Encountering the Other: Chinese immigration and its impact on Chinese and American worldviews, 1875-1905

Framed as a meeting of two streams of ethnocentrism, this is a study of how Chinese immigration to the United States created a crisis for China and the United States and how it forced intellectuals and officials in both countries to reevaluate their worldviews. Using Chinese and English-language sources, this study uses concepts of the self and Other as an analytical framework with which to compare how Chinese elites viewed the Chinese immigrant community to how Americans reacted to the Chinese presence in America. Chapter One juxtaposes the Sinocentric worldview and official attitudes toward emigrants with the tension in American society between ideals of pluralism and the desire for homogeneity and how Chinese immigrants brought this tension to the surface. Chapter Two examines how these conflicting worldviews were transformed through the immigration experience. The Chinese broke with tradition and established a foreign legation while Americans altered immigration policy by passing a series of bills excluding the Chinese from entering America. This chapter also provides a textual analysis of American anti-Chinese publications and Chinese written responses to the anti-Chinese movement.; Chapter three focuses on Yung Wing, a graduate of Yale, the Co-commissioner of the Chinese Educational Mission, and the Assistant Chinese Foreign Minister to the United States. His life is presented as the quintessential example of Chinese immigrant assimilation into American life, a process many Americans thought the Chinese incapable of. The final chapter is an analysis of the travel diary of the intellectual-reformer Liang Qichao, written during his 1903 tour of North America. Liang's negative assessment of the Chinese in America as found in this text is examined in light of Liang's use of Chinese immigrants as a "third party" Other as a vehicle to criticize Chinese culture and comment on American social and political institutions. Similarly, this study views Chinese immigrants and their treatment in America as important factors in shaping China's response to the West and its entrance into the modern family of nations, as well as the fundamental challenge to American constructions of the image of the United States as a "nation of nations."...