On October 7, 1888, approximately 176 Chinese passengers arrived in San Francisco aboard the S.S. Belgic. They carried laborer return certificates—documents that, until just days earlier, had guaranteed their right to reenter. But on October 1, President Grover Cleveland had signed the Scott Act into law, abruptly voiding those certificates. Officially, the act barred only Chinese laborers from returning. In practice, however, Chinese merchants and U.S.-born children of Chinese parents also traveled with laborer return certificates. They, too, would now be denied readmission.

The Fourteenth Amendment had conferred citizenship and all the “privileges or immunities” it entailed to everyone born on U.S. soil. On the very day Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States signed the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 with China. The treaty guaranteed Chinese people the personal right to emigrate to the United States, affirming “the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance.” Yet, it was a pledge of free movement across borders, compromised from the start by denying Chinese migrants the possibility of naturalization. That promise narrowed further with the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882, a subsequent 1884 amendment, and the Scott Act, which excluded new and returning Chinese laborers from the United States. Still, birthright citizens, Chinese merchants, and other Chinese migrants who were not laborers retained the right of reentry. When those individuals were excluded under the Scott Act, they turned to the courts—not only to defend their own rights, but to hold the United States to its legal commitments.^{Footnote 1,Footnote 2}

This essay turns to Chinese litigation following the Scott Act, which gave lived meaning to the legal categories of “citizen” and “unnaturalized alien” through their associated rights. Chinese merchants—one class of aliens protected by Sino-American treaties—were at times able to claim greater rights at the U.S. border, including the ability to sponsor alien spouses and children, than birthright citizens of Chinese descent. For people of Chinese ancestry, citizenship and alienage functioned as contingent legal positions along a shifting spectrum of state recognition. By tracing how Chinese litigants navigated these unstable legal boundaries, this essay examines how litigation over readmission added to the meaning of citizenship and alienage after the Civil War.

This forum attends to the meaning of belonging for the Chinese community in the United States—the widening gap between citizens and unnaturalized aliens, the struggle to establish birthright citizenship and claim its rights, and the gradual diminishment of those rights. Like my co-contributors, I approach citizenship intergenerationally, through the ways it was defined by and tethered to the legal horizons of aliens.

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In 1888, customs officials were charged with enforcing federal immigration laws.Footnote ³ By the time the Belgic docked in San Francisco, Collector of Customs John S. Hager, the port’s highest customs official, had received notice that the Scott Act was “in full force and operative from the date of approval.”Footnote ⁴ With that directive the Secretary of the Treasury, the Belgic’s passengers—along with those who arrived soon after on the Duke of Westminster, City of Pekin, and Arabic—became the first returnees to be denied reentry under the new law. For the first time, customs officials were authorized not only to block newcomers from China but also to turn away long-resident Chinese migrants returning from abroad.

To Hager and other committed exclusionists, this was long overdue. They believed that Chinese migrants who had never before set foot in the United States continued to enter through fraud. They allegedly did so by purchasing laborer return certificates from those who had returned to China permanently and then entering the United States by impersonating the original holder. To exclusionists, the Scott Act offered a solution: it cancelled the 30,788 certificates that had been issued but not yet used to claim reentry rights.Footnote ⁵

Hager and his deputies wielded the Scott Act as a crude instrument, rejecting all holders of laborer return certificates—even those claiming birthright citizenship or merchant status, and to whom the law clearly did not apply.Footnote ⁶ Their sense of empowerment is captured in a single gesture—a thick red line dated October 1, 1888, drawn across a page in the docket book of the federal district court for Northern California. Beside it, the clerk who drew the line added a telling note, also in red ink, “First case(s) filed after passage of the Scott Bill.”Footnote ⁷ Below the line, 2,061 Chinese names fill the ledger—seventy-five percent of which belonged to U.S. citizens, another fifteen percent to former U.S. residents who were not laborers. All were rejected by customs officials between the passage of the Scott Act and April 24, 1894, the last entry in this court ledger.Footnote ⁸

The line, the note, and the volume of Chinese litigation captured the shift as officials saw it: before, the Chinese could return, and after, they could be kept out. For this reason, they referred to it as the “Exclusion Act,” a law that, in their eyes, would finally allow them to prevent Chinese immigration to the United States.Footnote ⁹

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Upon arrival, the certificate-holding Chae Chan Ping was excluded by customs officials and detained aboard the Belgic with the other rejected passengers.Footnote ¹⁰ He filed a writ of habeas corpus—a legal action compelling a court to determine whether a detention is lawful. Chae used his confinement to challenge the Scott Act and the expanded authority it granted Congress over immigration.

Before the Scott Act, the Secretary of State had negotiated treaties with China that set the terms of Chinese migration to the United States, and Congress enacted laws in accordance with those agreements. Passed unilaterally over objections from the Chinese government, the Scott Act violated both the implied and explicit guarantees in the Burlingame and the Angell Treaties. Chae’s lawyers argued that the Scott Act was unconstitutional and that Congress lacked the authority to override treaties.Footnote ¹¹

Chae lost the Supreme Court case that bears his name, and the implications were far reaching. Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) cemented congressional power over the nation’s borders, a power that extended directly from the denial of citizenship to native peoples and sovereignty rights to their nations. Known as the plenary power doctrine, the precedent in Chae Chan Ping v. United States sharply curtailed the ability of all aliens—not just the Chinese—to enter, reenter, or remain in the United States.Footnote ¹² Counterintuitively, the case has been so pivotal that, in historians’ understanding of the period, it has eclipsed the diverse forms of migrant resistance to the Scott Act, including the strategies employed by other passengers on the Belgic.

Before the Scott Act, Chinese laborers were the only aliens required by federal immigration law to obtain return certificates. All other Chinese migrants could leave and return without them. This underscores an unexpected historical reality: while asserting U.S. citizenship necessitated extensive documentation, as Anna Pegler-Gordon describes, not needing papers signaled an alien’s privileged legal standing. The Chinese referred to this comparative advantage as wu ce, literally meaning “no certificate.” As far as I know, the earliest use of this term dates to 1903, when editor Wu Panzhao (Ng Poon Chew) employed it in reference to Chinese migrants exempted from an 1892 registration requirement, but whose rights as lawfully undocumented were being infringed upon.Footnote ¹³

The Chinese public recognized wu ce as a valued legal status well before the term appeared in the documentary record. Between August 6, 1888—when the district court clerk for Northern California began recording the grounds for appeal—and the passage of the Scott Act, 97 percent of litigants were wu ce: 741 prior residents and 61 birthright citizens. Though a minority, the number of citizenship cases is telling. Before United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), some U.S.-born children of Chinese parents reentered the country without formal documentation. Hager’s zealous enforcement, however, threatened the rights of wu ce birthright citizens and Chinese migrants.Footnote ¹⁴

However, Chinese migrants did not regard U.S. citizenship as a secure means of reentering the United States. During arrival interviews with customs officials, 62 percent of Chinese identified themselves as merchants, while less than 0.1 percent claimed U.S. citizenship. By contrast, most litigants appearing in the federal district court ledgers for Northern California were U.S. citizens (1,520 of 2,061), with merchants and their wives constituting a distant second (413 of 2,061). These figures do not reflect the reality of who was a merchant and who was a citizen. Still, they suggest that U.S. citizens turned to the courts only when their citizenship claims were rejected—a pattern that helps explain their overrepresentation in habeas corpus cases. Comparatively fewer merchants ended up in court because their grounds for reentry were more readily accepted.^{Footnote 15,Footnote 16}

After Chae’s case was accepted by the courts, the remaining passengers gathered on deck to weigh their options. They likely discussed propositions from lawyers who approached their ship, offering to file writs of habeas corpus using prepared forms with blank spaces for personal details. According to figures in the Daily Alta California, which closely followed these initial Scott Act cases, seventy-five individuals on the Belgic pursued this option. Just before the ship departed San Francisco, they were taken ashore and marched “like sheep” to the appraisers’ building, where they presumably had more opportunity to exchange information and strategize for court.Footnote ¹⁷

Among the petitioners were thirteen business owners seeking reentry as merchants. Collectively, they operated a boarding house, cigar factory, hotel, two clothing stores, and ten general merchandise stores in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Butte, Montana; and Deer Lodge, Montana.Footnote ¹⁸ Their enterprises sustained Chinese laborers in their migrations across the American West, where they worked in mining claims, logging mills, and railroads.Footnote ¹⁹ However one parsed the term “laborer” in existing legislation, they could not reasonably be classified as such. In 1883, Chief Justice Robert Greene of Washington Territory had defined “laborer” in law as only those who physically exerted themselves in their work. Nevertheless, these non-laborers had acquired return certificates as the only viable way to secure reentry.Footnote ²⁰

Only one of the Belgic businessmen won his case. The rest lost, and the government deported them on October 27. Yet even in defeat, they deepened the Chinese public’s understanding of how to return as merchants. The fact that these thirteen businessmen were heard by the courts already demonstrated the potential of habeas corpus petitions to assert their rights.Footnote ²¹

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As early as 1849, San Francisco’s Chinese business leaders began developing expertise in U.S. law through the advice of legal counselors.Footnote ²² Yet legal knowledge among Chinese migrants was not confined to the wealthy or powerful. Those with minimal resources also developed a keen, if informal, understanding of the law. In postbellum New York, for example, Chinese crewmen sued abusive ship captains with assistance from a litigious packet ship cook turned boardinghouse keeper.Footnote ²³ On the other side of the country, in California, Chinese women used habeas corpus petitions to access the courts, where they dissolved marriages, escaped coercive relationships, and established unions of their choosing.Footnote ²⁴

Chinese migrants cultivated legal knowledge as a means of asserting basic rights. Individual encounters with law enforcement, legal professionals, and the courts contributed to a collective understanding of the American legal system. This vernacular legal knowledge circulated through personal relationships, passing from boardinghouse keepers to residents and between married Chinese women and their lovers. Like the enslaved and incarcerated women, many of them Black or Indigenous, featured in the digital database Petitioning for Freedom, unhappily married Chinese women and the Belgic’s excluded passengers staked their hopes for freedom on writs of habeas corpus.Footnote ²⁵

According to San Francisco newspapers, Chinese spectators packed the Ninth Circuit courtroom where Chae Chan Ping’s case was being argued.Footnote ²⁶ As Tian Xu writes, court hearings functioned as a form of “mass legal education.” The presence of Chinese observers signaled an intention to absorb legal knowledge and prepare for the battles ahead. For those with limited English, bilingual spectators likely offered explanations, transforming the courtroom into a space where legal understanding was shared. When court interpreters translated ruling into Chinese, they conveyed the stakes and consequences of decisions that directly shaped the rights and standing of the Chinese community on U.S. soil.Footnote ²⁷

The general store owner Huang You (Wong Yew) happened to be in San Francisco, preparing for a trip to China, when the Ninth Circuit ruled against Chae on October 15, 1888. The outcome foreshadowed the difficulties Huang would later face upon return. At the time, no return procedures existed for U.S.-based Chinese merchants like Huang, whose store was in Tucson, Arizona. Section 6 Certificates, the prescribed means for a merchant’s initial entry, were only available to those with businesses in China or Hong Kong. During litigation over the Belgic merchant cases, attorney Thomas D. Riordan—who also represented Chae Chan Ping—advocated for establishing procedures that would allow U.S.-based merchants to return using documents similar to those once issued to returning laborers.Footnote ²⁸

Huang left before the Supreme Court ruled against Chae in 1889. As a precaution, he secured an identity document from the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, hoping it would suffice. It was authorized by Frederick Alonzo Bee, legal advisor to Chinese Consul Huang Zunxian.Footnote ²⁹ Bee had first encountered Chinese migrants during the Gold Rush, when he hired twenty laborers to drain water from a gold mine. His early interaction led to a lifelong commitment to defending Chinese rights. Over the decades, he became a public advocate for Chinese interests—appearing before customs officials, the State Department, in court, and in congressional hearings.Footnote ³⁰ His work came at personal risk. In one incident recalled by Consul Huang, a mob of White men threatened Bee at gunpoint for helping Chinese migrants enter the country. Bee, touching the gun hidden in his own boot, laughed and said, “Do you dare?”Footnote ³¹

In the early Exclusion era, lawyers—many trained at Harvard and Columbia—crafted effective courtroom strategies. Later, former U.S. Attorneys turned private lawyers for the Chinese, leveraging their bureaucratic expertise and political ties to help clients navigate a tightening legal regime. enhanced Chinese migrants’ vernacular legal knowledge and expanded their practical options for legal recourse.Footnote ³² Many of these men grew rich, showing that Chinese legal knowledge, far from being a purely Chinese community interest, financially bound a select cohort of White lawyers to Chinese legal dilemmas.Footnote ³³

As feared, Huang was denied permission to reenter in 1892. His friends immediately enlisted Riordan, who established Huang’s status as a returning merchant using affidavits from two respected local Chinese businessmen and five White men.Footnote ³⁴ This strategy, which paired supporting statements from well-known Chinese and lesser-known White men, illustrates the limits of the Chinese migrants’ legal standing, regardless of their reputation, wealth, or influence. It also underscores the necessity of White cooperation. Securing rights as merchants often meant mobilizing networks of sympathetic White men. These relationships were forged over years as neighbors, employees, employers, and business associates. Chinese merchants’ legal dependence on White men was codified a year later in the McCreary Act of 1893, which required they provide two non-Chinese witnesses, who were almost always White men.Footnote ³⁵

When San Francisco’s Collector of Customs still refused to release Huang, Riordan submitted a writ of habeas corpus. At the hearing, Chin Mun Wee, one of the affidavit signers, corroborated Huang’s status as a merchant. He had known Huang for a decade, dating back to their time together in “the interior”—a phrase that captured how Chinese migrants conceptualized Tucson, Arizona, as distant from the established centers of Chinese migrant life in California. In such isolated geographies, Chinese migrants were especially dependent on one another’s support.

Chin’s care for Huang was an expression of this mutual aid. He had leveraged his personal relationship with Bee to secure Huang’s identity document. Now, Chin stepped forward once again to fight for Huang’s freedom in court. Huang’s cousin had also acted as his legal proxy.Footnote ³⁶ These chains of co-dependence functioned both as repositories of vernacular legal knowledge and as the mechanisms for mobilizing it, making the social fabric of Chinese migrant life essential in confronting state power.

Case by case, with the support of lawyers and allies onshore, U.S.-based Chinese merchants built a body of legal knowledge that defined security through the right of free travel. But this legal foothold was more than a shield for merchants—it was a lifeline for Chinese American families. Between 1910 and 1924, 8,986 female Chinese aliens entered the United States, a third as the wives and daughters of merchants and other lawfully resident Chinese men.Footnote ³⁷ As Maddalena Marinari notes, merchants retained the ability to bring their spouses and children to the United States—a right U.S. citizens lost under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Immigration Act of 1924. In key legal questions to the Chinese, merchants exercised rights that surpassed those of citizens, challenging assumptions about the legal precarity of aliens after Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889).

Chinese use of merchant status did more than protect an elite class within the Chinese migrant community—it became a bridge to intergenerational civil rights struggles. Where anti-miscegenation laws limited marriage options, the presence of Chinese women gave U.S. citizens of Chinese descent and Chinese migrant men the chance to raise American-born children with distinct legal rights.Footnote ³⁸ Though their rights were often insecure, birthright citizenship nonetheless expanded the terms of belonging. What began as a strategy for maintaining merchant privilege expanded into a broader struggle that strengthened future generations’ to claim their place in the nation.