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A white plaintiff couldn’t do it. No, it took the mighty Model Minority to take down affirmative action. 

Conservative strategist, Edward Blum, and a group of Asian Americans, including many Chinese Americans, teamed in lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that the Asian model minority was being discriminated against in favor of other less scholastically successful minorities. “When you lower the bar for someone because of their race, it must follow that you raise it for someone of a different race,” Blum told the Wall Street Journal. 

The Supreme Court bought their argument, reversing decades of previous decisions by ruling 6-2 that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional, that applicants should be judged individually, not as members of a racial group. The decision is also likely to dampen if not kill diversity programs in corporate hiring and promotions. 

A major victory for Chinese Americans? It remains to be seen. Seeing minority groups pitted against each other is not a good look. Amy Wong, one of our top Gom Benn scholarship winner, shares her thoughts on “The Model Minority Myth.”

The Transformation

It’s amazing how Chinese Americans, once — and maybe still for some — America’s hated yellow peril, have become members of its glorified model minority. American historian Madeline Y. Hsu, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, writes about this remarkable transformation in her 2015 book, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority.

If you’ve read any of the stories on this website about our Gom Benn Village ancestors you know that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 barring Chinese laborers from entry to this country – the first ethnic group targeted in such a way. As far back as 1790, Asians were among the non-Whites who were ineligible to become citizens (along with slaves and indentured servants). 

Exclusionists were just one side of American’s immigration coin. Professor Hsu documents the pro-China advocates who won support for a small, selective gateway that allowed special classes of Chinese migrants to enter this country. The Good Immigrants looks at Chinese immigration from the perspective of these exempted elites―intellectuals, businessmen and students. Hsu connects the model minority‘s stereotypical Asian Americans – studious, hard-working, successful and passive – with US policies that screened for those immigrants with the highest potential to enhance America’s economic competitiveness.

It turns out our Gom Benn Village ancestors immigrated here through this selective gateway, mostly as businessmen or merchants. Our ancestors began coming to America after the Gold Rush, and stayed to open laundries, dry goods stores and later restaurants. Their sons, and then entire families would follow. They were desperate to escape the poverty of China, so they came – many by cheating their way in as “paper sons.”

Why did the pro-China Americans create this gateway for these special Chinese? 

Trade and Christianity

By the late 19th century, the Qing Dynasty was teetering, ravaged by civil strafe and famine. England’s victories in the Opium Wars had forced China to allow the trade of opium in exchange for China’s treasured tea, silk and porcelain. Other nation’s gained access to trade with China. The United States wanted access, too – both to trade and for the opportunity to convert the Chinese to Christianity and Western democracy.

In the 1860s, while Abraham Lincoln was president, the U.S. began negotiating a series of treaties that paved the way for U.S. trade with China. These treaties also outlined the rights of each nation’s citizens to migrate and emigrate to the other nation. Ultimately the only classes allowed to migrate were students, teachers, merchants and their families, diplomats and tourists. Chinese laborers, although in demand in the U.S. as miners, railroad builders and farm workers, were excluded beginning in 1882.

It was a time when violent anti-Chinese discrimination surged, mostly in the western United States. Chinese workers were stigmatized as the yellow peril, especially in California. It’s a racist stereotype rooted in Europe’s medieval fear of Genghis Khan and Mongol invasions.

Much like today, white working-class Americans and their labor organizations opposed non-White immigrants as unwanted competitors. They were joined in their opposition by white segregationists. Especially in U.S. western states, Populists (the Trump MAGA Republicans of their day) saw Chinese immigrants as a major threat to their jobs and culture. 

Denis Kearney (1847–1907) was a California labor leader from Ireland who was active in the late 19th century and was known for his anti-Chinese views. Again like Trump, he frequently gave long, caustic speeches on his contempt for the press, politicians and the Chinese. Kearney was known for ending his speeches with, “And whatever happens, the Chinese must go.” 

Student Evangelists

But not everyone hated the Chinese. U.S. internationalists wanted to transform Qing dynasty China into a modern capitalistic, democratic, and Christian nation. These Open Door advocates included missionaries, educators, business leaders, and diplomats. Some of China’s leaders saw advantages in sending Chinese students to America for training in Western military and industrial ways.

While exclusionists thought the Chinese were an inferior race, American missionaries were among the most committed champions for the Chinese, believing them capable of adapting to Western civilization and converting to Christianity, writes Professor Hsu. At the turn of the 20th century, YMCA leader and evangelist John R. Mott praised the Chinese as the “Anglo-Saxons of the Orient” because of their traits of “industry, frugality, patience, tenacity, great physical and intellectual vigor, independence, and conservatism.”

American missionaries opened more than 6,000 schools in China by 1918, according to Hsu. The students were trained in English so the best of them could go overseas to study in the United States. The missionaries expected their Chinese students to return to their homeland and help convert other Chinese to Christianity. Chinese students would become among the most numerous of international students attending America’s Christian universities and colleges.

Christianity would gain only a tenuous foothold in China, but the hundreds of U.S.-trained Chinese returned to help modernize China’s government.

Soong Dynasty

Among the most prominent, successful and influential of the American-educated Chinese were Charlie Soong, his three daughters and sons. “The Soong family offered perhaps the most prominent demonstrations of how persuasively Chinese who were educated and acculturated could convince Americans of their impact in shaping Chinese modernity,” writes Hsu.

In 1878, Charlie Soong was taken by an uncle from China to Massachusetts while not yet a teenager, to work in a tea and silk shop. After a short time, he went to sea as a cabin boy for a U.S. naval captain who was later based in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was there that Soong converted to Christianity. A minister thought to train Soong as a missionary who would be sent back to China. 

One of Soong’s sponsors was Julian S. Carr, a wealthy partner in Bull Durham tobacco. After schooling at what today is Duke University and graduating from Vanderbilt with a degree in theology, Soong returned to Shanghai to sell Bibles – in a business financed by Carr (a white segregationist who boasted about brutally whipping a black woman he said had insulted a white lady.) 

Soong would become wealthy and send his children to America to be educated as Christians. Remarkably, his daughters, who each attended Wesleyan College in Connecticut, would marry three of China’s most powerful men. Ai Ling would marry China’s finance minister, H. H. Kung, a man of great wealth. Ching Ling would marry Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the new Chinese republic; and after his death she would serve as a top communist official in the People’s Republic of China. 

The youngest daughter, Mei Ling, would marry Chiang Kai-shek who was president of China during World War II. She would become well known in America as Madame Chiang. At a time when Japan became the new yellow peril, many Americans were won over by Madame Chiang’s lobbying for China. She was joined in her crusade by pro-China business leaders and missionaries such as Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, whose parents were missionaries in China. Madame Chiang was featured repeatedly in Luce’s publications. 

Welcome Refugees

The pro-China lobby convinced Americans to aid China in the war against Japan, and eventually to end the Chinese exclusion laws in 1943. Chinese immigration was allowed based on a meager quota similar to other nations.

Of the 30,000 or so immigrants admitted in the following two decades, most were the wives of Chinese Americans. Others were refugees who fled the People’s Republic of China, or students who came to study but then slid through the “side door” to find work and remain permanently. 

According to Professor Hsu, this was a period in which U.S. refugee programs helped transform the Chinese into “welcome and valued immigrants …, whose limited numbers and symbolic value in the war on communism enabled not only the warm reception of readily assimilable, educated new immigrants but also redemption for resident Chinese Americans.”

Whether as refugees or students, the post-World War II immigrants were mostly “uptown Chinese,” from Taiwan, a higher class economically and educationally than the largely working-class Chinese (like those from Gom Benn) who came during the exclusion era, says Professor Hsu. 

Economic Assets

Major reform of U.S. immigration laws would finally come under President Lyndon Johnson, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of basing immigration eligibility chiefly on race and national origin, the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) shifted U.S. policy to a system that prioritized family reunification, individual merit, economic contributions and political compatibility.

For the first time, immigration from western and northern Europe, and the Western Hemisphere was minimized, opening the way for an increase in immigration from Asia, Africa and elsewhere in the world. With these changes the battle to bar Asians would shift to border wars against Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.

It was during the Civil Rights Era that the concept of the model minority first appeared, in a 1966 The New York Times Magazine article by Berkeley sociologist William Petersen. He was writing about the struggles of Blacks in education and employment, and contrasting their plight with that of Japanese Americans. Only a generation earlier, the Japanese were the yellow peril, and Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. By the mid-1960s, wrote Peterson, the Japanese Americans had become remarkably successful because of their strong work ethics and family values which lifted them above “problem minorities.” 

Also in 1966, US News and World Report published “Success Story of One Minority” describing Chinese Americans as a model minority, stereotyping them, too, like the Japanese Americans, as smart, hard-working, successful and passive.

Was this an apples to oranges comparison of Asian Americans to other minorities? Probably. Professor Hsu notes that in that era Asian Americans were being celebrated even as they faced community complaints of public health issues, unemployment and juvenile delinquency.

Outstanding Immigrants

In the decades to come, the news media would regularly highlight the most successful Asian Americans. In 1986, on the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, President Reagan presented Medals of Liberty to 12 outstanding immigrants, including three of Chinese ancestry: architect I.M. Pei (a Harvard grad), computer scientist and entrepreneur Wang An (another Harvard grad) and astronaut Franklin R. Chang-Diaz (an MIT grad and an immigrant from Costa Rica where his Chinese grandfather had fled in the 19th century.)

The New York Times did its part too in alluding to the model minority upon the death of Madame Chiang Kai-shek in New York City at age 105 in 2003. The Times eulogized her: “As a fluent English speaker, as a Christian, as a model of what many Americans hoped China to become, Madame Chiang struck a chord with American audiences … She seemed to many Americans to be the very symbol of the modern, educated, pro-American China they yearned to see emerge.”

Yet with Hart-Celler’s occupational preferences, more and more Asian immigrants (from Taiwan, South Korea, India and the Philippines) began to come as already-trained scientists, engineers and doctors – as ready-made model immigrants. Immigration policy that encouraged the migration of educated elites “laid the foundations of the so-called model minority” even as “the privileging of knowledge workers…masks new forms of racial inequalities,” writes Hsu.

Yes, the myth of the model minority has been somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A 2012 Pew Report identified Asian Americans (including Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese) as the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the U.S. They also came here with a head start: 74 percent of Asian American adults were foreign born, of whom 61 percent those aged 25 to 64 arrived with at least a BA degree – double that of non-Asian immigrants. Today Asian Indians are the highest achieving of all Asian American groups in income and education.

This is the consequence of Hart-Celler, privilege for educated immigrants while denying immigration to the many who are less educated. The model minority is a creation. All Asian Americans have been blanketed under a stereotype that ignores their diverse national origins, histories and educational backgrounds. As so-called good immigrants, they’re pitted against so-called bad immigrants.

It’s a myth that endures — at the most elite universities and the highest court in the land.