The Chinese Exclusion Act and U.S. Economic Development

>> Steven Davis: Immigration, political backlash, consequences, it's an old story and a new one. Today we reach back in US history to consider the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 and its economic consequences. Stay tuned, and you may be surprised by how it played out. Welcome to Economics, Applied. I'm Steven Davis, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Joining me is Nancy Qian, professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Nancy is an empirical economist with interests in development, political economy, and economic history. She founded the independent China Econ Lab, which supports research on the Chinese economy. She also co directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University and serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals in economics.

Born in Shanghai, Nancy earned a BA at the University of Texas, Austin, and a PhD in economics at MIT. She's an American citizen and an optimist about the outlook for the United States. Welcome, Nancy.

>> Nancy Qian: Thanks, Steven, thanks for having me.

>> Steven Davis: It's our pleasure. I want to set the stage for our discussion and provide some of the context, maybe more so than I might normally do.

You can fill this out or correct me if I get some things wrong, but here's how I understand the context. There were many, many Chinese persons who migrated to the western United States after 1840 to work in mining, railway construction, manufacturing, and personal services. So Many that by 1880 they made up 18% of the workforce in the western United States.

So nearly one in five workers were Chinese. And they came from a very different cultural and linguistic background, obviously, than most of the Americans that they intermingled with. So these developments led to strong social and political backlash among whites and rooted partly in concerns about jobs and wages.

Congress responded with the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882, which banned further immigration by Chinese persons and shut the door to naturalization for Chinese who were already living in the United States. These restrictions largely remained in place until 1965, as I understand it. I want to focus our conversation on two main questions.

First, how did the Chinese Exclusion act affect economic development in the western United States? Second, how did it affect white workers in particular? Because that was much the political motivation behind the act. Let me just turn it over to you now, Nancy, and ask you first, do you want to fill out this contextual picture a bit more fully to understand what led to the Exclusion act and, you know, what the setting was in which it played out?

>> Nancy Qian: Sure, I'll try to keep this brief because the economic historian part of me just finds everything historical very interesting. So, you know, the I think what's really important to understand how everything played out is to Keep in mind with the level of development of the west in the 1880s.

So this was a time when the eastern US was already fully engaged with the Industrial Revolution, when waves and waves of immigrants were coming to the US via Ellis island from Europe. Now, once you gets to Ellis island, it takes a little while, right, this is New York.

And the Western frontier was expanding slowly, slowly into the Midwest. So the city where I live now, where you used to live, Steve, in Chicago, was considered, you know, a city on the frontier, Right? And we all know Chicago is far, far from California and the West Coast.

So in the west, there were. There weren't as many European immigrants coming because it was far, far away. And the Chinese who came across the Pacific Ocean were one of the main immigrant groups who were coming to the US and working. So they were coming from the Pacific through San Francisco, and they were working.

You know, they first came for the Gold Rush, and then the gold ran out. This was around the 1850s. And then they came to help to build the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869. There were a bit in between 100 and 200,000 Chinese in the Western US at this time.

And if you think of where they were living, they were living all across the west, spread out often in little towns, you know, in the middle of nowhere, where they used to work on the railroads, but the railroads are now done. And an important thing to keep in mind is that in between where the Chinese and the Western Front, where the Chinese were living and working, and where the Western frontier was, as it was being pushed from the east, was just thousands of miles of space.

>> Steven Davis: It's interesting that obviously, if there were 200,000 Chinese at the time and they were a fifth of the population, it was a pretty sparsely populated part of the country at that time. It's interesting that nonetheless, there was still a tremendous political backlash.

>> Nancy Qian: Yeah, I mean, in hindsight it seems silly, right?

The West was pretty sparsely populated compared to the East and very sparsely populated compared to today. And yet people were still really worried about congestion of economic opportunities. Well, part of the problem was that in the 1870s there was a recession. And part of what contributed to that, ironically, was the transcontinental railroad.

The railroad integrated the Western economy and the Eastern economy. And the west was much less developed and much less productive in the East. And it wasn't competitive. So this immigration was good for the US in aggregate and definitely good for the East, but it hit a lot of western industries really hard.

So there was a sense that, you know, things aren't as good as before. And when that happened, people looked around and there was this group of people, who were working a lot. And so they looked at them and said, these guys are taking our jobs.

>> Steven Davis: Right, yeah, so this is an old story, it's recurred many times.

For some reason, immigrants attract the blame. And whether or not they're really the main source of the economic challenges facing the society at the time. So before we get into the empirical evidence and how you went about trying to assess the economic consequences of the Exclusion Act, just give me a sense of what does basic economic reasoning say about what the consequences would be if there's suddenly this big clampdown and really clawback to some extent of Chinese immigrants?

What does economic reasoning say about how that should affect economic development in the West? That might be fairly obvious to people, but also what does it say about the job opportunities and wage rates of white workers who are being affected by this reduction in the number of Chinese?

>> Nancy Qian: Yeah, so I mean, that's a really important question. And actually. Actually not obvious at all when it comes to the white workers. So for the Chinese workers, it's pretty obvious that this is bad, right? Because it's a ban, there's no more Chinese workers. If you're planning to reunify with your family, you can do that, you can go back to China, but that's your only possibility because you can't bring them over.

And if you decide to stay in the U.S. probably you're going to face a lot of discrimination because this act, this legal act, was accompanied by a lot of, you know, discrimination like day to day. So it's not, it's not very pleasant for you right now. There's been several really nice studies and a lot of books by historians and recent works that have looked at the plight of the Chinese immigrants during this period.

Now our work is really trying to do something in addition to what we already know about the Chinese. And we wanted to look at the white workers, and the reason was because they're supposed to benefit. The main economic rationale for why the Chinese Exclusion act was pushed through was to create more space, more economic opportunities, free up resources for white workers, right?

And so we wanted to know, do the white workers, who were the intended beneficiaries of the Chinese Exclusion act, do they benefit? And interestingly, economic rationale can go both ways, and it depends on how you think about the production function, right? So one story, and this is one that we hear all the time in current debates and also historical debates, one, one way to think about the labor market is that we have a finite amount of resources.

What's a good example? Let's think of mining. So we have a few, you know, the mine has a certain amount of gold that can be taken out of it ever. This is a given by nature. If there are Chinese people, Chinese workers mining, then that leaves less gold or less coal or zinc for the white miners.

If we kick the Chinese out, then there's more zinc, more minerals, more or for the white miners. So white miners stand to benefit, right? So that's one possibility. That's one production function. But there are others, right? So another one is to say, well, actually when we bring different types of workers together because they have different skills and they have different ideas, they can generate new technology, they can innovate, they can actually be more productive than otherwise, right?

So if you bring two workers from different places, different backgrounds, together they can produce more than if you bring together two workers from the same places. And what's a good example of this in the historical context? So the Chinese had some skills that they, the Chinese had skills that they had acquired both from home, where they came from in China, such as, you know, making textiles that weren't as common in the Irish and German workers that were coming to the West.

You know, textiles, rolling cigars. Because the Chinese were coming from. Almost all the Chinese immigrants to the US came from one region in China called Taishan. And these were, they were farmers and they were also really good at cottage industries like, you know, traditional textile production and traditional manufacturing.

And so they were bringing these skills to the US that the other immigrants didn't have. So that's one example. So that's one reason why losing the Chinese might actually reduce the productivity of everyone else. So another reason is just what economists call scale effects. So for some things, for many things, we have economies of scale and production.

So the more workers you have, and here it doesn't matter if it's the Chinese or the Irish or the Germans, it's just about numbers. The more workers you have working in a sector, the more productive everyone can become, right. And so what's an example of that? Manufacturing is an example of that.

Anything where there's a fixed cost to build a factory, where you have to have some sort of infrastructure, usually have economies of scales. So that's the second to learn, learn certain skills that take a while, that you can support more specialization in manufacturing activities with a larger workforce and so on.

That's right. So especially, and this was a period when the west was just starting to industrialize, Right. So you can imagine how there could be these type of scale effects and complementarities in the production function. So it could go either way. And normally what we hear about when we in the policy debate of immigration, both historically and today, is we hear the first story, which is very simplistic.

Finite number of jobs, finite number of resources, get rid of some people better off. Everyone who's remaining is better off. Economists, more and more are finding evidence for the second story and the second and third stories going into this. We weren't really sure which one would be the relevant one for our context so we were pretty open minded.

And in all honesty, we thought we were going to find positive effects for the white workers, at least in the short run, right, because the short run and the long run can also be different. So we thought that when the Chinese workers left in 1882, 1885, by 1890, we should see that the White workers in the places that had lost the Chinese workers were doing better off that they had the jobs that the Chinese used to have.

And that's just not what we found.

>> Steven Davis: Yeah, so one more piece of context that I think might be important for people to understand about why it became so unattractive for Chinese workers to remain in the United States after 1882 is there had already been very strong restrictions on women from China entering the United States.

So basically you've got a bunch of working age men and, and they're told, look, you can go back to China if you want, but you can't come back, you can't bring your family here. You're not very likely to find a Chinese woman here. The American women are probably not likely mates for you.

So you got a bunch of lonely, hard working Chinese guys and they're thinking, well, I'll never be able to bring my family here. Do I really want to stick around? So it's not just that further immigration was cut off, that was part of the ax effect and intention, but also the Chinese who are left here.

You know, probably many of them said, you know what, this is just not the place where I'm going to build my life. So many of them left, as I understand it.

>> Nancy Qian: Yeah, that's exactly right. So by 1880, almost 96% of the Chinese population were men. So of course in the west there's more men than women in every group.

Just because it's a frontier, it's dangerous, this is a place where most of the jobs require a lot of labor, just heavy labor. So this is a place where there were just more men. But when we say more men, it's usually like 60, 70%, 96% is extraordinary. This was a direct consequence of what you just pointed out, which is in 1875, the US government passed the Page act, which nominally the Page act was meant to prove.

Prevent people of immoral character from entering the U.S. but in practice, the way it was implemented, it was almost exclusively, it was used to target Chinese women. So the belief, the prevailing view was, excuse me, that was accepted by immigration officials, the general public, was that Chinese women were immoral, mostly prostitutes, and so they can't be let in.

And you know, as a woman who was born in China, I take personal offense to that, but I think we can understand that. But there, you know, but because of this, as you say, by 1880, there were no women. So these young men who were planning to go home and get married and bring over their wife, which was allowed because that's moral.

If you're like a married woman can come, they just, or go home and, you know, bring the wife they already had. They just couldn't do it. And then to add insult to injury, this was a period where miscegenation was illegal in the US So mixed race marriages are mostly not only discouraged or mostly not legal.

>> Steven Davis: I see, okay, all right, well, so I'm glad I wasn't a single Chinese male working in the US during this time. Would have been a rough existence. But let's just. In terms of the economic implications, I think that the, the bottom line is to recognize that from economic reasoning alone, economic theory, it's ambiguous.

It's unclear whether the restrictions on the presence of Chinese workers in the United States would benefit or harm the white workers in the western parts of the United States. So explain to us how you went about assessing the empirical effects of the act on the, on the job and jobs and wages of white workers and just on the economic development in the Western United States.

How did you approach this question?

>> Nancy Qian: So the simple thing to do would have been to simply look and see how the west was doing in terms of economic indicators and look at it before 1882 and then see what these indicators look like after 1882, right? If they improve, then we say getting rid of the Chinese was good for the US if they get worse, we see getting rid of the Chinese was bad for the U.S. the Western U.S. i mean, the tricky thing about that is a lot of things, a lot of other things were happening in the west.

And you know, in particular, this was a period of rapid expansion from the east to the West. The west actually was growing. It was going to grow short of an atomic bomb hitting the west, or like many, many atomic bombs, or I guess today we should say many, many fires in aggregate just over time was going to grow.

What we want to Know is did it grow less because it lost the Chinese? And so to do that we needed to find what economists call variation in the intensity and whether a place was affected by the loss of Chinese. So what we did was we identified counties that were affected by the loss of Chinese in the west and counties that were not affected by the loss of Chinese in the west.

And the way we did that was we said, well, if Chinese, there were a lot of Chinese living in this county in 1880, then losing the Chinese would affect you. The ban would affect this county. If this is a county where there were almost no Chinese living, then the ban's not going to affect this county.

So in other words, we use those counties without Chinese living there as our control group. And we said these counties grew as if the ban didn't happen because the ban didn't affect them. Let's see how the counties with the Chinese who lost the Chinese due to the act, how they grew, and compare that to the counties that didn't have any Chinese living in them and see if the growth rates of the counties that were affected by the ban is lower or higher than the counties that weren't affected by the ban. So that was our basic idea.

>> Steven Davis: Okay, so, and there are lots of counties in both categories because there was the highly uneven distribution of Chinese workers across counties in the western United States. Just a technical question, a bit of a technical question. Why did you do it that way?

Rather than having a so called linear interaction term, instead of grouping with high and low Chinese workforce shares, why don't you just look at a specification, an empirical specification that allowed for bigger effects as the Chinese workforce share was bigger.

>> Nancy Qian: That's a great question, so for two reasons.

One reason was because the distribution of where the Chinese led was highly skewed. That was one reason. So if you look at the distribution, it's like asking you to cut the sample into halves. Okay, no, that's fine, so then there wouldn't be any potential added value to this linear specification if the data just naturally sorts themselves into two clumps.

>> Steven Davis: One clone.

>> Nancy Qian: Yeah.

>> Steven Davis: High Chinese work workforce shares. Another clump, very low Chinese workforce shares. And you're saying that's how the data look?

>> Nancy Qian: Exactly, it was just the practical reason. And the second reason, which is also practically motivated, is that we were very concerned that Chinese share would be measured very inaccurately in counties with very few Chinese.

And the reason is because in the historical US censuses, your race and ethnicity was assigned by the enumerator. The census enumerator will fill out all the information, not you. Partly because, you know, people were not literate. You know, they were less educated, and we were. So in a place where there's a lot of Chinese living, the enumerator.

It's kind of obvious to the enumerator that I'm Chinese, you know, he's Chinese, but in a place that's more sparsely populated, or there's one or two Chinese, like, mixed in with a large Caucasian population. Especially, This Chinese assimilator adapted their dress when was wearing western dress. We were concerned that the enumerators would make mistakes.

So that was the other reason we did it. But we actually show in the paper. So we did these things to be practical and to be careful, but we actually show in the paper that the results are very similar if we just use a linear measure.

>> Steven Davis: Okay, great, so what did you find then on the economic development side?

So these counties that were more heavily affected because they had more Chinese workers as a share of the workforce before the Exclusion Act, how did they perform in terms of economic development compared to the other counties with few Chinese?

>> Nancy Qian: So not surprisingly, we found that they lost more Chinese workers.

That's not surprising because they have more Chinese workers to lose. The thing that was more surprising to us is what happened to the white workers. So they also lost white workers relative to the other counties. And by loss, I mean everyone is growing during this period. What I mean is that as white workers were moving from east to west.

The counties that lost the Chinese got less inflow than the counties that weren't affected by the ban, right, that's what I mean.

>> Steven Davis: So that seems highly consistent with the story that the Chinese workers had certain skills that were complementary to those of the white workers. And if you took those Chinese workers and their skills away, the white workers didn't want to go to those places as much as they had before.

>> Nancy Qian: Exactly, and the data actually tells us, what the Chinese workers were doing right. They were working in hospitality, which in the historical context in the west and these little towns in the west, hospitality means that you run or own a bar, you run or own a hotel and a hotel/ bar, these are pretty crude operations.

You know, this is where people sleep, this is where people eat, this is where people get their laundry washed. And so you can imagine if the Chinese, if, you know, if a few dozen Chinese guys were running this and they leave and the hotel shuts down or the bar shuts down, then that's bad for everyone.

>> Steven Davis: Right, okay, so we've all seen enough Westerns, I think we have the picture in mind and maybe those Westerns should show more Chinese workers. Some of them do, but I don't think 18%, or in this case, maybe 40 or 50% of the bar owners hotel laundry services, laundry services, yes.

They're always shown as Chinese, but they're probably underrepresented in some of these other relevant occupations. Okay, so that's the bottom line, but flesh out a little bit more about what happened to the. So you told us where the workers went and the white workers, but what happened to their wages?

Can you say anything about that?

>> Nancy Qian: So we can say a little bit, so one of the limitations of historical studies is that we don't have historical wage data. So the data we have are things at the firm level, we don't have individual level.

>> Steven Davis: Okay.

>> Nancy Qian: And so if we look at manufacturing firms, and this is using the historical firm censuses or manufacturing censuses.

 

You know, people have different names for it. And this tells us aggregate output in dollar terms for a county, the like, or the total number of workers that are employed or the total wage bill, what we find is that aggregate output, manufacturing output goes down in these counties.

We don't find any effect of output per worker, but the total of number of workers also goes down and the number of firm goes down. What we see is that in the counties that are affected establishments simply shut down.

>> Steven Davis: Okay, so, but do you have any way to zoom into the, it could be the annual earnings or output per.

Well, some way to zoom into white workers on some notion of what they made per month or per year or even what their employment rate was or what kinds of activities. Even these older sources do say something about what kinda job they have.

>> Nancy Qian: That's right, so we can look at employment by sector and we can also look at occupational income scores and we can look at occupations.

So let me talk about what we find for each of those. So when we look at the employment by sector and what's an example of a sector, it would be like services, hospitality, entertainment, manufacturing. We find that employment or labor supply goes down for white workers in every single sector with the exception of the public sector.

And this is what's public employment in the west during this period. It would be a post office, I imagine there were also public sector officials in land management.

>> Steven Davis: The federal government owns so much of the land.

>> Nancy Qian: Not so many during this period. During the later periods, not so much in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

And this makes sense to us because, you know, whether there's a federal post office, this is decided in D.C more or less. And it's going to be less responsive to local economic activity. The one sector that where white workers benefit is is mining. We started off with the story of mining that actually plays out. So in mining, white workers are more like the white labor supply increases when the Chinese leaves.

>> Steven Davis: Okay.

>> Nancy Qian: And this makes all sorts of sense because mining is probably the sector where the resources are most fixed, right? It's just given by nature. But in all other sectors, white labor supply, white employment goes down.

>> Steven Davis: And here, just to be clear, you said this earlier, but it's important point, when you say go down, you mean it grew less, less rapidly.

>> Nancy Qian: That's right.

>> Steven Davis: Other than employment in other county sectors.

>> Nancy Qian: The control counties, that's right.

>> Steven Davis: Control counties.

>> Nancy Qian: So whenever we say.

>> Steven Davis: Overall period, there's tremendous growth.

>> Nancy Qian: Exactly.

>> Steven Davis: As the western United States is developing. So the basic story is you got slower economic development.

>> Nancy Qian: Yes.

>> Steven Davis: In these affected counties than it appears you would have otherwise. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, There doesn't seem to have been any particular benefit to white workers except those in mining.

That's what I'm hearing you say is your bottom line results. Have I got that right?

>> Nancy Qian: That's right, so this was a period of tremendous growth. And the west would have grown even more had they not banned the Chinese. And in particular, white workers would have done even better in terms of employment and income, which I'll talk about next, had they not banned the Chinese. That's the bottom line.

>> Steven Davis: Okay, so tell us about income.

>> Nancy Qian: Okay, so I already said in the historical data, we don't have wage data and we don't actually have income data. So how do we measure income? So what economic historians did, very clever people, did this a while back is they constructed what's called an occupational income score.

So they take the 1950 census in which there's data on wages and occupations, and they rank the occupations according to the median income in each occupational category. Then they look at what occupation you're in in the earlier censuses, and they assign you a rank based on the 1950 rank.

So this is the occupational income score. This is the standard measure for income in US Economic history studies. We can look at the occupational income score of white workers, and we find that when the Chinese leave, it goes down again, meaning that it didn't grow as much as it would have otherwise, right? So if before you had a high income occupation, you now have a lower income occupation when the Chinese leave.

>> Steven Davis: But that's interesting, there's a large leap here. You're relying heavily on the 1950 occupational income rankings and imputing that to what. Happened to the-

>> Nancy Qian: That's right.

>> Steven Davis: Occupational income ranking in the 1880s.

But also if the exit of the Chinese opened up an especially large number of job opportunities for whites in lower income occupations, that would also lead you to the results you described. So it might have been that some of the whites who migrated from the eastern part of the United States to the western part of the United States to work in mining or elsewhere would not have done so but for the Chinese Exclusion Act.

So you can read this result two ways, but at least do you agree with that?

>> Nancy Qian: If this was the only result, yes. So you have to look at it in combination with our labor supply result, which is that there are actually fewer white workers in every sector.

And we can also do it by occupation ranking.

>> Steven Davis: Right, relative to the controls.

>> Nancy Qian: That's right.

>> Steven Davis: Right, right. Okay. So no, but the overall picture here I think that that is coming through is this was not a, in no way, shape or form some kind of economic panacea for white workers.

There may have been some workers, especially those who were very much attracted to mining, who benefited economically from the Chinese Exclusion act, but that's not the norm. Basically, the evidence is pretty clear this slowed economic development in the western United States and it looks like it also on net reduced employment and job opportunities for white workers.

Is that a fair overall reading of your evidence?

>> Nancy Qian: So that's exactly right. So when we look at the data, we just find that when the Chinese leave, with the exception of white miners, no. 1, we don't, we just don't. We just don't see anyone gaining in the data.

>> Steven Davis: Right, okay. So that's, you know, that's. If we kind of roll forward to the present day. I think that's an important. Now obviously there's a zillion and one differences between the Western United States in the 1880s and, and the United States in, in the 2000 and twenties.

But we are, I'm bringing it to the present day now. So leaping forward, I guess more than 100 years, we are on the cusp of what might be the deportation of a few million unlawful American immigrants in the United States. And the motivation, there's multiple motivations for that, but in part the motivation that you often hear is that they are harming the job opportunities for US Born workers.

Again, I don't want to say that's the only motivation, but that's one. And this evidence from the Chinese exclusion action maybe at a minimum give us some pause. That might not be actually how it plays out. And if we do deport 5 million workers from the United States that is likely to slow the economic development of some parts of the United States.

At least that's the inference I'm drawing from this. I don't know if you want to go that far. I'll let you react to that.

>> Nancy Qian: I'm always cautious when we, you know, academic economists, we're always very cautious when we extrapolate from our results to policy. But I think there are some important generalizable insights here, which is, you know, it's true that the historical context is very different from today in many different ways, but I think that important takeaways is to be careful.

Right. And to be careful of broad brushstroke policies and one-size-fits-all policies, right? We, I think what we would like is to be nimble. And when I say what we would like, I mean assuming that the objective is to maximize the economic well being of American citizens, right? That's what I'm assuming that that's the policy objective of the US Government.

If that's the policy objective, we want a nimble policy. What do I mean by nimble? When we think about reducing labor market competition for native, for, for American citizens, we want to first think about are we removing the right people? Right. Like, are these people actually competing for jobs or are they doing something that Americans wouldn't do otherwise or would only do at a price that's so high that American consumers don't want to pay, which means that those jobs will disappear, those services will disappear, the goods will disappear, the jobs will disappear.

If that's the case and we don't wanna get rid of the immigrants, it won't make Americans better off. If that is the case, then maybe reducing, then maybe reducing the number of workers will make Americans better off. And I think we need to also think beyond aggregate numbers at specific contexts.

So, you know, the Chinese immigrants on some level were simple because it was, they were just Chinese. The immigrants we're talking about banning today come from many different backgrounds and many different situations and they vary a lot in immigration patterns, right?

>> Steven Davis: Right.

>> Nancy Qian: And so we want to think through things like their communities and how are they immigrating.

Is it the case that if we deport a few people, I mean, what are the unintended consequences? Like for the Chinese, we wanted to ban the flow, but in the end, because they, it meant that they couldn't get married, the stock went down. Even now it's not clear to anyone who studied the Chinese Exclusion act that the people who wrote that many proponents of the act wanted the number of Chinese workers to go down by as much as it did.

Maybe some did. Maybe some just wanted to get rid of them all. But it's not clear at all that this was a prevailing preference for the people who supported the act. And so the same thing here, when we remove some individuals, we wanna think about, are these individuals central to a community?

Will they cause other individuals to leave, like people who we don't want to leave? Are they central to a production function? Is this, you know, a community of people who work together in teams, like construction crews, such that we get rid of a few, then they all leave, or we get rid of a few, and everyone becomes less productive?

I mean, we wanna think through the details and the context of the immigrants group by group.

>> Steven Davis: Yes, I think that's well said. The potential for unintended consequences is enormous if we're going to deport large numbers of people without being nimble, as you put it. Thanks so much.

And thanks for appearing on the show and for writing your study. I enjoyed reading it and talking to you, and I look forward to our next exchange in whatever. Whatever form it happens to be.

>> Nancy Qian: Thanks for having me, Steven, it was a pleasure.

>> Steven Davis: Okay. Take care, Nancy.

>> Nancy Qian: Bye, Steven.

>> Steven Davis: Bye-bye.