Book reviews

Who digs the mines?, by Andrew Liu – 21 July 2022

From The London Review of Books

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai. Norton, 440 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 393 63416 7

In​ 1852, a group of Chinese community leaders in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He comes because of his desire for independence.’ Thirty years later another pamphlet, The Chinese Question in Australia, was published by Lowe Kong Meng, Louis Ah Mouy and Cheok Hong Cheong, Chinese merchants in Victoria and Melbourne. They took aim at the same Chinese ‘coolie myth’: ‘Human nature is human nature all the world over; and the Chinaman is just as fond of money, and just as eager to earn as much as he can, as the most grasping of his competitors.’

California and Australia had followed parallel trajectories: in both places the discovery of gold led to mass migration from southern China, followed by a backlash from white workers. San Francisco came to be known in Cantonese as ‘old gold mountain’ (gau gamsan), Melbourne as ‘new gold mountain’ (san gamsan). Gold brought some 300,000 Chinese workers and merchants, mainly men, to the US and British settler colonies in the 19th century – a greater number than the 250,000 Chinese who worked on plantations in the Caribbean in the decades after emancipation, even though it was the latter who dominated popular conceptions of the Chinese diaspora. In her new book Mae Ngai, a historian of Asian America at Columbia, recognises the global character of Asian exclusion. She addresses the fate of Chinese workers in the US and Australia, but also considers South Africa and the sixty thousand Chinese recruited to work in the Witwatersrand gold mines between 1904 and 1910 – a further British colonial experiment with indentured labour.

The gold rushes transformed the world economy. In half a century 435 million ounces of gold were extracted, more than the total amount in circulation over the previous three thousand years. Increased supply strengthened the British Empire and the United States, setting off what Ngai calls ‘a new stage of capital accumulation’. Engels wrote to Marx in the 1850s that the discovery of gold mines would require them to revise their theories. The ‘two cases’ of California and Australia were ‘not provided for in the [Communist] Manifesto: the creation of large new markets out of nothing. We shall have to allow for this.’ The discovery enabled an expansion of trade and finance, and much of the world adopted the gold standard in response. Since 88 per cent of gold was held in Britain and the US, this transition cemented the countries’ status as global creditors and lenders. At the same time, the value of silver held by many other economies, most notably the Qing, collapsed. Chinese purchases of silver from Latin America and Asia, which began in the 15th century, had helped unite earlier incarnations of the global market; the shift from silver to gold symbolised the transition from a world economy centred on Asia to one centred on the North Atlantic.

‘The Chinese Question was simply this,’ Ngai writes. ‘Were Chinese a racial threat to white, Anglo-American countries, and should Chinese be barred from them?’ Her book teases out a contradiction that underpinned the politics of Asian exclusion. White populations across the Pacific found Chinese migrants a threat to their economic livelihood at a time when white capitalists in the US and British colonies fantasised about employing pliant Chinese workers while also conquering Asia-Pacific trade. ‘The gold we have been allowed to dig in your mines is what has made the China trade grow up so fast,’ Tong Achick wrote in 1852. ‘If you want to check immigration from Asia, you will have to do it by checking Asiatic commerce.’ Chinese exclusion evolved as a defensive measure by white workers and politicians who saw in Asian migration the inexorable march of transnational capital.

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Andrew Liu is an associate professor in the Department of History at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA). His research interests include modern China, South and East Asia, histories and theories of political economy and capitalism, and global and comparative history.

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