 |
| EDITOR'S NOTE |
| Size Matters |
| KERRY TREMAIN |
GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER’S RECEPTION BY ADULATORY CROWDS
in China last November delivered a clarifying moment for discerning California’s
prospects. Here was the self-made immigrant from old Europe, the ideological
legacies of which still preoccupy Washington’s foreign policy, implicitly acknowledging
that the prevailing wind had changed. Here was the Mr. Universe action hero paying
respect to a newly muscular land where Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, as
Andrew Lam
writes , cinematically triumph using agility and speed to best
sheer brawn. Here was the once confident reformer, rebounding from a defeat at the
ballot box (that
John Judis analyzes), appealing to a larger force at work on the California
economy and psyche.
Further exploration:
MacArthur fellow and human rights activist Xiao Qiang edits a compelling and
award-winning Web site, China Digital Times, from the Graduate School of
Journalism. |
|
In fact, the histories of California and China have intertwined for
a century and a half, a period that roughly traces the Chinese identity crisis,
described
by Orville Schell, that commenced as the last of the imperial dynasties that ruled
over the 5,000-year-old civilization, the Manchurian Qing, fell into corruption and
decline in the 19th century. From Canton, a center of anti-Qing rebellion, Chinese
immigrants first came to California to escape imperial repression and to quest for
the same "Gold Mountain" that so dazzled American ’49ers and gave California its
too-dominant story. ("The traditional task of the writer in California has been to
write about what it means to be human in a place advertised as paradise,"
Richard Rodriguez notes.)
The 1877 Wall Street crash, ensuing in part from the sudden drop in
silver production from Nevada’s Comstock Lode, fired up the anti-Chinese racism of
Denis Kearney and his Workingman’s Party that led, in 1882, to the Chinese Exclusion
Act, which effectively ended the first wave of Chinese immigration. It did not resume
until 1943, when the United States, allied with China against imperial Japan, began
to allow 105 Chinese immigrants per year. Mao’s 1949 victory in China’s civil war set
off the next wave, as intellectuals and professionals fled the communists, first to
Hong Kong and Taiwan, and then to the United States. In 1962, Mao temporarily loosened
China’s borders to relieve the mass starvation resulting from his Great Leap Forward,
and in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Services
Act, which ended racial restrictions on immigration. Since that time, the number of
Americans of Chinese ancestry has doubled every decade, encouraged by the thaw in
relations with Beijing after President Nixon’s visit there in 1972 and Mao’s death
four years later. It spiked again when many fled Hong Kong in advance of China’s
takeover in 1997.
 |
page 1 |
| |
2 |
 |
| |
|
|
