Alex Levine’s Reviews > The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics > Status Update

The Chinese Question in Australia and California, although ostensibly resembling each other, emerged in distinct contexts and centered around different concerns.

The Chinese question in Australia “emerged in context of a perceived clash between two empires in Asia, British and Chinese.”

Much of the anti-Chinese sentiment growing in California in the mid-1850s was a proxy for fear of large capital-intensive mining companies coming in and pushing small collectives and individuals off of claims yielding increasingly less.

It became a “bedrock principle of the Democratic Party in California.”

As early as 1853, the “Chinese question” was shaping electoral politics in California.

Chapter 3 is sort of a neat version of Abina and the Important Men.

Euro-American missionaries played important roles as translators to Chinese in places like San Francisco.

“Australian white society respected Chinese merchants who married white women because their unions bespoke a European bourgeois sensibility about proper gender and family relations. Most of these Chinese also became Christians.” In California, anti-miscegenation laws prevented this.

Chinese enjoyed more favorable legal and social conditions in Australian colonies than California, including no restrictions on marriage with whites (although uncommon, because Chinese migrants tended to keep conjugal households at home in China).

Mass remittances being sent back to southern China from gold fields, in a year and a half at the height of the boom in Australia, Victoria customs reported 830,000 pounds sterling worth of gold dust remitted. At its peak, average annual per capita remittances were greater than the annual cost of living in southern China (roughly 10 pounds sterling). Notwithstanding loads of gold carried home unreported.