of boycott ideology and the reality of life for Chinese migrants at the time. The forms of the texts vary from realistic, detailed descriptions of hardships faced by Chinese migrants in the Americas to fantastical journeys crossing undiscovered continents . One novella, Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott , from the later stage of the movement when some of the popular enthusiasm had waned, takes the form of extended dialogues by multiple characters, discussions and arguments over the strategy and viability of the boycott.
Written anonymously, authorship is attributed only to “A Chinese Cold-blooded Man.” As there is minimal plot—most of the length is taken up by two friends’ visit to a tea house where they debate with several strangers—scholars have considered it of low artistic value, or that it is a political essay written in the form of a novel . The hero of these discussions is a strange man referred to only as “Sick Man,” who speaks various Chinese dialects and even foreign languages. Based on his extensive knowledge of the exclusion laws and the current treaty situation, other characters wonder whether he has returned from the U.S. but this is never made clear. Wang notes that the analysis of boycott politics delivered by characters in Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott is more subtle and far-reaching than that in non-fiction sources, including newspaper and periodicals. As a series of discussions, it stages the issues of the boycott for the reader to consider. As a work of fiction, maintaining the slimmest distance from pressing organizational questions, it is able to take a more comprehensive approach to the problem than non-fiction works do, including to reflect more fully on the limitations of the boycott strategy. Sick Man notes that many American products are cheaper than their Chinese counterparts, but he does not call on his countrymen to make a patriotic sacrifice to buy these more expensive products. In other words, he does not think boycotting is a winning strategy. Instead he outlines a long-term solution in the slow development of local manufacturing that can support the goal that “Chinese buy Chinese” . The narrative ends with Sick Man becoming a business man and traveling to Jiangsu province to develop a large-scale farm employing hundreds of workers capable of producing great quantities of food products, tea, and mulberry leaves, together with a textile factory. The long-term solution to Chinese Exclusion in the U.S., as imagined in this text, is import-substitution through large-scale agriculture in China that can compete with the farms that we see in The Octopus. In both Norris’s text and Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott, the medium of fiction at once allows the writer to step back and consider a comprehensive, long-term solution to the pressing issues of the day, and also forces the writer to provide a detailed and plausible resolution. In structuring a plot, the fiction writer cannot simply appeal to the enthusiasm for an immediately pressing action that we find in non-fiction political propaganda such as Meat vs. Rice.The following chapters will trace the continued history of Americans hoping to feed China, both in terms of exports and famine relief, and in modernizing agricultural production in China itself. Coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party rejected U.S. “aid” and involvement in China as colonial intervention, and Mao explicitly criticized American shipments of relief flour as traps to ensnare the Chinese people. This did not take a leap of faith or flash of dialectical insight, as this is what Norris’s Cedarquist, following the senator Albert Beveridge, had advocated publicly from the very beginning. In the early Cold War of the 1950’s, most American cultural production was predictably censured in China, but in 1957 Beijing published a new translation of The Octopus. Perhaps coincidentally, this was the year of the “Hundred Flowers Movement,” when restrictions on publishing were briefly relaxed and intellectuals were even invited to make constructive criticisms of government policies. The translator’s afterword makes clear that the novel was selected because of its depiction of class conflict in the context of monopoly capitalism, and the discussion focuses on genre, analyzing whether the novel was an example of realism or naturalism. These terms were extremely politicized for the Communists: realism was understood to reveal the real social totality underlying everyday experience, and the characters’ positions in relation to it. Naturalism, by contrast, was understood to minimize human agency while focusing on extended, trivial descriptions of phenomena without penetrating to the real totality. Just as American critics have struggled to reconcile the tragic and triumphant moments of The Octopus, the translator, Wu Lao, sees in it both realist and naturalist tendencies. The novel is seen as of interest to the Chinese reader as a canonical example of “critical realism,” and the afterword begins by praising Norris’s unusually detailed, comprehensive account of the workings of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the century. Interestingly, the problems begin with Norris’s attempt to write in the epic mode, which Wu links to the issues of the “new” West that we discussed in relation to Turner: “Although The Octopus is prose, it is an epic novel. He uses a broadsword to carve out the story of this new land and these new people” .