Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States

rdf:langString Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States

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rdf:langString A defiant Columbia in an 1871 Thomas Nast cartoon "The Chinese Question", showing protecting a defenseless Chinese man from an angry white lynch mob that has just burned down a colored orphanage. The billboard behind is full of inflammatory anti-Chinese broadsheets.

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rdf:langString Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States

rdf:langString The Chinese Question , by Thomas Nast.png

rdf:langString Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States dates to the mid-19th century, shortly after Chinese immigrants, the ancestors of many Chinese Americans, first arrived in North America. It has taken many forms, including prejudice; racist immigration limits; and murder, massacres, and other violence. Anti-Chinese sentiment and violence in the country first manifested in the 1860s, when the Chinese were employed in the building of the world's First transcontinental railroad. Its origins can be traced partly to competition with whites for jobs and to the reports of American merchants, missionaries, and diplomats who had lived and worked in China and wrote "relentlessly negative" and unsubstantiated reports of the people whom they "encountered" there. Violence against Chinese in California, in Oregon, in Washington, and throughout the west took many forms, including pogroms; expulsions, including the destruction of a Chinatown in Denver; and massacres such as the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871, the Rock Springs massacre, and the Hells Canyon Massacre. Anti-Chinese sentiment led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the naturalization and further immigration of people of Chinese descent. Amid discussions of "Yellow Peril", anti-Chinese sentiment was eventually extended to all East and Southeast Asians, leading to the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. During the 1930s and 1940s, anti-Chinese sentiment slightly dwindled and anti-Japanese sentiment increased when China became an ally of the United States while it waged its war against Japan in the Pacific War theater of World War II. However, it was revived during the Cold War, especially during the McCarthy hearings and the Korean War, shortly after the communists rose to power at the end of the Chinese Civil War and proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, remaining in power until today. Although relations between the United States and China were normalized after the Sino-Soviet split and the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China, anti-Chinese sentiment has increased in the United States since the end of the Cold War, especially since the 2010s, and its increase has been attributed to China's rise as a major economic and military world power, which is perceived as a primary threat to America's position as the world's sole superpower. Since 2019, xenophobia and racism further intensified due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with increased discrimination, racism, and violence against Chinese people, people of Chinese descent or anyone perceived to be Chinese, especially Asians.