The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

THE DIPLOMACY OF MIGRATION

Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Meredith Oyen

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

In memory of

黄裕雯

and

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Migration Diplomacy at War

1. Unequal Allies

2. The Diaspora Goes to War

3. A Fight on All Fronts

Part II. Migrant Cold Warriors

4. Chinese Migrants as Cold Warriors

5. Remitting to the Enemy

6. Crossing the Bamboo Curtain

Part III. Shifting Exclusions

7. Cold War Hostages

8. Visa Diplomacy

Conclusion

Note on Sources

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker patiently guided me through a thousand different iterations of this project with both good humor and tough questions. My only regret is that she never got to see the final version. I hope it lives up to her famously high standards, though any failures in this respect are mine alone.

As with any such project long in the making, this work has benefited immeasurably from the help and support of a great variety of individuals, institutions, and organizations. My Chinese language training was funded in part by Americorps and the NSEP Boren Fellowship Program. My numerous research trips were funded with help from the Fulbright Program, the Georgetown University Graduate School and Graduate Student Organization, the Johns Hopkins–Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Everywhere I went, archivists and librarians went above and beyond to help researchers, especially at the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidential libraries; the National Archives at Kew in England and its U.S. counterpart in Maryland and Washington, D.C.; Academia Sinica, Academia Historica, the Kuomintang Archive, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive of the Republic of China; and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive of the People’s Republic of China, the Number Two Historical Archive, and in particular, the Guangdong Provincial Archive.

During my repeated visits to Taipei, my dear friend Yuwen Huang also went far outside the usual bounds of friendship to help me figure out how to get into archives when I was first starting out, organize photocopies, mail materials, double-check translations, and take me out for spicy hot pot and Taiwan Beer.

Friends, colleagues, and strangers helped me out by reading drafts in various stages of completion. In particular, my Georgetown classmates Sarah Snyder and Tao Wang helped me at every stage of the project. I am also indebted to Carol Benedict, Gordon H. Chang, Joseph McCartin, and David Painter for reading the manuscript and offering helpful advice and letters of support. More recently, I am thankful for advice and comments from Erez Manela, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, David Atkinson, Stephen Philips, and Kate Brown. I am particularly grateful to Warren Cohen for giving me so much of his time, insight, and friendship.

As this book neared completion, it benefited greatly from the support and advice of Michael McGandy, David Engerman, Paul Kramer, and anonymous reviewers who offered guidance, as well as from additional funding from the UMBC Dresher Center.

Finally, this project would not be complete without the ever-optimistic encouragement of my parents, Duane and Ann Oyen, as well as the emotional support and slightly improbable self-help theories of Matthew Beers.

Introduction

The Floating Population and Foreign Policy

On February 25, 1943, the RMS Empress of Scotland sailed into New York Harbor. The ocean liner had been pressed into wartime service, its luxurious accommodations refitted to ferry fresh troops to the front lines in Europe and North Africa. The urgencies of war usually forced a quick turnaround in port for the ship’s 480-man crew, but this call to New York proved much longer than the usual visit. Upon arrival, 177 of its sailors deserted, all of them Chinese.¹

For decades, a tradition of misapplying the United States’ Chinese Exclusion Acts barred Chinese seamen from taking shore leave in U.S. ports. This procedure was often advocated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and went unchallenged by the mostly British-owned shipping companies employing Chinese sailors, largely because the British companies were made financially liable for any errant Chinese migrants who managed to slip into the country via a visit to one of its ports. In August 1942, State Department officials more concerned about the appearance of anti-Chinese discrimination than the actual fact of it forged a deal with Chinese consular officials and British shipping authorities to allow Chinese to take shore leave on a trial basis. The agreement required that the local Chinese consul come aboard and warn the seamen against deserting, for the sake of the war, for the sake of the motherland, and for the sake of their own honor.

Desertions skyrocketed. It was not that Chinese sailors working Allied merchant ships were unconcerned about the war, China, or their own reputation. Instead, they were protesting inequality. Unfortunately, they chose to do so in a way that managed to threaten the entire Allied war effort in Europe. There were five thousand Chinese sailors in the Allied Merchant Marine—only about 5 percent of the total manpower—but Chinese desertions tended to follow the pattern of the crew of the Empress of Scotland. Instead of deserting one at a time like most other nationalities, Chinese seamen deserted in groups, which crippled the ability of a ship to leave port or join its scheduled convoys, needed for protection against the German U-boats patrolling the high seas. Using this critical moment to make their demands for equal wages, better treatment, and access to shore leave, Chinese sailors brought their concerns to the attention of shipping officials on either side of the Atlantic. Their militancy forced the Chinese government to take action as well, and the result was a series of negotiations between China and Britain, and China and the United States, aimed at pushing back against the legacies of European imperialism in Asia and Chinese exclusion in the Americas.

The fact that the desertions from the Empress of Scotland occurred after these agreements revealed just how racially charged the questions of Chinese labor and Chinese desertions remained. British officials and ship officers struggled to overcome what one Chinese editorialist called the Singapore mentality, or the assumption that all Chinese laborers were coolies—often code for cheap, expendable, and inherently unwilling to work.² U.S. officials had their own problems, centered on the State Department’s wartime view of China as a necessary, if somewhat inept, ally and the INS view of all arriving Chinese as both illegal and undesirable immigrants. American officials tasked with managing the desertion problem struggled between promoting the new official narrative of an equal partner in Asia and the legacies of long-standing exclusions. World War II became a watershed in reshaping how American officials interacted with China, as opposed to the Chinese, forcing a reckoning of the two perspectives. The Empress of Scotland did finally depart after several weeks’ delay and a raid on Chinatown in which some seamen were arrested and even impressed back into service. And, of course, the Empress was only one ship; an average of fifteen arrived in port every month from late 1942 to mid 1944, and a full 20 percent of the Chinese seamen arriving on them deserted.

The scramble to address the complaints of Chinese seamen and stop their desertions during the war reveals something important about the relationship between human migration, foreign policy, and national security. The seamen’s concerns were not the primary occupation of wartime policy makers arguing over opening a second front and managing the postwar world; but when enough problems added up, they consumed the time and attention of the officials tasked with keeping the war effort going. In the process, American, British, and Chinese officials learned that even in a time of war, traditionally secondary issues like migration policy and management can achieve primary importance. Moreover, it was not enough for the United States or Britain to have good relations with Chinese leaders: they needed better relations with the Chinese people as well.

The Diplomacy of Migration between China and the United States

Developing better U.S.-China and U.S.-Chinese relations was not an easy task during World War II, because a long history of inequality overshadowed both relationships. In 1784, the Empress of China set sail from the port of New York, inaugurating a century of rapidly expanding ties and a growing exchange of people. Americans moved to China to seek their fortunes and spread their gospels, while Chinese moved to the United States to get rich or at least to get paid. Early treaties protected the sojourners of either state, but the traffic was always lopsided—there were more Chinese bound for the United States than Americans for China. Because the United States grew in world influence as China faced increasing encroachments upon its sovereignty, the relationship became increasingly uneven as well, opening the door for the United States to seek and obtain extraterritoriality (exemption from local laws) for its citizens in China even while passing an act to exclude Chinese laborers from the United States, as well as tolerating discrimination and injustices visited upon Chinese sojourners. Even after the formal repeal of both extraterritoriality and exclusion during the war, the specter of inequality and exclusion lingered over Chinese migration in the twentieth century.

Despite this lingering inequality—indeed, because of it—the decades between the 1940s and the early 1970s are of particular interest for historians of both Chinese migration and U.S.-China relations. For migration historians, the years from 1943 to the immigration act passed in 1965 are marred by this de facto exclusion. Race-based standards for quota immigration continued to keep large numbers of Chinese (and other Asians) from immigrating to the United States, though as this book and others demonstrate, there were many other means by which contact, travel, and new migration occurred. For diplomatic historians, the years from 1949 to 1972 were the great aberration: the period in which there was limited formal diplomatic contact between the United States and mainland China and a great deal of ongoing conflict.³ Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 marked the beginning of the end of the U.S.-led exclusion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the international system, though it also began the exclusion of Nationalist China. Combining these two periodizations, the years in between 1943 and 1972 are notable for something else: they are the years of formal alliance between the United States and Nationalist China. During this period from World War II until Nixon landed in Shanghai, the Nationalists faced constant threats to their very existence. First the Japanese, then the Chinese Communists, then the growing loss of recognition caused that government to move from one crisis to the next. After 1949, its relationship with its greatest patron, the United States, determined its very survival. And its human resources during these dark years were limited to the population under its immediate control and the Chinese living overseas. It is not remarkable that managing migration became a vital part of Nationalist Chinese diplomacy; it would have been more remarkable if it had not.

This book identifies and explains the role that migration diplomacy—the process of using migration policy for diplomatic ends—played in managing the larger, complex relations between the United States and its Chinese ally and Chinese enemy from the formation of the Cold War during World War II until the start of its denouement in Asia.⁴ Throughout the existing literature on U.S.-Chinese relations and Chinese Americans, many points of reference for this history are scattered about, among them the wartime imperative of the repeal of exclusion, the early Cold War suspicions of Communist infiltrators as immigrants, and the use of repatriation of nationals as an excuse to restart direct communications. More than just showing how foreign policy affected migration, this book demonstrates that policy makers used migration policy to benefit foreign policy.

Three patterns in migration diplomacy emerged in this period. First, migration policy and practice became a direct tool of foreign policy, used to signal positive and negative developments in the bilateral relationships, as well as potential changes in the offing. How migrants were selected and treated, what policies were involved and how they were carried out, and whether visas were issued were all at one point or another employed to send a larger message beyond the migration they facilitated. Through two hot wars and the height of the Cold War, Nationalist China used migration policy to seek equality and legitimacy for its government. The United States used migration policies to placate Nationalist China when it could not fulfill other promises; and starting in the mid-1950s, American officials also used migration diplomacy to explore and eventually transform their country’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China. The PRC, meanwhile, used aid to migrants in the United States as a proxy for diplomatic recognition for as long as it was withheld.

Second, beyond this direct use of migration policy, migration diplomacy was employed more indirectly by both the United States and China as a form of public diplomacy. The United States used new measures to bolster its prestige in Asia and internationally, while the Republic of China (ROC) used migration policy to build an overseas network ready to support its position. The PRC also joined in, using family networks to seek support, both emotional and material, from Chinese Americans. Third and finally, migration diplomacy served a more complex purpose in attempting to remake the Chinese American community in ways that both the U.S. and ROC governments sought. The United States employed strict screening measures to recruit and permit only the best immigrants to integrate into American domestic life. At the same time, the Republic of China implemented broad-based screening techniques to ensure emigrants would both support their government in the face of Communist opposition and raise Americans’ opinions of the Chinese as immigrants. Both projects contributed to an idealized understanding of Chinese Americans as part of a model minority in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Exploring all three forms of migration diplomacy in these years makes clear the connections between varied forms of migration and the larger international history of the period. Quite naturally, historians tend to treat immigration as an issue distinct from cultural diplomacy, like programs to promote student and scholarly exchanges. Historians often view the former as the purview of social historians and the latter as something connected to public diplomacy. Deportation is considered apart from repatriation. Refugees are in a category of their own, with sometimes limited connections to voluntary exiles. But the post-exclusion, mid-century history of Chinese migrations demonstrates that building walls between these categories can cut off useful avenues of analysis. Thousands of Chinese students arrived in the United States in the late 1940s. After 1949, some simply returned to China, others were detained in the United States and found themselves the subject of ambassadorial talks in Geneva, and of course, many settled in the United States under refugee laws to raise the next generation of Chinese Americans. Immigrants, exiles, deportees, refugees, defectors, and dissidents all shared the experience of being Chinese in the United States, and the uncertainty in the international arena ensured that many individuals held more than one of these labels at one point or another in their migratory lives.⁵ From a foreign relations perspective, the distinctions between them fade dramatically: the question becomes instead what role they play in building up or tearing down diplomatic ties.

Beyond policy-level concerns, studying migrants in this era helps to reveal the lived experience of the Cold War: how uncertainty on the international level trickled down to affect people’s everyday lives.⁶ The subject here is not how Chinese American communities developed and flourished, faced down discrimination, or adapted to American life. Instead, I explore migrant lives at times when they became an issue in U.S. relations with China. Migrants became pawns of unruly governments at times, yes. But they also created their own brand of people’s diplomacy that affected how the governments understood each other and signaled changing goals and ideals, while permitting the migrants themselves to navigate Cold War politics to their own benefit. The American Cold War national security state proved frequently at odds with the ideological idea of the leader of the free world, and the migrants who found themselves caught up in that bureaucracy had a front-row seat to its greatest failures, as well as its greatest successes.

Migration diplomacy did not rise to the level of primary security concerns like nuclear policy or shifting Cold War alliances. Instead, its value is found in its subordinate status. During the war-torn decades from the end of Chinese immigration exclusion until the advent of Nationalist China’s international exclusion, the perception of these issues as secondary turned negotiations over migrations and manipulations of migration policy into safe ways for the United States and both Chinas to pursue larger diplomatic goals. Leaders and policy makers in all three governments shared a common experience of recognizing that low risk did not mean no risk, however, and persistent problems managing migration issues could affect both prestige and national security. Low risk critically also did not translate to unimportant, as migration diplomacy often had quite a lot to contribute to the success of foreign policy overtures. That missteps on any one such issue did not carry the threat of catastrophic results, however, made migration a useful venue for trying out new policy approaches, reacting to changing events, or making symbolic gestures.

The contingent nature of migration policy proved less ideal for migrants themselves. No amount of policy planning, of congressional debates, of bureaucratic organization, or daily paper pushing could force individual migrants to act in ways against their own interests. As a result, migrants created the policy positions as much as they were affected by them. Individuals became the subject of high-level debate, acted as go-betweens when formal ties failed, campaigned for their own hoped-for results, and protested ill-treatment and poor governance. In some respects they were the wild cards that made lofty policy plans succeed or fail, but they were also the reason these plans had be formed in the first place.

The Diplomacy of Migration provides an analysis of migration diplomacy in the period from 1943 to 1972. We already have some understanding of this dynamic for both the exclusion era and the post–Cold War era. Michael Hunt’s landmark work, The Making of a Special Relationship, ensured that no future monograph on the Open Door or the turn-of-the-century relationship would leave out the disputes over exclusion policy and the right to consular protections while abroad.⁷ Though the open door for American goods and closed door for Chinese nationals summarized an inherently unequal relationship that persisted until the Second World War, the unique ties between the two countries relied on migrants who were not excluded, such as merchants, diplomats, and students and scholars, making their own contributions to increasing mutual understanding.⁸ Moreover, migration historians have viewed the exclusion era as a dynamic era of ongoing, even expanding transnational ties between the two countries. The literature on the prewar era highlights migration as a process that joins the United States and China together; forges links between them by way of families, friendship, and funds; and re-creates itself with each new wave of travelers.⁹ In the period after rapprochement, studies once again embrace the idea of migrants effecting change in foreign policy, starting with the late 1970s or 1980s, when the Fulbright program restarts, consular offices are reopened, and a new age of cooperation brings more travelers, immigrants, and students to each other’s shores.¹⁰

The relationship between migration and foreign relations histories in the period after the official end of exclusion but before rapprochement is somewhat less clearly defined in the literature. In diplomatic history, the U.S.-China relationship grew increasingly complicated when the wartime alliance gave way to decades of Cold War competition and a divided China. High-stakes political and security concerns reigned as China experienced a civil war, established a Communist government, and faced off against the United States and United Nations in Korea. Continued U.S. support for the Nationalist government after it moved to Taiwan drove a wedge between Washington and Beijing, curtailing any chance of even economic reconciliation in the midst of ideological conflict. Scholarly treatments of these tumultuous years are both rich and varied, analyzing both particular incidents and long-standing disputes.¹¹ With exclusion repealed, direct contact between the United States and the Chinese mainland limited, and nuclear war threatening, migration policies and issues tend to fall out of the diplomatic history narrative. That said, more broadly the field of American foreign relations has experienced an international and transnational turn that has proved increasingly mindful of the contributions of private citizen diplomats, transnational networks and organizations, and public diplomacy in shaping high-level policy.¹²

Postwar and Cold War Chinese migration histories have also embraced transnational approaches. Historians such as K. Scott Wong, Xiaojian Zhao, and Mae Ngai argue that international events and conflicts have had a profound effect on Chinese American lives and migrations. Meanwhile, scholars Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Madeline Hsu, and Ellen D. Wu have turned increasingly to the influence of Cold War politics and preferences on creating and shaping the idea that Asian Americans served as a model minority in the United States.¹³ Recognition that international affairs can have profound effects on migrants has also come from beyond Chinese America, as historians such as Donna Gabaccia, Eiichiro Azuma, and Carl Bon Tempo note that both migration policy and migrant experiences are shaped by and even occasionally help shape diplomatic goals.¹⁴

The Diplomacy of Migration aims to bridge the excellent work on this period in both fields by demonstrating the political use of migration policy and how migrants responded. To do so, this book is divided into three parts. Each of the eight chapters considers a core migration policy or related policies in its particular context, then unpacks the policy’s efficacy in achieving associated geopolitical goals, as well as how migrants experienced it. As a diplomatic history of migration policy, revealing state-to-state communication, conflict, and collusion over migration issues is important, but the lived experience of the policies, not to mention the ability of migrants to have disproportionate impact on foreign relations (as the defecting Chinese seamen at the start of this chapter demonstrate), means that the experience as subjects of policies is important as well.

Together, the three chapters in the first part of the book explain the role of migration policies in fighting World War II and contributing to the advance of the Cold War in Asia. They also establish what was at stake for the United States, Nationalist China, and the migrants themselves, as many of the migrations begun in this short decade became the subjects of contention in the period that followed. Chapter 1 revisits the well-known story of the repeal of Chinese exclusion, but in so doing explains the mechanism through which the United States and Nationalist China would attempt to negotiate migration policy for shared political benefit, but to the detriment of the population of migrants most affected by it. Chapter 2 explains the roots of the Nationalists’ faith in their diaspora as a major component of any political or military victory, focusing on how Chinese officials sought to help Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans mobilize men and money to fight the war in Asia. Nationalist citizen services in the name of the war effort form a clear example of the use of migration policy to negotiate equality for the Chinese state. Chapter 3 details the reopening of transportation leading to repatriation and new migration during the Chinese Civil War. Because of the existential threat to the Nationalist state, Chinese officials made use of these migrations to solidify the Republic of China’s place as a member of the United Nations and as an ally of the United States, experimenting with greater control over who goes abroad and what they do there in the process. The United States, meanwhile, struggled to balance between the political pressure to support the Republic of China and the popular reluctance to accept Chinese migrants, a schism that would only deepen when the security concerns of the Cold War hardened.

Part 2 of the book demonstrates how Chinese migrants acted as cold warriors—influencing international relations both voluntarily and involuntarily. Chapter 4 picks up the story of new immigration begun in chapter 3, plus the dilemma of deportation in the context of closed borders to explain how the Cold War made it necessary for some migration policies simultaneously to serve national security imperatives and promote national prestige. Chinese in the United States both fell victim to fears of Communist infiltration and supported free China, and in each case struggled with Nationalist Chinese efforts to use their experiences to maintain standing in American eyes. Chapter 5 focuses on how migrants link domestic and foreign policies, explaining how traditional Chinese family remittances became a battleground between the two Chinas. The money trail was vital but difficult to control, and as a result, policy experiments here had tragic consequences. In chapter 6, the push of refugees into Hong Kong created a dilemma for the United States and Nationalist China, both of which politically wanted to be seen as offering assistance but preferred to accept few refugees for permanent residence. This chapter demonstrates that definitions such as immigrant or refugee mattered and were contingent on Cold War policy aims.

The third and final part of the book explains how migration policy became a means of easing the Cold War in Asia. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the repatriation of detained nationals in the 1950s became both the excuse for the United States and Communist China to open direct communications and a means for both Chinese governments to negotiate legitimacy. As Cold War hostages, Chinese scholars detained in the United States and Americans imprisoned in China had political significance that made the terms of their repatriations heavily contested. Chapter 8 looks at visa diplomacy and immigration policy changes in the 1960s, exploring how the wild card of Taiwan independence activists in the United States helped to break down the cooperation between the United States and its Nationalist allies. And finally, the book’s conclusion surveys changes in travel policy in the lead-up to the Nixon trip to China, demonstrating that migration both signaled changing American and Communist Chinese attitudes and offered a low-risk way to explore them.

A Note on Language

I have used the transliterations of Chinese names available in the documents. American, British, and even sometimes Chinese documents often provide a name and a great deal of information about an individual using the former Wade-Giles or other past transliteration systems without also providing the characters. For private citizens, this means the characters or pinyin transliterations are not always available. Where they are, however, I have tried to provide both transliterations. In a few other cases, as with Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi in pinyin), Soong Mei-ling (Song Meiling), and the Kuomintang or KMT (the Nationalist Party, Guomindang in pinyin), I have opted to use the most common and recognizable transliteration, even at the expense of total consistency. Except where explicitly noted, all translations from Chinese are my own.

Part I

Migration Diplomacy at War

Chapter 1

Unequal Allies

Renegotiating Exclusions

Soong May-ling (Song Meiling), wife of Chiang Kai-shek and arguably the most famous Chinese migrant to the United States in the twentieth century, made an official visit to Washington in 1943. Soong spent a decade in her youth studying in the United States, graduating from Wellesley College in 1917, and after Chiang died she returned to a family estate in New York for much of her remaining years. Over the course of the twentieth century, she traveled to the United States as a student, an official, and as an immigrant. The official purpose of her wartime visit was to seek medical care, though she had a long-standing invitation from Eleanor Roosevelt to visit the White House and took advantage of the opportunity to advocate for greater U.S. support of China’s struggle against Japan. The president apparently made a great effort not to allow himself to be taken in by her infamous charm, but Congress was generally not so careful.¹ As one Time magazine reporter gushed after her appearance there:

She was with the Senate, but over and above them. In her soul was the hot iron that six years of war, decades of civil warfare and politics can ram into a person, but it had left her rather purged of crass humanness than seared by the flame…. She was straight, almost as slender as a reed in a long, black trailing Chinese silken gown that fitted with more than clerical precision around her throat. Senators, as she walked to the rostrum, caught glimpses of well-turned, beautifully flashing legs as the split sides of the gown opened to the knee as she walked along.²

Both beautiful and formidable even while being objectified, Soong made a strong case for more equal standing between the United States and China in their joint execution of the war. She appealed publicly and privately for more aid to China, but she also pushed behind the scenes for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which insisted that however desirable she was to the men of Congress, being a Chinese woman made her officially an undesirable immigrant.

By the time Madame Chiang Kai-shek (as she was known) arrived in Washington, the American public proved as well conditioned to think positively about their largest ally in Asia as they had been to think negatively about Chinese once they arrived in U.S. ports as immigrants. When the United States finally entered World War II in December 1941, China had already been fighting the Japanese for four and a half years. Aid had arrived from a variety of sources: Germany and the Soviet Union first, and by mid-1941, from the United States and Britain. Private citizens in the United States joined fund-raisers and campaigns for United China Relief, proudly celebrating that nation as the first to fight the Axis powers.³ Egged on by the triumphant coverage from Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines, the American perception of the Chinese nation underwent a radical shift toward the positive during a short time early in the war.⁴

Popular support notwithstanding, official American support for China consistently fell short of Chiang Kai-shek’s expectations. For all the fanfare and celebration of Claire Chennault’s volunteer Flying Tigers air force and their daring supply runs over the Himalayas, the relationship between the Generalissimo (Chiang Kai-shek) and the American representative in China, General Joseph Stilwell, remained tense and difficult. American diplomats in China complained that the Chinese leader appeared more interested in saving his resources for the postwar fight against the growing Communist movement than in making an immediate effort against the Japanese. According to U.S. Navy Group member John Lacey, by the end of the war American diplomats in China were rather down on the Chiang government. Noting the combination of rampant inflation and unchecked corruption, he added, None of us felt very kindly toward the Soong clan, including Madame Chiang Kai-shek.⁵ Meanwhile, Chinese officials frequently complained about the Allied powers’ tendency to place Europe first on the wartime agenda. The Cairo Conference, which brought Chiang together with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, illustrated this complicated dynamic by simultaneously offering reassurances to Chiang while reinforcing China’s status as a secondary power, not important enough to merit inclusion in the regular talks that included Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.⁶ Frustrated with being treated as a junior partner, Chinese officials made frequent appeals for a revised Allied policy, additional lend-lease aid, and more support overall. Meanwhile, British and American officials used a variety of means to placate them—without fundamentally changing their own strategies.⁷ Migration policy became a useful forum for this, as a symbolic gesture toward equality that did not require a shift in wartime strategy. Repealing the intertwined policies of extraterritoriality in China and exclusion in the United States that the Chinese had long opposed became a way to give an inch and ignore the mile.

Extraterritoriality and exclusion had been closely linked from their very inception.⁸ The fact that they could exist in combination became one of the most striking reminders of the weakness of the Chinese government and the inequality experienced by the Chinese people: the privileged position of Americans and Europeans in China could not help but stand in stark contrast to the often brutal treatment of Chinese in the United States. The government of the Republic of China took the opportunity created by World War II to try to make recognition of the equality of the Allies a contingency of victory, pushing carefully but consistently for the repeal of both measures. Chinese equality was not an outcome of the war, however, because the motivations of the United States behind these measures remained rooted in its own security. U.S. officials needed the Chinese to keep fighting, so these largely symbolic victories became a way to promote morale and undermine Japanese propaganda. These differing goals meant separate visions for what the postwar relationship would look like, highlighting the weaknesses in Sino-American cooperation.

The U.S. decision to repeal Chinese exclusion in 1943 has long been understood by scholars of U.S.-Chinese relations and Asian-American history as a measure pushed forward by the exigencies of war and the requirements of foreign policy. Differing accounts of the repeal have considered the role of the Roosevelt administration in pursuing repeal and managing the domestic fallout, the efforts of Chinese Americans to speak on their own behalf in changing the law, the place of repeal in the larger context of the push for civil rights and racial equality in the United States, and the extraterritorial control exercised over Chinese immigrants by a powerful but distant Chinese government.⁹ However, there is an even larger context in the period from 1942 to 1946 within which the repeal decisions took place: the end of extraterritoriality, the revision of shore leave provisions for Chinese sailors, and the reconsideration of Asian exclusion as a broader topic. In most accounts, the Chinese government, perhaps only with the exception of Soong May-ling and the occasional renegade consul, often takes on the role of observer in the changing U.S. policy; but when the four-year period is taken into account, a much more profound pattern of influence emerges, one that is consistent with the Chinese government’s stated aims in its overseas Chinese policies. These low-level migration issues combined, via active participation on the part of both Americans and Chinese, to revise the two nations’ alliance during the war, with profound implications for the postwar period.

The Allied War Effort Grapples with Equality in 1942

The elevation of the Republic of China from a government struggling to maintain control over its vast claimed territory to one of the four great powers of the world can be credited in large part to the postwar vision of Franklin Roosevelt.¹⁰ Maintaining the fiction of being equal allies required some effort, however, and it led to some changes in U.S. policies on migration issues. In 1942, the first full year of U.S. involvement in the war, three issues emerged as low-stakes, high-reward: the long-promised end to the U.S. system of extraterritorial control, the idea of offering shore leave to Chinese sailors, and the idea of doing something—anything—about the Chinese Exclusion Laws.

Extraterritoriality came to the table first, at least in part because it was the longest time coming. The extraterritoriality system was a lingering effect of the unequal treaties signed between China and the United Kingdom, the United States, and other foreign powers in the wake of the Opium War that lasted from 1839 to 1842. The Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Nanjing established the idea in 1842, and the United States claimed it under the most-favored-nation clause written into the Treaty of Wangxia signed by the United States and China in 1844. The system ensured that foreign nationals living in China would not be subject to Chinese laws and could not be sued or brought to trial in Chinese courts; instead, when the need arose, they would make use of courts set up by their own governments or be sent home to be dealt with there. Such policies were long justified in the West by the claim that the Chinese court system was not yet developed enough to make fair determinations according to the standards of international law. Although the British and American governments defended the system’s continuance this way, the existence of extraterritoriality and its attending implication of Chinese inferiority created a cauldron of resentment for the Chinese government and people in the first half of the twentieth century.¹¹

Extraterritoriality in China had been the subject of international discussion ever since Germany and Austria lost their rights to it upon their defeat in the First World War. Chinese officials raised the issue at the peace talks at Versailles, but their appeal was largely ignored. The subject was discussed again at the Washington Conference in 1921–22; and then over the course of the 1920s, China signed new treaties of friendship and commerce with a number of European nations, each of which included a provision for the abrogation of extraterritorial rights. On January 1, 1930, both the United States and Britain agreed to the idea of abrogating extraterritorial rights, though they sought to do so gradually over the coming years.¹² Other nations followed suit, and by the time China joined the Allies, only Britain, the United States, Japan, France, Italy, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands maintained extraterritorial rights in China.¹³

In March 1942, circumstances warranted a revised look at the extraterritorial claims. As scholar Wesley R. Fishel argued, at this point the United States and Britain both had significantly more to gain by abolishing extraterritoriality than they had in keeping it: aside from offering an olive branch to the struggling Chinese, it seemed unlikely that such colonial-era privileges would survive the war.¹⁴ Moreover, leaders in the Chinese government continued to express dissatisfaction with the U.S. and British