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{
    "pk": 61657,
    "title": "\"Measured as Criminals and Labeled as Tea\": Surveillance Under Chinese Exclusion",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "<p>In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act—one of the earliest federal immigration laws in the United States—beginning a long period of federal immigration law that facilitated heavy scrutiny of Chinese immigrants and excluded most Chinese people from the U.S. From then until nearly a century later, Chinese exclusion was federal law. Even as millions of European immigrants arrived, settled, and naturalized, the vast majority of would-be Chinese immigrants were systematically barred from coming to the U.S.</p>\n<p>In addition to passing a series of highly restrictive race-based laws to carry out Chinese exclusion, the U.S. also built and operated a massive government apparatus to document and surveil Chinese Americans. Treated as perpetual outsiders, the few Chinese people who were permitted to migrate to the U.S. were categorically photographed, measured, interrogated, and required to prove their right to exist in the United States through extensive documentation and external validation by white witnesses. Many Chinese Americans suffered constant invasions of their privacy that generated perpetual fears and significant harms over the course of entire lifetimes. These measures not only restricted Chinese Americans’ movement and livelihood but also reinforced a racialized framework of suspicion.</p>\n<p>This Article offers a comprehensive overview of surveillance under Chinese exclusion in the U.S. and draws connections between past and present, situating Chinese exclusion surveillance within the broader history of state surveillance targeting marginalized populations. In doing so, it sheds light on the longstanding use of privacy erosion as a tool of racial oppression, and highlights harms and themes of surveillance under Chinese exclusion that echo into the present day.</p>",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "All rights reserved",
        "short_name": "Copyright",
        "text": "© the author(s). All rights reserved.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/authors"
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Articles",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87g9t0xq",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Laura",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Moy",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-12-15T20:05:00Z",
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            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/uclalaw_apalj/article/61657/galley/47570/download/"
        }
    ]
}