Preface: This continues from the previous piece, Oakland Chinatown Gangs (i). Text and images are unrelated. Made possible by Chatgpt.

In the 19th century, Chinese who came to the United States were essentially contract laborers. They did not come as “immigrants” in the sense of settling, nor to put down roots. For the vast majority of male workers, the main goal was simple: earn as much money as possible in the shortest time, then return home. This was something white Californians fundamentally did not understand. White settlers came as family units, to claim land, build a future, and seek stability. Chinese laborers came as self-contained individuals: traveling alone, taking risks alone, and leaving once they had earned enough. From the start, this migration pattern presupposed that you would not stay, you did not need to assimilate, and you had no standing to become “part of American society”: you were cheap, disposable labor that could be replaced at any time. All subsequent exclusionist logic was built on this premise that “you are not here to live; you are here to work.”

For 19th-century Chinese in California, extreme male overrepresentation and the near-absence of families was a fact; only a small number of merchants managed to establish early family households. This meant they lacked family structures that could reproduce themselves, lacked property rights that could accumulate into wealth, lacked legal protection they could turn to, and lacked police services they could rely on. Discrimination, prejudice, selective enforcement of the law, and tolerated violence are all extensively documented. Chinatown was never simply an “ethnic enclave”; it was a social system self-organized so that strangers in a hostile land could stay alive. I think of it as a shadow polity, set up to resist external violence. And the internal hierarchy, organizations, and flow of power within this shadow polity were entirely forced into being by the political violence and exclusionist structures of white society at the time.

Mid-19th-century statistics show that the Chinese population was almost entirely male, with women making up less than 1%. In practice, almost every Chinese person you saw on the street was a man without a wife, partner, family, or stable kinship network. There were several very concrete reasons for the absence of women. First, the Qing state strictly controlled women’s travel abroad, especially forbidding commoner women from long-distance journeys. Women going to sea were seen as violating Confucian norms and were also suspected of being at risk of trafficking, so families refused to let them go and individuals themselves did not dare. At the same time, passage was expensive, and bringing women made no economic “sense”: men could work, dig for gold, and earn wages. Women, in the logic of that era, did not generate direct economic value. So families only sent out “those who could earn.”

Later, the Page Act of 1875 effectively barred Chinese women from entering the United States, under the pretext of preventing the entry of prostitutes. In reality, all Chinese women were interrogated as suspected prostitutes, which almost completely cut off legal migration routes for Chinese women. As a result, Chinese communities had almost no way to naturally reproduce a complete next generation locally; structurally, this was a society that struggled to regenerate itself. For a long time, Chinatown was essentially a place where adult men rotated in and out.

In early California, land was the core asset by which white settlers established their status. Chinese laborers could not become citizens, and in practice they were almost entirely unable to obtain land ownership. Their dwellings were almost all rented or makeshift structures, which landlords or city governments could demolish at any time under the pretext of “sanitation” or “fire safety.” Lacking land meant they were permanently a floating population, unable to accumulate long-term wealth, with no bargaining power, seen only as tenants and workers, not as residents. No land means no roots.

In the 19th century, Chinese people could not vote, could not testify (in key contexts), and could not serve on juries. While there were indeed a few Chinese individuals who served in the military—for example, isolated cases in the Civil War—the Chinese working class as a whole was almost entirely cut off from military participation. On paper, they could file complaints with the authorities, but in reality the outcome was often that police ignored them, dismissed them, or buried the case. In practice, they rarely received effective protection. American law slapped them with the label “alien ineligible for citizenship.” This phrase was repeatedly invoked in later exclusion laws. Its political meaning was very clear: you are not part of America’s future, you are not someone who is meant to be integrated, you are not a person who might someday “become American.” Once political rights are cut off, all disputes can only be handled within Chinatown’s internal structures. This is the root of why tongs and huiguans (associations) grew so powerful.

People v. Hall was not an isolated case. It defined the legal reality in California: Chinese were not credible witnesses, and thus not full legal subjects. They could not protect themselves or each other. The consequences of lacking judicial protection were deadly: white men could beat, rob, and kill Chinese laborers and, to a large extent, walk away unpunished. A huge number of violent cases against Chinese were either never filed, never prosecuted, or resulted in trivial sentences. Police did not handle cases involving Chinese unless white interests were directly implicated. If a Chinese laborer was robbed, calling the police was meaningless; you might even be beaten to death on the spot for “causing trouble.” White tax-collecting gangs could use legal violence to force Chinese to pay special taxes and levies simply because Chinese could not testify against them.

If you put any population into this combination of factors, you will get sex, alcohol, drugs, and gambling. This is not “culture”; it is a structural law of demography. Chinatown’s “grey economy” was not innate; it was the inevitable result of a society that could not form stable families and thus had to develop substitute forms of intimacy and release. The absence of women directly produced a monopolized sex industry under the control of organized groups. Chinese women were extraordinarily scarce, and those who tried to enter the U.S. were blocked at multiple levels by the Page Act. White society, meanwhile, generally prohibited interracial marriage and cohabitation; white police would even arrest white women with Chinese male partners. Anti-miscegenation laws in California explicitly banned marriages between whites and Black people or Asians for long periods, and the state was particularly sensitive about unions between white women and Chinese men; there is archival evidence on this. As a result, the few Chinese women who did exist became resources simultaneously exploited by tongs, huiguans, and even white police. Brothels turned into tools for generating money, gathering intelligence, and securing territorial influence. Tongs did not protect brothels out of “moral depravity,” but because in a society without female resources, controlling women meant controlling men. When a group is stripped from top to bottom by the system, it will inevitably grow organizations that substitute for the functions of a state. That is not moral collapse; it is self-rescue.

The core structure of Chinatown can be thought of as four overlapping layers. The first layer is the huiguan—essentially the “consulates” of the city. Huiguans were not community centers; they were labor brokers, financial intermediaries, travel-loan agencies, temporary shelters, and external negotiators. They were divided by native-place origin, such as Guangfu, Siyi, Hakka, Ningyang, Taishan, and so on. Each huiguan took responsibility for people from its own region, arranging reception, registration, job placement, advances for living costs, funeral expenses, and travel, and stepping in when white violence or bullying occurred. A huiguan was not a charity; at its core it was a financial and social control system. New workers had to contribute a portion of their earnings, loans carried interest, and a huiguan could effectively blacklist workers who disobeyed. Huiguans fought over territory and “headcount.” Outwardly, they were Chinatown’s legitimate face to the outside world. But the real maintenance of order fell to the next layer.

The second layer is the tong—the shadow judiciary and shadow police. Tongs emerged because white courts would not let Chinese testify and white police would not protect them. Without a judiciary, you must create your own judiciary. Without police, you must create your own police. At the beginning, tongs were not “gangs” in the modern sense; they arbitrated disputes, chased down debts, protected workers, escorted goods, handled conflicts between businesses, ensured huiguan loans were repaid, and negotiated non-intervention deals with white police. But because tongs eventually controlled the flow of violence, money, labor, information, and even life and death, they naturally evolved into grey-zone power centers. Tongs had their own enforcers, debt-collection teams, information networks, protection-fee systems, and turf control. White city police knew this perfectly well but chose to cooperate: the tong paid bribes; the police looked the other way. The tong’s most important function was to allow a politically rightless population to maintain a minimum level of order in a legal vacuum.

The third layer is the guild-type trade associations—the economic self-rescue system. These more specialized organizations covered dockworkers, laundrymen, tailors, carpenters, cooks, shopkeepers, port laborers, as well as operators of gambling houses and teahouses. These associations set prices to prevent destructive competition; they managed workers, registering and reallocating them; they handled conflicts over wages, debts, and theft; and they provided limited benefits for illness and funerals. By trade, they formed the economic backbone that kept Chinatown running. At the same time, they were often absorbed into or protected by tongs, so the boundaries between trade associations and tongs gradually blurred.

The fourth layer consists of secret societies—clandestine brotherhoods and sworn associations that white society lumped together as “tong wars” and “Chinese gangs.” White observers liked to call all of Chinatown’s power structures “tongs,” but in reality there were differences. The more “gang-like” forces grew out of ancestral-hall brotherhoods, martial fraternity networks like those surrounding Wing Chun, the Hongmen, the Chee Kung Tong, and anti-Qing movements such as the Tiandihui. These organizations carried political, conspiratorial, mutual-aid, and “righteous brotherhood” qualities. In the United States, they were forced to transform into controllers of territory, gambling houses, opium dens, high-interest lending, and the black labor market, while also collecting protection fees. Because legitimate career paths were scarce and the group’s legal rights were constrained, they were pushed into the underground economy. Exclusionist policies herded them into the grey zone.

If you treat Chinatown as a system, its operating logic is very clear: the huiguan is the government, the tong is the apparatus of violence and justice, the trade associations are the economic ministry, and the secret societies are warlords and underground finance. This is not a cultural choice; it is the structural outcome of systematic violence.

Recommended Readings:

• McClain (1984) — People v. Hall

• Peffer (1990) — The Page Act and the exclusion of Chinese women

• Atkinson (2008) — The bachelor society

• Siu (1952) — The sojourner

• Lai (1973) — Organizational structure of the huiguan (Chinese benevolent associations)

• Wilson (1980) — Structural analysis of Chinese secret societies

• Pfaelzer (2005) — Overview of anti-Chinese violence

• Saxton (1971) — Mechanisms of anti-Chinese violence in California

• Wong (1978) — Social functions of opium dens

• Harrell (1995) — The political economy of vice in Chinatown