Patriotic Transformations in Philadelphia Chinatown

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On a chilly October afternoon in 1937, hundreds of Philadelphians gathered on the 900 block of Race Street to watch a lion dance. The lion was constructed entirely from cloth and paper-mâché, and its singular horn and long mane resembled the mythical Chinese monster Nian. Two costumed performers, one resembling the lion’s head and the other the tail, danced to the violent rhythm of gongs and cymbals, and spectators threw bills and coins into the lion’s gaping mouth. For hours, the lion troupe entertained Chinatown and its visitors, raising thousands of dollars for a critical cause near and dear to the Chinatown community.¹

Held on the 26th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China, Chinatown’s parade celebrated Chinese nationalism and served as a fundraising opportunity to aid refugees displaced by the Second Sino-Japanese War. Schoolchildren led the procession, carrying banners calling for transnational solidarity with the Chinese Republic. Others lifted large white tarps reading “Please Help Chinese War Refugee Relief” for bystanders and second-story window watchers to throw coins and money into. Merchants strung dollar bills on long strings from their shop windows and sold little flags to contribute to the relief fund. In July of 1937, the Empire of Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War. By October of 1937, Japanese forces had taken Beijing and Tianjin and were close to defeating Chinese forces in Shanghai. Fierce fighting in the city created a humanitarian crisis; aerial bombardments killed thousands and millions of civilians were forced to flee their homes. News of the crisis in Shanghai mobilized Philadelphia Chinatown to act. By the end of the day, Chinatown had raised several thousand dollars to support Chinese war refugees.

Political speech was sprinkled in the celebration. In between performances, Chinatown leaders voiced their opposition to the Japanese invasion. At 2 o’clock, the parade procession paused for an intermission, and a large crowd of Chinatown residents and non-Chinese visitors congregated on a Race Street parking lot to hear Wellington Meng speak. Meng, the president of the Chinese Students’ Association of Philadelphia, described the harrowing humanitarian crisis in China and predicted Japan would not stop at China and intended on “[dominating] the world.” Meng warned the crowd that the Chinese soldiers fighting against the Japanese invaders in Shanghai “[were the world’s] last chance to arrest the ambition of Japan.” Raising a call for action, Meng urged listeners to lend their support to the Chinese soldiers on the frontlines fighting against a common enemy and the Chinese civilians victimized by the Japanese Empire.

The broader Philadelphia community’s response to Chinatown’s parade was overwhelmingly positive. Both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Camden Courier-Post covered the parade in their Monday morning editions. The Courier-Post noted that “many non-Chinese” were among the crowd of spectators making donations and gathering to hear Meng speak.² The newspaper reception of the parade was radically different compared to its coverage of Chinatown in the years before. During the early 1920s, only sensationalized accounts of Chinatown crime and Tong violence populated the newspapers. A little over a decade later, Chinatown’s charity efforts graced the covers of those very same newspapers.

A Blend of National Support and Anti-Japanese Propaganda

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Philadelphia Chinatown mobilized for the Chinese war effort and served as a major organizing point for pro-Chinese fundraising and political demonstrations. In 1938, Chinatown decided to postpone and use the money allocated towards Chinese New Year celebrations and parades to support Chinese refugees displaced by the war.³ Organizations such as the Women’s Committee for Civilian Relief in China met in Chinatown to discuss fundraising plans.⁴ Massive banquets, such as the Bowl of Rice Party, hosted in Chinatown were well attended by the Philadelphia city elite and raised sums for Chinese civilian relief.⁵ Chinatown students performed lion dances and merchants sold flags to raise money for bombing victims. Chinatown’s transnational ties to China made it a natural channel for funneling money for Chinese war relief.

An effective strategy embraced by Chinese Americans was to frame American support for China as an anti-Japanese cause. Despite America’s reluctance to intervene in the war, graphic media coverage of the Japanese bombardment of Chinese civilians in Shanghai generated considerable American sympathy for the Chinese and antagonism for the Japanese.⁶ Furthermore, the Japanese invasion of China only accentuated American fears of the “dangerous and barbaric” Japanese infringing on American land and bodies. Chinese Americans, whether knowingly or not, capitalized on America’s intense Yellow Peril ideology by emphasizing the growing threat of the Japanese Empire to the rest of the world. Chinatown merchants launched a boycott of Japanese goods to slow the Japanese economy and war machine. At the lion dance parade, Luther Lee, a Chinese businessman and president of the Chinese Nationalist Society, invoked American fears of Japan as a military threat, arguing that “if Japan can bomb noncombatants in China she can do it in America.”⁷ If Americans were unmoved by the killings of innocent Chinese civilians, perhaps the threat of an impending Japanese invasion of America would lead to action.

Wellington Meng, or Meng Chi-Tseng, was the keynote speaker at the lion dance parade and spearheaded the anti-Japanese movement in Philadelphia. Meng was a product of American foreign policy in China. He trained and worked as an administrator at West China Union University, a private Christian founded by American missionaries following the Boxer Rebellion, and his immigration to the United States was conditional based on his educational, and religious background. In Philadelphia, Meng was admitted to the Crozer Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania for religious and political studies. In Philadelphia Chinatown, Meng quickly became a student activist in the community, leveraging his religious ties to spread the anti-Japanese movement within the city and across state borders. He utilized his friendship with religious figures like Reverend James H. Davis to give anti-Japanese speeches to Church audiences.⁸ In 1938, he embarked on a speaking tour and gave speeches on the subject of “Why America Should Fight to Protect Chinese Rights” in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.⁹ Meng later returned to China during the war, becoming the head of the YMCA in Chengdu and even receiving a telegram from Chiang Kai Shek thanking him for his religious service to the country.¹⁰

Non-Chinese organizations picked up on the growing anti-Japanese movement originating from Philadelphia Chinatown. Philadelphia charity groups had sponsored China relief in the past, but the new collaborations took on an anti-Japanese, anti-imperialist bent. Chinatown forged alliances with sympathetic political groups, including the American League against War and Fascism (ALWF) and the American Youth Congress (AYC), and they staged mass demonstrations and boycotts against Japanese aggression.¹¹ In late November, the Japanese Boycott Committee, supported by the ALWF, staged a parade on Market and Walnut Street in support of an economic boycott against Japan.¹² Chinese women wore traditional Qipao, serving as auxiliary forces to the army of women wearing pro boycott placards. In December, a larger boycott march organized by the AYC filled through mid-town and called on holiday shoppers to avoid shopping at Japanese stores and buying Japanese goods. Despite the protests of local hosiery workers hurt by the boycott of Japanese silk, Philadelphia contributed to the national reduction of Japan’s silk exports to the United States of sixty percent from 1936 to 1938.¹³ The growth of an anti-Japanese movement in Philadelphia over the course of a couple months was a testament to the tireless political advocacy of Chinese Americans in contributing to the change in American sentiment towards the Sino-Japanese War.

Philadelphia’s anti-Japanese movement grew at the expense of the local Japanese community. Across the United States, Japanese communities were engulfed in crisis; despite some Japanese Americans supporting the boycott against Japanese aggression, all Japanese faced American retribution for their perceived ties to the Japanese Empire. In the late 19th century, several Japanese import and export stores surfaced in Philadelphia. Beginning in 1915, Yosaburo Okamoto and his brother Tokizo ran the Okamoto Brothers Japanese store, and sold Japanese art, silk, and other fine goods in Center City. The anti-Japanese rhetoric and boycotts negatively affected Japanese businesses like the Okamotos, and many Japanese merchants were forced to abandon their livelihoods and become domestic servants. Japanese professionals, like architect Yosuke W. Nakano, were pressured for removal from firm projects because of their ancestry.

As the Second Sino-Japanese War progressed and Japanese military atrocities like the Nanking massacre entered the public consciousness, American public opinion became decidedly pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese—charity and protest demonstrations against Japan drew more participants and spectators. With America’s entry into the war, the Chinese were racialized as sympathetic friends and the Japanese as treacherous foes. Federal policy enshrined the new racial standing of both Asian ethnic groups. After relentless pressure from the political activism of Chinese Americans and the Republic of China, President Roosevelt signed the 1943 Magnuson Act. The 1943 Act served as a gesture of goodwill to America’s ally, China, and as an attempt to dispel racial critiques of the US’ treatment of Chinese Americans by Japan, ending decades of Chinese exclusion and the denaturalization of Chinese immigrants. Two years prior, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, criminalizing and forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps because of their perceived disloyalty to America and loyalty to Japan. In Philadelphia, which was outside of the exclusion zone, Japanese Issei were subjected to curfews, randomly interrogated by the FBI, needed permission to travel five miles beyond their homes, and had their financial assets frozen.

The lionization of the Chinese and the demonization of the Japanese illustrated the fragility and importance of transnational politics to Asian external and internal racial formations. Chinese American sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed that “as violently as the Chinese were once attacked, they are now glorified and mounted on a pedestal.”¹⁴ Shifting geopolitical power relations cast Japanese Americans as America’s treacherous enemy. Tragically, ideas of race and physical difference were just as arbitrary as the decision to prosecute Japanese Americans because of their ancestry. Appearance-wise, white Americans could not distinguish Japanese from Chinese Americans, and in Philadelphia Chinatown, Chinese Americans wore buttons and pins to avoid being mistaken as Japanese.

1. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Manchu Lion Roars for War Fund Here,” October 11, 1937. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
2. Courier-Post, “Phila. Dragon Aids Sufferers in China,” October 11, 1937. Camden, New Jersey. ↩︎
3. Kathryn Wilson. Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia Chinatown: Space, Place, and Struggle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) ↩︎
4. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “China Relief Meeting, “June 5, 1938. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
5. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chinese Hold ‘Rice Bowl’ Dinner,” December 5, 1939. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
6. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American experience in China, 1911–45. (Bantam Books, 1972) ↩︎
7. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Manchu Lion Roars for War Fund Here,” October 11, 1937. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
8. The Evening News ,“Wellington Meng Will Speak Here,” June 6, 1938, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
9. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “China Relief Meeting,” June 5, 1938, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
10. Chester Times, “Making Appeal for Chinese Aid,” January 7, 1938, Chester, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
11. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mid-Town Parade Calls For Boycott,” December 19, 1937, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
12. The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Anti-Japanese Parade Will Be Held Today,” November 20, 1937, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
13. K. Scott Wong, “Parades, Pickets, and Protests,” Humanities, July/August 2007, Vol. 28, No. 4 ↩︎
14. Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York: John Day Co., 1958), 120. ↩︎