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

Chinese people who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century were, in the main, transoceanic male laborers rather than immigrants aiming at permanent settlement. For a substantial portion of them, the purpose of coming to America was to accumulate cash through short-term, high-intensity labor and then return to their home villages. This form of “sojourner migration” differed fundamentally from the contemporaneous white settler model based on family homesteading and permanent colonization. Chinese laborers typically traveled alone, relied on labor brokers and credit-ticket systems, assumed personal risk, and intended to leave once they had earned enough. Within the dominant white social framework, this pattern was easily interpreted as: you are not here to live; you are here to work. That premise was later hardened into institutional and discursive logics asserting that Chinese people did not belong to American society.

For Chinese communities in nineteenth-century California, extreme gender imbalance was a real and persistent structural feature. Men constituted the overwhelming majority, while women were exceedingly few; only a small number of merchants or exceptional cases were able to form families early on. As a result, most Chinese laborers lacked family structures capable of reproducing themselves socially, found it difficult to accumulate stable property, and had little access to protection through kinship networks. Discriminatory policing, judicial injustice, and the tolerance of violence are well documented in the historical record. Chinatown did not emerge as a natural ethnic enclave but as a highly organized social system developed for survival in a hostile environment.

The scarcity of women had multiple causes. On the one hand, transoceanic travel was expensive, and early migration prioritized male laborers who could directly generate income. On the other hand, U.S. immigration law and enforcement practices displayed long-standing, systematic hostility toward Chinese women. The Page Act of 1875, enacted under the pretext of preventing prostitution, granted officials broad discretionary power in inspections; in practice, it nearly blocked all legal entry for Chinese women. The result was that Chinese communities for a long time could not sustain themselves through the formation of natural family units. Chinatown thus more often appeared as a space of adult men cycling in and out rather than a stable, multi-generational settlement.

In early California society, land was the core asset through which identity and long-term belonging were established. Chinese laborers were not only excluded from naturalization and political rights for extended periods, but also found it extremely difficult to acquire secure land ownership through institutional channels. Their housing was largely rented or makeshift, and could be demolished at any time under claims of “sanitation” or “fire safety.” Lacking land and citizenship, Chinese residents remained in a floating condition, unable to accumulate long-term wealth and rarely recognized as genuine “residents.”

At the legal level, Chinese people were systematically excluded from political and judicial rights for much of the nineteenth century. They could not vote, could not serve on juries, and in California were at one point barred from testifying against whites. People v. Hall (1854) explicitly codified this exclusion, with devastating consequences: violence, extortion, and robbery against Chinese targets were far less likely to be punished. Even when reporting crimes was formally possible, effective protection was often absent in practice. Under these conditions, law was not a neutral arbiter but a structure that intensified asymmetric risk.

When courts and police failed to provide basic protection, disputes were forced back into the community itself. This was the context in which huiguan, tongs, and other organizations gradually became powerful. They were not merely “products of crime,” but substitute structures that assumed functions of mediation, mutual aid, finance, and order maintenance in conditions of legal vacuum and institutional exclusion.

Within Chinatown, a multi-layered organizational system gradually took shape. Huiguan were usually organized by place of origin or native locality and handled receiving newcomers, job placement, advances for living and travel expenses, dispute resolution, and external negotiation—functioning much like informal consulates and financial intermediaries. Trade guilds organized by occupation coordinated labor, pricing, and internal conflicts, sustaining basic economic operations. Tongs and secret societies, in certain cities and periods, undertook roles in arbitration, debt collection, and protection, while also becoming involved in gambling, prostitution, and violence; their gray-zone and violent evolution was closely tied to external exclusionary structures.

If Chinatown in the late nineteenth century is viewed as a functioning social system, it was not composed of a single organization but of several distinct yet interwoven self-organized networks. For analytical purposes—rather than as a contemporary self-description—its operation can be abstracted into four layers.

The first layer was the huiguan system: native-place associations, benevolent halls, and surname associations. In cities such as San Francisco, these organizations were typically formed around regions of origin, counties, or dialect groups rather than formal provincial representation. Led largely by merchant elites, they performed multiple functions: providing lodging and job referrals to newcomers; serving as lenders for travel, living expenses, and return journeys; handling internal disputes; managing illness, death, and the repatriation of remains; and representing the community in dealings with white employers, municipal authorities, or police when necessary. Huiguan were not merely community centers but organizational forms that combined finance, mutual aid, and social control. They offered support while also imposing constraints, exercising influence through membership fees, debt relations, and access to employment. Competition among huiguan over labor, territory, or economic interests was not uncommon. Externally, they constituted Chinatown’s most “legitimate” and legible interface with white society.

The second layer consisted of tongs. Their rise was closely tied to the difficulty Chinese residents faced in obtaining equal judicial protection and the highly asymmetrical nature of law enforcement. When external legal and policing systems were unreliable, some Chinese relied on tongs for protection, dispute arbitration, debt recovery, and escorting people or goods, thereby maintaining a minimal level of order. Early tongs were not identical to what would later be understood as criminal gangs; they emerged as substitute organizations in the structural intersection of security needs and legal absence. Over time, however, as tongs came to control violence, capital, and labor flows, their functions in certain cities and periods became increasingly gray, drawing them into gambling, prostitution, extortion, and protection rackets, often in tacit arrangements with corrupt police. English-language media summarized these conflicts as “tong wars,” reinforcing the public image of Chinatown as dangerous. Regardless of shifts between legal and illegal activities, the practical role of tongs was to fill the void of order and security in an environment where political rights had been stripped away.

The third layer comprised trade guilds and occupational associations, which can be understood as an economic self-help system. Organized by profession or industry, they encompassed dock labor, laundry work, tailoring, food service, retail, and other service sectors. These organizations coordinated prices and labor allocation, registered and dispatched workers, handled disputes over wages, debts, and theft, and provided limited benefits such as aid for illness or funerals. They formed the economic skeleton that allowed Chinatown’s labor and commerce to remain stable amid intense external discrimination. These associations often maintained close ties with huiguan and, in some cases, entered into cooperation, dependence, or conflict with tongs, resulting in fluid and shifting boundaries.

The fourth layer consisted of more secretive organizations with traditions of sworn brotherhood—secret societies, fraternal associations, and gangs—some of which traced their origins to Chinese secret societies or anti-Qing networks, carrying elements of mutual aid, loyalty, and political symbolism. In the U.S. institutional environment, these groups lost their original political space and were pushed into the underground economy, sustaining themselves through territorial control, gambling houses, opium dens, high-interest lending, and black-market labor. Exclusionary laws and occupational restrictions sharply limited legal livelihoods, making it easier for such groups to be driven into gray or illegal domains. White society tended to label all these varied organizations simply as “gangs,” despite their distinct origins, functions, and roles.

Under conditions of absent family structures, extreme female scarcity, and legal and social prohibitions on interracial marriage and intimacy, prostitution, gambling, and underground economies were not cultural choices but outcomes of demographic structure and institutional oppression. The control of women became central to power not because of any inherent “moral depravity,” but because in a systematically deprived society, scarce resources are inevitably organized and monopolized.

Viewed as a system, Chinatown’s operating logic is not difficult to discern: huiguan handled external representation and basic governance; trade organizations sustained economic activity; tongs and secret societies filled the gaps of order and coercion left by absent law. This was not the natural extension of ethnic culture, but a set of substitute social structures forced into existence by sustained political violence, legal exclusion, and social hostility.

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