Chinese Workers in a Colonial World: The Making of a Global Working Class

After the gradual abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, Chinese workers (with their South and Southeast Asian counterparts) became the backbone of the colonial world economy. They labored on New World plantations, worked in the California goldfields and South African mines, toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal and transcontinental railroad, dug trenches and built barracks in Europe during the First World War, among many other undertakings. China’s decline at the hands of Euro-American imperialists and the growing production demand of colonial economies drove millions of Chinese workers to foreign territories under diverse labor recruitment arrangements, including indenture and free wage labor. This paper examines how Chinese workers’ employment in these diverse labor regimes gave birth to a global and highly racialized myth about cheap Chinese labor. Through an analysis of the relationship between Chinese labor migrations and changing class configurations in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the First World War, the paper argues that the emergence of the Chinese worker myth or “the Chinese Question” as it was described in Euro-America should be understood as an episode of racial capitalism. Not only was the racialization of Chinese labor a necessity in a colonial world economy. It also brought Chinese labor to the center of anti-colonial/nationalist movements in late Qing and early Republican China. Although it is hard to characterize this episode as class formation in the conventional sense, Chinese workers’ experience in post-emancipation Euro-America played a crucial role in shaping Chinese ideas of free labor, class struggle, and national sovereignty.