AHC: A population of Chinese Americans in the millions by 1900

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
There's probably some less enlightened ways to go about this

With emancipation, alot of southern planters perceived Asian coolie labor as a necessary substitute for slavery.

What if circumstances were such that African-American labor was not numerous or controlled enough to replace slavery with an economically useful Jim Crow-sharecropping-convict labor system, maybe a contract labor system could have brought alot of Chinese (from China itself or the Southeast Asian diaspora) to all plantation areas from coast to coast?

PoD could perhaps be some kind of war between 1750 and 1850 where the African-American population of plantation areas is greatly reduced either through (1) genocide, ethnic cleansing-trail of tears-ing, or (2) escape west, south, or into the mountains, or (3) as a result of British or French or Spanish operations rampaging through the south in force while pursuing a deliberate policy of disrupting slavery as it was established there. 2 or 3 in particular would probably work best together.
 
I think people are downplaying how radically different Chinese and Western cultures were in the 1800s.

Are there any circumstances similar to this PoD that occured in our timeline?
 
With emancipation, alot of southern planters perceived Asian coolie labor as a necessary substitute for slavery.

This. It's not necessarily about reducing racism. Even removing racism from the equation, there would still be anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment due to labor competition issues. An easier POD here is for business interests to actually want more Chinese immigration for cheap labor, and southern agricultural labor after emancipation is a ripe possibility for this.

Simply by preventing the Chinese Exclusion Act, it's fairly easy to see at least a million Chinese in the US by 1900, especially if there's some sort of coolie labor importing going on.
 
Top