Chinatown Friendship Gates as Soft Power Tools in China-Taiwan-US Relations, 1970-1984

Sarah Yu, University of Pennsylvania

From the 1970s, large, ornate gates began appearing at the entrances to historic Chinatowns around the United States. In San Francisco and Boston, these were accompanied with plaques explaining that they had been gifted by the “Government of Taiwan”. While Chinatowns had become thriving residential and business centers for Chinese immigrants since the mid 19th-century, their histories have been largely separate to those of the Chinese state(s). However, recently-declassified correspondence between the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan and the councillors of the city of Chicago in 1970—1971, when the United Nations seat for China permanently ceded to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reveals an intentional effort by Taiwan to demonstrate its support for diasporic communities in a soft-power diplomatic struggle with its rival. This paper examines the gifting of various Chinatown Gates as both sides’ chosen method for donating to overseas Chinese neighborhoods, taking Philadelphia as its core example. Funded and built by PRC artisans in 1983, the construction of the Friendship Gate in Philadelphia Chinatown cemented relations between Philadelphia and its new sister city Tianjin, as the United States increasingly looked towards the PRC for diplomatic ties. However, according to local reactions, the Gate’s origins and self-Orientalist design severely undermined its other stated purpose as an introduction to a historical, locally-significant immigrant community. The two Chinas’ soft-power race to gift Chinatown Gates devalued the unique experiences of overseas Chinese, and claimed ownership of their communities as parts of the respective Chinese states.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 219. Asians and the Construction of Ethnic Identities: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Power Relations