The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [77]
The boycott spread first to other coastal cities in central and south China—with the Canton region, the homeland for most Chinese in North America, providing plenty of financial support—and then to the interior of the country and abroad. The movement fascinated Chinese from all walks of life; one American traveler, visiting a mountaintop monastery in China, reported that “even the old monks” wanted to talk about it. It also gained the support of overseas Chinese communities throughout Asia and attracted donations from the Chinese in the United States and Hawaii, where mass meetings and fund-raisers were held to sustain the boycott. This was one of the rare occasions when diverse groups of Chinese in the United States—the mercantile elite, the laborers, the journalists, Christians, even the tongs—put aside their differences and worked together toward a single goal.
So effective was the boycott that it devastated many American businesses in China and deprived the United States of some $30 million to $40 million worth of trade. It hurt textile mills in the American North and cotton plantations in the South. In Canton, Standard Oil’s sales plummeted from about 90,000 cases of fuel monthly to 19,000. So low had American firms fallen in esteem that the British American Tobacco Company found it difficult to even give away free cigarettes to its agents in China.
A year after the boycott began, the U.S. government stepped in, pressuring the Manchu government to put it down. The royal family, still reeling from its humiliation in the Boxer Rebellion, acceded to U.S. pressure, no doubt fearing retaliation if it did not act and act quickly. It is likely that the government was inclined to move against the boycotters for another reason as well. At the time, the boycott was directed solely against foreigners, but the possibility was real that it could quickly turn into a domestic revolution that might topple the throne. The Manchus issued an imperial edict to crush the boycott.
Nonetheless, the embargo had made its point, not just in China but in the United States as well, which did not end the policy of exclusion, but did ameliorate its worst abuses. President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order to immigration officials to stop abusive treatment of Chinese merchants and other legitimate visitors, along with a warning that any official caught mistreating Chinese who had the proper paperwork would be dismissed. The U.S. government shortened delays in processing arrivals, discarded a proposal for a new round of Chinese registrations, and scrapped the humiliating Bertillon system of identification, instituted in 1903, which required detailed measurements of the nude body. The results were immediately apparent. In 1905, immigration authorities had rejected 29 percent of the certificates approved by American consuls in China; in 1906, after the boycott, they rejected only 6 percent.
But even more important, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to set a new tone for the treatment of the Chinese in America. Speaking before Congress, the president noted, “Much trouble has come during the past summer from the organized boycott against American goods,” and warned, “We must treat the Chinese student, trader and businessman in a spirit of broadest justice and courtesy if we expect similar treatment to be accorded to our own people of similar rank who go to China.”
The cumulative effect of the restrictive