Scholarship about the Chinese Question has largely been understood as a question of “coolies,” but what would happen if it we reframed it in terms of merchants?Footnote 1 More widely studied US anti-Chinese laws, like the 1875 Page Law and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, targeted women suspected of prostitution or male laborers rather than elites like merchants, students, and teachers.Footnote 2 But in 1921, the US-controlled Insular Government in the Philippines (1902–1935) enacted a statute known as the Chinese Bookkeeping Act (Act No. 2972), marking a moment in the history of US anti-Chinese laws when exclusion was directed toward businessowners.Footnote 3 Act 2972 essentially outlawed Chinese-language record-keeping practices, which affected merchants ranging from small storeowners to multi-millionaire tycoons. In response, a group of Philippine-based Chinese merchants sued the colonial government in Philippine courts, appealing their case until it reached the Supreme Court of the United States (US Supreme Court). In 1926, the court ruled the Bookkeeping Act unconstitutional.Footnote 4 On the “coolie” question, the Court said “yes” to exclusion, but for the merchant Chinese question, the Court said “no.”Footnote 5 The US Supreme Court’s rejection of a mercantile form of Chinese exclusion in the Philippines became part of those islands’ legal, racial, and economic transformation into a US colony, where its Chinese merchant community was increasingly alienated as they attained greater private property rights. In relation to patriotic Filipino capital and unmarked Euro-American capital, Chinese capital in the Philippines became increasingly framed within US law as “alien” by American and Filipino judges and politicians and surprisingly, the Chinese merchant community themselves.
The Bookkeeping Act (also called the Bookkeeping Law) was a form of Chinese exclusion that banned how Chinese businesses recorded, organized, and maintained their sales. The law required all merchants to have their records in “English, Spanish, or any local dialect.” Chinese languages were excluded from understandings of “local dialect,” even though Hokkien Chinese speakers were the largest and oldest immigrant group to the Philippines. Long before Spanish and English speakers entered the Philippines, Hokkien Chinese speakers had sailed from Xiamen, a southeastern port city in China, to work and trade in the Philippines.Footnote 6 As a result, this migratory population has influenced a number of Philippine languages.Footnote 7 Despite this long history of Chinese languages in the Philippines, the law determined that it was not part of the local language. As a result, tax collectors could enter stores, seize records, make arrests, and issue enormous fines worth over twenty years of the average merchant’s annual income (roughly USD 8,559 in 2022) for having Chinese-language records.Footnote 8 If Chinese commercial record-keeping practices were banned, then Chinese merchants could not migrate to the Philippines to establish their businesses. One merchant, for example, claimed it would be impossible to run his business because he would have to change “all of the employees,” as he and his current employees could not know if the books were “being kept in their proper form.”Footnote 9
By 1921, the Insular Government had undergone a period of Filipinization where Filipino political elites gained control of the legislature, but it was still under the leadership of a US Governor-General. The Filipino legislator who introduced Act No. 2972 was part of the Nacionalistas—the dominant Filipino political party in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 10 The Bookkeeping Law, he argued, monitored for tax evasion because it made it easier to detect fraudulent accounting records from Chinese firms by requiring them to be checked by a predominantly Spanish and English-language workforce. While this legislator associated Chinese merchant capital with corruption, he indigenized Spanish and English languages by associating them with the “local dialects” spoken by indigenous people across the archipelago, thereby naturalizing foreign Spanish and US merchant capital in the islands.
With the Bookkeeping Act, the Filipino-controlled Insular Government marked Chinese merchants with the abstract, negative dimensions of capitalism in order to expunge the role of Euro-American and Christian Filipino merchants from the social ills of capitalism. I understand this as a version of what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti-capitalism” in her analysis of North American Chinese exclusion laws, which she understands as an expression of how US and Canadian governments made Chinese laborers the scapegoats of capitalism’s negative dimensions through their alienation while white laborers were associated with a valorized form of concrete labor.Footnote 11 Day uses this term for labor, while I apply it to understand how the Philippines’ Insular Government valorized Filipino capital as patriotic in relation to a parasitic Chinese capital that was “alien.” Nacionalista elites prioritized an economic nationalism that enabled Filipinos to challenge foreign control over the Philippine economy, but they were also in favor of putting these industries under the control of their political allies and expanding claims over indigenous land.Footnote 12 Unlike Canada and the US, the Philippines was not a white settler state, but the Philippines’ Insular Government has exhibited similar settler colonial dynamics in its southern frontiers, making the Bookkeeping Act an expression of this Filipino settler colonialism that was entangled with US empire in the early twentieth century.Footnote 13 Chinese merchants from the Philippines economically benefitted from the rise in agricultural exports such as sugar and lumber, but they also became scapegoats for native peasants’ anger over being exploited for labor and a romantic anti-capitalism that was expressed through laws like the Bookkeeping Act.
Unexpectedly, Chinese merchants’ legal challenge to the Bookkeeping Act entailed representing themselves as embodiments of “alien capital.”Footnote 14 By the twentieth century, under US colonial rule, the Chinese in the Philippines’ national identity had transitioned from the nineteenth-century chino/tsino (a term that had replaced sangley) to the “alien” legal term, especially after Chinese exclusion eliminated the Chinese mestizo legal category which was used to describe the offspring of Chinese-Filipino unions.Footnote 15 Due to the extension of US Chinese exclusion laws to the Philippines, China-born residents could not naturalize into Filipino citizenship (US nationals) and were thus legally categorized as “aliens” in the Philippines.Footnote 16 Typically, it was more socially and politically beneficial for Chinese residents in the Philippines to emphasize traditionally Filipino traits, like Catholicism and knowledge of local languages. But in their legal suit, these merchants emphasized their alienation from Philippine society. To invoke the protections of the Equal Protection Clause, they used Chinese languages to create a substantial distinction between themselves and other residents in the Philippines. They argued that despite appearing racially neutral, the Bookkeeping Act disproportionately targeted their businesses and violated their right to Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, because their businesses could only operate in Chinese languages.
This “alien” positioning also sought diplomatic benefit from Chinese connections. By the twentieth century, the Manila Chinese began to receive protection and recognition from the Chinese government.Footnote 17 In 1899, after Spain sold the Philippines to the US as part of the peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the Qing government established an imperial consulate in the Philippines and gave Chinese merchants in the Philippines representatives in China’s new constitutional assembly.Footnote 18 By the time of the Bookkeeping Act, the Philippine Chinese merchant population had greater political power and protection from the Qing government.
In addition to their linguistically “alien” position, Philippine Chinese merchants emphasized their importance to global capital and US economic interests. Their legal team submitted petitions from multinational companies and merchants’ associations located around the world as evidence to emphasize how the Bookkeeping Act disrupted networks of global capital and damaged US economic interests in the Philippines. The imperial and unequal trade relationship between the US and the Philippines was characterized by the US export to the Philippines of capital-intensive goods requiring significant machinery like cotton cloths and iron and steel manufactures, and by the US import from the Philippines of labor-intensive goods and raw materials like sugar and abaca (hemp).Footnote 19 By the late 1920s, the US made up seventy to eighty percent of Philippine exports and imports.Footnote 20 Chinese entrepreneurs in the Philippines were largely excluded from the export sector, but their businesses were part of a four-tiered distribution network that sold imports, like US-manufactured goods, throughout the Philippines.Footnote 21 Importers, wholesale distributors, retailers, and small sari-sari shopkeepers purchased, distributed, and sold US-manufactured cotton textiles, shoes, and processed food to consumers in an archipelago composed of over seven thousand islands.Footnote 22 Chinese merchants submitted evidence to the court that demonstrated how their community undergirded these distribution networks in the Philippines.
The merchants’ victory over the Bookkeeping Act at the US Supreme Court illuminated how overseas colonial governments had less sovereignty in the face of the US Supreme Court than state governments. While unsuccessful in local Philippine courts, the Chinese merchants’ legal defense succeeded in the US Supreme Court, which ruled against the Philippine Insular Government. The Insular Cases, a set of US Supreme Court cases that determined the sovereignty of post-1898 acquired colonies, including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, determined that these colonies would have an ambiguous status that gave them fewer rights than US states.Footnote 23 One outcome of the Insular Cases, as this article shows, is that the US Supreme Court was able to give more protection to the private property rights of colonial alien residents, like the Philippine Chinese merchants, as opposed to state-based alien residents, because colonial governments, like the Philippine Insular Government, had less power than US state governments to write and enforce their own laws in the face of US Supreme Court intervention.
The thousands of pages of evidence in the case file adjudicated before the US Supreme Court—analyzed for the first time in this article—sheds light on the role of Chinese merchant capital in the making of US law and empire. This article examines the rise and fall of the Bookkeeping Act to uncover the multiple and conflicting layers of governance within the empire, particularly between the Philippine Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. I show how Chinese merchants represented themselves and embraced an “alienness” in their legal defense that was part of what led to such laws in the first place. In their different ways, Chinese merchants, American and Filipino judges and politicians all legally framed Chinese capital as “alien” in relation to patriotic Filipino capital and unmarked Euro-American capital. By showing how it was within the class interests of these different actors to represent the Chinese merchants as “alien” in the courtroom, this article helps us understand how and why Chinese capital became increasingly framed as “alien” in the Philippines.
Anti-Chinese Colonialism and Nacionalista Economic Nationalism
The Bookkeeping Act was one iteration of a long history of colonial laws that defined and targeted the Chinese in the Philippines. Centuries of Chinese migration and intermarriage with the local population, producing mixed-raced Chinese mestizos, has made the “Chinese” category both stable and porous.Footnote 24 From the three-hundred-year Spanish colonial period to the American occupation of the Philippines, a majority-male Chinese population faced expulsions, massacres, and anti-Chinese laws due to their ambivalent relationship to colonial officials, who saw them as threats but also essential to the economy.Footnote 25 The Spanish tax system contained a roughly graduated income tax, but its rates heavily favored the cacique elite.Footnote 26 Before the nineteenth century, the Spanish colonial government charged its Chinese residents in the Philippines the highest taxes, followed by Chinese mestizos, Filipinos, and then Spaniards, who paid no taxes.Footnote 27 By 1828, the Spanish colonial government implemented a new system that split Chinese taxpayers into four classes with different rates of industrial tax: wholesale merchants (120 pesos), retailers or shopkeepers (forty-eight pesos), artisans (twenty-four pesos), and day laborers, employed by the first three groups (twelve pesos).Footnote 28 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Spanish government enforced an 1885 poll tax charging every Chinese immigrant upon landing the Philippines—a huge source of revenue.Footnote 29
The US regime changed the Spanish colonial tax system. Notably, it retracted the discriminatory Chinese poll tax and the personal cedula taxes.Footnote 30 At the same time, the new Insular Government enforced other laws that targeted the Chinese immigrant population: exclusion (1902) and opium prohibition (1908).Footnote 31 Tax officials worried that Chinese merchants were not paying enough taxes, because they could not check their Chinese-language account books. In 1914, the Collector of Internal Revenue James Rafferty issued a circular that required merchants and manufacturers to keep sales records in English or Spanish.Footnote 32 Two years later, the Philippine Supreme Court overturned this administrative regulation, declaring that the Collector had overreached its legislative authority.Footnote 33 Within the next decade, the Insular Government would try to increase its power over Chinese businesses in response to widespread economic instability that affected merchants different from peasants.
The 1920s was a decade of contradiction. For Manila Chinese merchants, scholars have called it as “a golden era” of business, where Chinese groceries, distilleries, tobacco, and other manufacturers multiplied across the Philippines.Footnote 34 Due to the US domestic demand for sugar, the US increased its share of Philippine trade, which generated enormous profits for Filipino landowners.Footnote 35 Manila Chinese merchants, while excluded from the export sector, profited off of a large group of newly middle-class Filipinos.Footnote 36 Meanwhile, this same time period was marked by starvation, unemployment, and decreasing wages for the working class.Footnote 37 Angry sharecroppers blamed Philippine Chinese merchants for rising rice prices and set ablaze these merchants’ homes and rice mills. In the countryside, large numbers of dispossessed peasants and small landowners (2.5 million out of the archipelago’s nine million residents) went on strike and lost employment amidst a recession. Unable to find stable work in the Philippines, thousands of Filipino workers migrated to the US in the 1920s to labor at Hawaiian plantations.Footnote 38
Amidst this economic instability, the Nacionalista Party dominated the Philippine legislature. Its solution for greater autonomy from US imperial control was an anti-colonial nationalism that increased the economic power of a select group of Filipinos. Nacionalistas in government positions influenced the hiring of major corporations such as the Philippine National Bank, and they discriminated against “foreign competitors” in their effort to promote Filipino-owned industries.Footnote 39 In addition to preferentially hiring Filipinos in their social circles, the Nacionalistas also sought control over Chinese-operated retail stores, import and export businesses, financial institutions, and corporations.Footnote 40
Beginning in 1919, the Nacionalista-dominant Insular Government passed laws regulating Philippine Chinese business practices, including the Bookkeeping Act. To the Nacionalistas, Chinese immigrant businesses in the islands threatened their goal of nationalizing the economy because they perceived these business owners as foreigners who extracted capital from local consumers. In 1919, the Municipal Board of Manila passed an ordinance (No. 532) that required laundry businesses in Manila to keep receipts in English and Spanish to prevent “fraud, deceit, and cheating,” affecting over fifty local Chinese laundries.Footnote 41 In 1920, Kwong Sing challenged this law and lost at the Philippine Supreme Court, which claimed that the law’s public benefit outweighed Chinese laundromat owners’ private interests.Footnote 42 On October 16, 1920, Governor General Francis Harrison, during his annual speech to the Philippine Legislature, recommended that all businesses in the Philippines keep their books in English, Spanish, or a local Philippine dialect to “avoid wholesale frauds upon the public revenues.”Footnote 43
Members of the Insular Government accused the Chinese of tax evasion, illustrating the racialized logic of economic regulation. Allan Lumba observes how primarily white American and European bankers at the top of this racial hierarchy faced minimal taxes and economic regulations, while US soldiers and civil servants had access to stable exchange rates, and wealthy mestizos could acquire lucrative credit.Footnote 44 Meanwhile, Chinese merchants were untrustworthy smugglers with questionable business practices, and native indio peasants were idle hoarders who needed to be surveilled and disciplined into responsible economic behavior. Monetary authorities used economic regulations to police the “parasitic Chinese” in order to protect the natives who “lacked market knowledge.”Footnote 45 The Insular Government’s reasoning behind the Bookkeeping Act resembled this logic: it sought to punish Chinese merchants who defrauded the government with tax evasion. The most elite Chinese merchants shared class interests with the Insular Government, but they were still targeted due to economic nationalism.
The Filipino legislator who introduced the Bill for the Bookkeeping Act explained that the Act was a cost-saving measure that eliminated the need for translators.Footnote 46 From 1921 to 1922, Insular Government revenue from income tax fell by roughly fifty percent, and the authorities were looking for solutions to this shortfall.Footnote 47 The government needed to save money and generate revenue by further empowering its lead tax collector—the Collector of Internal Revenue—who collected sales and income tax and oversaw internal revenue agents, and provincial treasurers.Footnote 48 The money that the Collector generated from these taxes (internal revenue) was especially important due to low revenue from inheritance and property taxes (concessions American officials had made to Filipino ruling classes).Footnote 49 The Philippine Insular Government operated on a slim budget, and presumably, the Bookkeeping Act ensured that the Collector could more easily audit Philippine Chinese merchants’ income and sales tax payments.Footnote 50
Even though the Nacionalistas desired Philippine independence from US empire, their support of the Bookkeeping Act demonstrates how their anti-colonialism was a form of “conditional decolonization.”Footnote 51 In contrast to “unconditional decolonization,” which Lumba defines as a “remaking of the world, in which colonialism and racial capitalism would have no future,” conditional decolonization maintains the racial exclusion and economic system of US empire.Footnote 52 What is tricky with the Bookkeeping Act is that while it was racially exclusive, it was also largely anti-business and an attack on the economic system that US imperialism relied on. The ways in which the Nacionalista party took control of property in the Philippines, however, demonstrate their intent to further consolidate capital in the hands of a select few instead of redistributing it among the islands’ inhabitants. Several people Harrison appointed, along with Nacionalista members, participated in the very corruption that they accused Chinese merchants of participating in.Footnote 53 In 1922, Harrison’s appointee for the president of the Philippine National Bank was imprisoned after loaning his wife sixty times the legal limit—one of several Philippine National Bank scandals that involved other Nacionalista politicians and businessmen.Footnote 54 The Bookkeeping Law demonstrates how the Nacionalistas desired an postcolonial ethno-national nation-state that allowed them to continue to benefit from the US empire’s economic system.
While Americans in the Insular Government and Filipino Nacionalistas saw eye-to-eye, Chinese merchants and US-based politicians shared economic priorities, revealing a breakdown in Lumba’s racialized logic of economic regulation when we expand the frame of US empire to examine interactions between the Insular and federal governments. Many US-based politicians tried to block or change the law, but they were unable to reach the Insular Government. Governor General Harrison’s decision to sign the law in 1921 reflected how the Insular Government was somewhat independent from US federal rule. By January 1923, US newspapers were reporting that the Philippine Legislature had ignored suggestions made by the US State Department to amend the law, and that the Philippine House of Representatives had “tabled all resolutions proposing amendment or alteration of the law in any way.”Footnote 55 It was only when the Chinese merchants challenged this law in the US Supreme Court that the federal government intervened and overturned the law.
Chinese Merchants as Alien Capital
The Bookkeeping Act catalyzed widespread activism that unified the Philippine Chinese business community.Footnote 56 In their legal challenge, Philippine Chinese merchants came together and strategized a suit against this law, which involved a construction of “Chineseness” that highlighted language and global capital. The merchants reinforced their status as an economically essential minority, arguing that despite appearing racially neutral, the Bookkeeping Act disproportionately targeted their businesses, violated their right to Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, and threatened the global economy. To invoke the Equal Protection Clause, these merchants used Chinese languages to create a substantial self-distinction from other residents in the Philippines and aligned themselves with global capitalism. Paradoxically, it was tropes of Chinese merchants as money-making foreigners speaking broken Filipino that led to laws like the Bookkeeping Act.Footnote 57 Aspects of these tropes became part of their challenge against the law. This was quite different from cases in which Chinese litigants emphasized their Filipino language ability and Catholicism to qualify for Filipino citizenship.Footnote 58 Instead, Hokkien merchants like Co Liam emphasized how they were what Caroline Hau has termed “material men.”Footnote 59
The lawsuit against the Bookkeeping Act was one piece in a larger pattern of how diasporic Chinese commercial communities used the law to protect and accumulate property.Footnote 60 Chinese exclusion laws prevented Chinese residents from holding governmental positions in Philippine politics. As a result, Chinese merchants used organizations like Chambers of Commerce for social and political influence. Elite Philippine Chinese businessmen, such as members of the Manila Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, were especially litigious during the US occupation of the Philippines.Footnote 61 By the end of the first decade of American colonial rule, Chinese businessmen in the Philippines typically had American attorneys on retainer. Some of these men, such as Albino SyCip (a legal strategist of the case against the Bookkeeping Act), used Chinese exclusion laws to deport economic and social rivals.Footnote 62 Survival in a capitalist society like the US colonial Philippines meant a constant defense and reproduction of social and economic benefits at risk of being stolen or seized from others.
The Philippine Chinese merchants who fought against the Bookkeeping Act associated global capital and alienness with their Chineseness to benefit from an imperial US Supreme Court. Asian residents in the US portraying themselves as white to qualify for US citizenship through naturalization demonstrate how whiteness was encoded with rights and privileges under this same court.Footnote 63 But instead of whiteness, the Philippine Chinese merchants coded themselves with property in a form that was marked by their alien legal status. Their alignment with alienness and global capital provided them access to property rights—a marked and conditional form of belonging that relied on economic utility.
The strategists and funders of the campaign against the Bookkeeping Act were members of the Manila Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Chinese institution in the Philippines.Footnote 64 In 1904, William Howard Taft, as the first Governor General of the Philippines, encouraged elite Philippine Chinese merchants to create this organization, which eventually became essential in the campaign against the Bookkeeping Act. Members paid more than 167,000 pesos for the five-year long period of lawsuits against this law; spoke before Philippine Senate Committees; wrote articles and op-eds in journals, newspapers, and letters to audiences in the US, Philippines, and China; and donated funds to Chinese merchants all over the Philippines who protested against the law, leading to the first nationwide convention of Chinese merchants in 1921.Footnote 65 The Chamber president, a lumber merchant named Dee Chuan, collaborated with a US-trained lawyer and his China Bank co-founder, Albino SyCip, to end the Bookkeeping Law.Footnote 66 The men were part of a group of around fifty multimillionaire merchants and among the top 0.42% of Chinese merchants in the islands.Footnote 67
Albino SyCip (1887–1978), called the “chief legal strategist” against the Bookkeeping Act, attended the University of Michigan Law School from 1909-1912 (Figure 1), a school associated with Thomas Cooley, one of its founding faculty.Footnote 68 Cooley, generally viewed as a fierce defender of private property rights, was one of the most influential jurists of the late nineteenth century, and he was cited hundreds of times by the US and Philippine Supreme Courts.Footnote 69 When SyCip arrived at Michigan Law, Cooley was no longer alive. However, he had greatly influenced the constitutional law expert Victor Lane, who was most likely taught SyCip constitutional law.Footnote 70 By the time SyCip entered law school, students analyzed landmark appellate decisions, like Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), in their courses.Footnote 71 Yick Wo established that seemingly neutral laws can still violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause if discriminatory in practice. Importantly, this ruling also applied to non-US citizens under US jurisdiction, such as colonial subjects in the Philippines under the jurisdiction of the US Supreme Court.Footnote 72 SyCip likely used insights from foundational constitutional law cases, like Yick Wo, to inspire the merchants’ legal strategy.
Above, Albino Z. SyCip in the Class of 1912 at the University of Michigan Law School; below, photograph of the Class of 1912, University of Michigan Law School. Courtesy of Michigan Law School Archives.
Figure 1. Long description
One portrait photo, one group photo. The portrait photo shows Albino Z SyCip, a young man wearing a dark sweater and a white shirt. The group photo displays numerous small portraits of individuals from the University of Michigan Law School Class of 1912. The group photo is arranged in a grid format with rows and columns of individual portraits. In the center of the group photo, there are three larger images depicting notable figures or scenes related to the university, along with the text University of Michigan, 1912, and Man Class.
The lead petitioners of the case against the Bookkeeping Act emphasized how language defined their Chinese identity. Because Chinese languages were central to their business operations, they argued that the Bookkeeping Act—despite appearing to be racially neutral—violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights as a minority group within the Philippines because the law created legal roadblocks for Chinese-language businesses. Through their common languages as an ethnic group, the Philippine Chinese merchants self-represented as a distinct racial group that qualified for equal protection. The two petitioners representing “themselves and all Chinese persons similarly situated,” Co Liam and Yu Cong Eng, also represented two different kinds of merchants at the time. Co Liam, a retail merchant (seventy-two percent of all Philippine Chinese merchants), was a small business owner selling directly to consumers. Meanwhile, Yu Cong Eng was a wholesale merchant (twenty-eight percent of all Philippine Chinese merchants) who purchased large quantities of goods from manufacturers to resell to other retail merchants or wholesalers.Footnote 73 Yu Cong Eng was a prominent merchant (Figure 2) with an established lumber manufacturing company, which constructed many of Manila’s “finest edifices.”Footnote 74 Both merchants claimed that they could only keep their books in Chinese.
Photo of Yu Cong Eng in a 1930 publication highlighting influential Chinese merchants in the Philippines. Lim, Who’s Who in the Philippines, 80.
While newspaper articles and op-eds published by the Philippine Chinese elucidated how the Chinese business community did not evade taxes, the legal team focused on how their community was eligible for equal protection.Footnote 75 Thirty-three male Chinese merchants from Manila, ranging from eighteen to sixty-seven years old, testified on behalf of twelve thousand Chinese merchants in the Philippines.Footnote 76 Some witnesses had been merchants in the islands for over thirty years–even longer than the period of US rule. Others were more recent arrivals who had managed their store for around a year. All witnesses present, however, emphasized how the Bookkeeping Act would destroy Chinese businesses, because they could only operate their businesses in Chinese.Footnote 77
At every step of the legal proceedings, Dee Chuan and Albino SyCip were present, ensuring the merchants spoke as one body in their cross-examinations.Footnote 78 SyCip helped interpret the merchants’ testimonies, sometimes interfering with the official translator.Footnote 79 For example, when the translator told the lawyer for the Filipino government that the witness claimed he did not learn bookkeeping in China, SyCip contradicted the translator and told the court that the witness had in fact claimed that knowing Chinese also meant that they knew Chinese bookkeeping. Dee Chuan, in his capacity as president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, claimed that out of thousands of Chinese firms in the Philippines, only twelve could include English and Spanish records alongside their Chinese ones: eight kept books in Chinese and English or Spanish and four used only English and Spanish.Footnote 80 Even though Chuan himself worked with an American accountant for his English-language books, he still needed a set of Chinese books for other partners of his firm--his father, brother, and uncle who could only read in Chinese.Footnote 81
In the courtroom, the Bookkeeping Act incentivized a reversal of who portrayed the Chinese resident community as socially and culturally alienated. Typically, Chinese mestizos with a Chinese parent and a native Filipino parent found it more advantageous to emphasize their Filipino-ness over their Chineseness, but some Chinese mestizo merchant witnesses claimed linguistic alienation. In contrast to the Chinese mestizos petitioning for Filipino citizenship, who emphasized their Tagalog skills and conversion to Catholicism, Chinese mestizos in this trial emphasized their inability to operate in Tagalog and their separation from Philippine society. For example, twenty-six-year-old Simeon Ong Chang had spent over a decade in the Philippines, where he managed an underwear factory.Footnote 82 But during his cross-examination, Chang highlighted his Chinese language ability and schooling in China and downplayed his Filipina mother and schooling in the Philippines.Footnote 83 By distancing himself from his Filipina mother, Chang self-racialized as foreign and unassimilated. Even though he had lived in the islands for over a third of his life, he self-represented as someone unable to conduct business in English or Tagalog (Filipino).Footnote 84
In their testimonies, several merchants complained that the Bookkeeping Act’s language requirements disrupted their employment and hiring practices. Yu Cong Eng claimed he would be “ignorant” about what made someone a qualified bookkeeper, since his company operated with a double-entry bookkeeping system, which would be banned under the Bookkeeping Act.Footnote 85 Most Chinese firms in the first half of the twentieth century used a double-entry bookkeeping system, which not only recorded a sale but also how this sale affected the business’s cash flow or the debt owed them by a customer.Footnote 86 Chinese diasporic merchants in Southeast Asia could have up to four different kinds of record-keeping, which were variants of this double-entry system.Footnote 87 Even if new bookkeepers hired by the Chinese businesses could record these transactions in Spanish or English, they would not be familiar with the bookkeeping system that the firm used.
See Seng Tong, a grocery store owner, claimed it would be impossible to run his business under the new law: “I would have to change practically all of the employees, and neither would we be able to know if the books were being kept in proper form.”Footnote 88 See Seng Tong’s father first opened the family store during the Spanish colonial period, but because Tong migrated from China to the Philippines, where he had been living for sixteen years, he claimed to mainly read and write in Chinese.
While Chinese merchants’ legal team emphasized their alienation from Philippine society, the Filipino government’s legal team underscored that this business community was more integrated than they claimed. Upon further cross-examination by the opposing side, Tong confessed that he could read and speak English and Tagalog. He and his clerks made invoices in Spanish for Filipino and foreign customers and Chinese for Chinese customers.Footnote 89 The following image of a 1916 English-language and Spanish-language receipt (Figure 3), issued by a company owned by a Philippine Chinese merchant named Rafael Gotauco, is an example of such a receipt.Footnote 90
Receipt from The Manila Saw Mill issued to the Manila Railroad Company, 1916. Courtesy of the Bahay Tsinoy and Chinben See Memorial Library, Manila.
Indeed, younger merchants like Tong may have exaggerated their cultural alienation from Philippine society. By the 1920s, all Philippine public schools and private Chinese schools had an English-language curriculum.Footnote 91 In 1899, the Chinese community created the first Chinese school in the Philippines—the Anglo-Chinese school—which included English-language reading, writing, and math classes.Footnote 92 In addition to Filipino and American teachers, these schools had Chinese teachers who taught Hokkien and, later, Mandarin.Footnote 93 English-language schools were also available in Fujian, China, where most Philippine Chinese traced their ancestry to.Footnote 94 Younger members Philippine Chinese merchants who had attended these schools were more multilingual and integrated than the plaintiffs’ racial construction of the foreign, monolingual Chinese merchant.
The Manila government’s legal team brought forth evidence demonstrating the Chinese community’s ability in Tagalog, Spanish, English, and local dialects. According to Filipino officials, the Bookkeeping Act was reasonable because the Chinese community was more integrated than the plaintiffs claimed. An exchange between Felix, the lawyer for the opposing side, and Lim Kung Hong, a forty-eight-year-old merchant, represented the Insular Government’s legal strategy to construct the Chinese merchants as multilingual and integrated into Philippine society. While Hong claimed to be “an old man” who could no longer take the time to study English or Spanish, Felix interrogated him about his international clientele, particularly his Spanish-speaking customers. This exchange forced Hong to admit that most of his invoices were in Spanish.Footnote 95 With this line of interrogation, Felix uncovered that some Chinese merchants did indeed operate in non-Chinese languages.
This legal team also used Filipino employees of the Bureau of Internal Revenue to argue that Chinese merchants exaggerated their inability to operate in Spanish or English. Wholesale tobacco merchants in Manila, according to one bureau agent, “can keep their books in English or Spanish, inasmuch as they can, and in fact do, keep the L-3 registry books in either of those languages.”Footnote 96 Agents also testified that Chinese merchants outside of Manila knew how to read and write English, Spanish, or some local dialect.Footnote 97 By testifying that the Chinese merchants could operate in English or Spanish, these agents provided evidence to the Manila government’s legal team that supported the fairness of the Bookkeeping Act.
While the Chinese merchants used language to define their alienation, support they gathered from prominent corporate actors established these merchants’ construction of Chineseness as one tied to global capital. Their legal team assembled petitions signed by major corporations and associations to argue the negative global impact of the Bookkeeping Act. Major US firms, including John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New York and American Express, were among the 113 US and Asian businesses that signed such petitions. Pharmaceuticals like the Philippine-American Drug Company and financial institutions such as the Asia Banking Corporation, the Bank of the Philippine Islands, and the Yokohama Specie Bank responsible for handling Japan’s overseas trade had “a proper and direct interest” in repealing the Chinese Bookkeeping Act.”Footnote 98
All these actors also demonstrated how the Chinese merchant community in the Philippines was part of a global network of capital. The Merchant’s Association in New York proclaimed that the law seemed to be “aimed directly” at Chinese merchants, whose withdrawal from the economy would “seriously and permanently injure” American businesses in the Philippines.Footnote 99 Resolutions signed by two American Chambers of Commerce in China informed politicians and government officials that Chinese merchants were essential to providing machinery for distributing their merchandise. Representatives of Filipino companies such as Manila Tire & Rubber, Alhambra Cigar and Cigarette Manufacturing, and San Miguel Brewery also signed petitions claiming that this law would be destructive to “the economic situation of trade in the islands” and “most unfavorable upon all merchants and business of every kind in the country.”Footnote 100 The President of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, William Nolting, an American, claimed that this law would eventually shut down all Chinese-owned businesses in the Philippines, because all Chinese business owners were embedded in a dense commercial network that the Bookkeeping Act would destroy, from the smallest shopkeeper in the provinces to the multi-million dollar lumber tycoon.Footnote 101
Companies who petitioned against the Bookkeeping Act also stood to benefit from case law that limited police power over businesses. While the Nacionalistas desired more control over Chinese merchant economic activity, prominent commercial actors relied on these same businesses for their profit, which increased government regulation would harm. Even SyCip and Dee Chuan benefitted from decreased interference as leading incorporators of the China Bank—the first commercial bank in the Philippines owned by Chinese Filipinos.Footnote 102 SyCip had dropped his law practice to focus on China Bank until the Chinese Chamber of Commerce requested his help to fight the Bookkeeping Act, but a victory over the Bookkeeping Act also meant a victory for China Bank.Footnote 103 If case law turned to limiting police power in commercial spaces, businesses would have less government oversight over their profits.
Two racial constructions of Chinese merchants emerged with the rise of the Bookkeeping Law and the campaign against it. First, the racialized figure of cheating and exploitative Chinese merchants underpinned American and Filipino motivations to pass the Bookkeeping Act largely as a response to the economic inequality of the 1920s. Second, the figure of the Chinese merchant as a foreigner essential to the global economy appeared in how Chinese merchants testified and described themselves in the legal proceedings. These two figures, which appeared on opposite sides of the courtroom, shared the underlying logic of economic efficiency and capacity. One version threatened the local government in the Philippines, while the other served the functioning of global capital.
From Insular Exclusion to Imperial Protection
The Philippine Supreme Court agreed with the Philippine Legislature’s construction of Chineseness as untrustworthy tax evaders. Similar to the Philippine Governor General at the time, Justice George Malcolm sympathized with the aspirations of the dominant Filipino political class. In reviewing the thousands of pages of testimony, Malcolm emphasized evidence from the Bureau of Internal Revenue claiming that the Chinese merchants had underdeclared more than 600,000 pesos in income taxes (about USD 5.1 million in 2022).Footnote 104 The Collector of Internal Revenue supported these statistics with “repeated assurances” to the court that these merchants’ books were “unintelligible” and had led the public treasury to be “defrauded annually in several million pesos.”Footnote 105 In Malcolm’s eyes, the Chinese were choosing not to learn English even though the colonial government had made English education widely available and enforceable since the beginning of US rule.Footnote 106
In the Philippine Supreme Court, European and American bankers and wealthy Filipino mestizos and locals all distrusted Chinese merchants and working-class natives, even though Chinese merchants like Sy Quia and Dee Chuan shared the same social class as Malcolm and Filipino leaders of the Nacionalista Party. The rationale of this law, similar to other anti-Chinese laws in the Philippines, was to protect Filipinos and their government from corrupt influences.Footnote 107 To Malcolm, police power in the Philippines, like US police power, existed not just for “public health and safety” but also for “the prevention of fraud [and] cheating.” He defended the law as a “proper and reasonable exercise of police power of the Philippine Government, and of its power of taxation.”Footnote 108 He prioritized the colonial state’s power to collect taxes over the Chinese merchants’ Fourteenth Amendment rights. While the Philippine Supreme Court’s justification for upholding the Bookkeeping Act affirmed the racialized logic of economic regulation in US empire, the US Supreme Court’s overturning this law did not.
When the Chinese merchants appealed their case to the US Supreme Court, racial lines became reorganized along class lines due to the different economic priorities of the metropole versus the colony. The merchants appealed their case to a pro-business, anti-labor US Supreme Court. Amidst a massive wave of labor strikes from 1919 to the 1920s, the Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strengthen corporate power.Footnote 109 An ambiguous 1920s Equal Protection Clause was a “lost doctrine” that “drifted from case to case, absorbing the larger agendas of the Court, like the protection of national markets…or the safeguarding of commercial corporations.”Footnote 110 The US Supreme Court used the Equal Protection Clause as part of its pro-business stances—what Sam Erman would characterize as part of the decline of the Reconstruction Constitution.Footnote 111 The Reconstruction Constitution’s decline was especially relevant for Chinese immigrants to US territories like the Philippines, because it meant the US Supreme Court could select which parts of the US constitution, like birthright citizenship, would apply in its new colonies. From the perspective of citizenship and political belonging, Philippine-born Chinese were largely excluded from Filipino citizenship and did not always benefit from US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which established birthright citizenship for US-born children of Chinese nationals.Footnote 112 But from the lens of property accumulation, mercantile alien residents in US colonies could economically benefit from a pro-business US Supreme Court involved in the decline of the Reconstruction Constitution.
Chinese merchants in the Philippines could benefit from the US Supreme Court’s pro-business stances due to a more centralized US imperial legal system that gave them direct access to metropolitan justices. During the Spanish colonial period, the highest court that subjects in the Philippines had access to was the Real Audiencia of Manila (1583–1901), which exercised jurisdiction over other Spanish colonies in the region, like modern-day Guam.Footnote 113 Unlike the Audiencia, the Philippine Supreme Court was not the highest court of appeal available to residents of the Philippines. It was the US Supreme Court, which applied the same legal system used in the US metropole. Colonial subjects had access to the same highest court that also served US residents. This meant that that Chinese merchants in the Philippines could benefit from the pro-business US Supreme Court that had helped to establish the rise of corporations in the metropolitan United States.
The Bookkeeping Act caught the attention of William Taft, now the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, who explained that this case “seriously affected numerous persons and extensive property rights.”Footnote 114 Leia Casteñeda Anastacio, in her history of US constitutional colonialism in the Philippines, identifies how the rise of private property rights characterized US and Filipino officials’ translation of US law to the Philippines.Footnote 115 Taft, as the first Philippine Governors General, had particularly supported private investments and freedom for corporations instead of redistributing land and wealth in the islands.Footnote 116 His experience in this role and his belief in the importance of private property rights dovetailed with Philippine Chinese merchants’ desire to overturn this law. Consequently, his court declared the Bookkeeping Act a violation of these merchants’ right to equal protection under the US Constitution.
When Taft became the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, he extended the Lochner era of US legal history, where the Court was known for striking down economic regulations by emphasizing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the right to buy and sell labor.Footnote 117 In his landmark study of the Taft Court, Robert Post observes that for Taft, private property rights were society’s bedrock. Taft believed that the government provided various freedoms to society, such as the right to religion. But the most important freedom for Taft was the freedom to own property.Footnote 118 This was true when he was Governor-General of the Philippines and as a Supreme Court justice.Footnote 119 Post places the merchants’ victory in Yu Cong Eng within the category of the US Supreme Court’s protection of “economic rights.”Footnote 120
While the Bookkeeping Act did not outright name the Chinese as targets, Taft wrote that there was no doubt that the act was a “fiscal measure chiefly directed against the Chinese merchants.” He highlighted Yu Cong Eng’s testimony, claiming that “a very large majority of all” Chinese merchants in the islands only knew Chinese and relied on their Chinese books. Banning Chinese-language books would make merchants “prey to all kinds of fraud.” Significantly, this anti-Chinese law would “greatly and disastrously curtail their liberty of action, and be oppressive and damaging in the preservation of their property.” Taft’s opinion emphasized evidence of the Philippine Chinese merchants’ crippling monolinguism, and Taft with the merchants’ self-representation in their testimonies as a class of persons eligible for equal protection. In the US Supreme Court’s ruling against the Bookkeeping Act, racial discrimination became the justification for invalidating economic regulation.
While Taft used the Fourteenth Amendment to overthrow the law, it was more through the logic of due process instead of equal protection. The Chinese merchants’ legal defense which aligned their identity with property ownership and “abstract capital” meant that the US Supreme Court saw this case as primarily about economic rights. At the end of his opinion, Taft cursorily observed that the Bookkeeping Act clearly targeted the Chinese without even mentioning Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). It was not about protecting Chinese merchants, even though this law singled out this immigrant community. It was more about procedural fairness than race, even though the merchants went to great lengths to demonstrate their eligibility to be a protected class.
US trade relations with China factored into why the US Supreme Court enforced the private property rights of the Philippine Chinese merchants.Footnote 121 Chinese merchants in the Philippines had political representation in Qing China’s new constitutional assembly, and the Chinese government had an Imperial Consulate in the Philippines. Taft, who encouraged the formation of the Manila Chinese Chamber of Commerce, believed that the Bookkeeping law damaged US-China trade relations because of the Chinese merchants’ ties to the Qing government. His ruling against the law allowed the Court to uphold the Open Door policy, which stipulated that the US would support Chinese territorial and administrative integrity.
While the Insular Government in the Philippines prioritized ethno-national state-building, the US Supreme Court aimed for the US to maintain trade relations with China and to protect businesses in the Philippines. This tension between the Insular Government’s anti-Chineseness and the US Supreme Court’s protection of property was also central to conflicts between settlers and residents in the US West, where working-class colonial settlers in the late nineteenth-century US West aspired to an “imagined free white republic” by excluding the Chinese, while expansionist American commercial elites saw Chinese migration as their bridge into Chinese markets.Footnote 122 Disagreements about the Bookkeeping Act in the Philippines reflected similar tensions within the US empire. For Philippine-based politicians, the law was an expression of nationalism and a government growing fit for independence because it increased regulatory power for positions like the Collector of Internal Revenue and the Manila City Fiscal. Meanwhile, for US-based politicians and lawmakers, the law went against their belief in corporations, private property, and aspirations for trade with China, which was a major reason the US seized the Philippines after the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Philippine-American War (1899–1902).Footnote 123
Alienage in the Mainland versus the Colonies
The Chinese merchants’ victory against the Bookkeeping Act expands the history of alienage to the US overseas colonies, where alien residents had greater property rights.Footnote 124 Due to the extension of Chinese exclusion laws to the Philippines in 1902, Chinese immigrants could not naturalize as Filipino citizens and were thus legally categorized as “aliens,” similar to the Asian immigrant population in the US during this time.Footnote 125 A few years before striking down the Bookkeeping Act, Taft had adjudicated a set of cases that affirmed the Alien Land Laws (1913–1946), which forbade residents ineligible for citizenship from purchasing and leasing property.Footnote 126 While Taft revoked the Bookkeeping Act for its infringement on private property rights, his court upheld the Alien Land Laws, which denied essential property rights.Footnote 127
Aliens in the US had weaker private property rights than those in US colonies because the US Supreme Court had greater sovereignty over the Philippine Supreme Court than US state courts. The chief case against the Alien Land Laws, Terrace v. Thompson (1923), argued that the laws violated the equal protection rights of a Japanese farmer and the US-Japan Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907–1924). The Court faced the claim that the alien land laws “discriminated ‘arbitrarily against Nakatsuka [the Japanese farmer] and other ineligible aliens because of their race and color.’”Footnote 128 But the Court sidestepped this issue by arguing that these laws were under Washington state’s purview.Footnote 129 A similar argument about state sovereignty was made for another case challenging a California alien land law. In the lead opinion, supported by Taft, Justice Butler wrote: “In the matter of classification, the States have a wide discretion.”Footnote 130 State sovereignty blocked aliens in US states from benefiting from the Equal Protection Clause to the same degree when attempting to overturn laws denying them property. But the US Supreme Court’s greater sovereignty over the Philippine Supreme Court allowed it to declare the Bookkeeping Act unconstitutional. Taft and the other judges were “clearly of [shared] opinion that [the Bookkeeping Act] was not within the police power of the Philippine Legislature, because it would be oppressive and arbitrary” if all Chinese merchants could not maintain a set of books in Chinese languages and characters.Footnote 131
In terms of the hierarchy of access to private property rights, the outcome of Yu Cong Eng indicates that the US counterparts of Chinese aliens resident in US colonies were not Japanese aliens but European migrants.Footnote 132 For Chinese merchant alien residents in the Philippines, Taft drew parallels in the US not with Chinese and Japanese alien residents but with higher-status white Austrians who were unaffected by the Alien Land Laws because they could naturalize as US citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1870.Footnote 133 In his opinion, he referred to a 1915 US Supreme Court case, Truax v. Raich, which overturned a law mandating that an employer have a minimum of eighty percent native-born citizen employees. Taft connected the experience of Philippine Chinese merchants to Austrian alien residents in the US being denied equal protection. Interestingly, this case was also about the protection of the US citizen workforce, but the court upheld the corporate power to make contracts. He observed: “As against the Chinese merchants in the Philippines, we think the present law which deprives them of something indispensable to the carrying on of their business, and is obviously intended chiefly to affect them, as distinguished from the rest of the community, is a denial to them of the equal protection of the laws.” Even though Chinese aliens in the Philippines were unable to naturalize as Filipinos (paralleling the denial of citizenship for Chinese and Japanese aliens in the US), they benefited from the Equal Protection Clause in similar manner as the Austrian aliens who could naturalize as US citizens. To the US Supreme Court, the Chinese merchants in the US colony of the Philippines were rights-bearing subjects with more power than Asian residents in the metropolitan US.
The way that Philippine Chinese merchants in this Supreme Court case racialized themselves as alien capital helps explain why, as alien subjects, they were treated less like Asian immigrants to the US proper and more like Austrian residents. The cultural meanings of Japanese resident aliens in California versus Chinese resident aliens in the Philippines differed. Both groups were racialized in terms of their economic value, but the agriculturally efficient Japanese farmer threatened white settler expansion while the globally networked Chinese merchant served US imperial commerce. Scholars agree that Japanese agricultural upward mobility in California fueled the California Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920, and Colleen Lye observes this as an example of how Japanese farmers were racialized in terms of their “superior Asiatic industry in the agricultural sector.”Footnote 134 In California, Japanese farmers were part of an “Asiatic invasion” of white settler colonial space, and the Alien Land Laws expressed a “territorial definition of land as national soil.”Footnote 135 In the Philippines, however, Chinese merchants were part of the local landscape before US rule. Taft, in his opinion striking down the Bookkeeping Act, observed that “Chinese merchants are said to have been in the Philippines even before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1520,” and that Chinese merchants had “extensive and important business long established.”Footnote 136 The different economic positions of Asian aliens in US states versus those in US overseas colonies help to explain why Taft repudiated the Bookkeeping Act but affirmed the Alien Land Laws. California was a white settler territory where resident Japanese farmers competed with white farmers. Meanwhile, the Philippines was an overseas colonial territory that would never be fully incorporated as part of the US, making resident Chinese merchants useful for distributing US goods.
While Taft’s ruling against the Bookkeeping Act was a victory for the merchants, it unintentionally entrenched the merchants’ alien position in Philippine politics. The ruling was a blow to the Insular Government, which was undergoing a process of “Filipinization” in replacing American officials with Filipino ones.Footnote 137 Philippine-based officials argued that the US Supreme Court should treat the Philippine Supreme Court like a state court with sovereignty over its own statutes. Taft rejected this claim, declaring that “the Philippines are within the exclusive jurisdiction of the US government, with complete power of legislation in Congress over them,” especially in cases related to “questions of statutory construction.”Footnote 138 As a result, Filipino legislators who wrote the Bookkeeping Act were resentful that the US Supreme Court restricted their law-making powers.Footnote 139 An editorial in the Filipino press lamented, “we cannot do what would be protective of our interests in our own country…we have received a command from America hurtful of our interests but helpful to aliens, a command denying us a right and granting them a privilege.”Footnote 140 From the perspective of these legislators, the US Supreme Court’s ruling granted “alien” merchants the “privilege” of the Fourteenth Amendment, while denying the Philippine government their “right” to self-determination. Lim Boon Keng, a prominent Straits Chinese educator and politician, critiqued his fellow Chinese for bypassing the Philippine Senate and going to the US to resolve this dispute.Footnote 141 The Chinese merchant community had undercut the power of local officials by appealing to the metropole and emphasizing how Philippine society was alienating them and their businesses.
Philippine Chinese merchants’ “alien” position in Philippine society was part of the resurgence of the Bookkeeping Act during US withdrawal from the Philippines. In 1935, after the Philippines began its transition to independence, the new Philippine National Assembly passed another version of the Act (Bill No. 67) one year later.Footnote 142 As US political power became less visible in Philippine politics, an increasingly powerful Nacionalista political party in the Philippines promoted a “patriotic” Filipino capital, while scapegoating an “alien” Chinese capital in the Philippines. Unlike the US Supreme Court who saw the Philippine Chinese merchants as essential to Philippine economic development, the dominant Nacionalista party defined economic development in relation to having greater control over capital in the islands.
Conclusion
In most of Southeast Asia, Chineseness is associated with capital, and the Chinese merchants’ lawsuit against the Bookkeeping Act in US colonial Philippines provides a valuable case study for helping to understand how this came to be. The 1920s rise and fall of the Bookkeeping Act uncovers how law became a terrain where the Philippine Insular Government, the Chinese merchant community, and the US Supreme Court debated the role of Chinese merchant capital in the Philippines. The Insular Government passed the law to mark, contain, and regulate Chinese merchant capital while permitting unmarked Euro-American capital and promoting a nationalistic Filipino capital. Chinese merchants in the Philippines, meanwhile, emphasized how their business practices were too “alien” to accommodate the law’s language requirements and that an attack on their industries was also an attack on global capital. The US Supreme Court understood this law as an affront to private property rights, which they believed were fundamental to Philippine society, so they declared it unconstitutional.
The merchants’ victory against the Bookkeeping Act was short-lived, but it reveals how alien residents in US colonial Philippines had a different relationship to the priorities of the US Supreme Court compared to Asian alien residents in US states. Chinese merchants in the Philippines helped to distribute US goods across the Philippines, while Japanese farmers in California threatened white US settler colonial expansion. These differing roles, combined with the fact that California had greater law-making powers than the colony of the Philippines, meant that Philippine Chinese merchants accessed greater economic power than was wished for locally.
To the Philippine Insular Government, the merchants’ victory at the US Supreme Court meant an attack on their sovereignty. As a result, the merchants’ victory came at the cost of their social and political integration in the Philippines, even as it affirmed their private property rights. The economic autonomy that they maintained, combined with their social and political alienation helps to shed light on the association of Chineseness with capital in in the Philippines today. The legal history behind this alienation, as this article has demonstrated, was initiated not just by the Philippine Insular Government, but also, by the Chinese merchants themselves.
Acknowledgments
The Fulbright Program, the American Society for Legal History, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations financially supported the research for this article. Todd Shepard, Martha Jones, Kristin Oberiano, Bruce Schulman, Shi-Lin Loh, Moses Nakamura, and anonymous readers at Law and History Review read, edited, and/or commented on multiple drafts of this article. Participants at the Johns Hopkins University Modern American Seminar and those at the 2023 Hurst Summer Institute also provided invaluable feedback. Finally, this article would not have been possible without the help of librarians at the Chinben See Memorial Library in the Kaisa Heritage Center and archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D. C.
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