After China’s Reform and Opening Up of the early 1980s, Americans adopted thousands of Chinese orphans, which on the surface became a good story in the history of Sino-US exchanges, but which was used by the US to cast all kinds of negative allegations onto the the Chinese Socialist System. Even before this – from the second half of the 19th century to the 1930s – there was also a social trend of large-scale adoption of Chinese orphans in the US, known as the “Orphan Train Movement”. This is odd – as the “Chinese Exclusion Act” was passed by the US government in 1882 – designed to keep all Chinese people “OUT” of the US! This was the first Act in history to exclude a group of people entirely premised on their “race” – and is an Act that has been subsequently used across the Western world as a template for all xenophobic legislation.
