The Politics of the Excluded: The Political Thought of Wong Chin Foo

Introduction

On December 12, 1897, The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that roughly two thousand Chinese people were planning to march on Washington. “FOR RIGHT TO VOTE. Chinese Throughout Country Unite in a Movement,” the headline read. This “army” of protesters was not made up of “newly arrived and ignorant Celestials,” the Tribune wrote, but rather “recruited exclusively from the ranks of the Americanized and United States born Chinese,” and leading them was a man named Wong Chin Foo (Chicago Daily Tribune 1897a). Wong and the protestors hoped that their agitation at the nation’s capital would compel Congress to repeal the Geary Act of 1892, which extended the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by an additional ten years and required Chinese to carry a resident permit—including a photograph—at all times. “America has degraded her Chinese residents,” Wong wrote a few weeks later in the same newspaper. “If this is not changed, where is the superiority of your Christian charity and your common humanity that you preached to us heathens at the point of your bayonets?” (Chicago Daily Tribune 1897b).

The Chinese march on Washington never materialized. Wong and his supporters may have followed through with a “modified” plan, though, gathering 200 or 300 representatives to show support for the introduction of a bill—one that Wong himself likely wrote—that would have radically expanded the criteria for the naturalization of Chinese persons. Naturalized citizenship for the Chinese would be on the basis of lawful residence, good character, and certain expectations such as English proficiency and adopting Western dress (The Washington Post 1897). Importantly, one of the criteria was that Chinese men cut off their queue (the traditional male hairstyle worn at the time)—an act of treason under the Manchu government and the clearest sign that a man had completely severed his allegiance to China.

Despite never being realized, Wong’s plans for the Chinese march on Washington and his proposed bill was the culmination of decades of political thinking and activism on the issue of citizenship for the Chinese in America. However, Wong did not intend for all Chinese to become American citizens. His proposal, like the planned march on Washington, was not for the army of newly arrived, non-English speaking, poor laborers who had no intention of making their permanent home in America. Citizenship and equal rights were for those “Americanized Chinese . . . wholly of America, and cosmopolitan in nature,” not the “ignorant Celestials” (Chicago Daily Tribune 1897b, 1897a). Citizenship in the age of Chinese exclusion was, to wit, still exclusive. How did Wong sustain and justify this tension between inclusion and exclusion?

This article examines the ideas of citizenship and exclusion in the writings of the nineteenth-century figure Wong Chin Foo (王清福, 1847–1898). Considered by some scholars to be an unsung hero in Asian American history, Wong was a prolific writer, speaker, and one of the most vociferous opponents of Chinese exclusion. ¹ Born in Shandong province in China and educated in the United States, Wong was among the minority of Chinese in America who were highly literate and able to publish in English; the Washington Post dubbed Wong “probably the brightest and best educated Chinaman in America” (The Washington Post 1894). After obtaining citizenship in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1874, Wong also joined the minority of naturalized citizens of Chinese descent. He is credited with coining the term “Chinese American,” embracing the term not only for himself but also for the title of the first English-Chinese bilingual newspaper in the United States. As a founder of the Chinese Equal Rights League, Wong mobilized hundreds of Chinese in America to resist the sweeping expansions of Chinese exclusion when the Geary Act was passed in 1892. But beneath these ostensible commitments to equality, Wong’s vision of Chinese inclusion was entrenched in a profoundly unequal conception of citizenship and standing. Thus, his writings and record of political activism offer an underappreciated vantage point into the complexities and internal contradictions of the Chinese struggle for citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States. ²

This essay situates a selection of Wong’s writings within the context of the Restriction Period (1882—1888) and the Exclusion Period (1888 and after) in the United States. ³ I show how Wong’s writings operate simultaneously as defensive acts of cultural production and positive claims to political inclusion against a backdrop of intensifying racial violence. Across a variety of ethnographic, editorial, and political writings, Wong argued that the Chinese were culturally distinctive but morally and politically assimilable to American society; as a cultural broker, he emphasized how certain Chinese morals, customs, and habits repudiated the racial stereotypes long used to justify anti-Chinese violence and exclusion. Central to this argumentative strategy, I argue, was Wong’s reappropriation of the idea of the Chinese as alien and unassimilable “heathens.” His radical reimagining of the heathen was a conceptual device, which he used to criticize American institutions and advance the more radical argument that heathenism made the Chinese capable of assimilating into American society and, therefore, worthy of citizenship. However, in conceiving citizenship for the Chinese as something conditional on their “character and fitness,” Wong’s underlying theory of citizenship attests to his own class and racial prejudices. By positioning the Chinese in a racial hierarchy above Black and Indigenous Americans, Wong reinscribed the racial and ethical boundaries of citizenship. What is more, in Wong’s view, only some Chinese were worthy of citizenship—specifically, those he saw as thoroughly “Americanized”—which implied maintaining the exclusion of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants. ⁴ I contend that Wong’s conception of citizenship illuminates a theory of unequal inclusion. Inclusion for the Chinese was not only conditional on their assimilation but premised upon the exclusion of the majority of Chinese immigrants as well as the subordination of other racial groups. Such unequal inclusion, I suggest, is an expression of the profoundly constrained historical existence of the Chinese in America. ⁵

The analysis that follows aims to contribute on three fronts. The first is a historical elucidation of what the historian Gordon Chang has called “the politics of the excluded” (Chang 2013). While scholars have long recognized the significance of nineteenth-century Chinese legal activism in challenging discriminatory ordinances and shaping laws around immigration and citizenship, relatively less work has attended to how Chinese intellectuals articulated their positions and worked to affect American opinion and policy. ⁶ As one of the few Chinese in America able to publish in English during this period, Wong’s paper trail affords us a close-up of how figures from historically excluded groups understood, portrayed, and worked to alter their social position and their relation to state power through creative, effective, and untraditional means beyond the courts (Chang 2013, 332, 334). ⁷ Yet the unconventional and genre-defying nature of Wong’s oeuvre presents a methodological challenge. Wong’s writings include everything from polemical commentary on exclusion legislation to ad hoc reporting on activities in local Chinese communities, expositions on Chinese religious practices, and glossaries of Chinese food and cuisine. This multivocality has led some scholars to characterize Wong’s writings as agile, tactical responses to the demands of nineteenth-century periodical print culture and changing discourses of Chinese racialization (Hsu 2006, 85). This essay, however, aims to use Wong as a guide to clarify and think critically about the categories and features that structure Asian American politics and, more specifically, Asian American political thought. To that end, a close historical reading of a selection of Wong’s writings through the conceptual lens of citizenship underscores how central categories of politics and political thinking are often reconfigured by the very people those categories were designed to exclude.

Second, this article aims to provide a model for interpreting and reading texts within Asian American political thought and intellectual history. While it may be tempting to portray Wong as an “unheralded civil rights activist” who dreamed of “justice and equality for all” (Zhang 1998, 41–42), the analysis here suggests something more complicated. Characters like Wong Chin Foo merit our attention because they depart from an overly simplistic narrative that presents Asian Americans as “victims marginalized by structural and ideological discrimination who also became heroes by claiming America as their own and making lives in places from which they had been banned” (Hsu 2018, 72). Wong was simultaneously powerful and marginal: his bilingualism, acculturation, and education gave him access to platforms and modes of exchanging and producing ideas that most Chinese immigrants did not have. A charismatic and fiery public speaker, his rhetorical style was often unrelenting and aggressive. ⁸ He was also an outspoken critic of practices within local Chinese immigrant communities—such as gambling and opium smoking—and his divisive, moralizing opinions made him the target of a number of assassination attempts. In the mid-1890s, he dreamt of starting a revolutionary movement in Chicago to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty. Yet in spite of this outward radicalness, Wong transgressed norms of ethnic and racial solidarity by upholding existing class and racial hierarchies. Add to that his list of failures—the collapse of The Chinese American, his unsuccessful attempts to actually achieve equal rights for the Chinese in America, and his eventual withdrawal from public life—Wong is hardly the perfect representative of the ideals of democratic equality. Yet, as Hsu suggests, exploring the ambiguities within such figures can reveal not only how hierarchies and categories of exclusion emerge but also how people marginalized by those categories are obliged to respond to them, sometimes by capturing, replicating, and perpetuating them (Hsu 2018, 74). ⁹

Finally, this article hopes to make a theoretical intervention by showing how Wong’s writings disclose the peculiarities of Asian American positionality in debates about citizenship and inclusion in the U.S. racial order. Following the work of Shklar (1991), the analysis here takes for granted that citizenship confers not just an equality of political rights and responsibilities but, more importantly, the distinction of standing between citizens and noncitizens. However, as Joel Olson argued, what Shklar misses is that the standing of citizens was “a racialized standing” in a bipolar racial order of white citizens and Black anticitizens (Olson 2004, xx). To rephrase Olson’s point in the terminology of this essay, Shklar misses out on the dynamics of unequal inclusion. To what extent does including Asian Americans in the history of the struggle for citizenship, then, disrupt this bipolarity? Do they become racially triangulated vis-à-vis Blacks and whites, simultaneously uplifted as model minorities but civically ostracized as unassimilable aliens, as Claire Jean Kim (1999) once argued? Or, following her more recent work, does the Asian American struggle for inclusion in a world structured by the dual forces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness speak to the durability of a bipolar racial order (Kim 2023; Olson 2004, 27)? These questions, I would submit, are fundamental to our understanding of Asian American politics, history, and political theory. However, my goal in this essay is neither to settle these questions nor to offer a normative defense of Wong’s position on these questions. Rather, I contend that a historical reading of Wong gives us greater purchase on how binary theories of citizenship and non-/anti-citizenship have become theoretical problems in the first place and offers a realist account of the terms of this debate. ¹⁰ Following the works of Olson (2004) and Beltrán (2020) on African American and noncitizen migrants’ struggles for citizenship, I hope to show how Wong’s reimagined categories of the heathen and the citizen destabilized and reified white citizenship in America.

Background and Context

The historical distinctiveness of Chinese exclusion and anti-Chinese violence structured the political thinking of figures like Wong and limited their possibilities for political resistance. When Wong Chin Foo successfully filed his declaration of intention to become a citizen on April 3, 1874, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he became the exception rather than the rule. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, the Chinese were deemed racially ineligible for citizenship, laying the groundwork for the subsequent legal codification of “white” and producing new categories of racial difference (Lee 2003, 2019; Ngai 2004). In 1870, the federal Naturalization Act extended naturalization eligibility to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” While it offered a major revision to the 1790 Naturalization Act, which had limited citizenship to “free white persons . . . of good character,” the 1870 Naturalization Act’s silence with respect to the Chinese Question, however, not only implicitly denied citizenship to immigrants from Asia but also appeared to apply a sort of color test with reference to geography rather than race (Smith 2002).

The year after Wong naturalized, the enactment of the Page Act of 1875 further slowed immigration from Asia by barring the immigration of women of China, Japan, “or any Oriental country” for “lewd and immoral purposes.” In 1878, the decision of In re Ah Yup upheld the notion that the purpose of the Congressional statutes pertaining to naturalization was specifically “to exclude the Chinese” (In re Ah Yup, 1878). Citing contemporary racial science and ethnology, circuit judge Lorenzo Sawyer asserted that the term “white person” was never used scientifically or ordinarily to include “an individual of the Mongolian race.” That same year, an infamous report commissioned by the California Senate named the Chinese threat to “our own people”—defining “our own” as “original settlers of California, along with their children” and “recent immigrants from the East and Europe” (California. Legislature. Senate 1878; Lee 2019, 78). As historian Erika Lee has suggested, this unambiguous lumping of all European immigrants not only “conveniently ignored” the status of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Indigenous Americans, but it also established a pattern of distinguishing between European and Asian immigrants rather than distinguishing among European immigrants, thereby expanding “the boundaries of whiteness while advocating for Asian exclusion” (Lee 2019, 78–79). ¹¹

Restrictions on Chinese immigration culminated in the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which imposed a ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for ten years and required the Chinese to obtain “proper evidence” if they wished to leave and reenter the United States. It also denied state and federal courts the ability to grant citizenship to the Chinese. These forms of exclusion were premised on the assumptions that the Chinese were another form of unfree labor and that they were unassimilable aliens. As historian Beth Lew-Williams has observed, depictions of Chinese as “heathen coolies” became a two-pronged trope that bolstered the anti-Chinese movement in the late nineteenth century (Lew-Williams 2018, 31). Importantly, it was Chinese laborers who were the specific legal and social targets of exclusion; merchants, students, and teachers were able to enter and leave “of their own free will and accord” as stipulated by the Angell Treaty of 1880. Anti-Chinese advocates portrayed Chinese laborers as coerced, degraded, slavish, and a threat to republican values of free and independent labor. In the Congressional debates over the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese laborers were described as “machine-like” in their work habits therefore an economic threat to the United States (Gyory 1998, 223–38; Lee 2015, 64). The Chinese were also seen as complicit in capitalist monopoly; their willingness to work for abysmally low wages was viewed as culturally innate and something that drove whites out of work (Ngai 2010, 32, 2021). The anti-Chinese movement wove this anticapitalist rhetoric together with antislavery and abolitionist ideas as well. Representative James Blaine from Maine, one of the most notorious anti-Chinese politicians of the time, argued, “In the Chinamen, the white laborer finds only another form of servile competition,” the “worst and most demoralized features of coolyism [sic],” which were, he claimed, “in some respects more revolting and corrupting than African slavery” (Blaine 1879). The combined effect of anti-coolie rhetoric, therefore, was to equate the presence of Chinese immigrants with a new form of racial subjection that heightened lingering anxieties about Black emancipation and threatened white freedom in the United States (Jun 2011; Lew-Williams 2018, 32; Ngai 2021; Wong 2015). ¹²

If as coolies the Chinese threatened ideals of free labor, then as heathens they posed a broader civilizational threat. The trope of the “heathen Chinee” worked in a number of ways. First, the alleged heathenism of the Chinese was inextricably bound up with the conditions of Chinese laborers; their bodies, habits, and ability to survive under the most abysmal circumstances suggested that they were hardly human but mere “animal machines” (Gin Lum 2022, 160). Chinese heathenism also signified a broader continuity with ideas about race and religion in the United States. Alongside Native Americans, the Chinese were viewed as alien objects with uncivilized habits and idolatrous practices, ultimately unable to care for themselves. The discourse of heathenism marked them as being incapable of understanding American institutions, norms, and practices, hence California’s denial of Chinese and Native American rights to legal testimony in court. Finally, viewing the Chinese as constitutionally incapable of becoming Christians reinforced fears that they would not only resist conversion and assimilation but also that they could spread their heathen civilization in America (Gin Lum 2022, 15). Dooner’s (1880) sensationalist The Last Days of the Republic, one of the most notorious examples of extremist yellow peril literature in the late nineteenth century, described China as “the oldest as well as the richest country of the globe” whose traditions and policies “teach and require that she shall aim to rule the whole world” (Dooner 1880, 21–22). An 1898 article in the North American Review also portrayed the Chinese as politically cunning, subversive, and deceptively powerful. The author paranoically described the Chinese as part of a political machine, “more effective without the ballot than that of the entire Afro-American contingent,” and were it not for the exclusive immigration laws, “they would either have driven the white labor from the coast and adjacent territory or have precipitated a race war of extermination” (Holder 1898, 226–27).

The longevity of Chinese civilization and the latent political power of the Chinese embodied in coolie-heathenism simultaneously legitimated and threatened the existing mode of racial governance in the United States (Gin Lum 2022). The Chinese found themselves slotted into a racial hierarchy below whites and above formerly enslaved Blacks. This hierarchy cut in two directions. For some, the advancement of Chinese civilization was proof of its superiority over African civilization, so the possibility of extending the franchise to Blacks also entailed the possibility—or rather, the threat—of millions of voting Chinese in America. The Chinese were not only compliant, docile, and hyper-efficient laborers; as heathens, they were also existential threats, aiming at “nothing less than the conquest of America, through the ballot box and gun” (Chang 2013, 333). To others, the racial logic of Chinese superiority/Black inferiority was an argument for Chinese citizenship: “If Blacks, why not the Chinese?” ¹³ The appeal and endurance of the heathen coolie trope thus reinforced ideas about racial difference and, ultimately, exclusion (Gin Lum 2022, 153; Jun 2011).

Such ideas of racial difference were enacted and enforced through forms of extralegal violence, the scale of which scholars have only recently appreciated (Lew-Williams 2018; Pfaelzer 2008). Physical harassment, attacks, and lynchings were prevalent before the 1880s; one of the most brutal instances, for example, was the Los Angeles Chinese massacre in 1871 during which nineteen Chinese residents were murdered by a mob of about 500 people. However, violence against the Chinese in the 1880s became systematic. Lew-Williams documents approximately 170 sites of violent Chinese expulsions between 1885 and 1887 alone (Lew-Williams 2018). In some instances, like the 1885 massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming, white mobs murdered Chinese workers while looting and burning their Chinatown. In other cases, such as in Eureka, CA, and Tacoma, Washington, groups of vigilantes expelled entire towns of Chinese residents; in the case of the Tacoma expulsion, at least seventy Chinese were forced to board a train to Portland while the mob burned the town to the ground.

Far from being isolated incidents, these examples in the late 1880s signaled the anti-Chinese movement’s turn to organized and violent tactics with the singular goal of expulsion and exclusion (Lew-Williams 2018). As with anti-Black lynchings in the Jim Crow era, anti-Chinese violence had communicative effects. Weaponized terror and expulsions not only served as an “enforcement mechanism for racial hierarchy” but also reinforced the boundaries of political subjectivity between white and non-white—citizen and alien (Gorup 2020, 822). The scale of anti-Chinese violence also produced divided responses among the Chinese. Merchants and the educated elite demanded protection and the right to stay while laborers deemed it safer to leave and return to China. In 1886, even the Chinese minister Zheng Zaoru, who initially tried to protect his countrymen’s place in the United States, eventually conceded that the surest way of preserving foreign relations between the United States and China was to restrict Chinese immigration (Lew-Williams 2018, 111–12).

At the confluence of these forces of legal exclusion, racist rhetoric, and racial violence stood the organic intellectual Wong Chin Foo. ¹⁴ As a public lecturer in the 1870s, he was affiliated with Boston’s Redpath Lyceum Bureau, a speaker’s agency that represented figures such as Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. In the 1880s, during the height of anti-Chinese movements, Wong debated Denis Kearney, the staunch anti-Chinese leader of the California Workingmen’s Party, in paper and on stage. His writing appeared in a wide array of well-known periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Puck, and the elite literary magazine The North American Review. Outspoken, eloquent, witty, and unapologetic in tone, Wong worked to subvert racial stereotypes about the Chinese. Through “commoditized acts of self-revelation,” as Edlie L. Wong calls them, Wong presented the Chinese—everything from their food, clothing, and games to their laws, norms, and language—as curious, familiar, and ultimately knowable to white Americans who otherwise saw them as perpetually foreign and threatening (Hsu 2006; Wong 2015). ¹⁵ While it may be easy to see Wong’s works as an “uneven practice of transcultural bricolage,”(Hsu 2006, 85) I argue that there is a remarkable consistency and coherence in his political thought. Wong furnished his critiques of Chinese exclusion by reclaiming the racialized discourse of heathenism. His arguments defending his own heathenism, made most famously in his 1887 North American Review essay, appear in earlier lectures and speeches in the mid 1870s (Boston Daily Globe 1874; The New York Times 1874) as well as in short extracts in the 1880s and 1890s (Hsu 2006, 91–92; Wong 1892). Proudly proclaiming his heathen commitments and defending the integrity of the Chinese, Wong delivered a blistering criticism of what he saw as the unjust racial, moral, and political barriers to inclusion in the American polity. Yet his attempts to claim a place for the Chinese in the American polity nevertheless assented to the continued exclusion of most Chinese laborers while also tacitly consenting to and upholding existing racial hierarchies.

Reappropriating the Idea of “the Heathen”

Wong’s critical reappropriation of heathenism provides a conceptual throughline in his political thought. He adopted the title of the first “Confucian Missionary” and “Heathen Missionary” to America in 1874 and periodically referred to himself and other Chinese as “benighted heathens” before and after the publication of his North American Review essay. The irony would not have been lost on the audience. Protestant missionaries from Great Britain and the United States began in the early nineteenth century, and New England Congregationalists sent their first American missionaries to China in 1829. Frustrated by the lack of Chinese interest in Christianity, evangelizing efforts in the latter half of the nineteenth century tried different tactics, recruiting young American college students in non-denominational missions (Pruden 2009). So for Chinese-born and American-educated Wong, presenting himself as a “missionary” highlighted his foreignness and reminded Americans of their futile attempts to turn China into a Christian civilization. Wong’s (1887) “Why Am I a Heathen?” contains his most sustained argument in which he defends heathenism as a coherent set of political and ethical commitments in order to critique American institutions. Appearing in the prestigious North American Review, “Why Am I a Heathen?” was part of a series of apologetic essays beginning in March 1886, with many featuring mainstream Protestant denominations (“Why Am I a Presbyterian?” by John Hall and “Why I Am a Congregationalist,” by Gail Hamilton, for example) but also included others such as “Why Am I a Catholic?” “Why Am I a Moslem?” and “Why Am I an Agnostic?” The essay marked a turning point in Wong’s career as a writer. Whereas much of his earlier writings attempted to demystify customs in order to cultivate a more sympathetic view of the Chinese, “Why Am I a Heathen?” was a full-frontal assault on Christian ethics in which Wong’s self-proclaimed heathenism exposed the hypocrisies of white American Christendom and its attending political ideals.

The first step in Wong’s argument was to defend heathen values, which, for Wong, meant distilling Confucian ethics into a tonic suitable to the tastes of a white Christian audience. Confucianism, according to Wong, teaches the values of gravity, propriety, sincerity, virtue, and filial love. Chinese children from “respectable parents” are never seen on the streets except in times of necessity; their bonds of friendship are “seldom broken” (Boston Daily Globe 1874). Education is a preeminent value; students are raised in “Confucian schools” as well as more modern subjects, including “moral science, political economy, law and its most approved methods of application, philosophy, etc., etc.” Laws are based on “sound common-sense, bearing evidence . . . of being the very acme of human endeavor” (Wong 1883). It is on account of these Confucian teachings, Wong claimed, “the Chinese empire has been raised from degradation, and the people have been happy and prosperous for 2000 years” (Boston Daily Globe 1874). Such claims of the longevity and moral fiber of Chinese civilization were prevalent among Chinese elites at the time, yet I suggest Wong’s intentions here are not to defend Sinocentrism as such. ¹⁶ Rather, his portrayal of heathenism provided a moral framework in which the Chinese could be seen as modest, kind, “industrious, happy, and God-fearing,” and above all, assimilable into American society (Boston Daily Globe 1874).

More forceful, though, was the way in which Wong used a series of ironic inversions to launch a broad critique of the contradictions within American society—everything from its missionary impulse and imperialism to the soullessness of capitalism and blatant forms of discrimination. European and American missionaries wanted to bring civilization to the Chinese but instead infected others with “business greed and utter lack of filial reverence” (New York Times 1874). The supposedly heathen civilization of China “with a population of 450,000,000 people crowded together” had fewer murders than a country with less than 40,000,000 people, Wong argued, and yet it was Americans who “pride themselves upon their beautiful religion and civilization” (Boston Daily Globe 1874). ¹⁷ While Christian missionaries claimed to “love the heathen” in seeking their conversion, in reality, they loved only “the heathen’s possessions” (Wong 1887, 176). Greed disguised as love was in its baldest form in the Opium Wars, which Wong decried as a “great national curse” thrust upon the Chinese “at the points of Christian bayonets” and had done more harm than “all the humanitarian agencies of Christianity could remedy in 200 years” (Wong 1887, 177).

By juxtaposing and inverting these antipodal ideas of civilization and heathenism, Christianity and Confucianism, Wong threw into high relief the hypocrisies of Chinese exclusion. American Christians, Wong argued, were not only perpetrators of injustice but also guilty of “[suppressing] knowledge of the meritorious acts of others, to humor [their] vanity or gratify [their] spleen” (Wong 1887, 173). Chinese merchants provided $40,000 of aid to the city of Memphis during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, but their generosity was “quietly swallowed . . . without even a ‘thank you,’” Wong wrote. But such unselfishness and philanthropy was overshadowed by the American’s sanctimonious response to the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885—“petty compensation,” Wong declared, for the murder of 28 Chinese miners and the looting and burning of the Rock Springs’ Chinatown at the hands of white miners (Wong 1887, 174). In a series of ironic reversals, Wong continued to underscore the contradictions of Christian virtue: whereas the Christian’s charity was instrumental, the heathen “does good for the sake of doing good” (Wong 1887, 176). Whereas Christianity appeared to value “golden-calf worshipping” and a “restless . . . doctrine of ceaseless action” that produced nothing but “trouble and misery in Christian society,” heathen values taught contentment, tranquility of mind and body, and sincerity and practicality in one’s faith (Wong 1887, 172–73). The heathen’s discouragement of “labor-saving machinery” was not a sign of their backwardness or idleness but rather a commitment to equality in the distribution of work (Wong 1887, 176). Thus, beyond reclaiming heathenism as a normatively desirable set of ethical beliefs and practices, Wong reappropriated the justifications used by Christian missionaries in an effort to subvert them.

Finally, Wong used heathenism as a device to denounce the ever-shifting standards used to justify Chinese exclusion and racial exclusion in America more broadly. “In all their heathenism China has in no time surpassed the Christians in their persecution of races,” Wong wrote as a self-proclaimed “benighted heathen.” But here was the difference: the Chinese “persecute people on account of their lawless conduct, and never on account of their nature or birth.” In America, however, the opposite appeared to be the case because the Chinese were persecuted “for no other reason than because they are Chinamen.” Such discriminatory practices, Wong pointed out, were not only in violation of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 but also of general principles of fairness: “And yet we do not see why we have any less right in your country than you have in ours,” Wong wrote, “when we grant you all the rights, and even allow you liberties which are denied to our own citizens” (Wong 1879). ¹⁸ Wong echoed this argument in “Why Am I a Heathen?” with an additional reference to the Fifteenth Amendment: “We [Chinese] are so far heathenish as to no longer persecute men simply on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but treat them all according to their individual worth,” he asserted (Wong 1887, 175). ¹⁹ Missionaries need not be sent to Christianize the Chinese heathen, Wong claimed, but ought to be sent to “civilize the political savages at Washington” for their affronts against the Chinese and “open violation of the spirit of the Constitution of the United States” (Wong 1891). ²⁰

Between Wong’s reclamation of heathenism and the incendiary criticism of Christianity, “Why Am I a Heathen?” exposed the instabilities in the religious, ethical, and racial connotations of citizenship in America. Excerpts, complaints, and rebuttals were published in newspapers from The New York Tribune to the Christian Advocate (Seligman 2013, 140–44). The North American Review even published a rejoinder the next month—“Why I Am Not a Heathen,” authored by Yan Phou Lee. Lee, like Wong, was an American-educated Chinese immigrant. Lee rebuffed Wong’s attacks on Christianity as illustrations of the abuse of Christian precepts, not the wickedness of Christianity as a whole. Despite his opposition to Wong’s spirituality, Lee’s use of the term heathen was also subversive in putting white and Chinese heathens on equal footing: he invoked all heathens, “American, or English, or Chinese” to “come to the Saviour” (Gin Lum 2022, 173–74; Lee 1887, 311–12). And, like Wong, Lee demonstrated how the idea of “the heathen” could be exploited and repurposed in a way that blurred its racial and ethical boundaries.

Citizenship and Unequal Inclusion

This ambiguity between a racial and ethical conception of heathenism is echoed in Wong’s ideas of citizenship across other writings and speeches. To begin, Wong cast citizenship unambiguously as a marker of social standing. “When you don’t vote and don’t wish to vote,” Wong reportedly argued in a speech in 1884, “[the politician] denounces you as a reptile; the moment you appear at the ballot box you are a man and a brother and are treated . . . to cigars, whiskies, and beers” (The New York Times 1884). Citizenship was defined by its exclusivity; it provided access to more than political voice via the ballot box but also raised one’s standing to one of distinction above noncitizens and “reptiles.” For Wong, this implied a distinction among classes of Chinese immigrants, too.

In an 1891 editorial, Wong excoriated the government for denying a passport to another Chinese man named Tom Lee, who, like Wong, was a naturalized citizen. In being refused a passport, Lee was “practically . . . disenfranchised,” and along with him, the “rights of nearly 500 other intelligent and law-abiding Chinese-American residents of the United States” offended. To add insult to injury, Chinese-Americans (as Wong called them) would have to “hide their faces from their fellow countrymen” who might mock them for foolishly believing in the “superiority of American jurisprudence”: “‘Hello, Mellican man. Where is your country now? Who are you, any way?’ He is practically a man without a country. Is there a poorer man than he?” (Wong 1891). For Wong, to lose the privileges of citizenship was to lose more than a legal standing, but to lose face among one’s own countrymen.

The proposal and passage of the Geary Act of 1892 further accentuated Wong’s conception of citizenship as standing. In addition to extending the Chinese Exclusion Act by ten years, the Geary Act gave the federal government sweeping new powers over immigration. The phrase “Chinese persons” replaced “Chinese laborers,” signaling the law’s intention to exclude all except those expressly permitted (rather than admit all except those specifically excluded) (Chin 2005). It also required all Chinese to register with the federal government by obtaining a “certificate of residence” that included their name, age, local residential address, and a photograph as proof of their lawful residence; any Chinese person caught without their certificate would be “deemed and adjudged to be unlawfully within the United States” and subject to deportation. ²¹ In a fiery speech given in Boston in November 1892, Wong declared that when the Geary Act went into effect, “150,000 law-abiding and industrious citizens and residents of the United States will be made State criminals, and every one of them will have his picture taken for the national rogues’ gallery.” But the chief offense of the Geary Act, according to Wong, was that it would reduce the Chinese to the level of “degraded slaves” (Boston Daily Globe 1892). The new registration requirements were a “disgrace unjustly and maliciously heaped” upon the thousands of Chinese residents who had worked hard to assimilate into American society, paid taxes, and above all “[loved] and [admired] the Government, and look with joy to her instrumentality in promoting every good and just cause among men” (Chinese Equal Rights League 1893, 3). Under the new requirements, these Chinese would be branded like “a lot of cattle for slaughter” and would be “seen upon [the] streets with tearful eyes and hearts, objects of scorn and public ridicule,” Wong wrote (Chinese Equal Rights League 1893, 3).

Wong was not alone in his vocal opposition to the Geary Act. The Chinese Six Companies, the most established mutual aid societies for Chinese on the West Coast of the United States, sent a translation of the Geary Act to the emperor of China, organized a massive boycott of the Geary Act’s registration program, and issued a proclamation asking for Chinese in the United States to contribute a dollar each to a legal defense fund (Chin 2005, 18; Salyer 1995, 46–8; Seligman 2013, 198). Other Chinese elites, including the Chinese foreign minister Wu Tingfang, also issued condemnations of US immigration policy following the Geary Act while boasting the superiority of Chinese civilization. ²² What distinguished Wong’s opposition, though, was that he scaffolded his claims as an American citizen on two axes of difference and exclusion. One axis was race: Wong’s attempts to renegotiate the position of the Chinese in America—as foreign unassimilables, as heathens—fell victim to a logic that reinforced a racial hierarchy of white citizenship at the top, Black and Native American non-citizenship at the bottom. The other axis was class. The privilege of naturalized citizenship, for Wong, was conditional on the “character and fitness” best exhibited by assimilated Chinese Americans. “The people for whom the right of naturalization is asked are in every sense of the word American business men,” Wong declared in 1897. “There are no wage cutters among them; there are no criminals or drones in their industrial habitation. They are men of education, property, energy, intelligence,” he continued (The Washington Post 1897). In his opinion, the true victims of the Geary Act were the Chinese Americans—especially those who had successfully naturalized like himself—not Chinese laborers.

What emerges from Wong’s works is a conception of citizenship that attempted to replace racial qualifications with ethical ones, albeit unsuccessfully. The motto of the Chinese Equal Rights League was “Character and fitness should be the requirement of all who are desirous of becoming citizens of the American Republic” (Chinese Equal Rights League 1893). Making character and fitness the grounds of citizenship enabled Wong to do two things. On the one hand, with a more expansive criterion for citizenship, Wong could argue that the Chinese exhibited the kinds of character traits deemed desirable among white Americans: their adoption of Western dress and customs (as he had done), their lawfulness (“show me any race of men who are more willing to obey the law than the Chinese”), their industriousness (but not money-grubbingness), their contribution to the tax base, and their “unwavering love of human rights” (Boston Daily Globe 1892). Wong conjured up a notion of citizenship that underscored the virtues of independence, the dignity and honesty of work, and pride in American institutions. This closely follows Shklar’s idea of the citizen earner: that a good citizen “is an earner, because independence is the indelibly necessary quality of genuine, democratic citizenship” (Shklar 1991, 92–93). Surely, the abundance of successful Chinese laundries, the plentiful “good cooks and general household servants . . . [and] most faithful cashiers and clerks for business firms” proved that the Chinese were capable, dedicated citizen-earners (Wong 1889, 216). Moreover, Wong was eager to show that the Chinese desire to assimilate went hand-in-hand with the sense of citizen workmanship: “Our interest is here,” the Appeal declared, “because our homes, our families and our all are here. . . . Why, then, should we not consider your welfare ours?” (Chinese Equal Rights League 1893, 3). Character and fitness were thus malleable categories that enabled the Chinese to prove they, as a race, were worthy of full membership in American society as voters and earners.

On the other hand, by reconceptualizing citizenship as subject to character and fitness, Wong revealed the tragic choice forced upon the Chinese in America: to prove oneself as having the character and fitness of white citizens or “endure the degradations of not-white status” (Olson 2004, 27–28). Citizenship for the Chinese implied an elevation of their standing on par with white European immigrants and above Blacks and Native Americans. “Why can’t we become good and substantial citizens like those from England, Ireland, Germany, and other European and Asiatic and even African countries?” he asked. ²³ Chinese civilization and political organization, according to Wong, had been far more advanced while America was still a land of “half-naked savages . . . in their infancy in point of true civilization.” Equally problematic was Wong’s accusation that the Chinese were ostracized and degraded while the privilege of citizenship was “granted to all other races of men, even to the blackest people under the sun” (The New York Times 1884). In his responses to the Geary Act, Wong’s worries appear to be less about the legal threat of deportation, but the loss of standing by degrading Chinese residents to the level of the slave: “The same powers that are trying to make us the degraded slaves of America are now trying slowly but surely to be masters of this great republic,” Wong cried (Boston Daily Globe 1892). Such stipulations of character and fitness did more than merely belie Wong’s surface-level commitment to equality; they reinscribed the exclusive boundaries of citizenship along racial and class lines.

What is more, Wong’s class anxieties resurfaced throughout his political activism on naturalization and immigration. Having cut off his own queue in 1881, Wong led the queue-cutting movement alongside a group of Chinese merchants in 1897. The hairstyle was the distinctive marker of male subjects of the Qing dynasty; to cut one’s queue was to signal that one was no longer a subject of the Manchu government, an act of treason enforced by the death penalty. As a distinctive marker of the Chinese, it was weaponized by both anti-Chinese agitators in the 1870s and also by pro-naturalization Chinese like Wong. ²⁴ As the Washington Post reported of the movement, “Laundrymen and Ignorant Laborers would be barred,” for in addition to “ [discarding] the characteristic dress of his people,” they must also speak English (The Washington Post 1897). The composition of members in the Chinese Equal Rights League—approximately 150 “English-speaking Chinese merchants and professional men”—further evinced this class divide (Chinese Equal Rights League 1893, 1).

Of greater import, though, was Wong’s explicit dissociation of the Chinese Question from the issue of naturalization. “We do not want any more Chinese here any more than you do. The scarcer the Chinese here the better would be our conditions among you,” the Chinese Equal Rights League’s (1893, 3) appeal bluntly declared. In earlier writings, Wong’s reasoning on the Chinese Question was economic in nature: the fewer Chinese immigrants there were, the less competition laborers faced in their markets. ²⁵ But by the time of the Chinese Equal Rights League, Wong’s stance on Chinese immigration had hardened. “We have come before you this evening . . . not to advocate Chinese immigration. Nay, we have nothing to do with the Chinese in general,” Wong argued in a speech in 1892. “We are here to plead for the 150,000 Chinese residents of the United States whose liberties are threatened, whose rights over their own lawful homes are to be taken away by tyrants imported upon American soil” (Boston Daily Globe 1892). ²⁶ Again, Wong was speaking not of “the laborers . . . or Chinese who maintain their loyalty to the government of China.” Those Chinese “whose remains must or may be buried in the soil of the so-called ‘Celestial Empire,’ may take care of themselves,” Wong declared curtly (The Washington Post 1897). Instead, Wong was advocating on behalf of the very select Chinese who “from a standpoint of moral and social responsibility” represented “purely American ideas” with regard to their business and social relations (The Washington Post 1897). Thus, for Wong, the injustice that arose from the Chinese Question was not the racial logic that justified the mass exclusion of Chinese laborers; indeed, Wong even affirmed the “supreme right” for Americans to “dictate who shall land upon their shores and who shall not” (Wong 1891). Rather, at stake was the distinction of the few Americanized Chinese who stood to lose their standing as citizens—not as equals but as superiors.

Therein lies the fundamental paradox of Wong’s political thought. Wong’s efforts to repudiate the idea of the unassimilable, heathen Chinese coolie were made at the expense of the very population on whom that racial stereotype was based. Perhaps Wong thought the Chinese might have been subject to less racial violence if there had been fewer of them in the country. Or perhaps Wong saw the masses of Chinese immigrant laborers as “inconvenient obstacles,” easy targets for white Americans, and a liability for his cause of obtaining citizenship (Seligman 2013, 291). Nor was he the last to imagine assimilation and acculturation as co-constituting citizenship. In the 1922 Supreme Court case Takao Ozawa v. United States, Japanese American Takao Ozawa appealed for naturalized citizenship on the basis that he was educated in America, spoke fluent English, and was “well qualified by character and education for citizenship” (Takao Ozawa v. United States 1922). The problem with appeals like Ozawa’s and Wong’s, of course, is that in basing their claims to citizenship on conditions such as moral character, work ethic, and assimilation, they reinforced the idea that one simply had to argue for one’s whiteness on ethical—and later “scientific”—grounds without challenging the racial prerequisites of American citizenship in the first place (Ngai 2004, 42–44). ²⁷

In sum, Wong articulated a notion of citizenship that disclosed the dynamics of unequal inclusion in the American racial order. He audaciously challenged the racial criteria of citizenship in the hopes that the Chinese would be deemed eligible on account of their “character and fitness,” but in doing so, he conflated a racial category for an ethical one. For Wong and the Americanized Chinese for whom he agitated, elevation to the standing of citizenship destabilized racialized assumptions about the inassimilability of the Chinese, but inclusion for the Chinese, on Wong’s terms, still depended on the continued subjection of other groups, including the most oppressed members of his own race: laborers.

Discussion and Conclusion

“If one not entitled to become a citizen should be naturalized, what is his standing?” The New York Sun (1891) asked, responding to the news that Wong Chin Foo had been denied a passport. “I have severed my connection with China. I am therefore cast off by the Chinese Government,” Wong explained. “The State Department says I am not a citizen of this country. Then I am a man without a country, and I confess I don’t like to think of myself in that desolate position” (The New York Sun 1891). In a tone of exasperation and mockery, The Sun then went on to recount the shifting standards of exclusion: What were the markers of races? How many races were there? And what was a judge to do when faced with so many cases of immigrants appealing for their citizenship? “He cannot divide all applicants into blondes and brunes,” the piece verbally shrugged (The New York Sun 1891). From expressions of a felt loss of standing to the surrounding commentary’s obsession with contemporary ethnological standards of race, there could hardly be a more apt way of encapsulating the complexities of Wong’s experience of Chinese exclusion.

By reconstructing Wong’s politics of the excluded, this essay has endeavored to accomplish three things. First, I have sought to illuminate the historical forces that shaped as well as constrained Wong’s articulation of a politics of the excluded. In the context of legal, social, and discursive exclusion, Wong inverted the racialized discourse of heathenism to undermine American ideas of racial citizenship. At the same time, however, he propounded an idea of conditional inclusion for the Chinese that reproduced race- and class-based hierarchies baked into American society. Second, this essay has used Wong to grapple with methodological questions in Asian American historiography as well as normative questions in contemporary political theory. Cultural brokers like Wong Chin Foo complicate linear narratives of inclusion following exclusion, instead suggesting that the two forces are “concurrently and dynamically intertwined . . . vectors of the immigrant experience” (Ngai 2010, 225). I have suggested that the dynamic of unequal inclusion that Wong’s writings illuminate is not surprising but rather a constitutive feature of his politics. In a mode that anticipates Wu’s (2013) notion of “assimilating Others,” Wong redeployed Chinese otherness—their “heathenness”—not as a liability but as an asset that made them “capable of acting like white Americans while remaining racially distinct from them” (Wu 2013, 4). Yet his emphasis on the character and fitness of the Americanized Chinese as assimilated others obscured a real and much more uncomfortable dynamic of unequal inclusion in which citizenship for the Chinese was not only compatible with but premised on deep and persistent forms of inequality.

Finally, this essay has intervened in the nascent field of Asian American political theory (AAPT) or more precisely, Asian American political thought. In adopting a historical approach to Wong’s life and works, I have tried to treat him as an organic intellectual and political thinker in his own right who is subject to the same critical scrutiny that political theorists routinely apply to more familiar and canonical figures. This has served two interrelated aims. On the one hand, it works toward constructing a recognizable intellectual lineage comparable to that of Black, Indigenous, or Latinx political thought and thereby combats an “epistemic racism of indifference” to the contributions of/by/for Asian Americans to political theory and politics more generally (Lee 2018, 9). On the other hand, it invites reflection on the historical origins of field-defining questions in AAPT, especially before the invention of the category “Asian America”—a term not coined until the 1960s. ²⁸ Perhaps Wong might be considered a definitive voice in AAPT not merely on account of his Asian heritage or self-proclaimed “Chinese-American” identity. Rather, it is that Wong is the historical embodiment of a central problematic of Asian American political existence: Where do Asians belong in the US racial order, and on what grounds are they included? Are those grounds normatively justified? While I do not settle these questions here, at the very least my reading of Wong sheds light on the forces that necessitated the creative construction of Asian American civic capacity and positionality, even and especially when the goal of inclusion was far from possible and riddled with contradictions.