The City’s Chinese Population
An editorial analysis of the city's Chinese residency, labor practices, and the economic tensions of the late 1880s.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Chinese, and those who speak for them, are anxious not to let the public know the actual number of them resident here. It is claimed by them that the average number does not exceed 15,000. We, ourselves, thought the number was not over 20,000, but our estimates were under the mark. We now have it, on the authority of a gentleman who has had long dealings with the Chinese, that there is a permanent population of 40,000 of them here. Our object is to call attention to a few facts. These 40,000 Chinese earn at least $1 a day each, over and above their board. That is $40,000 per day. That is over $12,000,000 per year which is being drained through various Chinese channels from a city of 300,000 inhabitants. The most of this money each year goes to China, never to return. These 40,000 Chinese are supplanting 10,000 white men or women. If California were three days, ten times as rich as it is, it could not stand the strain on its resources which Mongolians would put on it if they were allowed to crowd into this state in unlimited numbers.
“Not one dollar goes to a white man if the Chinese can help it, and any avenue through which any of their money goes into white hands is open temporarily.”
This editorial reflects the intense, exclusionary anti-Chinese sentiment that defined the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s. Such rhetoric was a precursor to the systemic expulsion efforts and social segregation of that era, highlighting a historical pattern of scapegoating immigrant labor for regional economic anxieties.
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