When Two Great Powers Met — The Era of the Open Door and Chinese Exclusion

Every story begins, as always, with a single ship.

In the mid-19th century, ships that had crossed the Pacific arrived one after another at the wharves of San Francisco. Down from the holds came men who wore their hair in queues and spoke an unfamiliar tongue. They had come from southern China, from the region around Guangdong. What drew them was the gold that was then setting the American West ablaze, and soon after, the vast railroad that would link the continent from east to west.

Americans welcomed them as laborers chasing a dream of the Gold Mountain. And with the same breath, they tried to drive them away. Hope and prejudice. Welcome and rejection. From its very first moment, the meeting of these two great powers carried a strange contradiction.

The People Who Sought the Gold Mountain

Across the Pacific, China spent the 19th century deeply wounded. It lost the Opium Wars, had unequal treaties forced upon it, and saw its land ravaged by internal rebellion. Southern farmers who could no longer feed themselves looked for a way out across the sea.

In the California they reached, the Gold Rush was in full swing. Chinese laborers worked the mines and soon took on the brutal labor of the transcontinental railroad. In the tunnel work that pierced the Sierra Nevada, it was they who were lowered down sheer cliffs to set the dynamite, the most dangerous task of all. They worked for low wages, voiced no complaints, and labored hard. Yet that reputation brought no praise. Those who worked cheaply were also a threat to local white laborers.

Whenever a recession came, that resentment turned toward Chinese immigrants. The alien who steals our jobs. The foreigner who will not assimilate. Violence broke out in the streets, and politicians turned exclusion into votes. Within the labor movement of the West Coast, organizations even rose to prominence by making the expulsion of the Chinese their banner.

Two emotions ran through the American West of this era at the same time. One was the demand for cheap, diligent labor. The railroads, the mines, and the farms all needed their hands. The other was the fear and revulsion that saw those same laborers as an alien element threatening their own way of life. When demand and exclusion stood back to back, politics often chose exclusion. Chinese immigrants became its first target.

1882, the Door Closes

And so, on May 6, 1882, the United States passed a law.

The Chinese Exclusion Act. Signed by President Arthur, this law banned the immigration of Chinese laborers entirely for ten years. It was the first federal law in American history to shut out an entire group of immigrants simply because of the country they came from.

Here lies the irony of history. The nation that completed its railroads with the blood and sweat of the Chinese was the very nation that shut those same people out by law. The America that called itself the land of freedom and opportunity closed its gate on the grounds of race, and the first to be turned away were the Chinese.

On both shores of the Pacific, this was long remembered. To China, America was a land of dreams and, at the same time, a land that looked down on them. This double face would surface again and again across the century that followed.

The Voice Demanding an Open Door

Yet as the turn of the century arrived, America showed another face. This time, it began pressing China to open its door.

At the close of the 19th century, China was on the verge of being carved up by the great powers. Britain, Russia, Germany, France, and Japan. Each secured leased territories along the coast and drew out its own sphere of influence. The Qing dynasty, weakened by repeated defeats, handed over the rights to its ports and railroads to foreign nations one after another. The powers treated China as a single great quarry and competed for their share. The scene was called the carving of China.

The United States, having just won the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, sought to use it as a foothold to reach across the Pacific into the China market. But by the time it looked, the good places had already been divided up. For an America that had fallen behind, distracted by its own Civil War, accepting the lines the powers had drawn would have meant being shut out of the market itself.

So the move played by US Secretary of State John Hay was the Open Door.

In 1899, Hay sent notes to Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, and France. His argument was that trade and tariffs in China should be open equally to all nations. The following year, 1900, amid the Boxer Uprising, a second set of notes went further, opposing the political partition of China by the powers, in other words, calling for the territorial integrity of China itself.

It is hard to read this as pure goodwill. America was a latecomer to the scene, and to accept the lines of influence already drawn would have left it with no share at all. The Open Door was also the logic of one who arrives late and asks that the spoils be split evenly.

Two Views of China

But another voice was mixed in here as well.

From the 19th century into the early 20th, many American missionaries crossed over to China. They built schools, opened hospitals, and sought to spread modern education. Within American society, a genuine sense had taken root that saw China as something to be guided and helped toward modernization. The teacher-like, almost parental sense of involvement that America would later pour into China, its seed was already there in this era.

As the 20th century dawned, the two great powers had indeed met. But it was not a handshake between equals. One was a rising power with industrial might and a navy; the other was an old empire being cut apart by the great powers, groping for its own modernity.

This asymmetric meeting across the Pacific was the beginning of everything. America wanted China as a market, refused it as an immigrant, and watched it as a pupil of modernization. America’s contradictory gaze, and China’s emotion that received it as both dream and humiliation. Carrying this first contradiction, the two great powers stepped into the turbulent age that was the 20th century.

And that 20th century would toss both nations about in ways no one could have foreseen.