The anti-Chinese movement achieved a major victory when the Grant administration, under pressure from California politicians, modified the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 to give the United States the right to limit, regulate, and suspend Chinese immigration

Even this exodus, however, did not satisfy western politicians bent on purging the region of all Chinese presence. Some were determined to pass federal legislation prohibiting the Chinese from entering the United States at all. The anti-Chinese movement achieved a major victory when the Grant administration, under pressure from California politicians, modified the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which had ensured open emigration from China. In 1879, during his highly publicized world tour, former president Ulysses S. Grant met with Chinese officials in Tientsin to discuss a possible three- to five-year ban on Chinese immigration to the United States. The Qing regime, at the time fearing a military attack from Russia and war with Japan, acquiesced to American demands for a new treaty. Signed the following year, it gave the United States the right to limit, regulate, and suspend Chinese immigration, though not to prohibit it absolutely. The door was now open for passage of a new law, one that would haunt the Chinese American community for generations—the Chinese Exclusion Act. (Chang 129)