Ren Ci, He Fang, Wu Bin, You Tianlong
[Ren Ci Note]:
The new form of "Academic Flash" activity initiated by the American History Research Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is intended to gather the predecessors, well-known scholars, backbone forces, young scholars, etc. of the Research Association to promote the gains of China's academic progress. By inviting scholars from domestic and foreign humanities and social sciences to carry out interdisciplinary and cross-border dialogues, activate the academic community atmosphere of the American History Research Association of China, enhance exchanges between different academic entities, understand each other and understand the latest developments and theoretical methods in their respective research fields, and take it for your own use. The second academic flash event is - Tracing the origin of the history of immigration: "Source and flow" and "points and surfaces" of the history of immigration. The host is Ren Ci of the History Department of Xiamen University. He Fang (Han New York University postdoctoral fellow), Wu Bin (Han 4 Associate Professor of the School of History and Culture of Northeast Normal University), and You Tianlong (Associate Professor of the School of Ethnology and Sociology of Yunnan University) to discuss the origin and development and changes of the history of American immigration, the history of American Asian immigration, and the history of Chinese American immigration.
![[Ren Ci Note]: The new form of](https://cdn-dd.lujuba.top/img/loading.gif)
Immigration has a long history as human beings, and it can even be said to have never been interrupted. In the past 300 years, with the rise and expansion of capitalist economy, the close connection between globalization, and the innovation of technology and transportation communication methods, the types, motivations, scales and influences of immigration have become increasingly complex and diversified. Immigration has become a complex issue of "impacting sovereignty, challenging governance, and involving human rights", which is closely related to mass life, national governance, and international politics. Immigration has special significance to the United States. As a "immigrant country", immigration participation has created American civilization, and the United States has also achieved national construction through immigration issues. As Professor Liang Maoxin said, if you do not study immigration in studying American history, then American civilization will be incomplete and a big lack.
For a long time, the study of immigration history in the American academic community has been born and complemented by the self-awakening and social movements of different ethnic groups, especially minorities, to pursue fairness and justice. Relevant research by early immigration historians represented by Oscar Handling has made American history no longer limited to the history of the Anglo-Saxon elites. Since then, in the civil rights movement, Asian immigration history research and creation have been conducted, and marginal groups called "eternal foreigners" by mainstream society are included in the writing of American history. The specialization and discipline of immigration history research not only fill the gap in research related to American history, but also inspire everyone to rethink a series of important issues - who are Americans? Who should be included in the writing of American history? What does immigration mean to the United States? etc.
Research on immigration history is undoubtedly a huge issue, whether from the perspective of time and space geography, or considering its close connection with important issues such as economy, culture, politics, diplomacy, environment, cities, and medical diseases. The development of immigration history research is not isolated, and it also has a complex relationship of mutual collision, mutual influence and inspiration, and even competition with other disciplines, especially social disciplines. The shift in the theoretical paradigm of American immigration history research from assimilation theory, to multiculturalism , and then to transnational and global history, is attributed to the development and changes of the times and society, and is also the product of the integration of methodological concepts from different disciplines.
Now in the United States, the study of immigration and ethnic history has long become one of the most important components of American history research. The research team is huge and the results are numerous, and the centers of ethnic and immigration research are spread all over North America. In contrast, due to the limitations of the times and resource conditions, domestic research on American immigration history once fell into a long stagnation. Based on the early research of the students, over the past 30 years of reform and opening up, the research on domestic immigration history has made great progress in the true sense, but what cannot be ignored is that there are still many shortcomings. I hope that the research on domestic immigration history can learn from everyone's strengths and gather the strength of everyone, and carry forward the past and open up the future. I hope that through the wonderful short essays by the three scholars, we can provide some reference and help for everyone to think about where the research on immigration history in the United States and China came from, why the research, what significance is, and where the future will go.
He Fang: Briefly describe the development context and research prospects of the history of Asian immigration in the United States
The United States is an immigration country, and American history itself is also an immigration history. When we talk about the anti-immigration voices in the United States below, some people will say that except for the native Indian (Native American), we are all immigrants. But research shows that even these so-called "native people" migrated to the North American continent through the Bering Strait , which was not yet flooded by seawater. The history of immigration in the United States is inseparable from the history of race and ethnicity. We often say that the history of African Americans, Asians, Hispanics and Indians is part of the history of American immigration. Slavery, one of the core issues in American history, is also a kind of compulsory immigration. Whites, who account for the majority of the United States, also came to the United States through immigration, so in addition to the immigration history of minorities I just mentioned, Whiteness Studies also includes research on European immigration. For example, in "Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard University Press, 1999), Matthew Frye Jacobson said: The immigrants and Jewish immigrants who came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century were not regarded as white people. They had a process of slowly becoming "white", so the concept of "white people" is also a social and historical construction. Today, I will mainly talk about the development of Asian immigrants in the United States, especially Chinese in the United States, as well as some current research trends.
Asian American Studies emerged in the turbulent 1960s in the United States. Influenced by the civil rights movement and minority rights movements such as blacks, Asian students proposed that the history of Asian Americans should be brought into university classrooms. At the same time, a new school of historicism emerged in the American historic community - new social history, requiring the broadening of the scope of traditional historic research objects, giving special attention to social marginal groups such as women, workers, blacks and other minorities, and advocating the writing of "bottom-up" history. Therefore, the development of Asian American history from the beginning was interdisciplinary and political movement color, closely integrated with the new social history, and was committed to discovering new historical materials. Under the influence of the new social history, the history of Chinese American immigration focuses on the voice of Chinese Americans and the interracial relationship between Chinese and white people, but often strengthens the analysis framework of the oppressed and oppressed binary opposition between Chinese and white people. Some Chinese social history also has the shadow of "assimilation theory", emphasizing the American characteristics of Chinese immigrants. This is actually a response to the discourse of mainstream American society. The mainstream discourse here, I mean that it is difficult for Chinese to be truly assimilated, and they are "forever foreigners" and have the mentality of a traveler. Therefore, some related works tend to emphasize the extent to which Chinese immigrants and their descendants were assimilated in the United States, their contributions to the United States, and their desire to integrate into mainstream American society. The problems in these works, when explaining the experience of Chinese Americans, downplay the connection between Chinese Americans and Chinese in other countries, ignore all aspects of their transnational and global connections, and simply describe Chinese as passive victims of racial discrimination. There are basically similar development trends and problems in writing Asian history.
With the rise of the transnational theory of immigration around the 1990s, the writing of American history has also shifted in global history and transnational history. The early immigration history of the United States was mainly manifested as transatlantic history, while the history of Chinese Americans was mainly transPacific history. The following is a definition of several concepts:
World History (World History) mainly analyzes the rise and fall of Western civilizations and its non-Western world.
International History focuses on international relations, and uses nation-states or nationalities as tools for analysis to study state institutions, governments and international conflicts.
Immigration research under the Transnational History focuses more on immigration and community, focusing on mutual connections and interdependence, and is committed to challenging the research methods of the US and national centers, because the research methods of the US and national centers often define the identity and culture of immigrants from the boundaries of the country, and regard immigration as one-way migration.
In recent years, many American scholars have also made a distinction between "transnational" and "trans-pacific", which is more to push the efforts to center nation-states forward, and at the same time it is not to negate the role played by the state in the historical process. However, these are not rigid concepts. We still need to define them based on specific historical materials and the framework of our own explanation, and this is also a direction that scholars have been constantly discussing. From a global, transnational and cross-regional perspective, scholars discuss issues such as the modes and ways of migration of Chinese Americans, survival, adaptation and development overseas, connection with their hometown countries, and the construction of identity. By around 2000, many achievements in this area emerged. In "Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii 1900-1936, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Adam McKeown focused on the global network connection formed by Chinese immigrants in Chicago, Hawaii and Peru in terms of trade, personnel mobility, culture, social organizations and institutions, etc. from the perspective of global history and diaspora history. He believes that the limitation of analysis from the perspective of the nation-state of the country where the immigrants live is that it cannot fully present the process of Chinese immigration as a global phenomenon and the global network formed.
At the same time, most scholars combine transnationalism with the research methods of new social history to explore the formation and development of transnational families, marriages and transnational communities of Chinese Americans. For example, American Chinese scholars Zhao Xiaojian, Liu Haiming, Xu Yuanyin and Chen Yong used Chinese and English historical materials including Chinese and Chinese communities, including Chinese and materials published by in html, and strive to restore the life trajectory of ordinary Chinese immigrants who are deeply influenced by the social environment and historical changes on both sides of the Pacific. Some representative works include: Zhao Xiaojian's "Rebuilding Home" focuses on the period when Chinese history in the United States was less studied. Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Xu Yuanyin's "Dream of Gold, Dreaming of Home" focuses on the transnational community of Taishan people in Guangdong (Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). In "Chinese San Francisco", Chen Yong believes that if we do not understand the identity of Chinese Americans during the anti-Chinese period from a trans-Pacific perspective, but only focus on the influence of the United States on these Chinese people, we will find it difficult to understand the reasons for the formation of Chinese identity at that time (Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Some scholars have used a comparative perspective to study and have also achieved remarkable results. In his book "If They Don't Bring Women - History of Chinese Women's Immigration Before Anti-China", George Anthony Peffer explores the far-reaching impact of the US Peppa Act of 1875 and its implementation on the gender ratio of Chinese women to the Chinese community.The author compared and analyzed the immigration policies to China in mainland America, Hawaii, Australia, , Singapore, and other places, and found that the gender ratio of Chinese communities in Hawaii and Singapore, where the immigration policies for Chinese women are relatively loose, is gradually balanced. Therefore, it is concluded that strict immigration laws rather than traditional Chinese culture that seriously restricts the normal flow of Chinese women to the United States (George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). In addition, in the article "They Also Came: The Migration of Chinese and Japanese Women to Hawaii and the Continental United States", Ronald Takaki detailed the situation of Chinese and Japanese women immigrating to Hawaii and the Continental United States, and analyzed the reasons why their experiences differ (Ronald Takaki, "They Also Came: The Migration of Chinese and Japanese Women to Hawaii and the Continental United States," Chinese America: History Perspectives, 1990).
Overall, the writing of the history of Asian and Chinese American immigration is still deeply influenced by transnational, cross-regional and global, comparative explanatory frameworks and theories. Social history is still the focus of research, and there are new expansions in research methods and research horizons.
1. Dialogue with the history of the United States and global colonial history. Many years ago, Professor Ai Mingru proposed in his article that he proposed to see the American West as part of the Pacific region to understand the colonial relationships therein, and introduced the concept of "settler colonialism" and proposed that the 19th-century California United States has similarities with other British settler colonies such as Australia and South Africa (Mae M. Ngai, "Western History and the Pacific World," The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2012).
2. Pay attention to Hong Kong, China. Hong Kong University Elizabeth Zinn pointed out that Chinese immigration is not a single and linear process from China's hometown to the United States, but multidirectional, emphasizing the role played by Hong Kong in the process of Chinese immigration to the United States. Because most of the immigrants who left Guangdong to the United States were through Hong Kong at that time, this process also shaped Hong Kong (Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2012).
3. Pay attention to the border between the United States and Mexico and the United States. Professor Li Yilian's "Guarding the Gate of the United States" is a classic work that studies the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This book not only focuses on how the Chinese Exclusion Act contributed to the transition from a free immigration country to a gatekeeper country, but also explores the profound impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its imperialist forces on the Chinese immigration policies of neighboring Canada and Mexico (Erica Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). In addition, it is worth mentioning "Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borders 8, University of California Press, 2012).
3. Dialogue with Latin American history and Western hemisphere history. His representative works include: Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940, University of Illinois Press, 2017.
4, a combination with the Pacific Islander history and the Oceania history, also involves the content of environmental history. Representative works include: Gary Y. Okihiro, American History Unbound: America’s Past Through the Lens of Asian and Pacific Islander History, University of California Press, 2015.
These works show us scholars' efforts to further deepen the writing of Chinese American immigration history from the perspective of global and transnational history. In addition to the inspiration these works have brought to us, I will finally add some possible research directions in the future:
1. Urban history and environmental history can be combined with the research on the history of Chinese immigration in the United States.For example, the current research on Chinese people in San Francisco , New York, Oakland , Chicago, St. Louis and other cities is mainly community research. It has not yet analyzed in-depth the impact of Chinese on these cities, the interweaving interactions between urban buildings, space and Chinese lives, and the impact of Chinese on the American ecological environment. In his research, American immigration history scholar Xia Li focused on the housing segregation encountered by Chinese immigrants. When it comes to "apartheid", people often think of African-American experiences. This book talks about the first apartheid community in American history, Chinatown in San Francisco. This study promoted the combination of Chinese immigration history and American urban history (Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California, University of Chicago Press. 2009).
2. From the perspective of gender, there is actually a lot of room. The achievements of Chinese women's history have been emerging since the 1980s, and gender as one of the elements of intersectionality has also been used in related works. Representative works include: Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco, University of California Press, 1995; Xiaolan Bao, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92, University of Illinois Press, 2001; Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism, University of California Press, 2005. Among the many achievements, the "Racial Discrimination and Gender" by Taiwanese scholar Wang Xiuhui in China gives people a refreshing feeling. The author focuses on revealing how the interaction between gender and race shapes the experience of Chinese men in the United States before World War II, as well as the interweaving construction of Chinese masculinity and white masculinity and the power relationship that exists. Some of the thoughts this book provides us is that male history is not a history from the male-centered perspective. The discussion of Chinese male experiences from a gender perspective can make up for the lack of male history research caused by the long-term focus on women's history research in American Chinese history. More importantly, it can promote the inter-research results of women's history and male history, presenting the interdependent and intertwined relationship between Chinese male traits and Chinese femininity shaping, which will help further explore gender theory.
In addition, there are currently few works focusing on the sexual minority (LGBTQ group) and sexual orientation or sexuality in the history of Chinese Americans. His representative works include: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity, University of California Press, 2005.
3. "Return migration" is not only an important trend in the study of American immigration history, but also a direction that other immigration research focuses on. Many times we think that immigration is just one-way from one place to another, ignoring the dynamics of returning immigrants and the origin of the country of immigrants. Currently, in the history of Chinese Americans, Xia Li's "The Record of Out of the United States" has made outstanding contributions to the research on this issue. This book focuses on the situation of American-born Chinese leaving the United States to make a living in China between 1901 and 1949 (Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus, Second-generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949, University of California Press, 2019).
4. The relationship between ethnic minorities is a direction that the American historical community is constantly advancing and has strong demand. It is mainly committed to exploring the interracial relationship between Chinese and blacks, Indians or Hispanics. The theory and perspective of comparative racialization will help deepen historical research in this area and in turn promote related theoretical research.
conference screenshot.
Wu Bin: The status of research on American immigration history in China
Today I was going to talk about three issues: the first question is to talk about the status of research on American immigration history in China, the second question is to briefly talk about the status of research on American immigration history in the United States, and the third question is to talk about my own thoughts on the future development of domestic American immigration history in China. But given the time constraints, I plan to talk about the first question.
Even if you only talk about one issue, it is actually very complex and involves a lot of content. It takes the size of a very long article to explain it clearly. So today I can only talk about the issue of domestic American immigration history research in a very brief manner. If there is any inappropriate point, please give me some corrections.
About the overview of the research on domestic American immigration history, I wrote an article almost ten years ago. Many of the characteristics and problems analyzed in it have not changed much today nearly ten years later. Of course, some new characteristics and new problems have also emerged.
I don't think there is much to say about the importance of immigration and its descendants to the United States. Although the United States is not the only country composed of immigrants, there are few people who can match the scale of immigrants, the race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity that make up the immigrants and their huge impact on society. Due to the special significance of immigration in American history, the study of immigration history is particularly important in the entire American history. Oscar Handlin, one of the main founders of American immigration history, mentioned with emotion at the beginning of his book "The Uprooted" which won the Pulitzer Prize, "When I plan to write a history of American immigration, I found that American history is an immigration history." Although this statement is not without exaggeration, it also reflects the indispensable position of immigration history in American history. In recent years, domestic research on the history of American immigration has achieved considerable research results, forming certain characteristics, and also unveiling new methods and new fields for further research.
1. Overview of the research on immigration history
As early as the Republic of China, some scholars in China paid attention to the issue of immigration in the United States. "The Place of Orientals in the United States" by Wu Zelin, a scholar and ethnologist, and "The Past and Present of the Anti-China in the United States" by jurist Qiu Hanping , mainly explains the history and reality of Chinese exclusion in the United States. The two articles can be regarded as the pioneering work of domestic scholars in studying the issue of American immigration. "History of the Anti-China in the United States" published by Mr. Ding Zemin in 1952 is the first American immigration theory in New China, which exposes the "crimes" of the anti-China in the United States, and has obvious traces of the times.
Of course, as a branch of domestic American history research, the history of American immigration has truly started and continued to develop after the reform and opening up. The papers related to the history of American immigration in the 1980s are all grand narratives under broad topics. Such as Huang Annian's "Alien Immigration and the Development of the United States", Ding Zemin's "The Evolution of American Immigration Policy Over the Over the Year", Deng Shusheng's "The Evolution of American Immigration Policy and Its Motivation" by , Deng Shusheng's "The Evolution of American Immigration Policy and Its Motivation" by . The study of American immigration history during this period needs to be read dialectically. On the one hand, today, it seems that the topic selection, data thickness, or the persuasiveness of the argument are slightly insufficient. However, under the academic background of the domestic American historical community that was just starting to the right track, due to the limitations of the times and materials, these articles were rare and outstanding. On the other hand, from the internal logic of the development of historical research, when American history started at that time, the research on immigration history, as its branch, should not start with a specialized topic. Under such special conditions of the times, grand topics have the function of "paving stone". In this regard, it is unquestionable that our hard work will be learned first.
It is worth mentioning that the research on Chinese immigration history during this period played a major role in promoting the improvement of the research level in the entire field, and its research results accounted for half of the domestic American immigration history at that time. The research topics focus on the role played by Chinese in American railway construction and economic development and the anti-China issue in American society. The conclusions include the huge role of Chinese in American railway construction, western development and economic development, and the discrimination, exclusion and unfair treatment of Chinese people by the United States.Scholars' research on such issues often contains strong national sentiments, including objective historical facts, as well as dissatisfaction and accusations of the United States.
Compared with before the reform and opening up, domestic research on American immigration history in this period has exceeded the category of a single scholar, and a situation of multi-point blooming has been initially formed.
htmlThe 090s was a rapid extension of domestic research on American immigration history, and the results increased significantly compared with the past. He has published some more important works, such as Mr. Deng Shusheng's "America and Immigration: The Real Future of History", "Research on American Immigration Policy" written by Teacher Liang Maoxin, and "America Immigration Policy and Asian Immigration (1849-1996)" by Teacher Dai Chaowu .Since the 21st century, more than 20 monographs related to the history of American immigration have been published in China, and more than 300 papers have been published. Judging from the numbers alone, as a relatively "unpopular" branch of domestic American history research, it is really considerable. The more important works include Mr. Deng Shusheng's "American Dream" of Generations", Mr. Qian Hao's "Research on Hispanic Immigration in the United States", Mr. Huang Annian's "Silent Path Nails - Chinese Workers Building North American Railways", Mr. Ji Hong's "Research on New Immigration in the United States: 1965-present", Mr. Lin Guang's "Research on Immigration and New York City Development", Mr. Li Aihui's "Cultural Transplantation and Adaptation - The Road to Americanization of Jewish Immigration in Eastern Europe", Mr. Liang Maoxin's "Research on American Talent Attraction Strategy and Policy History", Mr. Ouyang Zhencheng's "Labor Market and Economic Impact of American Foreign Immigration", Mr. Chao Longqi's "Immigration, Order and Power: Research on the History of the American Overseas Chinese Church" and "Ouyang Zhencheng's "Ending Japanese Overseas Chinese and the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression".
However, what can be called "prosperity" during this period is the research on Chinese immigration in the United States, and both the quantity and quality of the writings have reached a new level. The research profile can be written separately. Due to time limitations, I won’t go into details here.
It is worth noting that many related researches of Chinese Americans during this period were introduced into China, such as Teacher Zhao Xiaojian's "Rebuilding Home: A Turbulent American Chinese Society (1940-1965)", Teacher Chen Yong's "San Francisco of Chinese: A Trans-Pacific Ethnic Group (1850-1943)", Teacher Ai Mingru's "Home of Lucky" and Teacher Li Yilian's "The Creation of Asian Americans". Of course, some important Chinese research results have been introduced into China before, such as Mr. Zhou Min’s important work - "Chinatown: Chinese Community with Deep Social and Economic Potential". However, the total number of relevant translations before the 21st century was not large, and Mr. Zhou Min was a sociologist.
2. Research characteristics
(I) Timely characteristics
In the first ten years of reform and opening up, the left-leaning ideology influenced academic research. Although the country's doors were already open at this time and the economy gradually became open, the academic "openness" seemed to be staggering due to the influence of ideological inertia. The reasons are many. First of all, because Sino-US relations have been in a state of hostility in the Cold War for a long time, academic exchanges almost do not exist, and the construction of historical materials in various domestic research institutions is almost blank. Secondly, since the founding of New China to the late 1970s, frequent political movements interfered with the teaching and research order of universities and research institutions. By the late 1980s, the academic community had not yet formed a conscious norm. Whether it was the use of annotations, the structure arrangement of articles and the analysis of academic thoughts, there were more or less problems with the problem of abnormality. Finally, scholars' arguments in their research show obvious bias. The 1990s were a transitional period for research on the history of immigration in the United States, and the objectivity and innovation of research results were constantly strengthened. Since the new century, China's research on American immigration history has continued to deepen on the basis of its original breadth, and the academic nature of the research results has been further highlighted. This is reflected in the strengthening of the research nature of the work, and some "historical research" in the true sense based on first-hand data emerged.
(II) Topic Orientation Characteristics
is mainly reflected in the following three aspects. First, we will gradually develop towards the microscopic based on the macro. This trend is not only the internal logic of academic development, but also inseparable from the richness of information. However, I think the domestic academic community seems to have some misunderstandings about microscopic research.Some people compare microscopic research with fragmentation, which is actually a misunderstanding. Fragmented research often selects some historical fragments that lack academic value to conduct research that lacks relevance; while valuable micro-research is different. It aims to see the big from the small, select important nodes of history, explore its correlation with a wider historical node in the historical context, and use rich micro-research to piece together a relatively holistic and three-dimensional historical picture.
Secondly, from "to apply what you learn" to "to apply what you learn" and "to learn what you learn" at the same time. "Put what you learn" is undoubtedly very necessary, but our past history tells us that excessive attention to "practicing what you learn" will often have an impact on the objectivity of academics and form biased or even wrong historical cognition. Only correct historical knowledge can truly serve reality, otherwise it will only backfire. In this sense, "learning to know" becomes more important, otherwise it is putting the cart before the horse. Especially under the current relatively tense relationship between China and the United States, rigorous and serious historical knowledge is even more valuable.
Finally, we have always attached great importance to the research on Chinese immigrants. This is determined by our national sentiment. At present, after more than 40 years of development in China, Chinese American immigration research has entered the study of quite meticulous issues, and is unique in the research of American ethnic groups in China, leading the academic community in terms of methods and data application. However, the research on other immigrant ethnic groups basically stays in several larger groups, such as Jewish immigrants and Hispanic immigrants, and is mostly a general study, which is difficult to go into depth. It can be seen that domestic academic circles do not pay enough attention to the research on immigrant groups other than Chinese Americans. In fact, it is difficult to conduct a meticulous and thorough investigation of Chinese immigrants just by paying attention to Chinese immigrants. As we all know, the Chinese community is not an isolated island in American society, but an organic part of it, and is integrated with other ethnic groups. Only by conducting equally profound research on other immigrants and then conducting comparative analysis on this basis can we have a clearer understanding of the role and commonalities and differences of the Chinese immigrant group in American cultural acculturation, thereby achieving the level of overall research on Chinese history in the United States.
In addition, domestic research on American immigration history also shows certain regional characteristics. Since the beginning of reform and opening up, Mr. Ding Zemin laid the foundation for research on American immigration history, Northeast Normal University is still one of the important centers for research on American immigration history in China. In the study of Chinese American immigration, regional characteristics are more distinctive, and its research centers are mainly concentrated in the South China area, among which the Chinese and Overseas Chinese Research Institute of Jinan University and the Nanyang Research Institute of Xiamen University are the most influential. This characteristic of centralized distribution in the region is mainly due to geographical advantages. On the one hand, China's overseas immigrants, including those who go to the United States, mainly come from the southeast coast. Even if immigrants to Southeast Asia, a considerable number of immigrants to the United States again, thus having emotional ties. On the other hand, the original information of the immigration places in this area is relatively easy to obtain, which is crucial for historical research. In addition, relevant results have also been published at the Center for International Immigration and Overseas Chinese Research Center at Central China Normal University, the Asia-Pacific Research Institute of Sun Yat-sen University and the Overseas Chinese Research Center at Peking University.
3. Inadequacy in research
Although domestic research on American immigration history has made great progress since the reform and opening up, it has formed some of its own characteristics, but if compared with the research in the same field in the American academic community, the shortcomings in research are obvious.
(I) A serious lack of research on the history of American immigration before World War II. In recent years, the research on early American immigration has only been mentioned in general history works or other topics, and there are not many monographs, and only a few scholars have conducted "guerrilla" research. The so-called "guerrilla" research refers to the fact that these scholars did not specialize in early immigration but did not work out of a temporary academic interest. In addition, we also lack systematic and profound research on the two immigration waves in American history in the 19th century.
(II) Examine external immigration from the perspective of the United States; focus on immigration policy. When studying non-Chinese immigrant groups, we focus on looking at immigration from the perspective of the United States.For example, the cultural accompliance, employment and other aspects of immigration in the United States, and the impact of the United States on immigration, lack the results of studying immigration history from the perspective of immigration. In fact, European immigration to North America is an important part of global population mobility in the process of economic globalization since the century. Together with transnational immigration between European and Asian countries, it constitutes a magnificent wave of population mobility.
Our understanding of the term "immigration" is also mostly limited to foreign immigrants, and there has always been a lack of attention to internal immigration, that is, the flow of people within the United States. Teacher Liang Maoxin’s book “The Era of Urbanization” is one of the important works to study American cities from the perspective of population mobility, but there are still too few such research. In fact, large-scale westward immigration in the United States has not attracted enough attention from researchers, and special investigations based on micro issues are still scarce.
At present, the research focuses on the policy level of US immigration, but there is little to say about the life experience of immigrants in the United States. There are still a large number of areas that are under-sufficiency or uninvested in the domestic research on the history of American immigration, such as employment structure, inter-ethnic marriage, relationships between immigrant ethnic groups, identity, cultural assimilation, immigration and environment, emotion and psychology of immigrants, and interactions with their motherland. These issues all require in-depth research in order to have a more thorough understanding of the history of American immigration, even American culture and American national character. It can be said that it is difficult to understand the real motivation for the changes in US immigration policy without a thorough understanding of this issue.
(III) focuses on broad overall research, and there is relatively lack of in-depth thematic research and macro theoretical architecture. Whether it is a study of individual immigrant groups, immigrant groups of a certain period, or a study of the overall immigrant ethnic group in the United States, there is a general broad phenomenon in the academic community. Although the use of original data has improved significantly over the years, the pace has been slightly slow. As for the domestic American immigration history community, it is undoubtedly extremely difficult to construct a certain theory, but we can still maintain sensitivity to theories related to the history of American immigration. For example, we can get inspiration from theoretical systems such as the Atlantic system, the Pacific system, the imperial system, colonialism, postcolonialism, economic globalization, and political internationalization.
(IV) From a horizontal comparison with other branches of domestic American history, the research on immigration history has been slightly slow. The importance of immigration in American history should have made the study of immigration history one of the key points of domestic American history research, but the facts are unsatisfactory. Compared with the "rises" American city history, the research on immigration history is slightly "thin" in terms of research teams or results, and is also far inferior in terms of data construction and interpretation perspectives. Emerging fields such as environmental history and medical disease history are also full of vitality and full of vigor. As for the gap between the history of American immigration and political and diplomatic history in China, there is even greater. It seems that if domestic research on American immigration history is to achieve an academic status commensurate with its importance, it will take everyone's efforts to go through a long journey.
You Tianlong: The century-long intertwined between American immigration history and immigration sociology
Although I agreed very readily when Teacher Ren Ci invited me, I was actually very nervous because I am not a professional immigration historian. Immigration history serves more tools, methods, or second-hand information for me. However, when I was editing the Legal Review of the Asian Lawyers Association in New York, I edited a paper on a lawsuit against Japanese citizenship by Greg Robinson, a professor of history at the University of Quebec. I dug up the archives for this paper, so I was a little involved in the practical level. Today I mainly share with you how the interaction between the history of American immigration and the social sciences of American immigration influence, enlightening and even competing with each other.
The relationship between our sociology and immigration history can be said to be a long history. "Love and kill each other" has a history of one hundred years.
Initially, the integration of the two was not in the academic world, but in the policy world. In 1907, in order to provide necessary data support for the introduction of restricted immigration policies, the US Congress established the Dillingham Commission.The commission published up to 41 volumes of reports in 1911, trying to prove that South-East European immigration poses a serious threat to American society and that immigration from these areas should be reduced. Its description of the occupation, residence status, education and organization of immigrants is very consistent with the sociological method and path; the report also includes the history of immigrants and the historical situation of the country of immigrant origin, which has a strong historical color.
The birth of American immigration history in the modern sense is actually an academic stress response to nativist and anti-immigration thoughts in the early 20th century. Immigration was regarded as a problem at that time, and there were naturally opposition voices, so academic groups that used empirical methods to conduct social science and history research emerged.
In the field of sociology, two sociologists at the University of Chicago, William Thomas and Florian Znanetsky, published the five-volume "Polish Farmers in Europe and the United States", which put immigration, that is, Polish immigration, from the perspective of the mainstream paradigm at that time - social change and modernization, and explored the impact of population growth, agricultural commercialization, industrialization, urbanization and population migration on the organization, de-organization and reorganization of Polish farmers (William Thomas, Florian Znanieck, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, University of California Libraries, 1918). This set of books was also the pioneering work of American ethnic research later, which started the discussion on "assimilation", which is the highlight of immigrant social sciences and history.
Immediately afterwards, the Chicago School published a series of monographs on immigration research. Robert Park, William Burgess and others are regarded as pioneers of community research in the history of sociology in our country, but these communities are actually immigrant communities. Classic studies such as William Foot White's "Street Corner Society" have also been translated and introduced to China a long time ago. Although the research methods of these sociologists are certainly not the way of history, they have a historical perspective and explain their immigrant sociology arguments by analyzing the "developmental" over a long period of time.
Almost at the same time, the first generation of immigrant social historians in the United States began to pay attention to the living experience, attitudes and values of European immigrants. Many of these people are immigrants and their descendants. So they tried to better combine the experiences of their ancestors into American history. Now we feel that the Progressive Westward Movement, the American elections, and many major wars have contributed and seen immigrants. However, in the era when the first generation of immigrant social historians lived, American history was still limited to the history of the Anglo-Saxon founding fathers, and did not include the European immigrants in the era of great migration.
In the 1950s, these two academic veins merged. Harvard historian Oscar Handlin puts immigrant life experiences, attitudes and values into a modern paradigm to understand. In 1951, he launched The Uprooted and won the Pulitzer Prize. But this confluence has the element of cutting foot and fitting foot. For example, Handlin did not accept the view of immigrating to a new country to reorganize, and reshape new identity and build new communities. He believed that these reorganization behaviors were more like defensive measures taken by people who were traumatized, just as people would have thought that Chinatown was actually a shelter for Chinese people to avoid discrimination and persecution in mainstream society. So in the book, he only accepted the first two-thirds of theories of William Thomas and others, believing that European farmers were disembedded from their existing organizations, then entered a deorganized chaos, and were then reshaped by the modernization of Western society and integrated into a new country - the United States.
Handelin not only facilitates this confluence, but also makes this incomplete confluence have flaws and defects. Because he regards all European immigrants as a homogeneous, flat, and vague whole, while ignoring the huge differences between European immigrants from different countries, cultures and religions. In addition, he overemphasized the structural power of society and underestimated the subjectivity of immigrants in making immigration decisions and forming new social and cultural spaces.However, across the ocean, European immigration historians also argue that the great migration in the 19th century was not the flow of European landless peasants being swept by capitalism, but the flow of them consciously, practically and rationally pursuing opportunities. In their research, European scholars abandoned the American-centrism perspective and adopted a more international perspective. This stream later developed into a transnational perspective in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, social history began to turn to a bottom-up perspective. In the past, the views, attitudes and values paid attention to were all from elite actors, but during this period, immigration historians began to pay more attention to the daily lives of ordinary people, believing that the power of ordinary people is the driving force behind important historical events. The starting point of this school is obviously deeply influenced by the Marxist view of history, so various ideas in the new fields of social sciences inspired by the Marxist philosophy of struggle have begun to be adopted by the social history community, especially the immigration history community, such as feminism, labor research, urban, community research, etc., which also marks that the immigration history community, like the immigration sociology community itself, has begun to become "fragmented".
The integration of these new social science theories and immigration history also provides possibilities for immigration history to go from transatlantic immigration to wider sources such as Asian immigration research. Previously, the immigration history community despised the Asian immigration group very much, believing that the Asian immigration history was a brief and strange episode in the history of American immigration. But Asian immigration has neither short nor surprising history in the United States. It turns out that Asian immigrants are now the fastest growing group in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the American civil rights movement, immigrants, including Asians, mobilized to fight for racial equality. Asian American and Asian American studies appeared at this time, and the earliest and most mature branches of Asian American studies were the two parts of Asian immigration history and Asian culture studies.
In the late 1970s, the emergence or revival of the school of historical sociology led by Charles Tilly in sociology was more comfortable and properly involved in historical research. Compared with the immigration history community that was only focusing on the great migration in the 19th century and only focusing on individual ethnic groups, historical sociologists tried to analyze the fundamental issues of immigration flow from a longer historical span, a larger global perspective, and a more structured understanding. For example, Tille himself proposed three elements of long-distance population mobility in 1978: changes in geographical distribution of job opportunities, population imbalance caused by regional natural population growth differences, and the behavior and policies of nation-states. It was also during this period that European and American countries, which caused economic stagflation due to the oil crisis, strengthened the immigration control policy that was once shelved after World War II. Cooperating with the academic purpose of Tillie and others to "bring the country back", the immigration history community and the entire immigration research community began to focus their attention on the country.
The immigration history community during this period began to resolutely abandon the "assimilation theory" with the intersectional shift of the entire social science community - that is, the race, gender, and class I mentioned earlier. The hidden agenda of "assimilation theory" is actually to build a great unity of the American nation, and the immigration historiography of this period was committed to "retrieving those ethnic groups that were not written by history." And more importantly, in the post-1965 immigration law era, a large number of new ethnic groups quickly appeared in the United States, breaking the black and white dual society in the United States. In line with the historical background of the civil rights movement era, the new ethnic groups have a sense of national honor than the past few generations of immigrants, especially white immigrants, and are unwilling to easily integrate into this new society completely, and even claim to be "unmeltable ethnicities". So this naturally presents challenges to the immigration research community, because these new immigrants did not integrate into the Americans, that is, the mainstream of middle-class Anglo-Saxon white Protestants, but chose to integrate into Ethnics, and lived in the American minority community with peace of mind.This situation of being slapped in the face by social reality has also allowed the immigration history community to expand two new theories: one is the "new assimilation theory", and the assimilation of immigration choices with American minority assimilation is also a kind of assimilation; the other is to embark on the path of "multi-culturalism", developing American Pluralism, and treating white immigrants as "white ethnics", which is commonly known as "salad plate".
On the road of pluralism, scholars become more and more detailed, because they feel that for example, the experience of Vietnamese cannot be summarized as Asians, and the experience of Puerto Ricans cannot be generally said to be Hispanic. At the same time, cultural research has also been introduced, and immigration historians have begun to emphasize the differences in immigration experiences among different groups caused by cultural differences in the same ethnic group and the same country. On the other hand, the study of European immigration history, which was regarded as mainstream in the past, has been re-examined from the perspective of ethnic and cultural studies, and the "whiteness" study of immigration history has emerged.
. In the immigration exporting countries, of course, it was mainly Europe at this time, and in fact it also included the Chinese and overseas Chinese research community in our country. In the 1970s, it began to join the discussion of the immigration history community in the United States. They have their own globalist perspective. Since the 1980s, with the rapid development of communication technology and transportation tools and the acceleration of globalization, they have quickly introduced the American immigration history community to the category monopolized by the nationalist perspective in the past, which has brought about multiple changes in the conceptual level. American scholars realize that the United States is not the only immigrant import country in the international immigration wave in the 19th and 20th centuries, and may not even be the most important immigrant import country. Comparative research on immigration history and global immigration history have begun to show signs. American immigration historians also began to go to immigrant export countries to obtain first-hand information, explore the impact of a large number of population outflows on local society, economy, politics, and culture, and discovered circular migration, which shattered the so-called "assimilation theory" from the most fundamental level, laying the historical foundation for the concepts of transnationalism and flexible citizenship proposed by anthropologists next.
Entering the 21st century, the immigration history community began various shifts, including cultural shifts, local shifts, global shifts, transnational shifts, and re-pick up classic research in the 1920s and 1930s for re-exploration. There are many, but there are not many subversive changes for the time being. However, I believe that with the ebb of globalization and the beginning of restricting, suppressing, and persecuting immigration, and the sharpening of the contradictions between the local and immigrant groups, the immigration issue has become the core issue in the political arena of various countries. New and relatively large paradigm shifts will naturally occur with the changes in the reality of the entire society.
Editor in charge: Zhu Fan
Proofreading: Luan Meng
