Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years

Charlotte Brooks is associate professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is the author of Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19356-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19373-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226193731.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brooks, Charlotte, 1971– author.

Between Mao and McCarthy : Chinese American politics in the Cold War years / Charlotte Brooks.

   pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-19356-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-19373-1 (e-book)

1. Chinese Americans—Political activity—History—20th century.   2. Chinese Americans—Social conditions—History—20th century.   I. Title.

E184.C5B736 2015

305.895107309'04—dc23

2014010243

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Between Mao and McCarthy

Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years

CHARLOTTE BROOKS

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Pam

And in memory of Gus

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

A Note on Names and Translations

Introduction

ONE. New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America

TWO. War, Revolution, and Political Realignment

THREE. The Resurgence of China Politics

FOUR. Divergence: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s

FIVE. The Immigration Racket Investigation and the Rise of a New Politics

SIX. Chinese Americans, Orientals, Minorities: Politics in a New Era

Epilogue

Notes

Who’s Who

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have completed Between Mao and McCarthy without the assistance of a wide array of friends, family, colleagues, students, and staff at institutions in New York and across the country. Their help and support made the research and writing of this book possible.

I am deeply grateful to the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, which through the Lang Junior Faculty Fellowship Program at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), provided much of the funding for my research. The Professional Staff Congress–CUNY Award Program also supported the research for this book, while the Macaulay Honors College enabled me to purchase Chinese-language reference materials.

In the course of writing the book, I visited and used the resources of numerous archives, libraries, and presidential museums across the country. I am thankful to the staffs of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Richard M. Nixon Library, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the National Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, the Princeton University East Asia Library, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Charles E. Young Library Special Collections Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Asian American Studies Library and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the University Library Department of Archives and Special Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills, the Hoover Institution, the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Department at the University of Utah, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives, the Arizona Historical Foundation, the New York Public Library, the Special Collections and Manuscripts Library at California State University, Sacramento, the Special Collections Department at the University of California, Davis, the California State Library, the New York Municipal Archives, the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Department of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Center for Research Libraries, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY.

I also wish to thank the many colleagues at Baruch College, CUNY, who provided assistance and encouragement as I did the research for Between Mao and McCarthy. Louisa Moy, Brian Ross, and particularly J. Silvia Cho of the college library’s interlibrary loan department did their utmost to locate the unusual materials I requested. The college’s chief librarian, Arthur Downing, found the resources to enable Baruch to join the Center for Research Libraries consortium at a crucial moment in my research. My colleagues and the staff of the Department of History provided a collegial atmosphere in which to work and teach.

While writing this book, I benefited from the help of undergraduate and graduate research assistants. Ethan Hong Zheng of Baruch College spent weeks poring over the 1949 numbers of the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York and finding relevant articles for me. May Poh Lai from the Macaulay Honors College served as my summer research assistant and helped me locate important material in the Chinese Journal and the Chinese-American Weekly. At San Francisco State University, graduate student Samuel Wanless proved a particularly intrepid researcher, finding and photographing San Francisco election precinct counts and the maps that accompanied them.

Over the past few years, I made significant efforts to contact the men and women whom I discuss in this book. Most had already passed away, and others either declined to be interviewed or chose not to respond to my inquiries. However, I was fortunate enough to locate and interview a handful of the men and women who participated in or reported on midcentury Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco. I also received considerable assistance from many of the family members of the activists who appear in Between Mao and McCarthy. I am very grateful to Judge Harry Low, John Burton, Catherine Lee, William Yukon Chang, Cindy Gim, Dr. Edward Chow, Dallas Chang, Connie Young Yu, Amy Chung, and Burk Chung, for sharing their memories and documents with me. Edward Jew was particularly generous with his extensive knowledge of San Francisco Chinatown politics and with material about his friend T. Kong Lee. I want to extend special thanks to Dorinda Ng and Wayne Hu, whose assistance and cooperation were crucial to this book. Both shared memories of their parents’ activism with me; provided information, documents, and photographs unavailable in conventional archives; and introduced me to friends and acquaintances with considerable knowledge of Chinese American politics in the Bay Area. Equally important, they shared their own memories of growing up with politically active parents in midcentury San Francisco.

I am also grateful to the many people who helped me as I completed the initial and final drafts of the manuscript. Brad Simpson provided invaluable assistance as I searched for additional Cold War–era source materials. Meredith Oda, Madeline Hsu, Shana Bernstein, Jason Chang, and Naoko Shibusawa offered useful comments on the conference papers that became part of the manuscript. Jonathan Soffer, Kristin Cellelo, Lara Vapnek, Vanessa May, Libby Garland, Jeffrey Trask, Randi Storch, Owen Gutfreund, Meredith Oda, Pam Griffith, Shana Bernstein, and Ellen Wu read portions of the book and pushed me to improve it in numerous ways. Shana’s encouragement and sense of humor buoyed me at key moments, while Ellen was always generous with her enthusiasm, suggestions, research materials, and admonitions to never forget dessert. Having been out of graduate school for more than a decade, I can no longer officially claim Nancy MacLean as my advisor, but she has never forced me to accept that fact. At the University of Chicago Press, Robert Devens and, later, Timothy Mennel patiently shepherded the book through the production process. I also wish to thank the two anonymous readers at the press for their valuable suggestions.

My family’s love and encouragement sustained me as I researched and wrote this book. Jill Brooks-Garnett, Jennifer Tucker, Nancy Bowman, Jim and Marlene Bentzien, Joy Brooks, and Dara Griffith offered laughter and kind words at all the right moments. Richard Brooks cheered me with bad puns, groan-worthy jokes, love, and a microfilm reader. Bjorn Broholm-Vail and Lou H.H. Griffith-Brooks provided perhaps a few too many hours of diversion. And Pam Griffith remained my inspiration throughout, quietly doing the kind of work that makes the world a better place. I am deeply grateful for her love and unflagging support.

ABBREVIATIONS

A NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLATIONS

There are hundreds of dialects of Chinese, many of them mutually unintelligible but all written with the same characters. Today, scholars generally transliterate written Chinese into English using the pinyin system developed in the People’s Republic of China. Pinyin is a Romanization system for what is known as standard Chinese, or putonghua, a dialect spoken around Beijing and today the language of education and government in China.

are not names but simply terms of familiarity sometimes used as name prefixes.

The result of this confusion was that Chinese immigrants often became known in the wider community by names that were not names at all, or were not the names they used in Chinese. Many of them simply accepted these new names, and to avoid confusion, their English-speaking children did so as well. For instance, one of New York’s more prominent Chinese Americans in the mid-twentieth century was James Typond, the Americanborn son of Chinese immigrant Yip Typond. In Chinese, James Typond’s name was Yip Wingjeun (Ye Rongjin in pinyin), but because non-Chinese assumed that Yip Typond’s surname was Typond rather than Yip, he and his son James used it that way when interacting with non-Chinese.

In this book, I use pinyin to transliterate names when I can find no record of the way the name was commonly transliterated at the time (a transliteration that would almost certainly have reflected a Yue dialect pronunciation rather than a northern Chinese pronunciation). When a person used different names in English and Chinese, I have referred to that person by the name that he or she used in English. Finally, I use the old Wade-Giles system (widely employed before 1979) for transliterations of names associated with the Republic of China (Chiang Kai-shek instead of Jiang Jieshi, for example).

Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are mine.

Introduction

In October 1952, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson held a campaign rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he spoke to a crowd of thousands of enthusiastic supporters, many of them Chinese Americans. At almost the same moment, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, arrived in Manhattan to urge Chinese Americans there to act as cadres for her husband’s regime. These two affairs were the year’s most important political events in the Chinese American communities of San Francisco and New York City, and they symbolized the complexity of Chinese American politics in the midcentury years. Long the target of discriminatory laws and practices, people of Chinese ancestry after World War Two enjoyed improved treatment but still yearned for a fairer and more equitable America. Events overseas deeply complicated their ability to organize politically to achieve this goal, particularly since much of the American public and government considered all of them surrogates for China, or even citizens of that nation. In 1949, the Chinese civil war ended after the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang/KMT), who fled to Taiwan. A year later, the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) entered the Korean War against the United States. In this context, what the Stevenson rally and Madame Chiang’s visit reveal is the degree to which the distinctive local political cultures of New York and San Francisco ultimately tempered the effects of the fraught ROC-PRC-US relationship on the Chinese American communities of each city. In short, the two events demonstrate the surprising and significant ways in which national and international politics intersected with local ones in the early Cold War years.¹

This is a book about Chinese American politics during that era. The word politics can be singular or plural; in the case of Chinese Americans, it was most definitely the latter. Chinese American politics were, in the simplest sense, the political choices and activities of people of Chinese ancestry in the United States, yet these politics were anything but simple: they involved both the politics of China and those of the United States. A mix of aliens and citizens, legal residents and unlawful entrants, the Chinese American population often maintained close ties to mainland China before the Korean War. Many Chinese Americans participated in Chinese political parties, and some even served in legislative bodies in China while living in the United States. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, thousands of Chinese Americans, especially American-born men and women, began to avoid China politics and participate in American electoral politics instead. During the period this book covers, China politics always remained a part of Chinese American politics. But by the 1960s, Chinese American politics became much less about China’s future and much more about winning elections in America and achieving greater civil rights for people of Chinese ancestry in the United States.

The political experiences of Chinese Americans challenge current understandings of how Cold War foreign policy converged with domestic civil rights struggles after World War Two. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union and the PRC both preached racial equality, an issue that undermined American prestige across the developing world. In particular, the United States seemed to be failing in its attempts to win friends and allies in Asia. Throughout the region, many citizens and leaders of newly independent nations expressed admiration for communist China while regarding the United States, an ally of colonial powers Britain and France, as a defender of white supremacy. Participants in the burgeoning US civil rights movement often tried to highlight this issue. As Congressman Adam Clayton Powell pointed out, the United States could improve its appeal to the developing world only if it would quit taking the side of colonialism . . . [and] clean up the race problem in the United States.² Occasionally, communist accusations pushed American officials to take the kind of positive action Powell desired. More often, the US government tried to cover up racial problems and suppress domestic critics, especially blacks who used anti-colonialism to understand and explain global white supremacy. Many African American activists responded by avoiding discussion of foreign policy altogether and instead focusing on purely domestic strategies for change. But because of their ancestry, Chinese Americans did not have this option.³

For almost every Chinese American in the postwar United States, the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics was not just ideological and rhetorical but immediate and sometimes imperiling. US officials used the supposed threat of communism to investigate and harass thousands of Chinese Americans and to justify draconian security measures against them. Being perceived as potential racial enemies of the United States affected their ability to communicate with, visit, and support families in China, altered their future plans and careers, and gave some people tremendous power and status while undermining the citizenship and welfare of others. At the same time, US foreign policy and domestic anti-communism enabled the ROC to actively interfere in Chinese American communities and influenced the PRC regime’s ever-changing treatment of overseas Chinese families.⁴

Frustrated at this state of affairs, more and more Chinese Americans in the 1950s and 1960s began participating in American politics. Some did so specifically to defend the interests of the ROC regime; far more hoped to protect and enhance the rights of Chinese Americans in the United States. Scholars who look at Cold War Asian America tend to focus on the ways in which people of Asian ancestry shaped, deployed, and exploited Asian and Asian American images.⁵ But Chinese Americans were not simply image manipulators. They were eager political actors who sought fairer laws, lobbied public officials, and rallied voters around issues of common concern.

Most were also liberals or moderates, and in contrast to previous studies that focus on community rightists or leftists, this book looks at Chinese America’s broad, active, and diverse political center. Home to the majority of Chinese Americans, it included supporters of ROC leader Chiang Kai-shek, his opponents in the KMT, third-party KMT opponents, liberals, moderates, Democrats, Republicans, and many who fell into more than one of these categories, or none at all. Current scholarship tends to portray the Cold War as either a period of Chinese American political apathy or an era during which repressive, right-wing KMT fossils attacked the heroic but doomed community Marxists who valued democracy and supported New China.⁶ This view not only flattens the complexities of Chinese American politics, but renders Americans of Chinese ancestry as passive victims and makes their energetic, centrist activism irrelevant. The anti-communist political climate of the early Cold War years certainly stifled many Americans’ freedom of expression and was particularly devastating for members of the Communist Party and those active in groups associated with it. Yet ordinary people never completely stopped criticizing the state or organizing for even controversial causes. Chinese Americans were no different. In fact, their political positions and choices say as much about the complexity of American politics at this time as they do about the Chinese American experience in particular.⁷

As this book demonstrates, centrist Chinese Americans publicly expressed profound ambivalence about both the ROC and the PRC, frustrating the attempts of the two regimes to claim the allegiance of overseas Chinese in America. By 1951, few Chinese Americans defended the PRC, but not just because the Korean War and the Second Red Scare made praise for the country seem traitorous. Instead, the PRC’s own policies alienated many Chinese Americans by harming their families in China. The ROC had to contend with the contempt and criticism of many Chinese Americans as well, even members of the American KMT leadership. During the early Cold War, centrist Chinese Americans became some of the ROC’s most eloquent and consistent critics. This drumbeat of dissent worried the Chiang regime, which invested considerable resources to suppress it but never really could. After all, the KMT government was dealing with an increasingly vocal and confident group of US citizens, many of whom wanted to forge ties to American rather than Chinese political parties.

Between Mao and McCarthy argues that the political activity of these citizens played a vital role in shaping Chinese American identity and community in the Cold War years, a period of tremendous economic and social change for people of Chinese ancestry. Before World War Two, many Chinese Americans saw themselves as Chinese rather than American, in large part because of the intense legal, social, and economic discrimination they faced in the United States. Numerous second- and even third-generation people contemplated returning to China, prompted both by bigotry at home and loyalty to their ancestral land. Growing US sympathy for Japanese-occupied China in the late 1930s improved the image and treatment of Chinese Americans, as did the Sino-American alliance during World War Two. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, a Chinese American ethnic identity was increasingly emerging in the United States. In part, the communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan complicated plans to return to China, however one defined it. But Chinese Americans also found far more reasons than ever before to stay in the United States. Pulled into the mainstream workforce and the military during World War Two, thousands continued to enjoy better job opportunities after the conflict. Congress eliminated some of the laws that excluded Chinese from immigrating and that denied them naturalization rights, while larger shifts in American ideas about race eroded the white supremacy that stymied earlier generations of Chinese Americans. By the 1950s, a growing number of Chinese American citizens rejected Nationalist interference in community politics, and in spite of KMT pressure, embraced a Chinese American ethnic identity divorced from both the PRC and the ROC. Entering American politics, they insisted on recognition as citizens and voters, rather than as Chinese, and they punished candidates whom they deemed disrespectful or dismissive of this demand.⁸

These Chinese Americans became politically active at a pivotal moment in America, when population and thus political power was shifting west and the future of liberalism was under debate.⁹ This book shows that the changing local politics of the communities in which people of Chinese ancestry lived played an important role in determining the success of ROC attempts to prevent the development of a Chinese American ethnic politics distinct from China politics. The Nationalists dominated populations that local political systems helped disfranchise, but their mission proved less successful where community members enjoyed a degree of influence in mainstream party politics. While China politics remained very powerful in Chinese American politics in some places, elsewhere in America its influence diminished. The results of this disparity are apparent even today in the degree of political influence Chinese Americans wield—or do not—in communities across the United States.

.   .   .   

By 1950, almost 120,000 Chinese Americans lived in the United States, excluding the Territory of Hawaii. Between Mao and McCarthy focuses on the American mainland’s two largest Chinese American communities: those of San Francisco, California, and New York, New York. Because of their size and geographical position, these two cities were the political, social, and economic capitals of East Coast and West Coast Chinese America. They housed their regions’ most important Chinese American merchants and businesses, immigration lawyers, community organizations, political party branches, Chinese-language newspapers and magazines, and Chinese government consuls.¹⁰

Because of San Francisco’s history, geographical position, and concentration of merchants and community organizations, it was also the capital of Chinese America as a whole. Chinese-language newspapers in the mid-twentieth century regularly referred to San Francisco not only as the sound-alike san fanshi but also as jiujinshan, or old gold mountain, and dabu, or great port. These monikers were no accident. The first Chinese arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and the city remained the port through which most Chinese entered America until the 1960s. For many years, including the period this book addresses, San Francisco was home to the largest Chinese American population in the continental United States (around 40,000 in the mid-1950s). New York gained a sizeable Chinese American presence in the 1880s and by the twentieth century had become the main center of Chinese American life on the East Coast. By the mid-1950s, its Chinese American population (about 32,000 in the metro area) was second only to San Francisco’s. As a result, half of the Chinese American population of the continental United States lived in the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas by 1960.

Chinese officials and party leaders recognized the special significance of San Francisco and New York to Chinese American life. Before 1949, Communist Party members in the two cities worked to organize Chinese Americans into leftist organizations, but the Second Red Scare and the Korean War ended their ability to operate openly. The KMT experienced no such restrictions in either place, although the cities’ relative value to the Nationalists changed markedly over time. In the prewar years, San Francisco was home to the most important Chinese American merchants, whose donations the Nationalist regime craved; the city’s KMT branch was large, active, and growing, and several papers in the Bay Area represented different party factions. After World War Two, the Nationalist government’s needs changed quickly. Determined to survive after the establishment of the PRC, the KMT regime on Taiwan shifted resources and attention to New York, home of the United Nations, much of the American media, and a growing collection of Nationalist backers and detractors. In Manhattan, the Chinese Nationalists fought to hold on to their UN seat and lobbied constantly in the press for more American aid and attention. San Francisco, while still important, no longer commanded nearly as much of the ROC’s attention or manpower.

American immigration officials recognized the special importance of Chinese American San Francisco and New York as well. Authorities who sought to stem the unlawful immigration of Chinese into the United States identified the two cities as their main problem areas. In both places, sailors who jumped ship and students who overstayed visas could blend easily into sizable Chinese American communities. Of even greater concern to officials, extensive networks of Chinese American immigration attorneys and travel agents operated in both places and sometimes maintained offices in each; these immigration experts used their connections and knowledge to help Chinese slip into the United States unlawfully. For this reason, the Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) focused most of their resources on San Francisco and New York during a crucial 1956 investigation into immigration fraud among Chinese Americans.¹¹

Of course, San Francisco and New York were not the only places where Chinese Americans participated in US and China politics, or where Chinese and American officials attempted to extend their authority over communities of Chinese ancestry. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Oakland emerged as other centers of Chinese and Chinese American political activism in these years. Diverse Hawaii, which contained a Chinese American population similar in size to San Francisco’s, occupied a unique position in the Asian American political world. American officials investigated immigration violations in Washington, D.C., Buffalo, San Diego, and a host of other communities. Still, no two places straddled the intersection of Chinese, American, and Chinese American politics quite like San Francisco and New York, and no two represented better the polarization of Chinese American politics by the 1950s.

.   .   .   

Almost every Chinese American who called San Francisco or New York home traced his or her ancestry to the Pearl River Delta area of Guangdong Province in southern China. The delta counties grappled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the impact of political unrest, natural disasters, Western imperialism, and new market forces. Since the region was located near major international ports, hundreds of thousands of its residents coped with these forces by migrating elsewhere. While some sought better opportunities in China itself, most traveled abroad, looking for work in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the United States, among other places.¹²

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which Congress passed in an effort to bar these Chinese migrants from the United States, played an immensely important role in the composition of Chinese American communities after that time. Those whom the law allowed to reside in the United States included students, merchants, and their families. In contrast, until 1943 the exclusion law forbade Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, and those already in the country could not bring in non-citizen wives and children. For this reason, the small population of native-born Chinese American citizens in the United States before World War Two were frequently merchants’ children. At the same time, thousands of Chinese sought ways around the law, purchasing fake identities that enabled them to enter the United States as the alleged sons of American citizens or as dependents of legally domiciled merchants. By the 1920s and 1930s, some of the Chinese sailors who worked in the international merchant fleets were also jumping ship in US ports in violation of exclusion. Before the 1950s, the vast majority of the laborers, sailors, and merchants who came to the United States, whether legally or unlawfully, were boys and men, meaning that Chinese American politics were even more heavily male than US politics in general during this era.

In the period this book considers, Chinese Americans in New York and San Francisco each developed a distinctive politics that grew further apart over time. To a certain extent, this evolution reflected the dissimilar demographics of the Chinese American population of each community, as well as the changing role leftists and the KMT played in both. But the startlingly different Chinese American political cultures that emerged in each place were hardly preordained, nor simply the product of Cold War repression. Instead, they reflected the importance of local politics, whose shifts shaped Chinese American political activity in significant and unprecedented ways. This book begins in the early 1930s, when the kind of token political influence that Chinese Americans enjoyed in Manhattan seemed completely out of the reach of their San Francisco peers. By the time the book ends, in the late 1960s, Chinese Americans in San Francisco had become an important political force in their city, while their New York counterparts exercised almost no influence whatsoever.

Regional and national political changes also shaped Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco in ways almost no one could have foreseen in the 1930s. In those years, New York State was the nation’s political and progressive powerhouse; its former governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, occupied the White House from 1933 until his death in 1945. New York City’s storied progressives, from Fiorello LaGuardia to Vito Marcantonio to Herbert Lehman, were the nation’s most prominent defenders of FDR’s New Deal state. But World War Two quickened an ongoing population shift from northeast to southwest, and New York City in the postwar years lost jobs, population, and political clout. As Democrats and Republicans created sophisticated new organizations on the West Coast, Manhattan’s old Tammany Hall Democratic political machine was in its death throes. New York’s loss was California’s gain—literally, in the Congress and the Electoral College, and symbolically in the emergence of Western politicians on the national scene and California conservatism by the late 1960s. Not all California politicians were conservatives, of course; in fact, by the 1970s, the San Francisco liberals closest to the city’s Chinese American community had become the most passionate defenders of progressive politics in the United States.¹³

To explore the complex politics of both places, Between Mao and McCarthy draws on a host of federal, state, and local government documents and FBI files, the papers of civic organizations and political clubs, and interviews with politicians and activists and their children. The book also uses the diaries and papers of Chinese political notables, including Chiang Kai-shek, V.K. Wellington Koo, and Li Zongren, as well as documents from the Kuomintang archives; articles from newspapers in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; memoirs of activists and bystanders; and community directories and commemorative publications.

Above all, Between Mao and McCarthy relies on local Chinese-language newspapers and magazines to give voice to an array of community members. The great majority of Chinese American men and women in the early and mid-twentieth century understood Chinese, and most spoke it at home. The Chinese Americans active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s could often both speak and read Chinese, and many paid close attention to the Chinese-language press. This book includes almost all the publications they might have encountered, drawing on the journals that represented various factions of the KMT in New York and San Francisco, the newspapers of the anti-KMT Third Force in America, communist-backed and openly communist papers, and centrist and liberal journals not affiliated with any political party. Together, these organs chronicled news of interest to their communities, devoting space to political meetings and groups that the mainstream English-language press ignored. Political parties and factions also used newspapers to hash out their disagreements and even threaten other parties and factions. Independent publications in Chinese American communities often aired the views of activist editors and provided space for letters from ordinary Chinese Americans—especially, but not solely, immigrants—who discussed their passions, annoyances, and frustrations. Used together, these publications capture the vigor and diversity of Chinese American politics in a way that other sources cannot.

The US-Taiwan alliance created significant political repression in Chinese American communities, but the high circulation numbers of the independent press confirm that a vibrant, diverse politics never disappeared from Cold War Chinese America. Nor did the Second Red Scare completely eliminate vocal dissent or progressive activism, unless progressive is simply a euphemism for Marxist. Despite what some historians maintain, the KMT never enjoyed complete control in any community, because even many centrists refused to bow to its dictates. In other words, the vast space between Mao and McCarthy contained vigorous debates and many independent political voices.

.   .   .   

In order to fully capture these debates and voices, this book begins in the 1930s and proceeds in a roughly chronological fashion up to the late 1960s. The first three chapters of the book examine the origins of Chinese American political activism in the New Deal and World War Two, as well as the impact of the immediate postwar years, when the civil war in China complicated political affinities. The final three chapters trace the evolution of Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco after the founding of the PRC and its involvement in the Korean War.

Chapter One examines the impact of New Deal politics on the Chinese American communities of San Francisco and New York. During the 1930s, Chinese politics remained an almost obsessive preoccupation in both communities, while the China-born segment of the community often derided the native-born citizens as brainless and weak, neither wholly Chinese nor American. Yet as the Depression increasingly affected Chinese Americans, New Deal programs offered them hope and a new vision of the way politics could affect their communities and give their citizenship actual meaning. Chapter Two explores the political ferment in Chinese American communities during and immediately after World War Two. Chinese politics remained a major obsession, and the Chinese civil war split the community; even many moderates who disliked communism criticized the repressive and incompetent Nationalist regime. But after the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act gave Chinese immigrants the ability to become naturalized citizens, American politics began to attract the attention of more of the Chinese American population. An influx of thousands of China-born wives under the provisions of 1946 war bride legislation compounded this effect: war veterans of Chinese ancestry pleaded with Congress to allow continued family immigration and to end immigration officials’ harassment of their wives. By 1947 and 1948, the growing importance of American domestic politics, and the increasingly poor reputation of the Nationalists, signaled the declining power of conservative leaders and organizations in Chinese American communities.

Chapter Three discusses the ways in which the communist takeover of the Chinese mainland and China’s involvement in the Korean War shaped Chinese American politics between 1949 and 1951. Leaders of the American KMT sought alternatives to Chiang Kai-shek, while American members of the anti-communist and anti-Nationalist Third Force continued their quest to shape American policy towards China. While the Korean War eventually unified the American KMT, it hardly silenced Chiang Kai-shek’s critics in New York and San Francisco. Chapter Four explores the rapidly diverging politics of Chinese American New York and San Francisco in the early and mid-1950s. In New York, KMT activists and officials infiltrated almost every Chinese American organization, but their factionalism and disregard for community welfare frustrated many residents. In San Francisco during the same period, Chinese Americans increasingly focused on American domestic politics, which not only proved safer than Chinese politics but also touched their lives more directly. Growing numbers registered to vote, and a group of younger men and women participated in the liberal Democratic club movement, forging valuable ties to regional politicians.

Chapter Five discusses the 1956 Justice Department crackdown on unlawful immigration and its aftermath in Chinese American New York and San Francisco. In New York, the investigation paralyzed the community and strengthened the very KMT leaders who proved unable to stop it. In San Francisco, Chinese American liberal Democrats used their connections to local politicians to fight the investigation and at the same time demonstrate to their peers the value of political participation. In 1958, they played a significant local role in the election that made Edmund G. Pat Brown governor and brought a host of other Democrats into state office. Some even began to envision pan-Asian American political solidarity as a route to greater influence in San Francisco. Chapter Six examines Chinese American political activity in the 1960s against the backdrop of the black civil rights movement, growing Asian American socioeconomic mobility, the Vietnam War, changes in US immigration policy, and the intergenerational tensions that the Asian American movement helped provoke. During this period, activist Chinese American youths increasingly rejected moderate politics and condemned as reactionaries the same community liberals who had long struggled against Chinatown conservatives.

.   .   .   

Between the Depression and the late 1960s, local politics and American foreign policy converged to shape the rights, opportunities, and political activism of Chinese Americans. The starkly different experiences of people of Chinese ancestry in New York and San Francisco demonstrate the way that local and global conditions could mix to either limit or facilitate political activism. By the 1950s, Chinese American politics in San Francisco were emerging from the shadow of China and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. Such a development took far longer in New York City, where a lack of robust party competition dovetailed with KMT imperatives to thwart real change. Even today, the Chinese American population of San Francisco enjoys far greater political influence than its New York counterpart, a legacy of the Cold War’s effect on midcentury politics in both places.

ONE

New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America

Describing Chinese American San Francisco before World War Two, the journalist Gilbert Woo vividly recalled the way the politics of China divided the community. There were disagreements over constitutional monarchy and constitutional democracy, there were debates over constitutionalism and dictatorship, there were arguments about Wang Jingwei versus Chiang Kai-shek, and there were disputes about Hu Hanmin versus Chiang Kai-shek, he noted.¹ China politics was a constant source of discord partly because Chinese Americans feared for the future of their ancestral nation. Racist American immigration laws also encouraged this fixation on China politics: because Asian immigrants could not naturalize, few Chinese Americans could vote. Even native-born Chinese Americans viewed American politics with skepticism, since white demagogues routinely used anti-Chinese sentiment to win elections. The result in both San Francisco and New York was that Chinese American politics and China politics were essentially the same. But shifts in local politics and Chinese American demographics, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression and Japanese encroachment in China, began in the 1930s to disentangle the two—at least in San Francisco. There, an emerging population of native-born activists started to participate in both the Democratic and Republican parties, even as Chinese New Yorkers grew more polarized and more suspicious of American politics.

New York and San Francisco in the early twentieth century seemed fairly similar: major ports with cosmopolitan cultures, strong labor unions, and long histories of immigrant involvement in politics. In reality, their political cultures differed in numerous ways. Democratic political machines dominated New York’s boroughs, but socialism also appealed to the heavily immigrant working classes. Laboring under terrible conditions and encountering the disdain of Protestant elites, many Jewish and some Catholic immigrants and their children engaged in radical politics that led them, by the 1930s, into the American Labor Party, or, sometimes, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In San Francisco, working conditions were often better, the conservative American Federation of Labor wielded significant power, and