This in turn resulted in a resilient attitude in response to misfortune and bad luck: "in the course of a long and turbulent history [the Chinese have] sooner or later overthrown by violence every single major dynasty that [have] misruled [them]".

When Federal officers mete out such treatment to a man previously established to be an American citizen, we can well understand the bitter irony of the current phrase "A Chinaman's chance."

[7] Another potential origin of the phrase Chinaman's chance traces it to the high probability of death or injury during the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s.

[8] Although these accounts of construction techniques have been debunked as mythmaking after the work was complete,[9][10] it is undeniable that many Chinese immigrants died while building the railroad.

[12] A third possibility is in reference to the low probability of a fair verdict in murder trials with a Chinese victim, assisted partly by California state law first issued in 1850.

[18] Bill Bryson believed the phrase could be traced to the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, referring to the forced expulsion of Chinese American residents, whose chances of living were slimmed by the dual threat of armed mobs and freezing overnight temperatures.

[19] Amy Uyematsu also related it to the Rock Springs, writing that the phrase had grim and bitter reality if the fair treatment of Chinese immigrants was impossible.

[20] The lower-case term "chinaman" also has a non-pejorative interpretation as a dealer of porcelain from China; the "chinaware" they sold were notoriously delicate and fragile.

"[26] Under this interpretation, the phrase may have originated as local slang in California and spread via the journalism of William Randolph Hearst and his flagship newspaper San Francisco Examiner in the 1890s.

[28] In 2018, Governor of West Virginia Jim Justice used the phrase "Chinaman's chance" to describe the low probability of passing a natural gas tax,[29] for which he received criticism.