Why Didn't The Taiping Rebellion Cause Mass-Migration Of Chinese To The US?

The Taiping Rebellion was one of the worst wars in terms of casualties. The impact of the war devastated the affected areas and the Qing Dynasty as a whole. I'm very surprised that this didn't cause a massive migration of immigrants to the US. Why was that?
 
Presumably, courting of the Japanese by the US (although I'm not an expert here).

Alternatively, the annual syndrome known as xenophobia.
 

Delta Force

Banned
There probably weren't too many people who could afford it, and even if they could American immigration laws were quite restrictive for people coming from Asia.
 
As noted, built the transcontinental railroads of US and Canada and did much of the work in the gold mines. But there were definite restrictions on their immigration to both countries. One heck of a lot immigrated to South America and Mexico. Four percent of the population of Peru is Chinese. They went over as contract labor, started small businesses and now are a very important economic power.
 
The Taiping Rebellion was one of the worst wars in terms of casualties. The impact of the war devastated the affected areas and the Qing Dynasty as a whole. I'm very surprised that this didn't cause a massive migration of immigrants to the US. Why was that?

Why would they? A lot of them would only be dimly aware of the US at best, in the deeper heartland, and it is a place very far from home with completely different language and customs. Not to mention, given the sheer size of China, just journeying to a place to migrate could be an expensive, ardous effort in and of itself, that could involve travelling through even more warzones. A lot of them would have to cross whole countries of land on foot.

Not to mention, there was quite a fair bit of Asian immigration regardless, from presumably bigger coastal areas like Guangdong where a lot of them came from; but for people in the deeper provinces? Why risk leaving your ancestral home to cross hundreds of miles of potential bandit country to a very far off foreign land that you know little about?
 
They were probably also limited by the very fact that there were relatively few ships travelling back and forth from China to America at this time, at least those taking passengers for scheduled runs.

For instance, it was unlikely that any given Chinese could have known when or where a US ship would show up, how to negotiate passage, where they would be going (it would only be luck if they were headed to California or wherever the Chinese wanted to go), if they could afford passage, know enough about America to want to go there, know how to get back, etc, etc, etc.

Also, trade had been damaged in the depths of the Taiping Rebellion and the reputation of all westerners was low.

The Taiping Rebellion (and northern Nian Rebellion) being more successful is a subplot of my "Quasi-War 4" Timeline ongoing now.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Was not law until 1882

Chinese Exclusion Act.

Was not law until 1882. The Taiping war was in the 1860s.

There was significant emigration from China to the US in this era; some 300,000 between 1850 and 1890. To put that into perspective, there were roughly 450,000 people listed in the 1860 US census in California, Oregon, and the then-Washington Territory (less than 11,000 in BC in 1870).

However, of those 300,000, it is estimated that 150,000 - 200,000 had returned to China by 1890; some 100,000 were listed in 1890, and there are undoubtedly some who were missed in the census or were listed under some other classification.

Something to remember is that there was always a significant percentage of (relatively) short term migrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, whose goal was to work, make a pile, and return home, and this was found with both Asian and European sender populations.

Best,
 
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