Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years by Charlotte Brooks (review)

One of the most compelling aspects of American history is the long, heroic struggle of minority groups — African Americans, women, and Latinos, among others — for the basic rights outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. The Asian American experience was long characterized by similar forms of discrimination suffered by other disaffected groups, yet it still remains largely overshadowed in the grander American historical narrative. With Between Mao and McCarthy, Charlotte Brooks focuses on the travails of Chinese Americans at a fascinating juncture, the early Cold War years, when they began to win their civil rights just as the communist victory in mainland China led many Americans to question the loyalty of this supposedly foreign element in their midst.

Charlotte Brooks is a history professor and chair of the Program in Asian and Asian American Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her previous monograph, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends (Chicago, 2009) explored white attitudes toward Asian Americans in California during the first half of the twentieth century, and she has written several other articles on Chinese and Japanese Americans during the World War II and early Cold War era. Between Mao and McCarthy appropriately focuses mostly on developments in New York and San Francisco, which then and now are home to the two largest Chinese populations in the United States. As a result, these two “capitals of Chinese America” had the most sophisticated political, economic, and social networks anywhere in the country.

In 1950, Asians and Pacific Islanders made up only 0.2 percent of the American population, but the Chinese accounted for roughly one third of the 321,000 Asians in the United States. The Chinese fled poverty and political unrest at home beginning in the early nineteenth century and came to America seeking hard work and a better standard of living, but they were subjected to severe persecution from the very beginning. This came in the form of a federal Chinese Exclusion Act, California laws restricting land ownership, enacting pogroms, lynchings, and property destruction in numerous American cities, followed by a 1924 Immigration Act that effectively barred Chinese immigration entirely. Yet the Chinese endured.

The Cold War created opportunities for Chinese Americans — racially exclusive laws were dismantled in large part because they were a propaganda nightmare in Washington’s global battle for hearts and minds — coupled with suspicions that they were “surrogates for [the Peoples’ Republic of] China, or even citizens of that nation” (1). Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory over the American-backed Nationalist regime under Jiang Jieshi prompted intense gnashing of teeth over the “loss of China” and the People’s Republic of China’s entry in the Korean War against an American-led United Nations force the following year raised fears of a Yellow Red Peril to epic proportions. Set against this backdrop, Brooks seeks to explore the political actions of Chinese Americans during a period of intense hostility between their homeland and their adopted home.

The strategy many Chinese Americans adopted was disengagement from the politics of China and the messy relationship between Beijing, Taipei, and Washington in favour of greater participation in the American democratic system that had previously excluded them. In the process they adopted a civil rights agenda that in some ways mirrored that of contemporary African Americans, but there were self-imposed limits on how far they could take their critique of the gap between American ideals and the realities of the American system. Foreign policy was dangerous territory; any attack on, for example, US support for European colonialism would open one up to charges of communist sympathies given the shrill charges of American hypocrisy on issues of race and power coming from the Soviet Union and mainland China during this period.

One of Brooks’ most significant historiographical contributions comes in highlighting the diversity within the community of politically active Chinese Americans...