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Chinese immigration to New Jersey began in 18?? with the arrival of ?? Chinese people were part of a broader pattern of Immigration to New Jersey that began in 16??.

Beginning of Chinese Immigration to New Jersey

Early Travelers

One of the first known Chinese who set foot in New Jersey was Zeng Laishun (1826-1895), who was born in Singapore to a Cantonese father and a Malay mother. With the funding secured by a missionary, Zeng enrolled in Bloomfield Academy, a boy's boarding school in Bloomfield, New Jersey from 1843 to 1846. He went on to study for two years at Hamilton College in New York before returning to China in 1848. Zeng later served at Fuzhou Navy Yard School (or Foochow Arsenal) and then Chinese Educational Mission, before becoming the personal secretary of Li Hongzhang.

Chinese Laundry Workers in Belleville, NJ (1870-1885)

In 1869, the construction of the Pacific Railroad was completed and thousands of Chinese who helped build the railroad had to look for work elsewhere. Impressed by the work ethic the Chinese demonstrated in railroad construction, American business owners in Northeast began to hire Chinese workers in sizable groups. Calvin Sampson, a shoe factory owner in Massachusetts, was most likely the first one to do so. To break the strike of white union workers, Sampson recruited 75 Chinese men from California, whose arrival at the shoe factory in North Adams, MA, in June 1870 was widely publicized and generated protests throughout the east. Inspired by Sampson’s example, Captain James B. Hervey sought Chinese workers from California as a reliable source of labor for his business, the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville, New Jersey. Even though the Chinese settlement in Belleville began three months later than the one in North Adams, it continued for a longer period of time until 1885, nine years after Sampson cancelled the contracts of his Chinese workers at the North Adams shoe factory.

The story of Chinese workers in Passaic Steam Laundry was reconstructed from English-language newspaper articles and no Chinese documents are available. On September 20, 1870, about seventy Chinese men arrived at Belleville to work at Harvey’s laundry. Initially satisfied with the performance of the Chinese, Harvey continued to recruit more Chinese workers; at its peak, about 300 Chinese worked at the laundry. 1870 was an election year and local Democrats tried to exploit the issue of Chinese labor for political gains. However, most of the Belleville community seemed indifferent to the arrival of the Chinese; some individuals even came out to defend the Chinese publicly. A Sunday school was created to teach English to Chinese and also to convert them to Christianity. The Chinese were able to publicly celebrate Chinese New Year, an interethnic event that attracted both white spectators from Belleville, Newark and New York and other Chinese immigrants in the region.

However, the Chinese workers did not turn out to be the perfect workers that Harvey had had in mind and Hervey’s opinion of them turned negative after a while. The Chinese workers in the laundry, all male with little or no education living largely in social isolation, exhibited a number of problems: gambling was their favorite pastime and some stole money, became delinquent on debt, and fought among each other. Local labor organizations in Belleville also persisted in their stance against the Chinese. At the same time the anti-Chinese sentiment was also growing in both New Jersey and throughout the United States, which led to the passing of Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. All of these might have contributed to the failure of Hervey’s experiment with the Chinese labor: In 1876, Hervey sold the laundry to George Casebolt who eventually let go of all the Chinese workers in 1885, following an incident when the Chinese went on riot when he tried to fire a Chinese worker.

Chinese Workers at the New Jersey Midland Railroad

Another early episode of Chinese immigration to New Jersey is the Chinese workers at the Midland Railroad. On September 21, 1870, one day after the arrival of the Chinese laundry workers in Belleville, another group of 150 Chinese came to New Jersey to construct a section of Midland Railroad, from Pompton, NJ to Middletown, NY. A year later, a group of white railroad workers attacked about 50 Chinese workers as they returned from church. Some of the Chinese were armed and they fired at the attackers, but without actually hitting any of them. Very little is known about these Chinese afterwards.

Chinatown, Newark (1870s – 1950s)

Some of the Chinese working at the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville and at the Midland Railway undoubtedly ended up in Newark, which contributed to the emergence of the Chinatown there. Newark Chinatown continued for almost a century, predating and outlasting the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). The following is a preliminary chronology of the Newark Chinatown.

• 1874 Hing Hung's laundry was listed in the local business directory.
• 1879 Charles Hung won a reward in oration in his high school in Newark.
• 1881 The first Chinese school was opened at Third Presbyterian Church.
• 1891 The First Presbyterian Church of Newark created a Chinese Sunday school, enrolling nine boys.
• 1900 The Chinese population in Newark reached 261.
• 1910 The Chinese population in Newark dropped slightly to 231. The Mulberry Arcade was built and became the center of Chinatown in Newark.
• 1920 The Chinese population in Newark increased to 281.
• 1924 Zhi Meng completed his Master’s thesis in Columbia University on the Chinese of Newark.
• 1920s Repeated police raids in Chinatown led to its decline.
• 1950s Newspaper headlines declared the death of Newark Chinatown,

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Chinese in New Jersey after the Immigration Act of 1965

At about the same time as the old Chinatown in Newark was fading away, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 changed the course of Chinese immigration to the U.S. and New Jersey. It abolished National Origins Formula, a quota system that discriminated against Chinese. It also opened up an important new pathway that many recent Chinese immigrants use: special skilled labor. Continuous waves of Chinese students, first from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and later from mainland China, came to the U.S. to pursue advanced degrees and then obtained U.S. permanent residency and citizenship through this pathway. New Jersey is a popular destination for these recent immigrants for the job opportunities offered by industries such as pharmaceutical, finance, and telecommunications and higher education institutions like Princeton and Rutgers in the state. As the Chinese population grows, businesses specifically serving the Chinese community also increase, from grocery stores to restaurants to beauty salons, drawing in low-skilled labor that usually come through the family sponsorship. Community organizations such as weekend Chinese schools, churches and religious organizations, and Chinese-language media also flourish. Unlike early immigrants, recent immigrants tend to settle in the state's suburban towns. For example, there appears to be a new Chinatown in Edison, NJ.

Political Activism

Thanks to Chinese-language media like Sino Monthly, there is a significant amount of information about the experiences and perspectives of Chinese in New Jersey than before. A survey by Sino Monthly in 2000 found that the majority of Chinese American voters in New Jersey are independents and the rest are split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Ms. Ming Hsu was probably the first Chinese to hold a high-ranking position in the state government of New Jersey. Ronald Chen, a legal scholar, held the position of Public Advocate from 2006 to 2010. Hon. Sue Pai Yang was the first Asian American appointed to the Workers’ Compensation Court in New Jersey. Shing-Fu Hsueh has been the mayor of West Windsor since 2001.

Demography

• 1880 170
• 1890 608
• 1900 1,393
• 1910 1,139
• 1920 1,190
• 1930 1,783
• 1940 1,200
• 1950 1,818
• 1960 3,813
• 1970 9,233
• 1980 23,369
• 1990 59,084
• 2,000 109,640
• 2,010 147,933

(Based on U.S. census data)

Bibliography

Data Sources for Chinese Immigration to New Jersey

Data for Wiki Project

Data

1. Census data (http://www.census.gov ). It would be very easy to track the growth of a particular group (e.g. Chinese) using census data. For example, one could start with a particular decennial census (e.g. 1950) and extract data for the state of New Jersey and counties that show how the population has grown from 1950 to 2010. Note, that “Asian” in summary files refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. So, we would need to access the detailed files to get data for a specific group. The detailed data report Chinese and Taiwanese separately. American Factfinder provides a basic mapping capability – see image on the last page for Chinese population by county in New Jersey for 2010.

2. ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, is the largest repository of social science data in the world. When searching ICPSR on “Chinese immigration”, 225 datasets were returned. These data sets are typically quite detailed and require SPSS or SAS software for further analysis. Still, there might be opportunities here to pursue more detailed topics such as the children of immigrants and multigenerational trends.

3. World Bank data has lots of social indicators at the national level (http://data.worldbank.org/). It might be possible to compare various New Jersey social indicators (e.g. education and employment) to those for mainland China.

4. China Data Online (http://chinadataonline.org/). The site has lots of data about China. The RUL Data librarian would have to log us in in order to get access to the website.

5. Diversity Data for Metropolitan Areas (http://diversitydata.sph.harvard.edu/). This site pulls together data from NCES, NCHS, and Census. Note related publications.

6. Eagleton Poll Archive (http://eagleton.libraries.rutgers.edu/ ). Although there are lots of poll questions in the archive regarding immigration, I was only able to find one question that related to China, regarding the relationship of the United States to mainland China. However there are lots of related questions that might be of interest for example “How much racial or ethnic tension do you think there is among people who live in your town or city-a lot, some, just a little or none at all”.

7. Other Possibilities.

a. National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/). NCES has lots of educational indicators at every level and it is easy to get data for a selected state. It would take some effort to break down the data by group or race. b. National Center for Health Statistics (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/). c. General Social Survey and East Asian Social Survey. These surveys have data on racial attitudes and race relations. However they are national surveys and I don’t think data is available at the state level. d. ARDA, the Association of Religion Data Archives (http://www.thearda.com/).

Articles, Books, ETDs

1. JSTOR. After reviewing Tao’s outline, I did a search at JSTOR (immigration, Chinese, New Jersey) which produces 100s of articles including publications from the 19th century.

2. RUcore ETDs, e.g. “Essays on high-skilled migration” and “Measuring acceptance of immigrant groups in the U.S.”.  

External links

Chinese Exclusion and the Establishment of the Gate-keeping Nation An online historical exhibit collection, part of the New Jersey Digital Highway.