1 - Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese

Summary

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.