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Chinatown, Globalization, and the Legacy and Future of Exclusion
It has been sixty years since the U.S. Congress and President Roosevelt repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, thirty-eight since the 1965 Immigration Act allowed, for the first time since 1882, more than a small number of Chinese immigrants into the U.S. per year, and thirty since the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China made one of the Chinese community's greatest fears — selective (or even mass) deportation to China due to an anti-Communist movement — diminish from a constant fear to a present, but ever more distant worry. Chinatown remains as a demographic and political consequence of this history, yet other factors compete with the legacy of exclusion in shaping today's Chinatown. The nature of Chinatown's future will likely depend as much on these factors as on those which shaped the neighborhood during the exclusion era.
One of these factors is globalization, or, to be more precise, an evolution of the world's economy in the direction of increased geographic separation between production and consumption, coupled with an increased ability for corporations to sell their products on a global scale. The evidence is apparent in the core of old Chinatown, where Aji Ichiban, a major Hong Kong-owned candy and snack producer which uses a Japanese name and also acts as a distibutor for third-party goods from Japan, runs a "Munchies Paradise" store at 37 Mott St. (at Pell). Identical stores sell the same products not only at two locations in newer parts of Chinatown, in Flushing, in Chicago, in Toronto, and in San Francisco, but also in 12 locations in Singapore, 80 in Hong Kong itself, and 150 in Mainland China. All were opened in the last 10 years, and all are directly owned by the Lai family (Aji Ichiban [PDF]).
While economic interaction between New York Chinatown and Hong Kong is anything but new, during the exclusion era it would rarely have taken the form of direct investment of a Hong Kong-based capitalist in businesses designed to appeal to an Overseas Chinese market. Other products, imported from China and other parts of Asia in roughly the same timescale in which other products can be imported from other parts of the US, dominate the shelves of Chinatown retailers. Direct trade between China and Chinatown was never absent, but it has never before existed on this scale. The factors which made this trade possible originate in global economic forces which seem, at first, not directly related to the end of exclusion (though it may be possible to prove that the more pragmatic reasons for the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act are quite inseparable), but which would certainly not have been operable in a U.S. with continued Chinese Exclusion.
Another form of globalization that affects Chinatown is the production in parts of Asia (including Guangdong and Malaysia) of cheap consumer products (sometimes copies, sometimes similar-looking originals) related to the entertainment industries of North America, Japan, and China itself. While black market DVDs are more often found on busier street like Canal St., curio shops near Mott and Bayard have their share of products like "Spader-Man" action figures and yellow buckets decorated with generic fighting creatures and labelled "Pock Emon." This is another example of old factors coexisting with new. Non-Chinese have New Yorkers have gone to Chinese-owned businesses (such as restaurants within Chinatown and laundries elsewhere) for cheaper products for as long as Chinatown has existed, but these products are also reflective of the increasingly interwoven and transnational nature of the world economy. The same products are sold in Hong Kong.
The end of the Cold War has had a similar impact on Chinatown as the end of Exclusion. Besides the fact that trade and capital movement such as described above also is facilitated by decreased political tension, the lives of Chinatown's residents have been greatly improved by the fading of McCarthyist attitudes in the government and among the people. Few today, unlike in the 1950s, see Chinatown as home of any PRC-aligned movement which intends to overthrow the U.S. government. Today, a stamp and coin store at Baxter and Hester which hangs a portrait of Mao Zedong in its foyer will not be harassed constantly by government officials, or even shut down, because the government suspects the portrait of meaning that the owners are dedicated "anti-American" Maoists. Yet it is also clear that the factors which led to McCarthyism are far from absent from today's world. Unlike globalization, which will almost certainly are competing with the legacy of exclusion to shape Chinatown's future, a relatively low level of xenophobia is not something one can count on remaining. How Chinatown looks in the future will largely be shaped by exclusion (though now it is economic and political exclusion of "illegal" immigrants rather than geographic exclusion of all immigrants) for the forseeable future.
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