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Chinese American
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Chinese Americans are Americans of Chinese descent. Chinese Americans constitute one group of Overseas Chinese and also a subgroup of East Asian Americans, which is further a subgroup of Asian Americans. Within this community, the term Chinese American is often broadly defined to include not only immigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau and their descendants but also immigrants and descendants of people from Taiwan and overseas Chinese people who have immigrated to the United States from places as diverse as Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Mexico.
The first Chinese immigrants arrived in 1820 according to U.S.
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Encyclopedia
Chinese Americans are Americans of Chinese descent. Chinese Americans constitute one group of Overseas Chinese and also a subgroup of East Asian Americans, which is further a subgroup of Asian Americans. Within this community, the term Chinese American is often broadly defined to include not only immigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau and their descendants but also immigrants and descendants of people from Taiwan and overseas Chinese people who have immigrated to the United States from places as diverse as Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Mexico.
The first Chinese immigrants arrived in 1820 according to U.S. government records. Fewer than 1,000 are known to have arrived before the 1848 California Gold Rush which drew the first significant number of laborers from China who performed menial work.
There were 25,000 immigrants by 1852, and 105,465 by 1880, most of whom lived on the West Coast. Most of the early immigrants were young males with low educational levels from the Guangdong province.
Chinese people were some of the early immigrants to live in the U.S., but then were banned from emigrating between 1885 and 1943 - when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Immigration of Chinese was heavily restricted until 1965. During the 1970s, the vast majority of ethnic Chinese immigration into the United States was from Hong Kong and followed by Taiwan with relatively few immigrants coming from mainland China, which almost completely banned emigration for most of the 1960s. During the 1980s, in part due to the liberalization of emigration restrictions in the mid-1970s, immigration from the mainland China became a larger fraction of ethnic Chinese immigration into the United States.
History
Chinese immigration to the United States has come in great numbers. Similar to other American immigration experiences, Chinese immigration has resulted in both hardship and success.
Citizenship
Legally all ethnic Chinese born in the United States are American citizens as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision. Upon naturalization, immigrants must take an oath of loyalty to the United States but are not required to formally renounce their former citizenship. The People's Republic of China does not recognize dual citizenship and considers naturalization of an person as an American citizen to implying a renounciation of PRC citizenship. The Republic of China ("Taiwan") allows dual citizenship, and it does not recognize the American naturalization, by itself, as renouncing citizenship.
According to the 2006 American Community Survey, 1,330,361 or 37% of Chinese Americans (including Taiwanese and multiracial people) are native-born citizens, and a further 1,319,137 or 59% of foreign-born Chinese Americans are naturalized citizens.
Major contributions
*Building Western half of the Transcontinental railroad
The Chinese who immigrated to America in the earlier decades were mainly from the area of Guangdong (Canton) and later Hong Kong. However, recently, more Chinese from mainland began to arrive to perform skilled jobs. Most of these Chinese Americans hold high educational degrees and value education.
Influence on American culture
Analysis indicated that most non-Asian Americans do not differentiate between Chinese Americans and Asian Americans generally, and stereotypes towards both groups are nearly identical. A 2001 survey of Americans' attitudes toward Asian Americans and Chinese Americans indicated that 68% of the respondents had somewhat or very negative attitude toward Chinese Americans in general. The study did find several positive perceptions of Chinese Americans: strong family values (91%); honesty as business people (77%); high value on education (67%).
Demographics
The Chinese American community is the largest ethnic group of Asian Americans, comprising of 22.4% of the Asian American population. They constitute 1.2% of the United States as a whole. In 2006, the Chinese American population numbered approximately 3.6 million.
As a whole, Chinese American populations continue to grow at a rapid rate due to immigration. However, they also on average have birth rates lower than those of White Americans, and as such their population is aging relatively quickly. In recent years, adoption of young children, especially girls, from China has also brought a boost to the numbers of Chinese Americans, although most of the adoptions appear to have been done by white parents.
Locations
Cities with large Chinese American populations include (the following is the top 15 Chinese-American populations):
- Boston, Flushing, Queens, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Houston, Plano in the Dallas, Texas area, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento and Las Vegas.
In these cities, there are often multiple Chinatowns, an older one and a newer one which is populated by immigrants from the 1960s and 1970s. In some areas, Chinese Americans maintain close relationships with other Asian groups (i.e. Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese and so on).
New York City's Lower East Side, San Francisco's North Beach and Los Angeles' Olvera Street are good examples of Chinese-Americans intermingled with other races and cultures.
In addition to the big cities, smaller pockets of Chinese Americans are also dispersed in rural towns, often university-college towns, throughout the United States. Chinese Americans formed nearly 3 percent of California's population in 2000, and over one percent in the Northeast. Hawaii, with its historically heavily-Asian population, was nearly 10 percent Chinese American.
Language
Chinese, mostly of the Cantonese variety, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, almost completely spoken within Chinese American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California. Over 2 million Americans speak some variety of Chinese, with the Standard Mandarin becoming increasingly more prevalent due to immigration from mainland China and Taiwan.
In New York City at least, although Mandarin is spoken as a native language among only ten percent of Chinese speakers, it is used as a secondary dialect among the greatest number of them and is on its way to replace Cantonese as their lingua franca. In addition, the immigration from Fujian is creating an increasingly large number of Min speakers.
Although Chinese Americans grow up learning English, some teach their children Chinese for a variety of reasons: pride in their cultural ancestry, desire for easy communication with them and other relatives, and the perception that Chinese will be a very useful language as China's economic strength increases. However, some Chinese American parents believe their children will fit in better with English speaking peers if they do not learn Chinese, and instead immerse themselves in an English-speaking environment.
Life in America
Chinese Americans have made many large strides in American society. Today, Chinese Americans engage in every facet of American life including the military, elected offices, media, academia, and sports. Over the years, many Chinese Americans have blended the American lifestyle with a more natively Chinese one.
Perhaps the most common landmark of the Chinese impact in America are the prolific Chinese restaurants that have cropped up in every corner of the U.S. Along with these culinary traditions, Chinese heritage is celebrated not only by most Chinese Americans, but also mainstream America; the most prominent of these is the Chinese New Year celebration.
Chinese American income and social status varies widely. Although many Chinese Americans in Chinatowns of large cities are often members of an impoverished working class, others are well-educated upper-class people living in affluent suburbs. The upper and lower-class Chinese are also widely separated by social status. In California's San Gabriel Valley, for example, even though the cities of Monterey Park and San Marino are both Chinese American communities lying geographically close to each other, they are separated by a large socio-economic and income gap.
Festivals
In most American cities with Chinese populations, the new year is celebrated with cultural festivals and parties. At other times of the year, Chinese cultural festivals provide a gathering point for the Chinese community, and help to educated others. In Seattle, the Chinese Culture and Arts Festival is held every year.
Other important festivals include the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Politics
Chinese Americans are divided among many subgroups based on factors such as a generation, place of origin, socio-economic level, and do not have uniform attitudes about the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, the United States, or Chinese nationalism, with attitudes varying widely between active support, hostility, or indifference. Different subgroups of Chinese Americans also have radically different and sometimes very conflicting political priorities and goals. It is for this reason that Chinese Americans do not have any unified political groups or any unified political viewpoints.
In the days leading up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, John Kerry was favored by 58% of Chinese Americans, with George W. Bush being favored by 23% of Chinese Americans and 19% undecided.
In recent decades, many Chinese Americans have started pursuing careers in politics, and succeeded in getting elected and/or appointed into political office. Among the most prominent is Gary Locke who became the first Chinese American state governor in U.S. history, and current nominee of President Barack Obama for the position of Secretary of Commerce. Others include Mike Eng, Hiram Fong, Daniel Akaka, March Fong Eu, Matt Fong, Thomas Tang, Norman Bay, Elaine Chao, Leland Yee, John Liu, David S. C. Chu and David Wu. Under the Obama administration, Steven Chu became the 12th United States Secretary of Energy when confirmed by the Senate on January 20, 2009.
During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Americans, like all overseas Chinese, generally speaking, were viewed as capitalist traitors by the People's Republic of China government. This attitude changed completely in the late 1970s with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Increasingly, Chinese Americans were seen as sources of business and technical expertise and capital who could aid in China's economic and other development.
Notable Chinese Americans
- See List of Chinese Americans.
See also
Further reading
- Chinese American Understanding: A Sixty-Year Search, Chih Meng, China Institute in America, 1981, hardcover, 255 pages, OCLC: 8027928
- Chinese Americans and Their Immigrant Parents: Conflict, Identity, and Values, May Pao-May Tung, Haworth Press, 2000, paperback, 112 pages, ISBN 0-7890-1056-9
- Chinese Americans: The Immigrant Experience, Dusanka Miscevic and Peter Kwong, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 2000, hardcover, 240 pages, ISBN 0-88363-128-8
- Compelled To Excel: Immigration, Education, And Opportunity Among Chinese Americans, Vivian S. Louie, Stanford University Press, 2004, paperback, 272 pages, ISBN 0-8047-4985-X
- The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, Iris Chang, Viking, 2003, hardcover, 496 pages, ISBN 0-670-03123-2
- Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, Shehong Chen, University of Illinois Press, 2002 ISBN 0-252-02736-1
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- On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese American Family, Lisa See, 1996. ISBN 0-679-76852-1. See also the website for an exhibition based on this book from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.
External links
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- a PBS Bill Moyers special. Thomas F. Lennon, Series Producer.
- - Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
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- Comprehensive list of famous Chinese Americans organized by professions. Includes short biographical notes and Chinese names.
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- hosts the memoir of the first Chinese American graduate of an American university (Yale 1854).
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