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This chapter examines the contributions and explores the lives of Chinese child laborers in nineteenth-century San Francisco. As a segment of the larger labor force, these children played a small but significant role in promoting California's economy. More importantly, Chinese child workers found themselves in the middle of the national conflict over the presence of Chinese laborers in California and the future of child labor. Continuing with the theme of previous chapters, this chapter examines how various forces promoted images of Chinese children at work that furthered political agendas. Using census data, oral histories, and autobiographies, this chapter explores how child workers coped with anti-Chinese hostility and considers the various factors resulting in the decline of child labor by the early twentieth century.

This chapter examines the accusation that the Chinese Six Companies acted as the chief labor broker for China during the late nineteenth century. Before discussing the claim that the Six Companies played a central role in importing Chinese laborers, the chapter considers the success of the Chinese merchants in the new market economy of California during the 1870s and how they were affected by the anti-Chinese movement in the state. It then explores how both the Democrats and the Republicans came up with the charge that the Six Companies had established a slavery government. It also looks at the reasons why the Six Companies was accused of being a labor broker, including false assumptions about nature of the organization, the belief that it had contracts with Chinese laborers, the notion that Chinese labor brokers were agents of the Six Companies, and its supposed agreement with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.

This chapter describes how thousands of Chinese entered Cuba under the 1917 provisions for agricultural laborers. Soledad Estate in Cienfuegos recruited Chinese laborers and continued to concentrate them in the technical aspects of sugar production. In January 1921, for example, the following Chinese worked in the factory: Benito Díaz, Chon Chu, Chan Chau, Cun Chin, Sen Gui, and Ra Leon. The use of Chinese names in plantation records indicates the improved social and legal status of Chinese workers over the previous century. No longer were they indentured laborers, given a Spanish name upon arrival or baptism and bound by contract to work long years on sugar plantations. Rather, they were free men who kept their names. Chinese took advantage of temporary laws allowing the immigration of contract laborers for sugar production.

This chapter focuses on the number of Chinese workers, the types of jobs they performed, and their lived experiences. From the 1860s to the 1890s, Chinese immigrants comprised 70 percent to 100 percent of the workers in some parts of the forests of the American West performing a variety of tasks and having some upward mobility. Although working in the woods was a transient occupation and probably not appealing to many Chinese whose ancestors lived in the same locality for generations, some of them liked the work and pay in a rapidly changing western frontier. This chapter first discusses legislation that contributed to the rapid growth of logging in the American West before citing statistics on the employment of Chinese laborers in logging production in the region, the types of jobs they performed and their wages, and their working and living conditions in the lumber trade.

This chapter examines the link between mining and logging in the American West. It considers how the gold rush in California triggered new discoveries of mining areas in neighboring states of Nevada and Oregon; mining in turn ushered in large-scale western logging as wood products became a necessary supply for mines. It also looks at some of the Nevada counties that were involved in mining and logging in order to provide insights into Chinese workers, the environment, timber barons and their support of the Chinese, lumber companies, and opposition to the Chinese involved in this new industry. It shows that the need for Chinese laborers in logging diminished as the mines declined.

This chapter examines the employment of Chinese laborers in the construction of railroads, primarily to cut trees in order to clear the roads, make ties, and provide fuel for the trains. The intensification of western railroad construction that began in California around 1854 stimulated the rapid growth of logging. The passage of the Timber and Stone Act of 1878 gave both mining and railroad companies a great incentive to be involved in logging, paving the way for more frenzied cutting and for larger, better-capitalized companies. This chapter discusses the role of Chinese workers recruited from the lumber industry in helping to build standard- and narrow-gauge railway lines that connected the forests, rural areas, and transportation centers in the American West. It also considers how railroad construction created another boom in the lumber trade and the establishment of new towns.

In the summer of 1881, the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) came to an end when all the students were ordered back to China, abruptly. The CEM was criticized on two points. First, many converted to Christianity. Second, Chinese Educational Commission (CEC) officials had been extraordinarily lax in controlling the students. Last was the surge in anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States. Led by labor organizations and the Democratic Party, the agitation targeted Chinese contract laborers. The CEM students were shielded to a great extent from the anti-Chinese movement by their American host families, teachers, and friends who were dominantly Republican in politics. However, the CEM students were not immune from the upsurge of the anti-Chinese prejudice. The students themselves were greatly disappointed to have their studies in America interrupted in mid-course and to be ordered home to China. Yet, they all obeyed the decree. The students were well treated during their return journey just as they had travelled before, first-class.

This chapter focuses on racially motivated violence and injustices committed against Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles during the late nineteenth century. It first considers the reaction in the press regarding such violent incidents, especially when it comes to the Chinese women and their occupation, before assessing the attitudes of Angelenos and non-Asians toward the town's Chinese residents. It then examines the difficulties encountered by Chinese immigrants in trying to blend into their Californian communities, citing language and cultural barriers. The chapter also describes the hysterical fear of a “Chinese invasion” that prevailed in California in the 1870s, with particular reference to Chinese laborers. Finally, it looks at the rise of anti-Chinese outbursts in Los Angeles that persisted until 1871 and how the Chinese responded to the brutalities committed against them.

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.

Settlers in the Australian colonies from the 1820s to the 1860s had access to an extraordinary range of unfree and undercompensated labourers, including convicts, unpaid Aborigines, and indentured Chinese, Indian, Pacific Islander, and European labourers. From the 1820s to the 1840s convicts formed the great majority of servants and labourers employed by settlers and constituted the largest part of the colonial population. The status of master of non-white labour was especially key to evolving patriarchal conceptions of white settler masculinity and integral to the ideas of such manly independence deployed to argue for responsible government in the Australian colonies. Masters outnumbered mistresses, and the magistrates and police constables who oversaw the harshly regulated labour system were all men. In judging how different categories of labourers should be treated and compensated, white settler men asserted their moral authority in legal and material ways.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) was one of the most important advocates and theorists of settler colonialism during its nineteenth-century ascendancy. Most discussion of Wakefield has centred on his scheme for the sale of colonial waste lands to fund the emigration of poor British labourers, but Wakefield and his followers’ enthusiasm to include Indian, Chinese, and Pacific Island labourers in their visions of systematic colonization has been overlooked. South Australia was a key colonial experiment of the 1830s, often seen as a successful implementation of Wakefield’s systematic colonization. Yet in South Australia as elsewhere, early frontier relations between settlers and Aborigines easily turned violent. Regarded as the less successful version of Wakefield’s idea, and perhaps for that reason largely overlooked in Australian history, was the settlement of Australind in Western Australia where Aborigines were employed as soon as settlers landed, but were exploited and incarcerated.

This concluding chapter discusses the departure of the Chinese from their involvement in lumbering, years after making a significant contribution to the building of the American West. In the 1880s Chinese immigrants constituted the majority of the men employed in the lumber trade in the Sierra Nevada. They undertook a variety of jobs, from wood transportation and mill operation to digging ditches, grading roads, cooking and cleaning, and caring for the animals. The wages they earned were determined by the type of job they did. This chapter shows that Chinese laborers in the logging industry had moved either into other occupations or to work in other forests—some even returned to China—by 1920 due to a variety of factors, such as the emerging forest conservation movement, technological improvements in logging, decreased demand for lumber, and the rise of large corporations that drove the smaller lumber firms out of business.