A “New China” in Brazil: The Chinese Imperial Court’s Shifting Attitudes on Immigration during the Late Nineteenth Century

In 1889, a high-ranking imperial official in Beijing named Kang Youwei penned an essay encouraging Chinese immigration to Brazil. Lamenting the empire’s decline, he viewed immigration as a means of guaranteeing the survival of Chinese civilization and Brazil as the ideal laboratory for this experiment. This represented a change of tone and approach to the subject by the imperial government. Only a decade earlier, reports of abuses suffered by Chinese laborers in Cuba and Peru had prompted prominent imperial officials to adamantly oppose the Brazilian government’s plan to stimulate a steady flow of Chinese coolies to substitute slave labor in coffee plantations. Using Kang Youwei’s essay as a point of departure, this paper will examine the imperial court’s shifting attitudes on immigration to Brazil during the late nineteenth century. This paper will also draw on Brazilian and Chinese archival sources to show that immigration played a pivotal role in molding the Chinese empire’s reconceptualization of Latin America and Brazil’s view of the Far East.