19th Century Images and Stereotypes of Chinese/Chinese-Americans in the United States: Media Portrayal and Historical Basis

Perhaps the most powerful influence on modern-day society is the media, which is generally thought of as television, film, newspapers, magazines, books, music, and radio. The media has always played a major role in shaping the attitudes and perceptions of the American public. Even before the advent of film and television, the most visible, effortless, and effective vehicles of information yet to be invented, the media wielded considerable power in the form of books, newspapers, and magazines. National publications such as Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper as well as regional newspapers and magazines served to inform readers in the 19th century, with peak circulations of these publications ranging from 80,000 to 400,000, compared to the millions of people who are exposed to television and film today. These publications reached most likely consisted of predominantly urban, literate white males, while the modern television and film audience is exponentially more universal in terms of race, gender, geography, and education. However, from the printed media of the 19th century to the visual media of modern times, one thing remains constant: Chinese-Americans and Chinese in the United States have been and still are often stereotypically portrayed by the media, and these stereotypes (and, arguably, all stereotypes) are for the most part unfavorable. These media stereotypes can be traced back and explained by historical bases and circumstances dating back to the 1850s when Chinese immigrants were beginning to enter the United States in substantially large numbers, continuing through exclusion and persisting well into the 20th century and persisting to some extent in the present day.
Chinese immigrants first began arriving in the United States during the late 1840s and early 1850s, driven by unfavorable economic conditions and turmoil in China, drawn by the prospects of gold in California and better opportunities in a place they dubbed "Gold Mountain". The Chinese were considered objects of novelty and curiosity, exotic and alien, different from Anglo Americans. P.T. Barnum capitalized on this fact and helped to perpetuate the image, purchasing in 1850 a "Chinese Museum" to be displayed at his American Museum at Ann Street on Broadway in New York. The exhibit purportedly consisted of a good number of "curiosities", including a 17-year-old "Chinese belle", as described by the April 21, 1850 edition of the New York Sunday Dispatch, accompanied by her servants. Barnum wrote:

The April 22, 1850 edition of the New York Courier and Enquirer described the woman as a "Chinese beauty" with "tiny feet ...polished manners ... distingue air ...pretty face ...charming vivacity". Other Chinese exhibits by Barnum included an "eight-foot giant named Chang-Yu Sing" and the "Siamese Twins" named Chong and Eng Bunker.

Tens of millions of Americans were estimated to have visited Barnum's museum, taking away with them Barnum's circuslike and perhaps fraudulent images and portrayals of Chinese as curiosities, exotic and different from the Anglo American. While none of these characterizations appeared to be overtly negative (some may even be considered marginally positive), the stereotypes that were cultivated by Barnum would persist for many years to come, still existing to some extent in today's society.
As it was, the initial reception of Chinese by Americans in the early 1850s was mostly favorable. Describing the arrival of Chinese to California in 1852, the Daily Alta California, wrote: "Scarcely a ship arrives that does not bring an increase to this worthy integer of our population" and predicted that "the China boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same altar as our own countrymen" , a claim that turned out to be grossly erroneous. (Chinese were not extended the rights of natural born citizenship until U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. Chinese were denied naturalization in 1870 and again declared ineligible for naturalization in In re Ah Yup (1878). Not until 1943 were Chinese able to gain naturalization. Chinese-American students were not allowed to sit in the same classrooms as white students until 1926. )
In the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese in the United States were concentrated almost entirely on the West Coast, especially in California. According to the 1870 and 1890 U.S. Census, all of the 34,933 Chinese in the United States in 1860 lived in California, with 84 percent of them living in rural mining regions and only 7.8 percent living in San Francisco. In 1870, 78 percent of Chinese in the United States (49,277 out of 63,199) lived in California, with now 24.4 percent living in San Francisco , where a sizable Chinatown had developed. Because of this concentration of the Chinese population living on the West Coast and in Chinatowns, isolated from the majority of the American population, the average American knew little about the Chinese.
To better inform the public about the Chinese, Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper began publishing a series known as "The Coming Man" in 1870, consisting of illustrations accompanied by textual explanations. Although this was being printed in an era of increasing anti-Chinese sentiment, "The Coming Man" seemed to attempt to portray the physical likenesses, lifestyles, occupations, and living conditions with as much accuracy and impartiality as possible. Only later when anti-Chinese sentiment approached a threshold culminating in exclusion did overt anti-Chinese depictions, propaganda, and political cartoons begin to appear. More on this will be discussed later.
The illustrations of "The Coming Man" series depict Chinese in a wide variety of situations. Some illustrations show them arriving in the United States en masse aboard steamships, the men uniformly dressed in nondescript peasant clothing and sporting long queues. The Chinese Quarters and Chinatowns are illustrated as dirty, crowded, and run-down. Chinese are drawn with slanting eyes and more-slanting eyebrows, but not brazenly evil and sinister as of yet. Chinese are depicted in certain drawings noisily celebrating Chinese New Year in the streets, measuring doses of strange medicines in a Chinese drug store, preparing strange foods with strange ingredients, crowded in "Strange Theatres" to watch decidedly foreign Chinese operas, burying their dead in Chinese fashion complete with offerings and incense, and praying to ancestors in joss-houses. Chinese are shown working as miners and fishermen, working on the Central Pacific Railroad and on plantations, working in vineyards, in Chinese laundries, in cigar factories, and in shoe factories.
One illustration entitled "San Francisco, Cal. -- A Chinese Rag-Picker" shows an old Chinese man with a stick from which are suspended two baskets in the traditional Chinese manner. The baskets are full of rags. The man is wearing a Western-style hat and vest over what could be traditional Chinese garb or merely the tattered remnants of his Western outfit. The accompanying text details the labor situation of Chinese at the time, and the "natural" reaction of "native artisans" (Anglo Americans) to "rise...in riotous opposition to the Celestials". It goes on to describe the rag-picker living "in the most perfect squalor...contented with just enough cash to pay for his unhealthy lodging, his stale beer, his victuals gathered from the garbage, and his satisfying quantity of opium." While giving American readers this account of one Chinese man's existence, this illustration also served to associate such conditions with the Chinese, inasmuch as they all appeared to be alike, a common sentiment of the times, whether this is true or not. The readers did not know any better.
The illustration may also be seen by some as a bastardization of America when Chinese are thrown into the mix and perhaps as an allegory of the fate that lies in store for the country with the continued immigration of the Chinese. Another interpretation of the illustration is that while the Chinese may appear to be Westernized and assimilated on the surface, they will still remain Chinese underneath.
While Chinese are not painted in an overtly nor intentionally negative light and are not given the sinister and evil caricatures that later arise, stereotypes can still be drawn from examining these illustrations. From the illustrations Chinese can be characterized as foreign and strange, different from Anglo Americans. Chinese are arriving in indiscriminate masses, one Chinese indistinguishable from the next. Chinese are heathens and idolaters, worshipping strange deities. Chinese are well-suited and perhaps only suited for manual and physical labor. The Chinese are always shown as subordinate to white masters/foremen/teachers/patrons/passersby, etc. These stereotypes are expanded and amplified, and new ones are built upon them to be used against the Chinese during the anti-Chinese movement.
It is curious, however, that some Chinese are also alternately depicted in others illustrations singing hymns in the street and sitting orderly in a "Chinese Mission-School" at the Methodist Chapel. One illustration entitled "The Chinese College at Hartford, Connecticut" shows the portrait of a nicely Westernized Chinese described as "Mandarin Yung Wing". Yung Wing is dressed in a suit with a white collared shirt and tie. His hair does not hang down his back in a queue but instead it is cut in the manner of the West, cropped short and neatly combed and parted. A decidedly Western mustache sprouts like an inverted crescent from above his lip, bushy and full, markedly distinct from the "Fu Manchu" style which is long, thin, black, and oily. His hair and mustache are drawn, colored, and shaded in such a manner that, because of the black-and-white nature of the illustration, it is nearly possible that his hair could be of some shade other than black (or perhaps merely streaked with gray). His eyes are not overly slanted and his eyebrows could perhaps pass for Caucasian in the manner that they are drawn. It is shown that Yung Wing lives in a nice house or cottage and perhaps he even teaches at the college.
These images appear to send mixed messages of Chinese as being strangely foreign and different as well as paradoxically being eminently assimilable. However, the growing anti-Chinese sentiment previously touched upon soon meant that illustrations and depictions of Chinese in the printed media were to become increasingly negative, and positive images of Chinese were about to be in short supply.
Anti-Chinese sentiment appeared to be closely correlated to changes in the American economy. Initially, anti-Chinese sentiment appeared when American white miners complained about competition from foreign miners, especially the Chinese, in the gold fields of California in 1852. Chinese were seen merely as contract laborers who were not looking to become American citizens, who degraded American white workers and discouraged them from coming to California. The foreign miner's license tax was passed in May, 1882, which charged a monthly tax of three dollars to every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen, and Chinese were ineligible for citizenship because of the 1790 federal law that limited naturalization to whites.
When the gold fields started to dry up, many Chinese went to work for the Central Pacific Railroad starting in February of 1865 when fifty Chinese workers were hired. Within two years the Central Pacific Railroad employed 12,000 Chinese who made up 90 percent of the work force. Chinese were paid less than white workers, who complained that Chinese were driving down the wages for everybody.
With the completion of the railroad in 1869, thousands of subsequently unemployed Chinese migrated to cities such as San Francisco, where the growing California economy created thousands of new jobs in the manufacturing industry and agriculture. However, the completion of the railroads also allowed many white workers from the East Coast and Midwest to travel westward to California in search of jobs, which placed them in direct competition with Chinese workers. In addition, the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in 1868, which abolished the Chinese government prohibition on emigration to ensure a sufficient supply of Chinese labor for the railroads after at strike in 1867, resulted in the large-scale entry of Chinese laborers into the United States.
Anti-Chinese sentiment reached a new high as the ethnically based differential wage system saw Chinese being paid less than whites for the same work. Chinese workers were accused by white workers of driving down wages in industries ranging from agriculture to manufacturing. In the late 1860s and 1870s, anti-coolie clubs such as the Anti-Chinese Union were formed in San Francisco and there were anti-Chinese mass meetings. Labor unions held mass rallies in 1870 decrying the Burlingame-Seward Treaty. Anti-Chinese violence broke out in California in places such as Los Angeles Chinatown in 1871 and in Chico in 1877, and occurred outside of California in places such as Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885 and Tacoma, Washington in 1885-86, a sign of the increasing spread of the anti-Chinese movement. Anti-Chinese violence continued to occur sporadically throughout the United States during the 1880s.
Eventually, this anti-Chinese sentiment and pressure led to the "driving out" of Chinese from the mainstream American labor market and also led to the passage of a series of laws and acts restricting Chinese immigration which ultimately culminated with the exclusion of Chinese laborers in 1882. Actually, attempts to exclude Chinese began in 1855 when the California state legislature placed a capitation tax of $50 on "the immigration to this state of persons who cannot become citizens thereof" , which of course included the Chinese. Two acts passed in 1870 prohibiting the importation of "Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese females for criminal or demoralizing purposes" and the importation of "coolie slavery" were declared unconstitutional.
In 1875, Congress passed the Page Law, which forbade the entry of Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian contract laborers, women for the purpose of prostitution, and felons, significantly reducing the influx of Chinese women. Between 1876 and 1882, the seven-year period after the passage of the Page Law, the number of Chinese women entering the United States declined by 69 percent from the previous seven-year period. As it was, most Chinese immigrants in the United States were males who lived the life of bachelors, being either single or having left their families behind in China. This lack of familial stability caused many to turn to prostitution, gambling, and other vices as ways to pass the time, hence the old stereotype of Chinese as immoral, sensual, and being a threat to white women, the "Yellow Peril".
The Page Law did not, however, appreciably stem the influx of Chinese males, so in 1880 the United States negotiated the Angell Treaty with China which allowed the United States to "regulate, limit or suspend" but not "absolutely prohibit" the immigration of Chinese laborers when the United States believed that they threatened the "interests" or "good order" of America. The Angell Treaty merely provided the pretext for the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers for ten years. In 1888, Congress passed the Scott Act, which made it impossible for Chinese laborers to return to the United States once they left the country, cutting off over 30,000 Chinese laborers who possessed previously valid certificates of re-entry. The exclusion of Chinese laborers was extended for ten years in 1892 and in 1902, and made indefinite in 1904 after much debate.
These were the historical circumstances that created the environment for increasingly negative portrayals of Chinese in the printed media through political propaganda which in turn led to more anti-Chinese sentiment in a dialectical, mutually-shaping relationship. Anti-Chinese studies and publications abounded, such as "Chinese immigration and the physiological causes of the decay of a nation" in 1862 by Arthur B. Stout, "Chinese immigration. An address to the people of the United States upon the social, moral, and political effect of Chinese Immigration" by the state office in Sacramento in 1877 , and a document by the American Federation entitled "Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American manhood against Asiatic coolieism." in 1902. Political cartoons painted negative, stereotypical images of Chinese in response to issues such as labor strife, exclusion, Sino-American relations, and race relations.
In political cartoons protesting the Chinese labor "monopoly" in various industries, Chinese were depicted as many-armed inhuman creatures who occupied jobs that could belong to white workers. Chinese were increasingly dehumanized, portrayed as sinister and cunning. One cartoon shows a Chinese laborer with a long queue, dressed in traditional Chinese clothing, his hand stamped with the word "MONOPOLY", his outstretched fingers ending with long, tapered nails and covering various products of industries which employed a large number of Chinese workers (cigars, clothings, shirts, boxes, etc.). The accompanying text says "The unsophisticated Mongol, imitating, ape-like, his fellow of this country, attains a monopoly of the cigar and laundry business, and smiles a cunning smile at his discomfited rivals." The depiction is decidedly negative, intended to generate anti-monopoly and anti-Chinese sentiment. In another cartoon printed in The Wasp on November 14, 1885, entitled "The Chinese: Many Handed But Soulless", Chinese are shown as many-handed monsters grabbing at white people, with a complexion nearly as dark as that of an African American's.
Exclusionist propaganda and cartoons attempted to gain support by showing the Chinese as a nameless horde streaming into America or being "dumped" into California. Pro-China trade politicians were shown kowtowing to evil and smug-looking caricatures of Chinese. One such cartoon ridiculing these politicians was entitled "The Adoration of the 6,000-Year-Old Chinese Idea, and If Its Disciples Keep It Up Long Enough, They Will Surely Bring Us All to Eating Rats and Rice", a reference to the potential moral and cultural corruption of America by the Chinese, and to the strange eating habits of the Chinese. (On a related note, none of the illustrations and cartoons of Chinatown show any dogs whatsoever, perhaps owing to another stereotype about Chinese cuisine.)
Cartoons often depicted Chinese as an inferior race, subservient to the white man, echoing scientific racism and claims of white physical, mental, and cultural superiority. Chinese were pictured as physically grotesque, one cartoon showing the evolution of an ape into a Chinese man, who then evolves into a pig. Like the aforementioned cartoon involving a darkly complexioned Chinese, they were often compared with supposedly inferior races such as African Americans and Native Americans. Other illustrations show Chinese smoking opium, gambling, bearing diseases such as the plague, and ravishing white women. These images were products of American racial ideology that often saw Chinese as standing in the way of a homogeneous white society. Chinese were seen as a threat to moral and racial purity.
Even cartoons seemingly sympathetic to the Chinese that addressed the unequal nature of Sino-American relations and the unfair treatment of Chinese in the United States painted unfavorable images of the Chinese. Such cartoons emphasize the moral obligation of America, as a nation of Christianity and democracy, to treat the Chinese in a fair manner, in spite of the depraved and barbarous nature of Chinese. Chinese are infantilized and shown as needing the protection righteous Americans.
The stereotypes of Chinese that arise from the media portrayal of Chinese and unfavorable propaganda in the wake of Chinese immigration and the anti-Chinese movement can be summarized: Chinese are alien and exotic, different from white Americans. The Chinese population consists of a nameless mass of immigrants who all look alike, speak little, no, or pidgin English, and come to the United States to take American jobs. Chinese are underhanded, mysterious, sinister, and cunning, with slanted eyes, long queues, long, tapered fingernails, and given to smiling enigmatically. Chinese are inherently inferior to whites physically, morally, and culturally and only suited for physical/menial labor. Chinese men are criminals, gamblers, and opium addicts, and Chinese women are prostitutes. Chinese adhere to strange customs such as eating rats and dogs, and praying to strange gods and idols. Chinese are heathens. Chinese are unassimilable, etc., etc.
Many of these stereotypes of Chinese would continue well into the 20th century, some persisting even today. Elaine Kim attributes this to the fact that the Chinese population was kept small by the racially discriminatory immigration laws that have previously been detailed, and segregation of Chinese from mainstream American life. Because of this, most Americans were likelier to have gotten their knowledge of Chinese-Americans from Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, or Suzy Wong rather than from encountering Chinese-Americans in real life. As recently as 1960, the Chinese population in the United States was only 237,292 out of the total U.S. population of 179,323,732, or only 0.132 of one percent..
Kim gives as an example of the stereotypes and widespread misconceptions of Chinese held by Americans a study done in 1929. American children described Chinese as "crafty, backward, and clannish, and said that they disliked the Chinese because they steal, do 'underhanded work', bring opium into American, stab people in the back with knives, and have a 'sneaking, slimy air' and 'slant eyes (that) give me a chill.'" Another study of adults in Chicago showed that many Americans "feared the 'criminal appearance' of Chinese laundrymen, whom they believed 'did all kinds of sinister and mysterious things in their back rooms', ate rats, and kidnapped little boys in their laundry bags and hid them in rooms behind secret sliding panels."
From such circumstances arose a number of stereotypes and misconceptions, such as the character of Dr. Fu Manchu, created in 1913 by Sax Rohmer and eventually appearing in thirteen novels and many films and radio programs. Fu Manchu was characterized by a long, black mustache, long, flowing Chinese-style robes, and a sinister smile. He was immensely, coldly intelligent yet seemingly possessed no soul or emotion. He was the embodiment of evil, juxtaposed with the more human white protagonists.
Charlie Chan was another character who embodied a number of stereotypes about Chinese, portrayed in six novels, i.e. Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) by Earl Derr Biggers and forty-seven films. A supposedly "good" portrayal of Chinese, Charlie Chan was an ally of the white man, helping to solve crimes through some sort of mystic divination. However, the Charlie Chan character made the Chinese male appear to be subservient to the white man, amusingly asexual and non-threatening.
Images of Chinese women as exotic and sensual sex objects for white men have arisen from old stereotypes of Chinese women as prostitutes and as obedient servants. A fairly recent example that substantiates this stereotype can be seen in an article entitled "What It's Like to Be a Chinese-American Girl" by Lily Chang that appeared in the October 1978 issue of Cosmopolitan. In the article, she characterizes Chinese women as possessing greater amount of emotional and physical restraint, but "once we exorcise family-bred inhibitions, we can be quite delectable in bed". She describes Chinese women as having "a style of femininity that differs subtly from the one typically favored by forthright all-American girls", being "softer, more pliable, more willing to defer to our men in public". Again, old stereotypes are being reinforced and not refuted.
Physically grotesque characterizations of Chinese have also persisted, as evidenced by "The Hands of Shang-chi, Master of Kung Fu", a Marvel comic line created in 1973. The half Chinese, half Caucasian hero, Shang-chi, is described as being "colored a more pleasant orange rather than [a] sallow grapefruit hue" by William F. Wu in article entitled "White Makes Right: Marvel's Kung Fu Color Line" that appeared in Inside Comics in 1974. Asian/Chinese villains are shown with exaggerated racial traits reminiscent of 19th-century anti-Chinese caricatures: "eyes slanted at an unnaturally high angle, skin-color shaded an unnaturally strong yellow." Fu Manchu has been brought back as the chief villain. Apparently, old stereotypes die hard.
It is apparent that the media has always characterized Chinese in a mostly unfavorable and stereotypical manner, dating back to the 1850s and continuing even in the present day. Factors for this included anti-Chinese sentiment due to labor competition, scientific racism, and anti-Chinese political propaganda. One common thread throughout is the fact that only once in the preceding examples Chinese portrayals were Chinese able to actually represent themselves (the Chang article), with racial stereotypes deriving partly from the "burden of representation", the fact that, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism,

That having been said, it goes to reason that perhaps these stereotypes and misconceptions that have plagued Chinese-Americans and Chinese in America may finally be done away with, if only these groups are allowed to accurately represent themselves.