Chinatown, McCarthy and the Red Scare late 1950

More about Chinatown, McCarthy and the Red Scare late 1950

When Senator Joseph McCarthy began to allege that “known communists” were working at the State Department, he and his allies paid no attention to Chinese Americans. Instead, they accused Owen Lattimore, a U.S. wartime advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, and other “China hands” in the U.S. foreign service of creating “American policy in Asia which has resulted in the loss of China, with its 400 million inhabitants, to Soviet Russia.” In these early months of 1950, a small handful of Chinese Americans did face persecution, but only because of their association with the US Communist Party or with leftist groups in America.

When the People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the side of North Korea, however, Chinese American communities and their politics suddenly attracted public attention in new and unwelcome ways. In late 1950, with China and the US essentially at war, the veteran journalist Gilbert Woo described his fellow Chinese Americans as “numbed with fear” and wrestling with the sense that “being Chinese is itself a crime.” Outside of Chinatown areas, vandals attacked several Chinese-owned businesses, while Chinese Americans, many of whom remembered the World War II government incarceration of the West Coast Japanese American population, scrambled to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. Businesses withdrew advertising from community newspapers that seemed too supportive of the People’s Republic of China, including New York’s China Daily News and San Francisco’s China Weekly and Chung Sai Yat Po, and readers cancelled their subscriptions. Chinese American veterans’ groups marched in anti-communist parades, carrying American flags and banners denouncing the “reds.” Even children felt the need to prove their loyalty: San Francisco’s 1951 Chinese New Year parade included a girls’ marching band carrying signs urging onlookers to “rid the world of communism.