The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [136]
In 1957, in what has come to be known as the “anti-Rightist” movement, Mao Zedong encouraged open criticism of the Communist Party by proclaiming, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Those who took Mao at his word, however, and actually voiced criticisms of any aspect of the Communist system suffered serious reprisals. Labeled “counterrevolutionaries,” thousands of intellectuals who had foolishly suggested reforms landed in prison or reeducation camps. Many others kept silent and quietly applied for exit visas.
A year later, in 1958, the Chinese Communist government began an obsessive national effort to increase industrial output under a plan named the “Great Leap Forward.” Seven hundred million people were placed in agricultural communes and ordered to build “backyard steel furnaces.” Forced to abandon the fields to tend cauldrons of molten steel, peasants melted down their metallic possessions—from pots and pans to bedsprings—for gains that had only symbolic value. Livestock and crops perished from neglect, and soon the country found itself in the throes of the worst famine in Chinese history, possibly the worst in human history. Food was tightly rationed, but millions of Chinese died of starvation. Eventually the Great Leap Forward was abandoned, and even Mao admitted it had been a mistake, announcing, “The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility.”
To ease the pressure of widespread hunger, the Communist leadership suddenly allowed thousands of Chinese to emigrate. Within a twenty-five-day period in 1962, seventy thousand people, mostly residents of Guangdong province, were permitted to leave. At that time, it was easier to emigrate to Hong Kong than to the United States, so most went there, hoping to move on to America at a later date. But those who attempted this two-step migration to the United States faced numerous frustrations.
Even though they were now residents of a British territory, and U.S. emigration policy still heavily favored northern Europeans while restricting immigration from other parts of the world, most of these Chinese émigrés were still denied entry. According to the McCarran-Walter Act, the statute on immigration, U.S. nation-of-origin requirements separated applicants not by country of residence, but by country of birth.35 Thus, the Chinese trying to get to America from the British territory of Hong Kong were treated not as British applicants, but as Chinese. The established quotas permitted only a token 105 Chinese to be admitted annually. Beyond the quota, some Chinese, thanks to special legislation, could enter either as political refugees or on the strength of their individual talents, but their numbers were small.
Many did not even make it to Hong Kong. With so many Chinese streaming across the border, conditions in the city became so overcrowded that British authorities threw up barbed wire to prevent more from entering and rounded up as many refugees as they could to ship them back to China. Hong Kong’s problems were exacerbated by the callousness of the British to the plight of these homeless Chinese as well as restrictive U.S. immigration practices. These issues prompted President John F. Kennedy to sign a presidential directive on May 23, 1962, admitting refugees who were in Hong Kong but had been born in mainland China. By 1965, some fifteen thousand Chinese refugees had arrived in the United States.
Even more were able to come after the U.S. revised its immigration law. In 1963, President Kennedy attacked the nation-of-origin provision as having “no basis in either logic or reason,” arguing that “it neither satisfies a national need nor accomplishes an international purpose. In an age of interdependence among nations, such a system is an anachronism, for it discriminates among applicants for admission into the United States on the basis of the accident of birth.” Two years later, on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a new Immigration and Nationality Act, also known