Law, Literature, and Poetic Justice: The Chinese Exclusion and Late-Qing Boycott Novels

Chinese fiction on the 1905 Chinese boycott of American goods and trade appeared in response to increasingly racist American immigration laws and Qing government failure to safeguard the interests of overseas laborers. The boycott literature that Ku Shehui ( Bitter Society ) in 1905 and Biheguan Zhuren’s Huangjin Shejie ( Golden World ) in 1907 represent advocated a cross-class alliance between working- and middle-class Chinese and created what American philosophy professor Martha C. Nussbaum calls “poetic justice,” the public imagination of a justice that has real-life impact. This article first shows how literary genre and style form a fictional cross-class alliance, then examines the use of the fictional ocean steamship as a location for this alliance, and reveals how globalized markets doomed its destiny. It finally analyzes the utopian and settler colonizing incentives hidden in the blueprint. Reading the late Qing novels against American immigration law demonstrates a way to evaluate how a literature born of social crisis changed conceptions of class, race, gender, and nation.