Explain the history of the Chinese experience in the United States. How did this affect organized criminal activity among the Chinese?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Chinese immigrants throughout the world were subjected to pernicious discrimination to which they responded by relying on cultural attributes that provided great advantages in business, both legal and illegal.
Chinese laborers were originally brought into the United States after 1848 to work in the gold fields of California, particularly in those aspects of mining that were most dangerous because few white men were willing to engage in blasting shafts, placing beams, and laying track lines in the gold mines. Chinese immigrants also helped to build the Western railroad lines at pay few whites would accept—known as "coolie wages.". After their work was completed, Chinese were often banned from the rural counties; by the 1860s they were clustering in cities on the Pacific coast, where they established Chinatowns. Hostility toward Chinese was codified in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusionary Act. This law was repealed in 1943, a time when the United States was allied with China in war against Japan.
Chinese became the targets of abuse and random violence and found refuge in urban areas where they established "Chinatowns" and formed mutual aid societies and tongs. Tongs were first established in San Francisco in the 1850s as benevolent societies. They provided loans and legal assistance and oversaw vice operations that catered to the primarily male Chinese population (Keefe 2009).