Chinese Must Go Research Paper

Chinese immigrants started coming to the US due to the gold rush of the 1848 and were at first received with open arms.However, within a few decades public opinions towards the Chinese as a whole shifted dramatically, climaxing at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which forbade all immigration to the United States by Chinese people. This law was the first piece of legislation that discriminates against people from a certain country of origin that was on the federal level. The irony comes from the fact that this was during the Progressive Period, where people actively tried to better the lives of everyone in society through reforms and protests, yet they tried to destroy the lives of Chinese workers. The reason that the Americans who had initially welcomed the Chinese turned on them was due to their own negative stereotypes of the Chinese that portrayed as anti-American, a concern for their livelihoods due to the economic troubles and large number of jobs being taken by the Chinese, and misdirected …show more content…
The play “The Chinese Must Go”, written in 1879, portrayed the Chinese in this light. They were scheming of ways that they could earn more money and steal all the wealth from the Americans for themselves. This created the image that the Chinese were non-patriotic and were only in America for monetary purposes. The autobiography of a chinese immigrant contradicts this as he states, “More than half of the Chinese in this country would become citizens if allowed to do so, and would be patriotic to America”, proving that the way the play portrayed them was created out of paranoia and misunderstanding of the Chinese. However, the play was published much earlier than the autobiography so the story from the Chinese’s view would not have had the impact to change public opinions. The public, now thinking that the Chinese are against them, would obviously want them gone so this plan could not