New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable AwakeningBrown, Arthur Judson
History
New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening
Brown, Arthur Judson
China -- Commerce; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government; Missions -- China
President Cleveland, in a message to Congress in 1885, felt
obliged to make an allusion to this that was doubtless as humiliating
to him as it was to decent Americans everywhere. The
Chinese Minister to the United States, in his presentation of
the case to Secretary of State Bayard, ``massed the evidence
going to show that the massacre of the subjects of a friendly
Power, residing in this country, was as unprovoked as it was
brutal; that the Governor and Prosecuting Attorney of the Territory
openly declared that no man could be punished for the
crime, though the murderers attempted no concealment; and
that all the pretended judicial proceedings were a burlesque.''
All this Mr. Bayard was forced to admit. Indeed he did not
hesitate to characterize the proceedings as ``the wretched
travesty of the forms of justice,'' nor did he conceal his
``indignation at the bloody outrages and shocking wrongs inflicted
upon a body of your countrymen,'' and his mortification
that ``such a blot should have been cast upon the record of our
Government.'' There was sarcastic significance in the cartoon
of the Chicago Inter-Ocean representing a Chinese reading a
daily paper one of whose columns was headed ``Massacre of
Americans in China,'' while the other column bore the heading,
``Massacre of Chinese in America.'' Uncle Sam stands at his
elbow and ejaculates, ``Horrible, isn't it?'' To which the
Celestial blandly inquires, ``Which?''
In the North American Review for March, 1904, Mr.
Wong Kai Kah, an educated Chinese gentleman, plainly but
courteously discusses this subject under the caption of ``A
Menace to America's Oriental Trade.'' He justly complains
that though the exclusion law expressly exempts Chinese
merchants, students and travellers, yet as a matter of fact a
Chinese gentleman is treated on his arrival as if he were a
criminal and is ``detained in the pen on the steamship wharf
or imprisoned like a felon until the customs officials are
satisfied.''
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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