Yong Chen's Argumentative Analysis

By 1950, the Gold Rush was fully functional in America. Many Americans flocked from the East in order to try their luck at finding gold, while at the same time, Chinese started coming in from the West. It was clear that one of the main reasons of emigrating was to find gold, however, a lot of them ending up staying in the California. This leads scholars many scholars to question their motives. Most interpret this mass exodus and migration as a flee from socioeconomic problems and hardships that were present in China. Yong Chen believes instead that this is an incomplete interpretation since it doesn’t look at who was actually emigrating. He believes that the people who were relocating couldn’t have had hardships since most were from the most prosperous region of China. It is clear that Yong Chen’s ulterior motive to writing this paper is to change Americans’ negative view of Chinese who emigrated. Though Yong Chen’s argument is persuasive, after analyzing the paper it can be seen that he overlooks multiple possibilities that might disprove his explanations. One of Yong Chen’s points which he seems to deem the strongest is that most
By the time that the Gold Rush had come about there were well-establish and heavily traveled trade routes connecting San Francisco to the Pearl River Delta (540). With these trade routes come information and news, so it was clear that in this region, the people were the first in China to hear about the Gold Rush. Chen uses an article from a newspaper, The Oriental, which stated that a majority of the Chinese immigrants were there as gold-miners. This now explains their purpose once they moved to California but it creates a fault in Chen’s logic. It seems that he believed that these people who were emigrating were just trying to cash in on the Gold Rush. However, if they had already had prosperity in their region then why would they want to