The Herald: Harker Historical Review - Volume 2, Issue 1, June 2022

Cover Art by Kailash Ranganathan (2022)

Herald Harker Historical Review

Volume 2, Issue 1 June 2022

Table of Contents Acknowledgements The Board

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Preface

vii

Preface

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Introduction

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Evolution of Scientific Historiography

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Women of the French Revolution

6

“A Tongue Intelligible to All”

10

China’s Persisting Hukou System: 60 Years of Division

26

Connections Between Black and Asian Americans in Civil Rights Actions

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Donna Gilbert Lauri J. Vaughan Justin Fung

Tanay Sharma

Tiffany Chang and Jeremy Ko Rupert Chen Sally Zhu

Gordon Chen

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

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Russian Revelations

70

Emmett Chung and Krish Maniar Annmaria Antony and Armaan Thakker

Table of Contents About the Authors

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The Board

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Acknowledgements

The creation of the Herald would not have been possible without the support of the entire Harker community, to which we owe a great debt of gratitude. We would like to thank the staff and faculty for supporting our mission, in particular Mr. Byron Stevens, Ms. Donna Gilbert, Mr. Mark Janda, Mrs. Meredith Cranston, Ms. Amy Pelman, and Mrs. Lauri Vaughan.

We also truly appreciate the encouragement and enthusiasm brought by Mr. Clifford Hull, Ms. Roxana Pianko, Ms. Katy Rees, and Mr. Jonathan Rim for promoting interest in the journal and historical research. We would also like to extend our sincerest thanks to Mr. Butch Keller for supporting this program of the History Department and allowing us the opportunity to share the plethora of exciting research by students in our community. Last but not least, we would like to congratulate and applaud the authors of this issue’s papers for their unceasing curiosity, love of learning, and commitment to academic excellence surpassing all expectations.

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Preface The History and Social Science Department is proud to showcase the exemplary work of our students. Research is one of the core pillars of historical scholarship and part of the exciting journey of exploration that is the foundation of our department. The Herald, edited and curated by students and for students, reflects student initiative, creativity, and high regard for authentic inquiry and superior writing. We welcome and celebrate this addition to our research program and hope that it will inspire future Harker students to embrace every opportunity to investigate the past and understand our world.

Donna Gilbert Harker History & Art History Instructor Near Mitra Chen Lin Program Co-Director

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Preface Writing, rewriting, editing, and publishing a collection of research is no small feat. Most of us have struggled through the difficulties as well as the joyful discoveries of research, ultimately wrestling new-to-us ideas into a readable, evidence-based argument. To edit others’ research is a more ambitious but less glorified task. One might remark, “That’s a beautifully written piece,” but when was the last time you heard, “Whoa! Stunning editing, that!” To initiate and establish a publication in hopes that it will continue long after you have moved on is yet more remarkable – possibly only as extraordinary as it is unacknowledged.

Having worked with the student editors of the Herald over the past three years, I have observed their tremendous dedication to take on difficult tasks. When I handed Catherine, Gordon and Justin a brutally reviewed first draft in 2019, I fully expected the project to fold. Editing a journal is not something that can be done halfway. Editors either embrace challenging criteria and adopt extremely high standards or they don’t publish. With the commitments Harker students tackle day to day, I would not have been disappointed had this editorial staff abandoned an overshot ambition.

To my absolute delight, these determined teens recruited others like them, realigned their objectives, took on the mantle of fierce but responsible editors and ran toward success. And they met it. This year for the second time. They learned how to participate in scholarly dialogue in classes at Harker. Then, independently and without any promise of a reward that might measure up to the bleary-eyed time they spent at their laptops, they generated their own conversation. How comforting to know these are but the first conversations they will initiate! How exciting to think ofwhat they will inspire and shepherd into being in their futures!

Congratulations and thank you, brave editors!

Mrs. Lauri J. Vaughan Library Director Near Mitra Chen Lin Program Co-Director

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Introduction The Herald Editorial Board is delighted to present the brilliant work of Harker students in the second volume of the Herald’s publication. With research inspired by philosophy, politics, linguistics, and more, this issue of the Herald demonstrates history’s abilities to connect people with the past and foster engagement in the present. With this in mind, the stellar work of the authors highlights history as an ongoing conversation—an investigative dialogue with the potential to inspire. Our purpose as a student-run publication is to celebrate this exploration and, through our editorial process, augment the authors’ historical writing skills. We welcome humanities-oriented papers from all courses and independent research, and we are always open to questions at herald@students.harker.org. It has been a pleasure to work with this issue’s authors, and we hope that these papers will encourage you to reflect on why history matters and how history guides our actions today.

Justin Fung Herald Editor-in-Chief

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The Evolution of Scientific Revolution Historiography in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

Tanay Sharma

Before other existing scientific models gained popularity during the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, science was based almost entirely on the beliefs of classical Greco-Roman scientists, such as Aristotle and Ptolemy.1 The emergence of humanism and the increase in communication during the Renaissance along with a new focus on the scientific method led to experimental proofs, superseding the older model of deriving new theories from previously discovered formulae.2 While scholarship on the Scientific Revolution in the 1960s primarily analyzed the technological advancements of the Scientific Revolution, studies from the early twenty-first century focus more on the ideological and philosophical legacies of the Scientific Revolution.

1 “Scientific Revolution,” in Gale World History Online Collection (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2020), Gale in Context: World History (accessed June 1, 2021).

2 “Scientific Revolution.”

Tanay Sharma wrote this paper for a historiography research assignment for AP European History with Mr. Byron Stevens in the 2020-2021 school year.

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Historians in the 1960s initially emphasized the impact of newly developed machines and methods on scientific research. Herbert Butterfield, a Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, explained the modern scientist’s newfound affinity for experimentation rather than the philosophy of deductive reasoning to explain the universe in a famous article published in the popular journal Scientific American.3 Scientists acquired accurate and consistent results with machines such as ordnance and pumps.4 Butterfield’s article explains how a newfound interest in technology during the Scientific Revolution contributed to a surge of scientific exploration.5 The article also contains images of the technological developments created because of the Scientific Revolution, most significantly a print from a Gutenberg printing press and a woodcut of Copernicus’s original heliocentric model of the universe.6 Butterfield concentrates on the technical and concrete products of the Scientific Revolution rather than the shifts in ideology discussed in later historical works.

In a 1962 article in Science, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote of the framework for scientific innovation, describing specific examples of discoveries from the Scientific Revolution, such as those of oxygen and Uranus.7 Kuhn’s definition of ‘paradigms’ in his monumental 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, quickly became a reference point for both scientists and historians and revolutionized the history of science, according to historian Hugo Meynell in a 1975 article in the journal Mind.8 Historian Allen G. Debus wrote in Isis in 1998 that most historians of science began purely as scientists, explaining this ideology-heavy approach.9 While the inventions of the Scientific Revolution advanced society considerably, most quickly became obsolete. By the twenty-first century, interest in the historiography of particular inventions receded in favor of more relevant 3 Herbert Butterfield, “The Scientific Revolution,” Scientific American 203, no. 3 (1960): 182, JSTOR. 4 Butterfield, 182.

5 Butterfield, 182.

6 Butterfield, 178 and 180.

7 Thomas S. Kuhn, “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” Science 136, no. 3518 (1962): 2-3, JSTOR. 8 Hugo Meynell, “Science, the Truth, and Thomas Kuhn,” Mind 84, no. 333 (1975): 80, JSTOR. 9 Allen G. Debus, “Chemists, Physicians, and Changing Perspectives on the Scientific Revolution,” Isis 89, no. 1 (1998): 2, JSTOR.

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philosophical topics.

By the late 2000s and early 2010s, historians directed their studies of the Scientific Revolution towards the shift in scientific philosophy from deductive reasoning, a methodology based on derivation from previous knowledge, to empirical reasoning, a methodology based on experimentation and observation. In his 2015 book, The Scientific Revolution Revisited, Mikuláš Teich differentiates Francis Bacon’s pursuit of knowledge through experimentation from René Descartes’s pursuit of knowledge through derivations and reasoning.10 Bacon’s philosophy involved observing nature, while Descartes used logic to draw results.

During the Scientific Revolution, scientists leaned closer towards Bacon’s empiricism than Descartes’s derivation and used Bacon’s refined scientific method to systematically research and publish scientific findings.11 While science during the Scientific Revolution focused on empiricism and inductive reasoning, modern science balances inductive and deductive reasoning to find and prove physical laws.12 Teich used his knowledge of science history to better describe the significance of the Scientific Revolution on modern scientific procedure and exemplifies something of a “paradigm shift” within scientific historiography itself. The historian John Henry similarly analyzed the scientific method as the driving force of scientific advancement in a 2008 essay.13 Henry also drew ideas from and analyzed the ideas set forth by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, including the concept of paradigm shifts.14 Harold J. Cook, a history professor at Brown University, also supported this analysis when he paraphrased economic historian Joel Mokyr’s claim that scientific discoveries made during the Scientific Revolution gained credence and therefore influence because of the empirical method.15 The new ideologically focused historiography better emphasizes the long-term effects of the Scientific Revolution and the 10 Mikuláš Teich, The Scientific Revolution Revisited (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 79, ProQuest Ebook Central.

11 Teich, 85.

12 “Scientific Revolution.”

13 John Henry, “Ideology, Inevitability, and the Scientific Revolution,” Isis 99, no. 3 (2008): 4, JSTOR. 14 Henry, 4-5.

15 Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, New Jersey, 2002), 31, quoted in Harold J. Cook, “Moving about and Finding Things Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution,” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 6, JSTOR.

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massive change that Bacon’s philosophy brought to Europe, and the rest of the scientific world, as demonstrated by Bacon’s lasting impact in the modern world.

In the middle of the twentieth century, historians of science, such as Butterfield, emphasized technological innovations and the role of tangible results from the Scientific Revolution. Later, historians of science shifted towards explaining the ideological effects of Bacon, Descartes, and empiricism. While the inventions of the Scientific Revolution were quickly replaced during and after the Industrial Revolution, the philosophical and ideological innovations have maintained their importance. This is reflected in the shift in scientific historiography from focusing on technology to concentrating on ideology, a change that better expresses the lasting effects of the scientific developments of the era.

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Bibliography Butterfield, Herbert. “The Scientific Revolution.” Scientific American 203, no. 3 (September 1960): 173-93. JSTOR. Cook, Harold J. “Moving about and Finding Things Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution.” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 101-32. JSTOR. Debus, Allen G. “Chemists, Physicians, and Changing Perspectives on the Scientific Revolution.” Isis 89, no. 1 (1998): 66-81. JSTOR. Henry, John. “Ideology, Inevitability, and the Scientific Revolution.” Isis 99, no. 3 (2008): 552-59. JSTOR. Kuhn, Thomas S. “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery.” Science 136, no. 3518 (1962): 760-64. JSTOR. Meynell, Hugo. “Science, the Truth, and Thomas Kuhn.” Mind 84, no. 333 (1975): 79-93. JSTOR. “Scientific Revolution.” In Gale World History Online Collection. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2020. World History in Context.

Teich, Mikuláš. The Scientific Revolution Revisited. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015. Open Book Publishers.

A Historiography of Views Regarding Women of the French Revolution

Tiffany Chang and Jeremy Ko

For late eighteenth century Europe, the French Revolution of 1789 marked the beginning of a period of great social and political change.1 With this transformation, the corresponding shift in women’s roles emerged as a subject of much scrutiny and disagreement among historians.

In the first few months of the revolution, the National Assembly drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a document that defined the rights of male citizens but held a vague stance towards women’s rights, an issue that would cause turmoil in the following years.2 However, working class Parisian women soon compelled King Louis XVI to return to the city 1 Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Urban Institutions and Politics: The Early Modern Period,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. Peter N. Stearns (Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 2:305, World History in Context.

2 Peter McPhee, “French Revolution,” in Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter (Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 2:887, World History in Context.

Tiffany Chang and Jeremy Ko wrote this paper for a historiography research assignment for AP European History with Mr. Byron Stevens in the 20202021 school year.

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from his palace at Versailles, which brought him under the power of the Assembly and proved to the world the potential of women to further the French Revolution’s goals and political ideals.3 Although many historians from the twentieth century viewed that the French Revolution sparked an era of female oppression and political exclusion, more recently historians support the belief that the French Revolution increased women’s rights and political power.

Throughout the late twentieth century, historians espoused the notion that women were generally barred from participating in politics due to the Revolution’s focus on male influence in politics.4 Catherine MarandFoquet argued in an 1989 article that the negative impacts of the French Revolution on women, ranging from monetary loss to the death of family members to legal restraints, far outweighed any potential improvements in women’s political power or rights.5 Likewise, Marilyn Yalom’s bicentennial article provides a series of biographical accounts from Parisian women that emphasized women’s misery and prohibition from politics, displaying the late twentieth-century belief among scholars that the French Revolution brought great oppression upon women.6 However, by the turn of the twenty-first century, historians began to emphasize the fluctuations in gender hierarchies and the great potential for change brought about by the French Revolution, challenging past historians’ views of the Revolution’s role in forcing women into domestic life and away from participation in politics.7 Preserved texts from the French Revolution enabled modern-day historians to form counterarguments against twentieth-century views: for example, Karen Offen argues that a focus on the limitations imposed on women prevented Marand-Foquet from recognizing the positive effects the revolution had on women’s rights.8 In response to Yalom, Offen underscores the limited sample size of women from which Yalom drew conclusions regarding all women at the time.9 In addition to refuting pessimistic arguments 3 McPhee, 887.

4 Suzanne Desan, “Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 567, Project Muse.

5 Karen Offen, “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 4 (1990): 912, JSTOR. 6 Offen, 912-913.

7 Suzanne Desan, “Recent Historiography,” 567.

8 Offen, “The New Sexual,” 912.

9 Offen, 912.

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brought up by twentieth-century historians, Offen draws attention to views developed more recently. After analyzing the documents of six women and considering their stories with respect to various events of the French Revolution, Anne Soprani concludes that the revolution greatly heightened women’s political power and inclusion.10 Women took more legal responsibility upon themselves, such as defending themselves in court when their husbands failed to.11 The stark contrast between Yalom’s and Soprani’s conclusions, drawn from different samples of women, reveals the pivotal role the selection of women subjects played in shaping historians’ views. Their increased political and social involvement of women in France reflected a step in the feminist direction, which modern-day historians attribute to the French Revolution.

Combined with the ever-growing feminist movement, the preservation of biographies and documents from the French Revolution facilitated the development of new views regarding the watershed event and its implications on women. While twentieth-century historians focused on portraying the hardships women suffered during the revolution, modern historians choose instead to highlight the positive outcomes of the French Revolution, depicting the event as the as the root of more recent feminism movements.12

10 Offen, 913.

11 Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 14, ProQuest Ebook Central.

12 “Feminism,” World History: The Modern Era, (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2021), World History: The Modern Era.

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Bibliography Bernstein, Samuel. “New Directions in French Revolution Historiography.”

Science and Society 23, no. 4 (1959): 333-51. JSTOR. Desan, Suzanne. “Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender.” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 566-74. Project Muse.

“Feminism.” World History: The Modern Era. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2021. World History: The Modern Era. “French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815).” In Gale Encyclopedia of World History: War. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2008. World History in Context.

Friedrichs, Christopher R. “Urban Institutions and Politics: The Early Modern Period.” In Encyclopedia of European Social History, edited by Peter N. Stearns, 301-06. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. World History in Context.

Hufton, Olwen. Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

ProQuest Ebook Central.

McPhee, Peter. “French Revolution.” In Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, edited by John Merriman and Jay Winter, 884-99. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006. World History in Context.

Offen, Karen. “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolutionary Historiography.” French Historical Studies 16, no. 4 (1990): 909-22.

JSTOR.

“A Tongue Intelligible to All:”1 Esperanto, Language, and Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Rupert Chen

“To communicate is the first step towards mutual understanding” —UNESCO Director-General M’Bow, World Esperanto Congress2

“Are you English or Russian?”3: Language and Nationalism In 1864, a French school inspector touring the southern département (district) of Lozère despairingly noted that at one village school, no pupil could answer basic questions such as “Are you English or Russian?”4 1 L.L. Zamenhof, Dr. Esperanto’s International Language, Introduction & Complete Grammar, trans. R. H. Geoghegan (Oxford: Balliol College, 1889).

2 Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, “Address by Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow.” 31 July 1977. UNESCO Archives. DG/77/9.

3 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1976), 110.

4 Weber, 110.

Rupert Chen wrote this independent research paper for the National History Day Contest in 2021.

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Although France was a nation in name, in practice its people had little sense of unity of the state or any attachment to it: they were unable to say that they were, in fact, French. The issue of a culturally and linguistically fragmented populace was not unique to France. Following the unification of Germany in 1871, and Italy in the same year, both countries struggled with related problems: how to create a sense of national identity and foster loyalty to the state.5 Linguistic disparities were a significant part of the problem for these governments. In France, half of French children did not speak French, but rather a form of patois, or regional dialects from regions like Brittany and Savoy.6 Germany and Italy faced even greater hurdles, as both comprised of formerly independent states with widely varying and often mutually unintelligible vernaculars.7 Historian Christopher Duggan estimates that at the time of unification, 80-90% of Italian citizens did not speak or understand Tuscan Italian (which became the standard version of the language): indeed, on an 1853 trip, Milanese visitors to Sicily were mistaken as foreign Englishmen.8 Recognizing this problem, newly formed nineteenth-century European countries focused on promoting linguistic uniformity, believing that a universal national language would unite their citizens. As early as 1834, the Cahors Committee of Primary Education in France noted that “the political and administrative unity of the kingdom urgently requires the unity of language in all its parts.”9 In 1877, Italian Minister of Education Michele Coppino introduced reforms creating public schools that taught standardized Tuscan Italian.10 Similarly, in 1881 and 1882, Jules Ferry, Minister of Public Instruction in France, passed laws instituting free schooling while also standardizing the curriculum and mandating instruction in French.11 Sociologist Charles Tilly comments that European governments in the late nineteenth century “took steps which homogenized their populations: the adoption of state religions, expulsion of minorities…, institution of a national language, [and] eventually the 5 Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy since 1796 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 10.

6 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 67.

7 Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 10.

8 Duggan, 108.

9 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 72.

10 Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 276-77.

11 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 77.

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organization of mass public instruction.”12 Notably, these linguistic efforts to unify involved defining and rejecting a minority based on ethnic, religious, and national lines.

In the face of Europe-wide initiatives to inculcate national identities through schooling and language, Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917), a Jewish optometrist in Warsaw, published an 1887 manifesto that would become known simply as Unua Libro (“The First Book”) (see fig. 1).13 In this volume, which appeared first in Russian, Polish, French, and German (and was soon translated into other languages, including English in 1889), Zamenhof introduced his plan for a universal language that would be widely accessible, easy to learn, and distinct from any national or ethnic traditions. Published under the pseudonym “Dr. Esperanto” (“one who hopes” in the fledgling language), the project became known as “Esperanto.”14 Recognizing the power of communication and the politicization of language by Europe’s nation-states, Zamenhof hoped to use language to unite people and transcend geographical and political barriers. In a career that spanned the nation-building efforts of the 1870s to the conflict of the First World War, Zamenhof developed his belief that conflict and prejudice stemmed from misunderstanding between different peoples. International cooperation and lasting peace, he believed, could be achieved through open communication.

Figure 1. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1889 and translated by R. H. Geoghegan. The book that started it all: Unua Libro. (Photo courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Department of Planned Languages) 12 Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 43-44.

13 Zamenhof, Dr. Esperanto’s International Language.

14 Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto (London: Routledge and Paul, 1960), 33.

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“A Babel of Languages:” Zamenhof as a Polish Jew in the Russian Empire Zamenhof ’s early ideas about language were forged in the industrial city of Białystok, Russia (modern-day Poland), where he was born in 1859.15 Białystok’s busy factories employed many ethnic groups: Zamenhof wrote in 1896 that the city “consists of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews; each of these elements speaks a different language and sees the other elements in an unfriendly way.”16 Tensions between these peoples were often high. In a 1907 interview, Zamenhof remembered Białystok as “a babel of languages,” observing that “daily life was poisoned by the bickerings and animosities that arose out of this diversity of tongues.”17 Zamenhof himself spoke Yiddish, Polish, and Russian, reflecting his overlapping identities as a Jew, a Pole, and a marginalized resident of the Russian Empire. In school, he learned German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English.18 Bjałistok was located in an area of Poland that had been given to Prussia in 1795 and was subsequently assigned to Russia in 1807.19 It was politically unstable: the Poles revolted in 1830, 1863 and again in 1905.20 Zamenhof, who was four during the 1863 revolt, grew up in its shadow. The Russian response gave him firsthand experience with the weaponization of communication. Biographer Marjorie Boulton writes that “the use of the Polish language was prohibited” in the Lithuanian provinces after 1863 in order to crush resistance and force the Poles to assimilate.21 The establishment of Russian as the official language rendered 20% of Poles technically illiterate.22 In Bjałistok, Zamenhof learned that language could be used to disenfranchise and punish, as well as to unite. As part of both 15 Aleksander Korzhenkov, Zamenhof: The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto, trans. Ian M. Richmond (New York: Mondial, 2010) 16 Korzhenkov; L.L Zamenhof to Nikolai Borovko, 1896, in Lingvo Internacia 2, no. 6-7 (June-July 1896): 115, trans. (Russian to Esperanto) Vladimir Gernet. Author’s Translation.

17 L. L. Zamenhof, “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals,” interview by R. I. Harris, Jewish Chronicle 67, no. 16 (September 6, 1907): 16-18.

18 Zamenhof, 16-18.; Brigid O’Keeffe, “An International Language for an Empire of Humanity: L. L. Zamenhof and the Imperial Russian Origins of Esperanto.” East European Jewish Affairs 49, no. 1 (2019): 1–19.

19 O’Keeffe, 3.

20 Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto, 4.

21 Boulton, 4.

22 Boulton, 4.

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an ethnic and a religious minority, he recognized that he spoke what were viewed as seditious languages.

Within the social hierarchy of the Russian Empire, Zamenhof was doubly disadvantaged. While Poles were politically oppressed, Jews came under vicious attack throughout his youth. Tsar Nicholas I’s 1835 “Pale of Permanent Jewish Settlement” restricted Jewish residence to Russia’s western region.23 His successor, Tsar Alexander II, loosened some restrictions, allowing Jewish university graduates “the rights and privileges of their Gentile counterparts—including unrestricted residence and choice of occupation.”24 But in 1881, Alexander was assassinated, provoking unrest and backlash against Jews, who were blamed for the attack.25 Zamenhof left Moscow to escape the worsening situation, completing his studies in Warsaw.26 Even so, he spent three days hiding from pogroms in his cellar in December 1881.27, 28 These experiences prompted Zamenhof to embrace Zionism, although he soon realized that Zionism “would never solve the eternal Jewish question.”29 He returned instead to the unifying potential of language.30 Together with his experiences as a Polish subject of Russian nationalism, Zamenhof ’s Judaism was a decisive factor in his creation of Esperanto. “If I had not been a Jew from the ghetto,” he wrote in 1905, “the idea of unifying humanity either would never have entered my head, or it would never have gripped me so tenaciously throughout my entire life.”31 In creating Esperanto, Zamenhof drew from his experience with Yiddish as an example of a language with worldwide speakers that transcended the nation state.

The creation of a universal language, Zamenhof later wrote, might appear to be an “impracticable scheme… of some good citizen of Utopia,” 23 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 29.

24 Nathans, 29.

25 O’Keeffe, “An International Language for an Empire of Humanity.”

26 Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 11.

27 O’Keeffe, “An International Language for an Empire of Humanity.”

28 Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto, 23 29 O’Keeffe, 23.

30 Zamenhof, “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals.”

31 L.L Zamenhof to Alfred Michaux, February 21, 1905, in Mi Estas Homo, ed. Aleksander Korzhenkov (Kaliningrado: Sezonoj, 2006), 100. Author’s Translation.

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yet he believed it was of “considerable importance to humanity.”32 Mutual understanding, communication, and ultimately peace were at stake from his point of view. In a 1907 interview, Zamenhof identified lack of communication as a major source of conflict. By speaking Yiddish, he noted, “the Jew is separated from his fellow-Jew [who does not speak Yiddish] as well as from his Christian neighbor.”33 Ultimately, Zamenhof believed that differences in language, rather than religion or politics, were what truly drove people apart since linguistic differences prevent communication and understanding.

“A Neutral Tongue:” Esperanto as a Lingua Internacia Although Zamenhof first published “Unua Libro” in 1887, the idea that language could promote peace had interested him as a teenager. Already in 1874, he had begun exploring the social and political possibilities of international auxiliary languages (languages constructed with the goal of becoming a lingua franca).34 Originally, he considered reforming Latin or Greek, but concluded that the grammar was too challenging.35 Instead, realizing that complicated conjugations and declensions were unnecessary to language comprehension, he took inspiration from English.36 In 1878, Zamenhof completed his first project, Lingwe Uniwersala.37 Zamenhof ’s goal was to create a language that drew on many traditions without privileging any. Previous linguae francae such as Latin or French carried with them cultural baggage that was antithetical to his project: Latin was associated with the Catholic Church, for instance, and French was considered a language of the elites. Similarly, Zamenhof determined that Yiddish was unsuitable due to its ties with Judaism.38 As he commented in 1907, “Only a neutral tongue could become a universal medium of communication, and neutrality was the character which I gave to Esperanto.”39 By drawing from many linguistic influences, Zamenhof ensured that no group would have an advantage in learning the language: 32 Zamenhof, Dr. Esperanto’s International Language, 3.

33 Zamenhof, “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals.”

34 Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto, 12.

35 L.L Zamenhof to Nikolai Borovko: 116.

36 Zamenhof; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 5.

37 Korzhenkov, 5.

38 Esther H. Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2016), 69.

39 Zamenhof, “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals.”

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“Esperanto belongs to the whole world,” he noted, “because it is derived from no one language in particular.”40 Zamenhof ’s goal of equality, for both language and people, is evident in the 1889 inaugural publication of La Esperantisto, a magazine he founded to foster a worldwide community of Esperantists (see fig. 2).41 Zamenhof ’s prospectus appears on the title page in three languages: German, French, and Esperanto (Prospekt, Prospectus, Prospekto).42 In it, Zamenhof writes that Esperanto is not “fixed or invariable” (ne estas fermita kaj neŝanĝebla), but would grow and change with the people who spoke it.43 He rejected the titles author and creator. As he declared, “I do not want to be a legislator: I gave only the foundation, and now my role is done, and now the future of the international language finds itself not more in my hands than in the hands of every other friend of this language.”44 In keeping with his philosophy of free and open access, Zamenhof released his books into the public domain and turned over the management of Esperanto to a committee.45

Figure 2. Zamenhof ’s magazine La Esperantisto published in 1889. (Photo courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Department of Planned Languages) 40 Zamenhof.

41 L. L. Zamenhof, “Prospekto,” La Esperantisto 1, no. 1 (September 1889): 1-2. Author’s Translation.

42 Zamenhof. Author’s Translation.

43 Zamenhof. Author’s Translation.

44 Zamenhof. Author’s Translation.

45 Boulton, Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto, 157.

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“That Enormous Evil”: Esperanto and the Politics of Nation Building In 1914, Europe was convulsed by war as France, Italy, and Russia fought Germany. Zamenhof, now in his 50s, was horrified, but not shocked. In an “Appeal to Diplomatists,” (1915), Zamenhof presented his hope for an eventual “United States of Europe” (see fig. 3).46 Any postwar attempt to create lasting peace by focusing on land redistribution, he warned, would fail.47 Instead, diplomats must address the root cause of conflict: nationalism.48 In 1914, Zamenhof condemned nationalism as the source of societal ills, declaring that it “presents for humanity only the greatest unhappiness.”49 In 1915, he concluded his “Appeal” with a call to “remove once [and] for all the chief cause of the wars, the barbarous survival from pre-civilised antiquity, the dominance of race over race.”50 Zamenhof ’s views had changed dramatically since his time as a Zionist, yet they clearly reflected the philosophy that inspired his creation of Esperanto—a freely available, widely accessible language that was owned and controlled by none. Equality lay at the heart of his linguistic project, which was designed to put all cultures and people on equal footing. In 1915, the urgency of his mission was clear. As war raged, Zamenhof wrote that any “apparent act of justice towards one race will be at the same time an injustice to another race.”51 His anti-nationalistic views were fundamental to his linguistic mission: “every citizen of every state has full right to speak whatever language or dialect he chooses to speak, and to hold whatever religion he wishes to hold.”52

46 L. L. Zamenhof, “After the Great War: An Appeal to Diplomatists,” trans. Alfred Edward Wackrill. The British Esperantist 11, no. 123 (March 1915): 51-55.

47 Zamenhof.

48 Zamenhof.

49 Schor, Bridge of Words, 102.

50 Zamenhof, “After the Great War.” 51 Zamenhof.

52 Zamenhof.; L. L. Zamenhof, “Prospekto.” Author’s Translation.

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Figure 3. Zamenhof ’s “An Appeal to Diplomats” from March 1915. Translated by Alfred Edward Wackrill. (Photo courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Department of Planned Languages)

Zamenhof ’s “Appeal” underscores the political context and motivations that provided the foundation for his linguistic philosophy: unity, equality, and freedom. His proposal for a “United States of Europe” is inseparable from his goals in creating Esperanto: that the “whole of humanity… be united in one family,” an idea that had inspired him even as a schoolboy.53 Zamenhof ’s declaration that “every state belongs… to all its… inhabitants,” reflects the democratic principles that moved him to place Esperanto, ultimately, in the hands of its speakers.54

Conclusion Forte staras muroj de miljaroj Inter la popoloj dividitaj; Sed dissaltos la obstinaj baroj, Per la sankta amo disbatitaj.

53 Zamenhof, “Prospekto.” Author’s Translation.

54 Zamenhof, “After the Great War.”

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[The walls of ages stand fast Between the divided peoples; But the unyielding barriers will leap apart Breached by the sacred love.]

—Esperanto Anthem55 Esperanto is often dismissed as a linguistic oddity, a project for hobbyists and devotees. It does not appear in most history textbooks.

Yet Esperanto was, at its core, a political movement, and Zamenhof a political theorist. His ideas are inextricably connected to the situations that produced them—late-nineteenth century nationalism and the oppression of minority groups in the name of national unity. Esperanto reflects the optimism that guided some thinkers during this period. Esperantists looked forward to a future in which communication would lead to greater understanding and conflict would become obsolete. They believed that, together, they could change the world. In this sense, Esperantists shared much in common with other utopian movements of the pre-war period.

In 1915, Hector Hodler, a Swiss cofounder of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), declared that Esperantists “have the duty never to forget the very simple truth” that Europeans, although in the midst of a bloody war, “are and remain people.”56 Hoping that opening lines of communication would allow the two sides to understand each other not as combatants, but as fellow human beings, he promoted a service for citizens to send letters across enemy lines through the UEA’s Geneva headquarters.57 Hundreds of thousands of letters were forwarded, a testament to the Esperantists’ unwavering commitment to the freedom of communication.58 Zamenhof did not live to see the war’s end, yet his belief that communication can break barriers and promote understanding lives on through the Esperanto movement. In the immediate post-war period, Esperantists urged the newly-formed League of Nations to consider the 55 Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton, 1982), vi.

56 Hector Hodler, “Super,” Esperanto 7, no. 1 (January 1915): 2-3. Author’s Translation.

57 Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 159; Hyman Levine, “Brotherhood of Language a Factor in Preventing War, Esperantists Say.” Washington Times. October 14, 1915, 10.

58 Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 159.

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benefits of Esperanto for international peacekeeping.59 Three decades later, the UN resolved to collaborate with the UEA “in matters concerning both organizations.”60 (see fig. 4) However, Esperanto fell prey to the very issues that it had attempted to solve: nationalism and division. It was opposed by France, which championed French as a lingua franca, and by the United States, which was invested in the spread of English.61

Figure 4. “Report on the International Petition in Favour of Esperanto” from the1954 UNESCO Courier graphic. (Photo courtesy of the UNESCO Archives)

Yet the Esperantist community persisted. Humphrey Tonkin (UEA President 1974-1980, 1986-1989) shared with me his recollections of attending the 1959 World Esperanto Congress in communist Warsaw.62 Speaking Esperanto behind the Iron Curtain underscored for him the power of language and communication to transcend political barriers.

59 United Nations Archives, Geneva, “Committee on Intellectual Co-Operation: Minutes of the First Session.” Geneva, August 1 to August 5, 1922. C. 711. M . 423. 1922. X II; United Nations Archives, Geneva, “Committee on Intellectual Co-Operation: Minutes of the Second Session.” Geneva, July 26 to August 2, 1923. C. 570. M. 224. 1923. X II. 60 UNESCO Archives, “Records of the General Conference, Eighth Session, Montevideo, 1954: Resolutions.” 1954. 8 C/Resolutions, CPG.54.VI.8; UNESCO Archives, “Report on the International Petition in Favour of Esperanto.” 1954. 8 C/PRG/3.

61 Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language – Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin, trans. Humphrey Tonkin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 52.

62 Humphrey Tonkin. Personal interview. 19 Mar. 2021.

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“That was a huge eye-opener for me… Eastern Europe was a totally different world,” he recalled, but “Esperanto… was a bridge between those two worlds.”63 “Language is a key,” the UNESCO Courier declared in 1954. “It unlocks the door to a real knowledge of other peoples.”64 This truth is what Esperantists recognize, and to it Zamenhof devoted his life.

63 Humphrey Tonkin. Personal interview. 19 Mar. 2021.

64 “Languages: Bridge or Barrier?” UNESCO Courier 7, no. 1 (January 1954): 3.

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Alesina, Alberto Francesco, and Bryony Reich. “Nation-building.” Working paper, Department of Economics, Harvard University, 2015. Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.

Anderson, Benedict R.. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006.

Boulton, Marjorie. Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto. London: Routledge and Paul, 1960.

Duggan, Christopher. The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy since 1796.

London: Allen Lane, 2007.

Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Translated by James Fentress. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

“Esperanto is Recognized.” The Tensas Gazette. August 21, 1908, 1. The Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Forster, Peter G. The Esperanto Movement. The Hague: Mouton, 1982.

Hart, Peter. The Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Hastings, Max. Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. New York: Random House, 2013 Hodler, Hector. “Super.” Esperanto 7, no. 1, January 1915, 2-3.

Konishi, Sho. “Translingual World Order: Language without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan.” The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 1, 2013, 91-114. JSTOR. Korzhenkov, Aleksander. Zamenhof: The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto. Translated by Ian M. Richmond. New York: Mondial, 2010.

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“Languages: Bridge or Barrier?” UNESCO Courier 7, no. 1, January 1954.

Accessed May 1, 2022 Lapenna, Ivo. “Letter to the editor.” UNESCO Courier 7, no. 3, March 1954, 30. Accessed May 1, 2022.

———. “Letter to the editor.” UNESCO Courier 7, no. 7, July 1954, 33.

Accessed May 1, 2022.

Levine, Hyman. “Brotherhood of Language a Factor in Preventing War, Esperantists Say.” The Washington Times, October 14, 1915, 10.

The Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed May 1, 2022.

Lins, Ulrich. Dangerous Language – Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin.

Translated by Humphrey Tonkin. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar, “Address by Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow.” 31 July 1977. UNESCO Archives. DG/77/9. Accessed May 1, 2022.

MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2003.

Medcraft, Kenneth D. “San Franciscans Prove Esperanto Perfect.” San Francisco Call. March 20, 1910, 5. The Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed May 1, 2022.

Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

O’Keeffe, Brigid. Email interview. 1 Apr. 2021.

———. “An International Language for an Empire of Humanity: L. L. Zamenhof and the Imperial Russian Origins of Esperanto.” East European Jewish Affairs 49 (1), 2019, 1–19. Taylor & Francis Online. Accessed May 1, 2022.

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———. “Building a Communist Tower of Babel: Esperanto and the Language Politics of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia,” in Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2021, 17-32.

Privat, Edmond. Vivo de Zamenhof. London: Brita Esperanto-Asocio, 1920.

Schor, Esther H. Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2016.

Soros, Tivadar. Masquerade. Translated by Humphrey Tonkin. New York: Arcade, 2000.

“Surprising Activity of Esperantists in America.” San Francisco Call.

October 6, 1907, 6. The Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed May 1, 2022.

Tonkin, Humphrey. Personal interview. 19 Mar. 2021.

Tilly, Charles. “Reflections on the History of European State-Making.” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Charles Tilly ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 3-83.

UNESCO Archives. “Records of the General Conference, Eighth Session, Montevideo, 1954: Resolutions.” 1954. 8 C/Resolutions, CPG.54.

VI.8. Accessed May 1, 2022.

———. “Report on the International Petition in Favour of Esperanto.”

1954. 8 C/PRG/3.

United Nations Archives, Geneva. “Committee on Intellectual CoOperation: Minutes of the First Session.” Geneva, August 1 to August 5, 1922. C. 711. M . 423. 1922. X II. Accessed April 6, 2021.

———. “Committee on Intellectual Co-Operation: Minutes of the Second Session.” Geneva, July 26 to August 2, 1923. C. 570. M. 224. 1923. X II. Accessed April 6, 2021.

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Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1976.

Wexler, Paul and Julia Horvath. “Unspoken ‘Languages’ and the Issue of Genetic Classification: The Case of Hebrew.” in Jewish and NonJewish Creators of “Jewish” Languages. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006, 72-97.

Zamenhof, L. L. Dr. Esperanto’s International Language, Introduction & Complete Grammar. Translated by R. H. Geoghegan. Oxford: Balliol College, 1889.

———. “De la redakcio.” La Esperantisto 6, no. 5-6, May-June 1885, 1-2.

———. “Esperanto and Jewish Ideals.” By R. I. Harris. Jewish Chronicle 67, no. 16, September 6, 1907, 16-18.

———. “Letter to Abram Kofman,” May 15, 1901, in Mi Estas Homo, edited

by Aleksander Korzhenkov. Kalingrado: Sezonoj, 2006. Pp. 97-98.

———. “Letter to Alfred Michaux,” February 21, 1905. In Mi Estas Homo, edited by Aleksander Korzhenkov. Kalingrado: Sezonoj, 2006. Pp. 99-106.

———. “Letter to Nikolai Borovko,” 1896, in Lingvo Internacia 2, no. 6-7, June-July 1896, 115-119. Translated (Russian to Esperanto) by Vladimir Gernet. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Accessed May 1, 2022.

———. “Post la Granda Milito: Alvoko al la Diplomatoj”; “After the Great War: An Appeal to Diplomatists.” Translated by Alfred Edward Wackrill. The British Esperantist 11, no. 123, March 1915, 51-55. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Accessed May 1, 2022.

———. “Prospekto.” La Esperantisto 1, no. 1, September 1889, 1-2. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Accessed May 1, 2022.

China’s Persisting Hukou System: 60 Years of Divison

Sally Zhu

An old police officer in the city of Zhengzhou, China, looks out wearily at a crowd of people gathered outside of the registration building. His voice has become hoarse, and so have the voices of all his fellow officers. He is a registration official, dealing with one of the most unique caste registration systems in the world that remains in place today: the Chinese hukou system. Each day for many years, hordes of people have swarmed the old officer, asking for him to solve their registration problems. Some kneel and some kowtow and some beg with tears in their eyes. Some bring ropes and threaten to hang themselves if their problems are not solved. Yet the old officer must reject almost every single one of their pleads.1 This was the reality that was brought about by the hukou system, which had evolved and taken influence from numerous systems before it.

Formally initiated in 1958 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the 1 Ren Xianliang, “China’s Registration Taboo,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 29, no.

1 (1996): 15-16.

This paper was originally published in The Concord Review, 32, no. 3 (Spring, 2022). Sally wrote this independent paper after learning that her parents grew up under the hukou system in China.

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modern system assigns a hukou, or household registration to each citizen.2 A person’s hukou falls into two categories: non-agricultural, as in urban, or agricultural, as in rural.3 The Chinese government originally set up the system more than 60 years ago with three central purposes: to regulate rural to urban migration, to manage resource allocation and subsidization, and to observe targeted people. Through these major functions, China could reorganize and improve its economy in the late 20th century, but the triumphs of the hukou system also brought consequences that proved to be detrimental for many, especially the rural class.4 Hukou identification became the basis for an individual’s economic opportunities, community benefits, education, and more, and it determined “the fate of a person, of a family, and even of several generations of people.”5 The registration was extremely restrictive and exerted powerful control: a citizen could not live, get a job, or attend school in a place outside of their hukou. Furthermore, switching a hukou from rural to urban was highly coveted, since urban facilities and privileges were usually superior. Nevertheless, this was nearly impossible, leading to situations such as that of the old Zhengzhou police officer.

Hukou restrictions based on rural or urban status greatly divided the Chinese population into two distinct classes, which some have described as geographical apartheid.6 This division grew because of limits on transference between the two groups based on migration policies and the disproportionate treatments given to the two populations by the government based on the guidelines of the hukou system.7 Thus, although the establishment of the 1958 hukou system improved aspects of China’s economy, its overall success in the years following was substantially imbalanced across the nation and greatly benefited the smaller urban class at the expense of the larger rural class, ultimately causing more harm than good.

2 Lei Kuang and Li Liu, “Discrimination against Rural-to-Urban Migrants: The Role of the Hukou System in China,” PLoS One 7, no. 11 (2012).

3 Kam Wing Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System at 50,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 50, no. 2 (2009): 201.

4 “Household Registration,” in Encyclopedia of Modern China, ed. David Pong (Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009), 2: 246-248.

5 Xianliang, “China’s Registration Taboo,’” 17.

6 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 210.

7 Ping Huang and Frank N. Pieke, “China Migration Country Study,” Conference on Migration, Development and Pro-Poor Policy Choices in Asia, 2003

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The Start of the System Similar systems to the current hukou system in China are some of the country’s oldest political institutions, with some origins dating back to 25 centuries ago. For example, the Xia dynasty from the 21st century to 16th century BCE had an establishment similar to the modern hukou system, with population census and household registration, and the Shang dynasty continued this by recording statuses of different households, further extending this into successive dynasties.8, 9 The Zhou dynasty (1047 BCE to 772 BCE) had a system known as the xiangsui (districts) system that, like China today, divided families into a rural network and an urban network. This system was likely less practical in actual implementation than its description indicates, a result that would repeat itself in the modern system.10, 11 The Qin dynasty in 375 BCE created a baojia system with population registration and limits for migration, also allowing for the government to manage taxes more easily, and punishments were given to those who violated the guidelines, such as illegal migrants; these punishments have also carried over to the current hukou system. Similar to the xiangsui system, the success of the implementation of the baojia system is not concretely known.12, 13 Later, hukou laws were established in the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 BCE) for household and poll taxes as well as for collecting demographic information. All these systems were useful to the bureaucracies because they helped centralize migration and tax collection.

Subsequent dynasties also used these systems, but their importance started to decline by the 1500s in the late Ming and Qing dynasties. However, these two early systems still established the basis for the modern hukou system in later years.14 When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) first came to power in 1949, leaders wanted to modernize the nation and noticed the success of the Soviet propiska practice, which separated industrial workers from 8 Sima Qian, Shiji: Shangjun liezhuan, 2.

9 Shangshu (Ancient books), Chapter Duoshi.

10 Jin Jingfang, Jinshu qiantang (Preliminary analysis on the classics) (Beijing: Zhonghua Press, 1984), 46 11 Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), Chapter 2.

12 Qian, Shiji: Shangjun, 2.

13 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 2.

14 Wang.

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poor peasants and included an internal passport system.15 Reminded of their own past success with social orders like the baojia system in the Qin dynasty, the Party established the hukou system in the 1950s, largely influenced by Soviet policies, with similar guidelines such as separating urban and rural workers and tracking migration. As Professor Fei-Ling Wang, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, states, “the hukou system was a natural choice for [the government’s] needs to control the society and plan the economy.”16 At the time, the government saw a “pressing need for a national hukou management” for China’s future.17 As a result, the hukou system was planned out at the first PRC public security conference in November 1950 and was to be established nationwide within ten years.18 With firm resolve and historic speed, a series of documents written by the PRC in the 1950s helped reshape the face of China and fix millions— and now billions—of people in place on the map. Party officials began their reach into every home in China with the “Provisional Regulations on Urban Hukou Management” in 1951, and followed this with the “Instruction on the Establishment of a Household Registration System” in 1955, after which a network of police and public security centers were set up across the nation.19, 20 The comprehensive Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hukou dengji tiaoli or “The Household Registration Regulations of the People’s Republic of China,” legislated during the ninety-first meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on January 9, 1958, now oversaw every family in the nation.21, 22 There would be no escape from this new social order for China’s population, as the 1958 guidelines assigned every citizen a hukou from birth. Article 7 of the Household Regulations stated that a newborn’s hukou must be formally 15 Qiqi Fu and Paola Pasquali, Legal Instrumentalism in China: The Case of Hukou Legislation in Beijing and Shenzhen, 262.

16 Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 2.

17 Sun Yao, Hukou guanlixue jiaocheng (Textbook on Hukou management) (Beijing: Qunzhong Press, 1994), 31.

18 Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 2.

19 Ministry of Public Security, “Provisional Regulations on the Governance of Urban Populations,” news release, July 16, 1951.

20 State Council, “Instruction on the Establishment of a Household Registration System,” news release, June 9, 1955.

21 National People’s Congress, “Instruction on the Establishment of a Household Registration System,” news release, January 9, 1958.

22 Fu and Pasquali, Legal Instrumentalism, 262.

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filed within one month of the child’s birth, specifically at the “institution responsible for registering permanent residency”, and a child’s hukou was the same as their mother’s hukou, or either of the parent’s after 1998.23, 24 This article enforced enrollment, making it illegal not to be registered in the system.25 When the first official guidelines were established in 1955, the urban hukou community only accounted for 13.5% of China’s population, one-sixth of the percentage of rural households at the time. This fraction of the population was considerably small, and the 86.5% rural population was excluded from them. These percentages of urban hukou population grew very slowly in the early years of the system, with the number of rural hukou holders still larger than urban hukou holders today.26 The hukou system had a few central goals that it sought to accomplish, with the first one being to regulate migration. Targeting movement from rural to urban areas, the Household Regulations contained detailed and restrictive rules about migration and residence. Article 6 of the guidelines states, “Citizens should register as permanent residents in the place they regularly reside. One citizen can only have permanent resident registration in one location.”27 This article emphasized the importance of one’s residential location in determining one’s hukou; it also contributed to restricting migration between different residential locations and limiting people to certain regions, so as to avoid overflow of urban areas. This ensured that every Chinese citizen was locked into their original status and location essentially for life, regardless of their needs, talents, or hopes for the future. Adding further restriction to this already predetermined life, Article 10 stated that every individual must file for a certificate to move, and he or she may only do so with “proof from the city’s Labor Department, proof of a school’s acceptance, or proof of an immigration permit.”28 Immigration was extremely difficult because of further 23 Hayden Windrow and Anik Guha, “The Hukou System, Migrant Workers, & State Power in the People’s Republic of China,” Northwestern Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2005): 3.

24 Haifeng Nie and Chunbing Xing, “When City Boy Falls in Love with Country Girl: Baby’s Hukou, Hukou Reform, and Inter-Hukou Marriage” (paper presented at Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), 2010), 2. The State Council approved some measures proposed by the Ministry of Public Security in 1998 (during the hukou reforms) that countered some problems in the management of the hukou system, one of which being that a child’s hukou could follow either his or her mother’s or father’s.

25 Windrow and Guha, “The Hukou System,” 4.

26 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 203.

27 Windrow and Guha, “The Hukou System,” 3.

28 Windrow and Guha, 4.

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applications and immigration procedures, even after showing proof of a certificate. Only those with the necessary documents could move for work or education purposes, and institutions that managed the hukou system, such as the Public Security Bureau and its individual units, rarely gave these documents.29 Aside from urban or rural hukou type, each citizen was also assigned a hukou location, called the hukou suozaidi. Even tighter regulations followed for these location classes in Articles 15 and 16, which exemplify the restrictions on migration based on one’s hukou location. Together, these articles stated that every transfer of location, as long as it was over three days, such as a short vacation, had to be registered with the government, even if for personal reasons.30 In addition, these guidelines were unfairly biased: citizens who resided in the city did not need to register for temporary residency in the country, which shows the limitations on migration for the rural class.31 Overall, the hukou system successfully regulated population migration control and followed through with the guidelines described. The regulation of migration was pivotal in the development of China because it allowed the industrial and agricultural sectors to grow separately, revealing the PRC’s purpose in keeping peasants on the land while supporting industrialization in their developing cities.

Detailed hukou regulations also covered two other central functions, that of resource allocation and that of controlling internal threats.

Resource allocation prioritized residents of major urban centers over those dwelling in rural communities.32 In relation to facilitative resources, one was restricted to accessing privileges only in their own hukou area, causing many rural residents to have worse access to education or health care. As an example of these differences, urban families were given social welfare and subsidies in industrial centers; this was only offered to about 15-16% of the population. On the other hand, the rural population was not allotted any national resources, expected to provide for themselves and left unprotected by the government, which only focused on the urban group.33 The hukou system’s intrinsic division of the population allowed the government to allocate resources between the groups, favoring urban 29 Windrow and Guha, 4.

30 Windrow and Guha, 5.

31 Windrow and Guha, 5.

32 “Household Registration,” 246.

33 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 200-201.

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residents over rural residents.

The last focus of the hukou system was to manage potential threats, for example, citizens who posed risks to the Chinese one-party authoritarian government. These people were known as zhongdian renkou, and the police could organize lists of these targets using hukou files, with each targeted person being monitored in their region.34 An instructional manual for hukou officials published in 1994 wrote, “On the one hand, [we] need to find out [hidden] enemies quickly, assist struggles against the enemy, and maintain the revolutionary order through the hukou management that controls the information on the population.”35 By taking advantage of all the information already in the hukou files, the government was able to monitor potential threats to the PRC, helping stabilize China’s regime.36 Tracking and monitoring advancements have been made in the hukou system in recent years, as Professor Fei-Ling Wang writes: “Hukou files are now computerized and routinely used by the police for investigation, social control, and crime-fighting purposes,” and these files are still being tightly managed even today.37, 38 Since 1958, over six hundred documents about this discriminatory system have been released by the PRC State Council. Many of these documents stated how the system would be run, specifically by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and local police stations.39 The country was divided into different hukou zones such as neighborhoods or townships, which were administered by hukou police and overseen by provincial and municipal governments.40 The police helped regulate movement and prosecute violators, who could be subject to a number of punishments including fines and forced repatriation.41 One such highly publicized example of this occurred in March of 2003, when a legally employed and registered migrant worker Sun Zhigang was arrested and beaten to death while being deported for not having his papers with him.42 34 Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 2.

35 Yao, Hukou guanlixue, 31.

36 “Household Registration,” 246.

37 Fei-Ling Wang, “Brewing Tensions while Maintaining Stabilities: The Dual Role of the Hukou System in Contemporary China,” Asian Perspective 29, no. 4 (2005): 88.

38 “Household Registration,” 246.

39 “Household Registration,” 246.

40 “Household Registration,” 246.

41 “Household Registration,” 246.

42 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Notes.

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This all-pervasive system left many opportunities for abuse and injustice against the rural class, with this example showing how it could even lead to one’s death. Discrimination was the cost China’s leadership was willing to pay for economic progress: as detailed in the next section, the in-depth guidelines of the hukou system and its consequences greatly changed the country’s economy in the years following.

Economic Impact Though relatively unknown outside of China, the hukou system contributed significantly to China’s initial economic growth in the late 20th century. The Chinese government took advantage of the hierarchy of urban and rural hukous, with many sectors of the economy under state control in order to boost China’s industrialization. As Professor Kam Wing Chan at the University of Washington states, “This not so well known [hukou] system has actually played a significant role in China’s spectacular rise on the economic front during the last three decades,” and it is “perhaps China’s ‘secret’ recipe for its recent unprecedented economic success.”43 This is crucial because after guidelines were established for different economic strategies, the hukou system provided an excellent breeding ground for rapid economic growth.

Once again following the successful lead of the “big brother” Soviet Union, China aimed to establish a command economy, in which the government controls production and the market, during the 1950s.4445 The Chinese government worked to meticulously plan all aspects of a widespread Big Push industrialization strategy, where all parts of an economy, such as power plants and factories, were all built at once.46 One necessary element of this strategy was the organization of resource allocation. The state used the hukou system to control its resources by drawing on agricultural profit from the rural population, which initially was around 85% of the entire population, and which was only treated as a provider of raw, cheap materials, including food and grain and other resources. These accumulated goods and profits would be directed to the 43 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 197.

44 G.I. Khanin, “The 1950s: The Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 8 (2003): 1187.

45 The Investopedia Team, “Command Economy,” ed. Somer Anderson, Investopedia, last modified July 21, 2021.

46 Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), 131.

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urban, more industrial sector.47 Soon, the agricultural and the rural sectors became collectivized and monopolized by the government, with the people of rural hukou status forced to produce materials such as food and grain for the government.48 The farmers needed to follow state-mandated standards, amounts, and prices, even though these prices and subsequently the farmers’ incomes were generally low. As part of the First Five-Year Plan in the mid to late 1950s, yet another way in which China modeled themselves after the Soviet Union, the administration created large collective agricultural units.49 In these units, villages were grouped into agricultural producers’ cooperatives, where families would receive money from the land they contributed or from the labor they produced, and farms would share tools and animals.50 By 1957, around 93.5% of farm households were part of cooperatives, which first started with around five households each, then grew to include higher cooperatives of hundreds of family farms.51 It can be inferred that the government largely viewed the rural population as simple facilitators for the urban population, who were very much benefited and favored by the state. The government prioritized and spent most of its resources on the industrial sector, which was located in cities and housed people of urban hukou. The entire sector was nationalized, state-owned, and given much more support than the rural population.52 The hukou system’s regulations on migration and prevention of conversion and contact between hukou groups contributed greatly to the government’s ability to control the economy.53 By taking advantage of these regulations and excluding the two statuses from each other, the state could successfully manage the agricultural sector and generate capital from rural labor to power and support the industrial sector—but at a heavy human cost.

Deliberate policies combined with the hukou system accomplished the economic goals set by China for fast modernization and growth, but at the same time doomed a majority of the population to substandard living, 47 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 200.

48 The Library of Congress Country Studies, “China’s Recovery from War, 1949-52,” Photius, last modified November 10, 2004.

49 “China’s Recovery from War.” 50 Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

51 Jonathan Mirsky, “The China We Don’t Know at the Wayback Machine,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 3 (February 26, 2009).

52 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 200.

53 Windrow and Guha, “The Hukou System,” 5.

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with a small, urban majority enjoying better support and finance. In 1965, even though the urban, or non-agricultural, population only represented 18.0% of the total Chinese population, the gross domestic product of this sector contributed 62.1% of the total gross domestic product of the country.54 And also as a result of China’s migration limits, urbanization was relatively slow: between 1966 and 1976, the urban population only grew by an average of 1.47% per year, which was mostly due to natural growth.

On the other hand, China’s industrialization swelled: by the late 1970s, the urban share of the country’s GDP was averaging 70%.55 The statecollectivized agricultural and industrial sectors allowed for China’s rapid industrialization, paving the way for the nation’s economic growth. Clearly, the majority of the people on farms paid a high price so that a smaller, more privileged population could reap the benefits in their industrial economy.

Class Differences and Discrimination The hukou system, as written in the guidelines, strongly restricted rural migration, giving freedom for urban groups to move but limiting rural groups. The increased mobility of people with urban hukou was mainly due to government officials wanting to protect the quality of the people in the cities. An internal hukou police manual in 2000 outlines the purpose of the migration restrictions of the hukou system: [We should] encourage the dispersal of the population. [We should] make it harder to migrate to major cities, easier to small cities; harder to migrate to cities or townships, easier to villages; harder to migrate to the southeast, easier to the northwest; harder to migrate to economically developed areas, easier to old revolutionary bases [usually in remote and mountainous areas], [ethnic] minority regions, border regions, and poor areas. ... [We should] make it easier for high-quality people to relocate, harder for low-quality people; easier for professionals to relocate, harder for general labor; ... [We should] work especially to prevent national blind floating of low-quality people.56 This excerpt of the manual summarizes the regulations that were imposed against those wanting to migrate to major cities, labeling those 54 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 203.

55 Chan, 203.

56 Ministry of Public Security-Bureau of Personnel and Training, Huzheng guanli jiaocheng (The textbook on Hukou management) (Beijing, China: Qunzhong Press, 2000), 139.

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of rural hukou as low-quality. The blunt statements of the manual, which was internal only to the hukou police department, give insight into how upper officials viewed the rural population, and it clearly shows the jarring discrimination against them. This is significant because these ideas of discrimination were clearly widespread and seemed to be justified, with officials taking extensive steps to limit migration by the rural class.

Furthermore, transferring from rural to urban hukou status proved to be extremely difficult and rare. The process of switching hukou was clearly outlined by the government, which listed only a few ways to do so. The first method was through the promotion of an individual to a state cadre at a designated rank, usually xiangzhang, township head, or kezhang, section chief.57 An individual could also become a military officer at the rank of a platoon leader, earn an officially authorized university degree, or win a national or international award in sports or other competitions. After this, only limited quotas were available for rural citizens in specific policydictated programs.58 In more recent years of reform, it became possible to pay an urban registration fee, so one could be granted urban hukou and migrate to cities or access specific benefits, but this was still very expensive in order to prevent transfer.59 On the other hand, it was already possible for urban citizens to migrate to rural places without any contract, and they already had access to these superior social welfare benefits. The difficulties of rural to urban hukou transfer did not exist the other way around, providing a clear example of the discrimination against the rural class.

One also could not access the mentioned community benefits, such as medical care, job training, and social welfare programs, in places not belonging to their hukou, causing differences in privilege.60 A specific case in point is the tonggou tongxiao policy, in which a state monopoly over grains granted food rations at a fixed, beneficial price to urban people only.61 The policy led to disaster during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961, when an estimated twenty to thirty million people died of malnutrition, with the majority of them being from rural areas.62Another 57 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 4.

58 Wang, Chapter 4.

59 Wang, Chapter 4.

60 Wang, Preface.

61 Chen Yun, Chen Yun wenxuian 1949-1956 (Selected works of Chen Yun) (Beijing, China: Renmin Press, 1983), 209.

62 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 2.

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example is that, while those with an urban hukou were given high-quality healthcare and childcare, those with rural hukou did not have health insurance and were often forced to rely on barefoot doctors, peasants with little medical training.63 Oftentimes, it was also difficult to marry between different hukous; for example, some matchmaking ads in Beijing and other urban cities included statements such as “do not contact if you do not have a local urban hukou.”64 The state budget often supplied resources such as employment, housing, food, water, medical facilities, transportation, police protection, and schools to urban locations, while they provided nearly none of these to rural locations.65 Sven Agten, a Belgian man who has lived in China since 2004 and married into a Chinese family, experienced the society and economy of China from the inside, writing in “Adventures in the Chinese Economy: 16 Years from the Inside” about the challenges that the rural population had to face. Agten claims, “I once saw an elderly bedridden man suffering from cancer just waiting to die, because he could not afford the cost of treatment,” and he asserts that “the rural population has been left behind” in China.66 These examples, along with the fact that it was nearly impossible to switch residencies unless in rare grants related to work or education, make the biased social divides under government control through the hukou system undeniably clear.

These concrete barriers had significant emotional impacts on rural citizens. For example, in 1987, a doctor of rural hukou status, having spent so much of his energy and money trying to switch his wife and three children to urban status, said to them at last, “‘I cannot leave you another inheritance to this life, I can only give you this urban registration.’”67 A different doctor, unable to resolve the transfer problem with his wife and forced to live apart from her for ten years, contained his sadness and maintained his mental and physical peace and balance by standing on his head on his bed for 3,000 nights.68 These stories of extreme measures taken by people to combat class discrimination are just two examples out 63 Daqing Zhang and Paul U. Unschuld, “China’s barefoot doctor: past, present, and future,” The Lancet 372, no. 9653 (October 20, 2008): 1865-1867.

64 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Notes.

65 Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, “The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System,” The China Quarterly, no. 139 (September 1994): 64.

66 Sven Agten, Adventures in the Chinese Economy: 16 Years from the Inside (Springer Nature, 2021), 37.

67 Xianliang, “China’s Registration Taboo,” 15.

68 Xianliang, 15.

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of millions revealing the painful impact of the hukou system on the rural population.

Not only did this discrimination apply for local benefits, but further inequality was also present when it came to jobs. All employers were required to record their employees’ hukou status, and many companies prohibited the hiring of people that differed from the local hukou, and often programs only created jobs for local urban hukou holders. Moreover, many companies were not allowed to hire any rural hukou workers unless there were no other workers available, sometimes even simply refusing rural people.69 A textile company in Hangzhou in 1984 looked to hire 1,395 workers, but urban youths turned down the tiring work, and rural youths willing to work could not, due to their rural registration. The company ended up only recruiting one third of their intended number.70 The major constituent groups for jobs, based on hukou status, differed dramatically between statuses: rural hukous consisted of rural workers, farmers, and dependents, while urban hukous consisted of urban workers and state cadres and professionals.71 Military officers at or above the platoonleader level, police officers, except some working in rural areas, the very educated, and permanent state employees were given an urban hukou.72 This information illustrates the discrimination of job opportunities and the problem of selecting only the urban hukou type in hiring practices.

Another major point of discrimination came from differences in taxes and income. Even today, it has been estimated that the annual income of a rural farmer is approximately one-sixth of an average urban city citizen. Even more, these farmers were required to pay a tax that was three times the tax paid by the urban city dwellers, emphasizing this distinction in both income and taxes.73 Job, tax, and income discrimination reveal the ongoing dysfunction in the hukou system connected with its continued limits for rural youths and workers.

Discrimination not only affected jobs and wages but extended to political opportunities. Professor Fei-Ling Wang states that, “The hukou system has enabled a political structure in the PRC that is completely 69 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 3.

70 Xianliang, “China’s Registration Taboo,” 20.

71 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 202.

72 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 5.

73 Antoine Boquen, “China’s Hukou System Explained,” New Horizons, last modified June 28, 2021, New Horizons Global Partners.

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dominated by the urban residents, who have never been more than 26% of the total population.”74 Since the 1960s, nearly all political leaders of the PRC or cadres in the CCP have been of urban hukou, with very rare representation from those of rural hukou. Moreover, in the 1990s, when less than 2% of rural hukou holders were CCP members, over 10% of those with urban hukou were members, a gaping difference.75 The rural portion was also generally less active and more poorly organized compared to the urban counterpart of the Party in the cities.76 When allocating seats for the National People’s Congress (NPC), from 1949 to 1995, there were twice as many urban residents with elected seats in the NPC than there were rural residents, meaning that there was a seat for one in every 200,000 people in the urban class, but only one per every 800,000 people in the rural class, with similar numbers from 1998 to 2003.77 These numbers remained consistent until reforms of recent years. Though there is not as much data about the CCP Central Committee, it is estimated that there was even more discrimination here against rural residents.78, 79 This led to a potentially self-perpetuating system: because there was no rural representation in the government, no changes in favor of them would pass.

Furthermore, rural citizens were discriminated against in the Chinese education system. To start, rural students had to attend schools in the countryside, which meant less access to qualified instructors and large universities. Parents who wanted their children to attend separate schools had to pay fees that were often 10 times the normal amount, even after having personal connections.80 Specifically, college entrance examinations can make or break a student’s future career and social life and provide citizens with a great opportunity for vertical economic and social mobility.

Even though the rural population had always been the majority, this was not the case in the college entrance system, which has an unbiased exam considered to be one of the fairest in the world. Until 2004, out of the PRC’s 74 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 5.

75 Wang, Chapter 5.

76 Cao Jinqing, China Along the Yellow River: A Scholar’s Observations and Reflections on Rural Society (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Literary and Arts Publishing House, 2000), 390.

77 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 5.

78 Xinhua Daily Telegraph (Beijing, China), May 19, 1995.

79 Fei-Ling Wang, From Family to Market: Labor Allocation in Contemporary China (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1998), 152.

80 Jing Lin, Social Transformation and Private Education in China (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).

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roughly 3.5 million high school graduates, only 1.5 million were accepted into colleges, with the rural population consisting of less than half of these numbers.81 Only in 2004 did the number of admitted rural students grow to above the urban number.82 Moreover, most top universities were located in metropolises, which were not very accessible for most of the population.

In 2001, only one university out of the top fifty ranked was not located in a metropolis.83 Acceptance quotas in top universities were another discriminatory factor. One protest broke out because of college admissions quotas in 2016, when thousands of rural parents demonstrated about loss of admissions spots at local universities in the Hubei and Jiangsu provinces, and called attention to the unfairness of the college system and quotas based on hukou registration.84 The roots of this protest stemmed from limited 1998 to 2001 college admissions quotas; for example, the top-ranking Tsinghua University accepted 600 out of 60,000 urban applicants in Beijing, though only 200 rural applicants were accepted out of the 300,000 from Shandong province.85 One story from 2010 written by a mother describes her daughter’s struggles with education; even though the family lived in and the daughter attended school in Beijing, their hukou was registered in the small, rural province of Hainan. The hukou guidelines required her to take the college admissions exam in Hainan, forcing the daughter to move there for a lower quality high school education.86 Besides systemic discrimination, rural hukou holders faced personal prejudice on a day-to-day basis. A study from 2015 showed that releasing hukou identification significantly decreased the performance of rural students compared to urban students.87 These discriminations would soon lead to growing social tensions between the two types of hukou status with many protests and much unrest. One such protest occurred in 2008 when hundreds of migrant workers demonstrated against the beating of another 81 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 5.

82 Wang, Chapter 5.

83 Wang, Chapter 5.

84 He Huifeng, “Thousands of Chinese parents take to the streets to protest university admission quotas,” South China Morning Post, May 15, 2016.

85 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 5.

86 Siyu Cai, “China’s Household Registration (Hukou) System and its Socioeconomic Impacts,” McNair Scholars Journal, Spring 2011, 17.

87 Farzana Afridi, Sherry Xin Li, and Yufei Ren, “Social identity and inequality: The impact of China’s Hukou system,” Journal of Public Economics 123 (March 2015): 17.

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worker, Zhang Zhongfu, aged 34, who was trying to obtain a temporary urban residence permit and was beaten by police officers after a quarrel.

This incident prompted the workers in the Zhejiang province to burn police cars and motorcycles for three days, eventually leading to the deaths of three police officers.88 The protests came in a broader context of dissent against the hukou system as a whole: in an interview with NBC News, an Asian researcher, Phelim Kine, described the practice as “a de facto apartheid system,” a view mirrored by the demonstrators.89 As can be seen, these examples of migration restrictions, hukou transfers, access to local programs and benefits, differences in jobs and taxes, limited opportunities for political reach, and education discriminations show favor for urban over rural populations. Each of these aspects of social and economic life was disadvantageous to the rural class, either from lack of access to certain privileges or guidelines preventing them from certain goals. The damage and harm that come from these disadvantages greatly outweigh the economic benefits discussed in the previous section in terms of the negative effects on the general well-being of a much larger rural population, both socially and politically.

Changes in the System The hukou system has changed in part over the last sixty years, sometimes actually working in the favor of the rural population in reform periods. China’s economy began to deteriorate following the 1961 famine of the Great Leap Forward and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), along with the impact of dramatically changing policies and the withdrawal of Soviet assistance.90 This downturn brought about large and widespread reforms for the Chinese economy in 1978, led by Deng Xiaoping.91 A subsequent push piloted by Chinese peasants called for an easing of the economic difficulties of those who labored on agricultural collectives. In a change from 1958 hukou policies, the government took to assisting the agricultural sector more by removing state-collectivized farmland and returning land to private plots and farm 88 The Associated Press, “Hundreds of workers riot in eastern China,” NBC News, July 14, 2008.

89 “Hundreds of workers riot.”

90 “China’s Economic Rise: History, Trends, Challenges, and Implications for the United States,” EveryCRSReport.

91 “China’s Economic Rise.”

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families.92 As rural communities exceeded government policies for food production by switching to household farming, the Party issued two policies: “Contracting Output to the Household” in 1979 and “Contracting Work to the Household” in 1981 which allowed for the communes to reinstate private farming.93 The abolition of these communes and the decollectivization of 98% of rural households by 1983 created a new wave of rural agricultural markets and economic development.94 Because of this, there was soon a surplus of rural labor with a simultaneous demand for urban labor, causing the government to implement reforms that relaxed the mobility restrictions for those of rural hukou.95 These changed policies granted more temporary urban hukou statuses to migrant workers, giving rural citizens more mobility between their rural hometowns and unskilled jobs located in the cities. One aspect of this system was the self-supplied food grain hukou label. Through this label, which was introduced in 1984, rural residents could obtain residence status in smaller urban areas, as long as they met locally determined entry conditions such as employment and housing and could obtain their own food rations.96 These locally determined entry conditions continued to develop between the reforms of these years and the last few decades, with most small cities in 2001 including, for example, conditions for a “stable job or source of income” and a “stable place of residence.”97 Larger cities like Nanjing, after 2001, instituted similar guidelines more stringently; in Nanjing, the “stable place of residence” had to be private ownership of a house or a stay in government or corporate housing.98 Furthermore, the blue stamp policy, which was introduced in 1992, allowed wealthy and educated individuals to purchase an urban status by investing large amounts of money in specific urban cities; thus, by offering hukou statuses to these urban areas, local governments could attract the wealthy, educated,

92 Martin K. Whyte, Social Change and the Urban-Rural Divide in China (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rozenberg Publishers, 1999), 45-60.

93 Windrow and Guha, “The Hukou System,” 5.

94 “The Hukou System,” 5-6.

95 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic Paper: China’s Household Registration System: Sustained Reform Needed to Protect China’s Rural Migrants, October 7, 2005.

96 “Household Registration,” 246.

97 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

98 Special Topic.

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and skilled individuals they desired.99 Some local governments, such as the Jiangsu province in 2003, decided to stop labeling hukous as urban or rural or blue-stamp to break the social divide, though the restrictions were not completely removed.100 Even given these new and more lenient guidelines, millions of rural status holders migrated illegally to urban areas without formal registration, attracted by the job and economic opportunities. Because of the growing abandonment of food rations, unregistered migrants in urban locations could begin to purchase food on their own, which increased unregistered migration even further. One estimate from 1995 claimed that only around half of the 80 million migrants in China at the time were registered as temporary residents.101 Oftentimes, these migrant workers had to be separated from their families back home. A 1996 document writes that six million migrant workers in the mining industry lived far from their wives; the annual meetings of these colloquially-known weaving girls and cowherds caused crowdings of 50,000 railway carriages and 100,000 public buses, with the government having to pay 2.3 billion yuan for the expenses.102 A Caijing report from 2009 estimated that there were 130 million migrant workers with rural hukou living in urban areas, and even though these migrant workers had more mobility and freedom than in the past, they were more vulnerable to a variety of rules and exploitation.103 For example, they were not given the social welfare available to those with urban hukou, even if they lived in the area.104 And after losing their jobs in the cities, the workers would usually return home to rural areas, and sometimes their land would have been seized by local officials or given to other farmers.105 Authorities also instituted an administrative detention regime, which would deport rural migrants who did not have fixed 99 Kam Wing Chan and Li Zhang, “The Hukou System and Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes,” The China Quarterly 160 (December 1999): 836-38.

100 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

101 Special Topic.

102 Xianliang, “China’s Registration,” 16.

103 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Officials’ Early Response to Unemployment and “Social Unrest” During Downturn, March 12, 2009.

104 “China: Economic Crisis Increases Risks for Migrant Workers,” Human Rights Watch, January 23, 2009.

105 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Officials’ Early Response.

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housing, stable jobs, or formal documentation, from urban regions.106 Yet guidelines continued to relax and change, and many more urban hukou statuses were offered than in previous years. According to the China Statistical Yearbook and China Population Statistical Yearbook from various years, 13.5% of the population was of urban status in 1955, but by 2006, urban dwellers has grown to 43.9% of the population.107 Along with this, the government gave 100 million urban status grants to migrant workers in 2020, with grant numbers continuing to rise because of these changes to the system.108 Other relaxations of the rules include the slowing and abolishment of forced repatriation or abuses towards hukou-less unregistered migrants as well as the gradual decline of the hukou-based resource allocation, which heavily favored the urban citizens. For example, the nation-wide protests after the afore-mentioned 2003 beating and death of the young migrant Sun Zhigang due to hukou registration issues prompted the State Council to abolish the repatriation system.109 And in the Zhejiang province and in Hangzhou city, the public security department ended wide population sweeps to find undocumented migrants.110 Moreover, many subsidies granted to only those of urban hukou have shrunk or disappeared, and market-based resource allocation has increased.111 The State Council in 2004 also announced their aim to remove discriminatory employment measures against migrants in urban regions, and the Beijing government removed the restricting regulations that prevented migrants from living in apartments or office spaces that prohibited them from different job opportunities.112 These numerous changes have already reformed many aspects of the hukou system, yet the discrimination and social divide is still in place, leading to more recent calls for reform.

The large imbalance and class discriminations still favoring the urban over rural hukou holders have caused social tensions in the system. On May 13, 2005, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights wrote in their “Concluding Observations of the Committee 106 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

107 Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System,” 203.

108 Agten, Adventures in the Chinese Economy, 35.

109 Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, Chapter 7.

110 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

111 “Household Registration,” 246.

112 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

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on the Initial Report of the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macao)” about the lasting discrimination because of the hukou system in China: The [United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights] notes with deep concern the de facto discrimination against internal migrants in the fields of employment, social security, health service, housing, and education that indirectly result[s], inter alia, from the restrictive national household registration system (hukou) which continues to be in place despite official announcements regarding reforms.113 Although Chinese officials claimed to have passed reforms already, the United Nations Committee’s “deep concern” reveals that foreign nations are still worried about the persisting effects of the hukou system, an example of outsider criticisms against the system. Even though the hukou system only takes place in China, its effects and discrimination have drawn entire reports of opposition from worldwide officials, such as those of the United Nations committee, calling for change.

In order to prevent social unrest due to discrimination against migrant and rural workers, experts have wanted longer-term protection for this population, with calls for reforms to eventually integrate migrant workers completely into the urban population.114 And despite many changes since 1958, the hukou system still exists with segregation, as Professor Fei-Ling Wang states in an interview: “The basic system, that is to segregate people and manage them, is still there. Administratively, this kind of organizing through exclusion is still there.”115 Since many fundamental rights are still withheld from the rural population, previous reforms have failed to diminish the discrimination against rural hukou holders. These fundamental grants include land and property rights, freedom to immigrate and migrate, and more, and without these rights given to individuals of both groups, the social divide will continue to persist.116 Without these reforms in the hukou system, the majority of the Chinese population will still be at a disadvantage, lacking basic citizen rights.

113 Special Topic.

114 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Officials’ Early Response.

115 Priyanka Juneja, “China’s Hukou System (An Interview with Fei-Ling Wang),” The Diplomat, July 14, 2007.

116 Juneja, “China’s Hukou.”

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The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), an independent agency of the United States government led by Senator Chuck Hagel and Representative Jim Leach at the time, offered recommendations for the Chinese government in a 2005 special topic paper. This included relaxing requirements to obtain an urban hukou, specifically with an emphasis on non-discriminatory criteria. The CECC also recommended that they eliminate guidelines that separate rural and urban public services, and “engage in international dialogue on internal migration and hukou reform.”117 However, implementing all of these recommendations is nearly impossible for China currently, due to a lack of sufficient resources to provide public service access to migrant and rural workers, and a need for much political commitment. As an example, some ministries and local governments in 2005 wrote that reforms are “not entirely within the power or responsibility of the MPS,” resisting the reforms because of the complications required for government efforts such as the lack of resources or commitment mentioned.118 In the future, the CECC suggests that China experiment with regulations in which hukou status is given based on criteria that do not discriminate as much economically. For example, some potential measures are to grant status based on how long one resides in an urban area or to grant an urban hukou to the children of migrants. Such measures would still allow the government to control the number of urban hukou holders but will slowly work to close the divide.119 Though many changes have already occurred since the start of the hukou system over 60 years ago, more inclusive reforms are still necessary now and in the future to support more people.

Conclusion During its 60 years of existence, China’s hukou system left a multifaceted impact—economically, through the state collectivization of various industries, as well as socially and politically, with the inherent separation into two distinct and unequal castes—and the harms caused by the separation are far greater than any benefits the system brought about. Although these policies have relaxed due to protests and reforms, 117 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

118 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, “Local Governments Resist Reforms to Household Registration System,” January 4, 2006.

119 Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Special Topic.

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division in the country still prevails, resembling an apartheid system that necessitates global attention. Nearly 60% of China was and still is restricted from government positions, education, and other social benefits because of a label assigned to them from birth and beyond their control. These issues have led to the rise of a migrant worker population as well as the rise of left-behind children, those who live in rural areas while their parents are away from home working in urban areas. These 70 million children, who are abandoned by at least one parent, have less education, have poor mental and physical health, and have become trapped in a cycle of poverty.120 Despite the difficulties associated with reforms and with abolishing the system as a whole, the country is moving in the right direction, with recent calls for change to improve the lives of the rural population. Growing local and global awareness about the intricacies and injustices of the hukou system is working to ensure a future in which China recognizes the tragedies of the system’s early decades and moves towards equality for both social groups.

120 Radley Tan, “China’s Left-Behind Children,” The Borgen Project.

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Jinqing, Cao. China Along the Yellow River: A Scholar’s Observations and Reflections on Rural Society. Shanghai, China: Shanghai Literary and Arts Publishing House, 2000.

Juneja, Priyanka. “China’s Hukou System (An Interview with Fei-ling Wang).”

The Diplomat, July 14, 2007. Accessed October 19, 2021.

Khanin, G.I. “The 1950s: The Triumph of the Soviet Economy.” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 8 (2003): 1187-211.

Kuang, Lei, and Li Liu. “Discrimination against Rural-to-Urban Migrants: The Role of the Hukou System in China.” PLoS One 7, no. 11 (2012).

The Library of Congress Country Studies. “China’s Recovery from War, 1949-52.” Photius. Last modified November 10, 2004. Accessed October 15, 2021.

Lin, Jing. Social Transformation and Private Education in China. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Ministry of Public Security. “Provisional Regulations on the Governance of Urban Populations.” News release. July 16, 1951.

Ministry of Public Security-Bureau of Personnel and Training. Huzheng guanli jiaocheng (The textbook on Hukou management). Beijing, China: Qunzhong Press, 2000.

Mirsky, Jonathan. “The China We Don’t Know at the Wayback Machine.”

New York Review of Books 56, no. 3 (February 26, 2009).

National People’s Congress. “Instruction on the Establishment of a Household Registration System.” News release. January 9, 1958.

Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Nie, Haifeng, and Chunbing Xing. “When City Boy Falls in Love with Country Girl: Baby’s Hukou, Hukou Reform, and Inter-Hukou Marriage.”

Paper presented at Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), 2010.

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Qian, Sima. Shiji: Shangjun liezhuan. Vol. 2.

Shangshu (Ancient books).

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Tan, Radley. “China’s Left-Behind Children.” The Borgen Project. Last modified October 19, 2020. Accessed October 15, 2021.

Wang, Fei-Ling. “Brewing Tensions while Maintaining Stabilities: The Dual Role of the Hukou System in Contemporary China.” Asian Perspective 29, no. 4 (2005).

———. From Family to Market: Labor Allocation in Contemporary China.

Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1998.

———. Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Digital file.

Whyte, Martin K. Social Change and the Urban-Rural Divide in China.

Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rozenberg Publishers, 1999.

Windrow, Hayden, and Anik Guha. “The Hukou System, Migrant Workers, & State Power in the People’s Republic of China.” Northwestern Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2005).

Xianliang, Ren. “China’s Registration Taboo.” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 29, no. 1 (1996): 15-26.

Xinhua Daily Telegraph (Beijing, China), May 19, 1995.

Yao, Sun. Hukou guanlixue jiaocheng (Textbook on Hukou management).

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The Movement is Contagious: Connections Between Black and Asian Americans in Civil Rights Actions Gordon Chen

The movement is contagious, and the people in it are the ones who pass on the spirit.

—Yuri Kochiyama, A Passion for Justice1 The 1960s was an explosive period of domestic and international tumult, manifested as President Kennedy’s assassination, the Cold War, and perhaps most importantly, the Civil Rights movement’s emergence into the mainstream. The Black-led front was part of a global push for decolonization and racial equality set off after World War II when Western powers weakened by war could no longer suppress campaigns for freedom in their colonies, from Vietnam and Korea in Asia to 1 Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice, directed by Pat Saunders and Rea Tajiri, performed

by Yuri Kochiyama, 1993.

Gordon Chen wrote this independent research paper for the National History Day Contest in 2021.

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Algeria and Senegal in Africa.2 By this decade, peaceful, nonviolent decolonization negotiations had morphed into demonstrations and more radical identity movements like the Black Power campaign.3 Key figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael dominated political thought for much of the decade, and Malcolm X’s assassination produced the infamous Life magazine cover depicting him sprawled across the Audubon Ballroom floor after being shot (see fig 1.).4

Figure 1. This photograph titled The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm was the cover of the March 5th 1965 issue of the Life Magazine. This photograph depicts Malcolm X’s body at the scene of his death with Yuri Kochiyama cradling his head.

The Asian woman cradling his head in that photo appears to be a mere bystander, an assumption representative of Asians’ relation to the Black civil rights movement: recurrently overlooked. In reality, that woman, Yuri Kochiyama, was critical to the movement’s success. Historically, Asian and African Americans have often been driven apart by destructive mechanisms of white supremacy, such as the model minority myth and segregation, leading to a “lack [of] the extensive contact and shared experiences that facilitate coalition building.”5 However, the Black and Asian American communities fought together in their respective yet 2 Elizabeth Pollard et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 2n ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 680.

3 Pollard et al., Worlds Together, 692.

4 Life, “The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm,” Tumblr, February 21, 2012.

5 Claire Jean Kim and Taeku Lee, “Interracial Politics: Asian Americans and Other Communities of Color,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 3 (September 2001): 633.

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intertwined struggles for civil rights, and, in the process, communicated extensively through both interpersonal relationships and evolving institutional arrangements as best exemplified by the activism of Yuri Kochiyama and Richard Aoki.

Asian American Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement Written and oral communication, including letters, small-scale discussions, and demonstrations, facilitated the direct participation of Asians in the Black Civil Rights movement. Kochiyama, the woman in the Life cover photo, was one of Malcolm X’s closest associates and campaigned tirelessly for Black self-determination, anti-imperialism, and Third World liberation. Raised in San Pedro, California, Kochiyama first experienced racial discrimination while detained in World War II internment camps.6 However, until her move to Harlem, the center of the explosive Black Power movement, in 1960, Kochiyama still believed that racism was not intrinsic to U.S. democracy and firmly stood for assimilation.7 In fact, her first words to Malcolm X in October 1963 explicitly challenged his “harsh stance on integration,” referring to his firm support of Black nationalism, and asked if he believed in the “‘togetherness’ of all people.”8 However, after a year of correspondence and Kochiyama’s radicalization, she invited Malcolm X to speak at her home to survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.9 During his talk, Malcolm X mentioned receiving many letters from Kochiyama and promised to write to her during his travels; in her autobiography, Kochiyama describes how she later received 6 Diane C. Fujino, “Race, Place, Space, and Political Development: Japanese-American Radicalism in the ‘Pre- Movement’ 1960s,” Social Justice 35, no. 2 (2008): 59.

7 Diane C. Fujino, “Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama’s Humanizing Radicalism,” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, and Dayo F. Gore (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 297.

8 “Mrs. Mary Kochiyama & Family,” letter to Malcolm X, October 17, 1963; Yuri Kochiyama, interview by Diane Fujino, December 8-11, 1995, quoted in Diane C. Fujino, “The Black Liberation Movement and Japanese American Activism: The Radical Activism of Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama,” in Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans, ed. Bill V. Mullen and Fred Ho (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 178.

9 Yuri Kochiyama, Passing It On—A Memoir, ed. Marjorie Lee, Akemi KochiyamaSardinha, and Audee Kochiyama-Holman (UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2004), 67-68.

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eleven postcards from Malcolm X while he visited world leaders (see fig.

2).10 In one, Malcolm X went so far as to describe the Kochiyamas as “the most beautiful family in Harlem.”11

Figure 2. Postmarked from Cairo in 1964, this is one of the 11 postcards sent by Malcolm X to “Mr. & Mrs. Wm Kochiyama & Family.” This is part of Yuri Kochiyama’s collection.

Within the Civil Rights movement, Kochiyama served as an arbiter and a communicator. Throughout her life, she was a conduit of ideas, always remaining on the political periphery due to her strong conviction that a movement about Black liberation should not center herself, an Asian American. After Malcolm X’s death, Kochiyama founded the North Star, a political newsletter recording the burgeoning nationalist movement in Harlem, in his honor.12 Through this newsletter, Kochiyama “disseminated the ideas of Black Power to Black, Asian American, and other progressive audiences.”13 The North Star reflects the shift in Kochiyama’s own political paradigm, pushing for Black Power as a means “to inspire a new image; assert a Black self; create basic changes; govern one’s own destiny; achieve not for personal attainments, but for all Black people.”14 Kochiyama championed Black self-determination in the North Star, stating, “We realize the urgency and need for the privacy and intimacy of Black people.

10 Kochiyama, Passing It, 67-68.

11 Malcolm X, eleven postcards to ‘’Mr. & Mrs. Wm Kochiyama & Family,’’ 1964, collection of Yuri Kochiyama, quoted in Fujino, “Black Liberation Movement,” 178.

12 Fujino, “Grassroots Leadership,” 298.

13 Fujino, 298 14 Kochiyama, “And Then We Heard the Thunder ‘Black Power’: SNCC’s New Battle Cry!” North Star, December 1966, 1, quoted in Fujino, 298.

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We hope we have not ever trespassed. We have tried to help only when asked; and especially in the periphery role of support, fund-raising and notifying.”15 Beyond the North Star, Kochiyama was most recognized for her work as a community bastion, utilizing her extensive networks to support political prisoners and activists jailed for radicalism. Mutulu Shakur, who met Kochiyama through their mutual participation in the Black nationalist group Republic of New Afrika, stated that “when we were captured by an enemy, our first call went to WA6-7412 [Kochiyama’s phone number].”16 Shakur continued that “her network was like no other. She would get a lawyer or get information out to our family and the Movement. You knew she wasn’t going to stop until somebody heard from you.”17 Kochiyama was a repository of information on political prisoner cases, supporting prisoners arrested for radical activism. Shakur further asserted that despite her intention to maintain a peripheral role, Kochiyama was indispensable: “She was more than just a leaflet maker … She was essential to that decision-making process.”18 Max Stanford, leader of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), credited Kochiyama with the formation of the RAM Black Panther Party in Harlem, describing her as “a constant communicator, constant facilitator, constant networker.”19 Acclaimed as a linchpin in the Black liberation movement, Kochiyama was named a founding member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.20 In contrast with Kochiyama’s less externally visible role, Richard Aoki was a fiery, outspoken activist whose work was prominently on display.

He operated as less a facilitator and more the leader of protests, rallies, and other demonstrations. Aoki was key to forging Afro-Asian solidarity and was an eminent figure in the birth of the Asian American civil rights movement. However, despite his prolific work on behalf of the Asian American community, Aoki identifies his affiliation with the Black Panther Party (BPP) as the most significant post of his career.21 Aoki befriended 15 Kochiyamas, “Warm Greetings,” North Star, 1968, 2, quoted in Fujino, 304 16 Mutulu Shakur, interview by Diane Fujino, October 19, 1998, quoted in Fujino, 184-85 17 Shakur, interview, quoted in Fujino, 184-85 18 Kochiyamas, “Warm Greetings”; Shakur, interview, quoted in Fujino, 185 19 Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford), interview with author, January 30, 2000, quoted in Fujino, “Grassroots Leadership,” 307.

20 Yuri Kochiyama to Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson, November 8, 1993, quoted in Fujino, 188.

21 Diane C. Fujino, Samurai among Panthers (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 127.

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Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the two founding members of the BPP, and regularly engaged in lengthy political conversations with them at his apartment. Seale describes their meetings as “long broad intellectual discussions with each other … ten or twelve times over a two to three year period. [This was] all before the Party started.’’22 Upon invitation by Seale and Newton, Aoki joined the nascent party and became the only nonblack person to hold leadership, ranking as a field marshal and informally serving as the minister of education.23 Aoki was a firm believer in necessary defensive violence, advocating for aggressive responses to the hate crimes against Blacks so prevalent at the time. He supplied Newton and Seale with the first guns of the BPP and affirmed, “I pushed the spirit of self-defense … [as] a tool to help stop the violence.”24

Asian Identity and Activism Influenced by Black Thought After the first few years of his involvement, Aoki shifted away from the BPP and began focusing on Asian American activism on the UC Berkeley campus, where he founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and galvanized the Asian American civil rights movement. As the official AAPA spokesperson, Aoki fought in a historic series of protests for the establishment of Ethnic Studies at Berkeley and, upon succeeding, became a faculty member and the program coordinator.25 Later, Aoki chaired the AAPA during a strike organized by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), for which he served as the Asian American spokesperson.

Characteristic of his BPP history, Aoki focused on the strike’s militant aspects, carefully planning confrontational tactics against the police.26 These protests and his work with other student activist groups, such as the Vietnam Day Committee and the Tri-Continental Student Organization, connected Asian American experiences with those of Black Americans.

Through his positions in the BPP and the Berkeley faculty, Aoki highlighted Afro-Asian solidarity as a mainstay of racial activism.27 22 Bobby Seale, interview by Diane Fujino, September 2, 2003, quoted in Fujino, “Black Liberation Movement,” 173.

23 Fujino, “Race, Place,” 70.

24 Fujino, Samurai among Panthers, 284.

25 Fujino, “Black Liberation Movement,” 174.

26 Fujino, 175 27 Fujino, Samurai among Panthers, 291; It should be noted that recent evidence suggests that Aoki was, at some point in his life, an FBI informant. Historians are still debating how

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acknowledging the Asian diaspora’s linguistic diversity displayed that Asian American protesters’ support for Newton was derived from their common racial identity and solidarity with Black people.

However, Asian Americans were divided over borrowing Black political theory. Frank Chin, playwright of the 1972 The Chickencoop Chinaman— one of the first distinctly Asian American works of literature—was critical of the Red Guards and their attempts to imitate the Panthers, viewing their performances as “yellow minstrel show[s].”33 By dismissing their acts as performative, Chin argues that simply emulating Blackness does not generate a satisfactory racial identity. Chin believed that the Red Guards’ combative slogans and talk of minority unity did not represent the actual Asian community: “We started talking about the sisters in the street and the brothers in the joint … That wasn’t our thing.”34 However, Chin “distinguished between a generative adoption of blackness - which … emerged from organic relations between Asian Americans and blacks - and a non-generative, vulgar, and overly romantic imitation of blackness.”35 Ideological proximity between Black and Asian Americans led to controversy over the two groups’ co-dependence, with some Asian Americans arguing that mimicry could not replace a unique political self.

Black Ideology Influenced by Asian Activism Prominent Black figures also perceived Asian liberation movements as examples for Americans to follow and used Asian experiences to foster inter-racial unity. For instance, Malcolm X asserted, “You were bombed and have physical scars. We too … are constantly hit by the bombs of racism” to the audience of Hiroshima survivors at Kochiyama’s home.36 Newton also compared the “enslavement of Black people” to the “dropping of atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”37 Black activists principally viewed Japan as a role model for resisting white supremacy, as it was the only Asian nation to resist foreign colonization up until World War II, but also learned from movements originating all across Asia.38 Revolutions in 33 Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession (New York: New Press, 1992), 310, quoted in Maeda, 1079.

34 Terkel, Race, 310, quoted in Maeda, 1093.

35 Maeda, “Black Panthers,” 1094.

36 Kochiyama, Passing it, 69.

37 Black Panther Party, “Executive Mandate No. 1,” quoted in Fujino, Samurai among, 291.

38 Kochiyama, Passing it, 69

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Aoki’s work for the AAPA and TWLF reflected a larger trend of Asian Americans taking inspiration from the Black Civil Rights movement.

Taking inspiration from another movement is a form of intellectual and cross-cultural communication, as it fundamentally involves sharing experiences and ideas. Steve Louie, longtime activist promoting Asian liberation, claims that Asian Americans “[owe] a huge debt to the black power movement,” describing how the Black Panthers and other Black activists were idealists “who … really brought … the Asian American movement out.”28 According to historian Gary Okihiro, he and many other Asian Americans found their identities through the works of Black authors such as Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Langston Hughes.29 Specifically, the ideologies and styles of Black activists were instrumental in the construction of distinct Asian American identities. For example, the Red Guard Party, a group of Chinese Americans espousing Asian American nationalism and the predominant Asian American leftist organization, was inspired by the Black Panthers. Their stylistic choices and presentation, such as their dress and charged, combative language, drew on those of the Black Panthers. Their Ten-Point Program essentially copied the Panthers’ platform verbatim, simply substituting “black” with “yellow.”30 This choice of language also unified the diverse and dispersed Asian diaspora, uniting Asian identities under a single banner of “yellow people.” The Red Guards, though assembled in Chinatown by Chinese Americans, advocated for the freedom of all “yellow people,” drawing parallels between the Black and Asian American communities and signaling that Asians were “locat[ed] … within a paradigm focusing on power and self-determination.”31 When Newton was arrested in 1967 for the murder of a police officer (to which he claimed he was acting in selfdefense), the AAPA’s support for his freedom featured posters inscribed with “Free Huey” in multiple Asian languages, despite the majority of participants being native-born English speakers.32 These posters that fact affects his legacy.

28 Steve Louie, interview by Daryl Maeda, July 20, 1997, quoted in Daryl Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December/January 2005): 1086.

29 Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 129-38.

30 Maeda, “Black Panthers,” 1090.

31 Maeda, 1090.

32 Maeda, 1088.

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Vietnam and Korea were also examples of people of color resisting white colonialism from which Black activists drew inspiration.39 Struggles in Asia spurred wider circles of people of color around the world towards antiracist and anti-imperialist actions.

While not often viewed as a model for resistance to imperialism, China crucially influenced Black political philosophy. In Kochiyama’s autobiography, she recounts how Malcolm X “admired Mao because he simultaneously took on feudalism, government corruption, and foreign incursion.”40 Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and prominent militant, was influenced by Maoist ideology when he fled to and spent three years in China upon exile from the U.S in 1965. Williams wrote that “China impressed me as a variety of worlds with a variety of people bound by … morality and selflessness.”41 Williams even managed to extract two statements from Mao Zedong in support of racial equality in the U.S; in a 1963 address, Mao expressed “our resolute support for the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination” and specifically cited Williams as the speech’s impetus.42 In fact, Chinese politics influenced an entire generation of Black activists, as evidenced by the inclusion of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book in the BPP’s educational resources.43 Chinese ideology proved so important to the Black civil rights movement that many activists adopted Chinese peasantstyle garb to express their political values.44 BPP chairman David Hilliard, upon meeting a group of Vietnamese activists, stated that “their resilience and ingenuity in defeating American military power awes me” and pronounced, “You’re Yellow Panthers, we’re Black Panthers … Together we will eventually destroy imperialism and free the people of the world.”45 However, connections drawn with Asian movements primarily stemmed from continental Asia, not Asian American identity. Hilliard’s 39 Fujino, 291.

40 Kochiyama, Passing it, 70.

41 Robert F. Williams, “On the Platform with Mao Tse-tung,” New York Times, February 20, 1971.

42 Mao Tse-tung, “Calling upon the People of the World to Unite to Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism and Support the American Negroes in Their Struggle against Racial Discrimination,” August 1963.

43 Maeda, “Black Panthers,” 1085.

44 Maeda, 1085.

45 David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 247.

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relationship with the Asian community was indicative of a lack of understanding of the Asian dilemma in the U.S. At a Red Guard rally, he argued that Chinese Americans were effectively overassimiliated and that “if you can’t relate to China then you can’t relate to the Panthers,” a statement contradicted by the long history of Yellow Peril, internment camps, and bars to citizenship and immigration showing the longstanding oppression Asian Americans suffered.46

“The Movement is Contagious” Following years of social unrest and nationwide protests, from Black Lives Matter to Stop Asian Hate, we must remember that the fight against racial injustice is not just the burden of one community—oppression is systemic and intersectional. The recent attacks on Asian American elders and women are extensions of the same oppressive framework that has subjected Black people to disproportionate policing, targeting, and violence. In the modern world, with the Internet and social media at our fingertips, it is much easier to communicate with one another than it was decades ago. Communication of all types—be it the large-scale rallies initiated by Aoki, Kochiyama’s preferred behind-the-scenes operations, or the exchange of ideology, style, and knowledge—facilitates unity, understanding, and action. Communication is the contagion that conducts activism and social awareness to broader communities and is instrumental in fostering the solidarity necessary to combat the pervasive social inequities of this country. As citizens of this nation and the world, we must ensure its survival.

46 AAPA Newspaper 1.4 (March 1969): 4, quoted in Maeda, 1083.

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Bibliography Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon: Two Plays

by Frank Chin. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.

Fujino, Diane C. “The Black Liberation Movement and Japanese American Activism: The Radical Activism of Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama.”

In Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Fred Ho. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

———. “Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama’s Humanizing Radicalism.” In Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, and Dayo F. Gore. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

———. “Race, Place, Space, and Political Development: Japanese-American Radicalism in the ‘Pre- Movement’ 1960s.” Social Justice 35, no. 2 (2008): 57-79.

———. Samurai among Panthers. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Hilliard, David, and Lewis Cole. This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Kim, Claire Jean, and Taeku Lee. “Interracial Politics: Asian Americans and Other Communities of Color.” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 3 (September 2001): 631-37. JSTOR. Kochiyama, Yuri. Passing It On—A Memoir. Edited by Marjorie Lee, Akemi Kochiyama-Sardinha, and Audee Kochiyama-Holman. UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2004.

Kochiyama, “And Then We Heard the Thunder ‘Black Power’: SNCC’s New Battle Cry!” The North Star, December 1966, 1.

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Kochiyama, Yuri. Letter to Herman Ferguson and Iyaluua Ferguson, November 8, 1993.

———. Letter to Malcolm X, “Mrs. Mary Kochiyama and family,” October 17, 1963.

Kochiyamas, “Warm Greetings,” North Star, 1968, 2 Maeda, Daryl T. “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972.”

American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December/January 2005): 1079-103.

JSTOR. Malcolm X, eleven postcards to ‘’Mr. & Mrs. Wm Kochiyama & Family,’’ 1964, collection of Yuri Kochiyama Okihiro, Gary Y. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Pollard, Elizabeth, Clifford Rosenberg, Robert Tignor, and Alan Karras.

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. 2n ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Seale, Bobby. “Executive Mandate Number 1.” Speech, California State Capitol, May 2, 1967.

Terkel, Studs. Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession. New York: New Press, 1992.

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Performed by Yuri Kochiyama. 1993.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Capitalist Triumph or Political Inevitability?

Emmett Chung and Krish Maniar

During the Cold War between the world’s only two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, each nation and its allies battled for their respective ideologies, capitalism and communism, to prevail worldwide. At the center of this tension was a now-divided Germany where, in 1961, the communist government of East Germany constructed a barrier known as the Berlin Wall to separate the Soviet-controlled East from the enclave of West Berlin, a detatched part of the capitalist West Germany.1 Ostensibly built to protect the East from “capitalist subversion,” it was actually meant to stop the huge numbers of East Berliners who were fleeing communism.2 The towering and stringently protected Wall divided 1 Seth Givens, “Berlin Wall.” In America in the World, 1776 to the Present: A Supplement to the Dictionary of American History, edited by Edward J. Blum. vol. 1, (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2016), 113 Gale eBooks.

2 “Berlin Wall.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., edited by William A. Darity, Jr., vol. 1. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008), 289. Gale In Context: World History.

Emmett Chung and Krish Maniar wrote this paper for a historiography research assignment for AP European History with Mr. Byron Stevens in the 2020-2021 school year.

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the city until 1989, with 125 East Germans losing their lives attempting to escape.3 Since the end of the Cold War, historians’ access to documents from East Germany has allowed them to better analyze and contend the causes of the fall of the Wall in 1989. Although some historians believe the fall of the Berlin Wall was a result of American liberal democracy prevailing over the declining influence of Soviet communism, most historians attribute the fall of the Wall to systemic problems within East Germany, such as poor economic conditions and travel restrictions, as well as an abysmal governmental response to crisis.

Some historians saw the fall of the Wall as a sign that American capitalism had decisively triumphed over communism. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, Professor Francis Fukuyama published an essay later known as The End of History, in which he argued that by 1989, communist and fascist states would both have failed, and the only remaining political ideology in the world would be liberal democracy.4 Fukuyama claimed the supposed goals of protecting human rights and democracy in U.S. Cold War policy were “not entirely misplaced” given his belief that the triumph of liberalism would be inevitable.5 With regards to the revolutions of 1989, Fukuyama defended President Ronald Reagan’s demand for Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, believing that those living under the Soviet hegemony in Warsaw Pact states would inevitably incite a revolt, a cause which would need to be supported by the West.6 Historian Barbara J. Falk criticized one of Fukyama’s boldest claims, in which he argued that a universal desire for democracy around the world would overcome ethnic or political divisions in any one nation, thus justifying U.S. foreign intervention as simply accelerating that process.7 Falk also challenged the image of “crowds delirious with freedom expressing their support for capitalism” as proof of liberal democracy’s inevitable triumph, and she asserted that expecting a similar speed of rapid regime change in other regions would be unreasonable without considering the systemic factors that led to the collapse of the Eastern bloc.8 While the triumph of American capitalist liberal democracy was a 3 “Berlin Wall.”

4 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 279-280.

5 Fukuyama, 279-280.

6 Fukuyama, 280.

7 Barbara J. Falk, “1989 and Post-Cold War Policymaking: Were the ‘Wrong’ Lessons Learned from the Fall of Communism?,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society; 22, no. 3 (September 2009), 295, ProQuest.

8 Falk, 300.

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relatively well-accepted explanation for the fall of the Berlin Wall at the time, most historians attribute the fall of the Wall to systemic problems in East Germany, primarily harsh economic downturn and limits on freedom of movement, rather than the inevitable fate of any communist state. In his book review of Patrick Major’s Behind the Berlin Wall, William Smaldone comments on the economic problems within East Germany.9 Characterizing East German fiscal policies as “disruptive, oppressive, and unsuccessful,” Smaldone explains how those policies led to East Germany’s inability to compete with West Germany’s higher wage rates, lower levels of unemployment, and better job opportunities.10 Furthermore, the East German government was reluctant to implement any major reforms because it feared that they would incentivize their citizens to emigrate.11 Ironically, however, East Germany frequently looked towards West Germany for economic aid to alleviate their financial situation.12 Later, East Germans rallied for economic freedom against the inadequate government in movements such as the Leipzig Demonstrations.13 In Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, Charles Maier thoroughly explores the problems regarding travel restrictions, which barred East Germans from entering into West Germany, believing that it “made the absence of freedom an almost tangible condition.”14 Aside from traveling to West Germany or attempting to gain asylum there through embassies in other Eastern Bloc states, many East Germans also desired to improve their living conditions by fleeing to other Western European countries, such as Italy. The government’s inadequate response to their situation accelerated the collapse of the Wall.15 Besides the array of internal problems that plagued East Germany, the lack of a decisive response from the government further accelerated the fall of the Wall. In 1993, Frederick Baker pointed to the strain on the East German government after the opening of the border fence between Austria and Hungary in September 1989 as an important step towards the fall of 9 William Smaldone, “Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power.”

Canadian Journal of History 46, no. 3 (2011), EBSCO. 10 Smaldone.

11 Smaldone.

12 Smaldone.

13 Maier, Charles S. Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997, 140.

14 Maier, 125.

15 Maier, 125.

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the Wall.16 He also attributed the sudden “rush” of protesters into West Berlin to a now-infamous press conference led by East German spokesman Günter Schabowski.17 Schabowski, who had been instructed to tell reporters the East German government would now issue citizens passports but was unaware that unrestricted travel permission would begin the next day, incorrectly announced that the policy would take effect immediately, causing citizens to rush through to the wall in hopes of going to the West.18 Hope Harrison’s more recent study of the fall of the wall also discovered the reluctance of government and police to forcibly quell protests despite their ability to do so.19 She emphasized the lack of clear instructions given to guards at the Wall on the night of November 9 who, once confronted by protestors, eventually opened checkpoints by their own volition.20 The fall of the Berlin Wall was not entirely the result of capitalist triumph over communism but rather more a product of both the cracks within the East German government, as well as the lack of effective response to the mass demonstrations. Although historians have studied narratives of both ideological triumphalism and the inevitability of the Wall’s collapse, the role of the Wall both in reunified Germany and the former Eastern Bloc remains controversial. Some historians even claimed that the Wall, previously a universal symbol of communist oppression, has itself become an instrument of capitalism through tourists and souvenirs.21 With barely over thirty years separating the fall of the Wall from the present, there has also been limited time for more diverse or authoritative historiographies of its collapse to emerge. Nevertheless, study of the causes of the Berlin Wall and the greater revolutions of 1989 remains important to understanding both ideological struggles and modern German society.

16 Frederick Baker, “The Berlin Wall: Production, Preservation and Consumption of a 20th-century Monument,” Antiquity 67, no. 257 (1993), Gale in Context: World History.

17 Baker.

18 Michael Meyer, “Günter Schabowski, the Man Who Opened the Wall,” New York Times (New York, NY), November 6, 2015, accessed November 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes. com/2015/11/07/opinion/gnter-schabowski-the-man-who-opened-the-wall.html.

19 Hope M. Harrison, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 319.

20 Harrison, 320.

21 Baker.

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Bibliography Baker, Frederick. “The Berlin Wall: Production, Preservation and Consumption of a 20th-century Monument.” Antiquity 67, no. 257 (1993). Gale in Context.

“Berlin Wall.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 289. Vol. 1. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. Gale in Context: World History.

Falk, Barbara J. “1989 and Post-Cold War Policymaking: Were the ‘Wrong’ Lessons Learned from the Fall of Communism?” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Seociety; 22, no. 3 (September 2009): 291-313. ProQuest.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Givens, Seth. “Berlin Wall.” In America in the World, 1776 to the Present: A Supplement to the Dictionary of American History, edited by Edward J. Blum, 130-33. Vol. 1. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2016. Gale in Context: U.S. History.

Harrison, Hope M. After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Maier, Charles S. Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Meyer, Michael. “Günter Schabowski, the Man Who Opened the Wall.”

The New York Times (New York, NY), November 6, 2015. Accessed November 6, 2021.

Smaldone, William. “Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power.” Canadian Journal of History 46, no. 3 (2011): 706+. EBSCO.

Russian Revelations: A Historiographical Evaluation on the Western Reinterpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis Annmaria Antony and Armaan Thakker

Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western scholars gained access to previously restricted government archives for the first time, marking the beginnings of an unprecedented development for modern historians to uncover new perspectives in Soviet history.1 The newfound access to official documents, the Central Party Archive, and classified state files allowed Sovietologists to critically examine historical documents from both state and party sources.2 In turn, the Western intellectual’s understanding of Soviet social policy could broaden beyond the Communist Party’s public statements and secretive bureaucracy.3 One such important historical event involving the Soviet Union was the Cuban 1 Serge Schmemann, “Soviet Archives: Half-Open, Dirty Window on Past,” New York Times (New York City, NY), April 26, 1995, accessed April 8, 2022.

2 Schmemann.

3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History,” The Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 378-380, accessed May 24, 2021.

Annmaria Antony and Armaan Thakker wrote this paper for a historiography research assignment for AP European History with Mr. Byron Stevens in the 2020-2021 school year.

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Missile Crisis. Although former restrictions on the Soviet archives resulted in Western unfamiliarity with the deliberations of Soviet policymakers, gradual disclosures after 1991 have allowed Western historians to reevaluate the Cuban Missile Crisis and identify American misjudgments regarding Soviet military capabilities in Cuba, the secret agreement to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey, and the irrelevance of the FominScali backchannel to the rectification of the conflict.

As one of the most dangerous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated the tensions that had been developing during the Cold War and pushed the world closer to nuclear annihilation than it had ever been before. Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, had feared a successful American invasion in Cuba, which he deduced would be detrimental towards his own political power as a Russian leader.4 Conversely, the United States’ public mood was misguided during the crisis, as National Opinion Research Center’s Illinois study states that forty-five percent of American citizens believed that the probability of war between the United States and Russia had decreased due to the Cuban settlement’s discussing the removal of the American blockade.5 However, critical examination of released texts revealed that the United States had severely underestimated Soviet capabilities, making American optimism on the nuclear situation in Cuba irrational. During the 1960s, the CIA had believed there to be 4,000 troops on the island, but records show that the actual number was closer to 42,000.6 Around this time, leading U.S. military generals had considered the chances of tactical nuclear weapons existing in Cuba to be negligible, as American military planners also remained oblivious to the true magnitude of the Soviet threat. In reality, Cuba housed over one hundred Soviet nuclear weapons.

Soviet archives reveal that the weapons would have been likely launched in the case of a U.S. invasion on the island, though the U.S. neglected to consider this possibility in a show of misguided confidence.7 4 Hugh Phillips, “Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Encyclopedia of Russian History, ed. James R. Millar (New York, NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), 1: 345.

5 Tom W. Smith, “Trends: The Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2003): 268.

6 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Story,” Foreign Policy, no. 72 (1988): 67.

7 Raymond L. Garthoff. “Some Observations on Using the Soviet Archives.” Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (1997): 251-52.

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Khrushchev’s agreement to remove Soviet arms from Cuba ended the Missile Crisis, but President John F. Kennedy had accepted a covert deal to withdraw the American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.8 Popular belief praised Kennedy for successfully executing a “Trollope ploy” by deliberately misunderstanding Khrushchev’s disarmament proposal so that the U.S. would not fulfill its obligation to withdraw the Jupiter missiles. In reality, he publicly accepted Khrushchev’s request that the United States refrain from occupying Cuba, but he also covertly fulfilled the demands of the Jupiter missile agreement.9 Although the missiles provided American security through the nuclear encirclement of Russia, Soviet archives revealed Kennedy’s secret agreement of the removal of the intermediaterange ballistic missiles from Turkey, altering the former perception of an American upper hand during negotiations to end the crisis. Because the violent rebellions in Turkey stemming from a 1960 coup d’etat led to the Western perception that Turkey had turned into “a politically volatile country on the Soviet border,” the removal of the Jupiter missiles may have offered the United States an advantage.10 Nevertheless, Kennedy wanted to keep the removal of nuclear weapons from Turkey a covert operation as he attempted to preserve his reputation and preserve American hegemonic power through the image that the United States had maintained during the peace settlement.11 Kennedy’s perceived heroism and defiance of foreign military power soon dominated American politics and Western public opinion; however, the president displayed shrewd politics through his bargains with Khrushchev that ultimately led to advancements towards international peace that were not a result of the publicized Trollope ploy.12 Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s silence was explained by Russian fears of U.S. military interference, as Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy hoping for “the relaxation of international tensions.”13 This common motif of Russian adherence to American dominance initially reinforced the 8 “Cuban Missile Crisis,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., ed.

William A. Darity, Jr. (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008), 2:184.

9 Sheldon M. Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 134-135.

10 Cody Fuelling, “To the Brink: Turkish and Cuban Missiles during the Height of the Cold War,” International Social Science Review 93, no. 1 (January 2017): 44.

11 Leslie H. Gelb. “The Lie That Screwed up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy, November 2012, 24+. Gale In Context: Global Issues.

12 Alice L. George, “A World on Edge,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Threshold of Nuclear War (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 151-153.

13 Fuelling, “To the Brink,” 45.

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ideology of U.S. supremacy over the Communist Bloc, but the introduction of material from the Soviet archives ultimately revealed the mutuality of the concessions made by both nations’ leaders in ending the conflict, such as the removal of the American blockade and the Russian initiation of the peace negotiations.

Another myth of the Cuban Missile Crisis exposed by the formerly closed Soviet archives surround the Fomin-Scali backchannel. The Fomin-Scali backchannel refers to the correspondence that took place between two prominent figures from the Cuban Missile Crisis: U.S. Ambassador John A. Scali and Soviet Embassy counselor Aleksandr Fomin. Fomin had met with Scali and informed him of potential peace terms between Russia and the United States, proposing that Khrushchev would “promise never to introduce such offensive missiles into Cuba” in exchange for Kennedy’s public statements regarding his nation’s promise to refrain from invading Cuba.14 Not long after Scali promised to relay his message, a telegram was sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy offering that exact settlement. Scali informed the White House of his meeting, which caused the American government to believe that his contact with Fomin induced Russia’s offer. While the Soviet Archives eventually contradicted Fomin’s initiation, during the time of the resolution, popular opinion portrayed Khrushchev as a stubborn, uncompromising leader. A clearer understanding of Khruschev’s actions might have softened his reputation to the American public and spurred more American optimism for an amiable Soviet administration. Although the Fomin-Scali backchannel previously seemed to be the catalyst for the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet archives have disproved this theory. Fomin’s message never actually reached Khrushchev, making it impossible for the backchannel to have influenced any discussions for peace.15 Through the release of the conversation between Khrushchev and Kennedy and its occurrence prior to the Fomin-Scali negotiations, historians were able to decipher that Fomin-Scali had little impact on the actual discussions of peace that began to occur between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

The revelations made through the introduction of Soviet archives to Western scholars display the significance of considering comprehensive literature in the interpretation of complex historical events. Furthermore, 14 Lawrence Van Gelder, “John A. Scali, 77, ABC Reporter Who Helped Ease Missile Crisis” New York Times, 1995 Oct 10, late Edition (East Coast) edition.

15 Garthoff, “Some Observations”, 252-53.

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Russian records state that examining alternate references allows for depolarization regarding competing historical interpretations. This is exemplified through the shift of the Western attitude concerning U.S. military supremacy during the Cold War to a milder form of SovietAmerican impartiality regarding peace negotiations made at the end of the crisis. Consequently, as demonstrated by Kennedy’s heroic portrayal during the secret Jupiter deal or the American misunderstanding of Russian intent during the Fomin-Scali backchannels, scholars, regardless of affiliation, must remain cautious while evaluating resource-restricted history and strive to procure a holistic understanding.

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Bibliography “Cuban Missile Crisis.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 183-85. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. Gale in Context: World History.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History.” The Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 377-400. Accessed May 24, 2021. JSTOR. Fuelling, Cody. “To the Brink: Turkish and Cuban Missiles during the Height of the Cold War.” International Social Science Review 93, no. 1 (January 2017): B1+. Gale in Context: World History.

Garthoff, Raymond L. “Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Story.” Foreign Policy, no. 72 (1988): 61-80. JSTOR. Garthoff, Raymond L. “Some Observations on Using the Soviet Archives.”

Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (1997): 243-57. JSTOR. Gelb, Leslie H. “The Lie That Screwed up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Foreign Policy, November 2012, 24+. JSTOR. George, Alice L. “A World on Edge.” In The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Threshold of Nuclear War, 151-86. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.

ProQuest Ebook Central.

Phillips, Hugh. “Cuban Missile Crisis.” In Encyclopedia of Russian History, edited by James R. Millar, 345-47. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. Gale in Context: World History.

Schmemann, Serge. “Soviet Archives: Half-Open, Dirty Window on Past.”

The New York Times (New York City, NY), April 26, 1995. Accessed April 8, 2022.

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Smith, Tom W. “Trends: The Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. Public Opinion.”

The Public Opinion Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2003): 265-93. JSTOR. Stern, Sheldon M. “The Trollope Ploy Myth.” In The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality, 134-47. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “John A. Scali, 77, ABC Reporter Who Helped Ease Missile Crisis: [1].” New York Times (New York, N.Y.), 1995 Oct 10, late Edition (East Coast) edition.

Notes on Authors Tanay Sharma is an avid engineer and quiz bowl player. In his free time, Tanay enjoys watching television, reading novels, and reading comic books.

Tiffany Chang is passionate about subjects ranging from biology to the classics to graphic design. Tiffany is a member of Harker Journalism and can be found at coffee shops around the Bay Area, though most likely at Philz!

Jeremy Ko is interested in eighteenth-century European history and social activism in the Enlightenment era. In his free time, he plays soccer and mobile games and explores new hairstyles Rupert Chen enjoys studying the Classics, exploring languages, and playing the bagpipes. He has been learning Esperanto since 2019.

Sally Zhu wishes to share her findings on the hukou system with others and also is passionate about math and journalism. In her free time, she likes to collect keychains and read fiction novels.

Gordon Chen’s interest in both the modern Civil Rights movement and Asian American history inspired him to write this paper. In his free time, he reads fanfiction on AO3, plays basketball, and plays League of Legends.

Emmett Chung is an avid member of the Quiz Bowl club who enjoys traveling, cooking, watching movies, and studying politics. He roots for the 49ers and Warriors through the good times and the bad.

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Krish Maniar is interested in a balance between STEM and international relations. Outside of school, he loves playing soccer and basketball, as well as traveling to Europe with his family.

Annmaria Antony is an avid Lincoln-Douglas debater and active competitor in both HOSA and DECA. Beyond academics, Annmaria is a horror movie fanatic and enjoys participating in triathlons Armaan Thakker is intrigued by twentieth century American and European History. Aside from history, Armaan enjoys playing sports including track and football.

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The Board Editor-in-Chief Justin Fung

Managing Editors Gordon Chen Catherine Feng

Editorial Lead Angela Jia

Editorial Associates Emmett Chung Trisha Iyer Gordy Sun Desiree Luo

Design Lead Ariya Reddy

Design Associate

Kailash Ranganathan

Outreach Lead

Sasvath Ramachandran

Outreach Associate Rahul Mulpuri

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