How 19th-century gold rushes led to a distrust of China

For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary Festival had become tainted with the smoke and soot of Nuremberg. Here was Thomas Friedman, bloviator-in-chief to America’s chattering classes, standing before a rally of thousands, delivering a powerful philippic about the ascent of the Asiatic East.

As he warmed to his theme, he decided for some messianic reason to demand that his audience chant the phrase that he suggested now dominated the American economic landscape. Come on, he urged like a latter-day Elmer Gantry, yell out with me the words: ‘Everything. Is. Made. In. CHINA!’ And, as one, the thousands complied, and roared, and the hills suddenly came alive with the sound of ‘China’ echoing like some awful warning.

The Chinese Question was in the headlines again, as it remains three years on. And though most of history’s other tabloid interrogatives — the Jewish Question, the Woman Question, the Negro Question — have been settled, more or less, the Chinese Question remains, and seems likely to do so for some while to come.

Irish, Dutch and Italian immigrants came to loathe the Chinese for their endurance, industry and seriousness

Mae Ngai, who teaches history at Columbia University, has long been interested by the marginalised and migrant of the world’s workforces. She is particularly fascinated by the Chinese around the world who fall into both categories. Her latest important and eminently readable book takes on the challenge of speaking the unspeakable and asking the unaskable: why do so many white people continue to loathe, suspect, disdain, fear or otherwise shun so many of the ‘Celestials’ (as we once knew them), and in doing so sustain the Chinese Question decades after it should have been laid to rest?