Use in Australia Historically, words such as
Chinaman,
chink and
yellow have been used in
Australia to refer to
Chinese Australians during the
Australian gold rushes and when the
White Australia policy was in force.
Use in the United States The term
Chinaman has been historically used in a variety of ways, including legal documents, literary works, geographic names, and in speech. Census records in 19th-century North America recorded
Chinese men by names such as "
John Chinaman", "Jake Chinaman" or simply as "Chinaman".
Chinese American historian Emma Woo Louie commented that such names in census schedules were used when census takers could not obtain any information and that they "should not be considered to be racist in intent". One census taker in
El Dorado County wrote, "I found about 80 Chinese men in Spanish Canion who refused to give me their names or other information." Louie equated "John Chinaman" to "John Doe" in its usage to refer to a person whose name is not known, and added that other ethnic groups were also identified by generic terms as well, such as
Spaniard and
Kanaka, which refers to a
Hawaiian. In a notable 1853 letter to
Governor of California John Bigler which challenges his proposed immigration policy toward the Chinese, restaurant owner Norman Asing, at the time a leader in
San Francisco's Chinese community, refers to himself as a "Chinaman". Addressing the governor, he writes, "Sir: I am a Chinaman, a republican, and a lover of free institutions."
Chinaman was also often used in complimentary contexts, such as "after a very famous Chinaman in old
Cassiar Rush days, (who was) known & loved by whites and natives". As the Chinese in the American West began to encounter discrimination and hostile criticism of their culture and mannerisms, the term would begin to take on negative connotations. The slogan of the
Workingman's Party was "The Chinese Must Go!", coined in the 1870s before
Chinaman acquired a derogatory association. The term ''
Chinaman's chance'' evolved as the Chinese began to take on dangerous jobs building the railroads or ventured to exploit mine claims abandoned by others, and later found themselves victims of injustice as accused murderers (of Chinese) would be acquitted if the only testimony against them was from other Chinese. Legal documents such as the
Geary Act of 1892, which barred the entry of Chinese people to the
United States, referred to Chinese people both as "Chinese persons" or "Chinamen".
Use for Japanese people The term has also been used to refer to
Japanese men, despite the fact that they are not Chinese. The
Japanese admiral
Tōgō Heihachirō, during his training in
England in the 1870s, was called "Johnny Chinaman" by his British comrades. Civil rights pioneer
Takuji Yamashita took a case to the
United States Supreme Court in 1922 on the issue of the possibility of allowing
Japanese immigrants to own land in the state of
Washington. Washington's attorney general, in his argument, stated that Japanese people could not fit into American society because assimilation was not possible for "the
Negro, the
Indian and the Chinaman".
Use for Korean people Mary Paik Lee, a
Korean immigrant who arrived with her family in San Francisco in 1906, writes in her 1990 autobiography
Quiet Odyssey that on her first day of school, girls circled and hit her, chanting:
Ching Chong, Chinaman, Sitting on a wall. Along came a white man, And chopped his head off. A variation of this rhyme is repeated by a young boy in John Steinbeck's 1945 novel
Cannery Row in mockery of a Chinese man. In this version, "wall" is replaced with "rail", and the phrase "chopped his head off" is changed to "chopped off his
tail.": Ching Chong, Chinaman, Sitting on a rail. Along came a white man, And chopped off his tail.
Literary use Literary and musical works have used the term as well. In "Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy", an 1870 essay written by
Mark Twain, a sympathetic and often flattering account about the circumstances of Chinese people in 19th-century United States society, the term is used throughout the body of the essay to refer to Chinese people. Over a hundred years later, the term would again be used during the Civil Rights era in the context of racial injustice in literary works. The term was used in the title of Chinese American writer
Frank Chin's first play,
The Chickencoop Chinaman, written in 1972, and also in the translated English title of
Bo Yang's work of political and cultural criticism
The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture. During the 1890s
detective fiction often portrayed Chinese characters as
stereotypically conniving, tending to use the term "Chinaman" to refer to them. This occurred to such a great extent that it prompted writers of the 1920s and 1930s (during Britain's
Golden Age of Detective Fiction) to eschew stereotypical characterizations, either by removing them from their stories entirely (as suggested by
Ronald Knox in his "Ten Commandments" of Detective Fiction) or by recasting them in non-stereotypical roles. This "Rule of Rule Subversion" (The phrase used in Brel's original French lyric was
vieux Chinois, meaning "old Chinese".) The term was also used in the hit 1974 song
Kung Fu Fighting, by
Carl Douglas; the song's first verse begins "They were funky Chinamen from funky
Chinatown." ==Modern usage==