Chinese Students’ Intermarriages in Exclusion-Era U.S. Newspapers

Abstract

Antimiscegenation had been an important means for white Americans to exclude nonwhite people from the American body politic. Initially enforced against Blacks, it was extended to the Chinese after their arrival on American shores in significant numbers. The ban targeting the Chinese became particularly severe from the 1880s -- when Chinese exclusion became a federal policy -- through the 1910s, when exclusion was made permanent. Chinese students, exempt from exclusion and rapidly assimilating into American society, received special treatment. American public opinion did not openly resist their relationships with American women but couched its disapproval in terms that emphasized the political, social, and even personal challenges facing such unions. A study of this attitude could enhance one’s understanding of how race and nation impacted the most intimate aspect of cross-racial interactions in American society at the turn of the twentieth century.