The Chinese merchants, who (unlike the Chinese laborers) were literate and wealthy, were not easily intimidated by the racist hordes. In 1885 Chinese immigrants Joseph and Mary Tape (a successful businessman and an orphan raised by the Ladies Protection and Relief Society) sued the city of San Francisco because their daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public school (Spring Valley School, which had been inaugurated in 1852 as California’s first public school): they won in front of the California Supreme Court but the California parliament immediately passed a law authorizing the creation of segregated schools. When, in 1886, San Francisco passed regulations that were clearly targeting Chinese laundries a Chinese laundry owner, Yick Wo, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of the USA ruled in his favor, enforcing once and forever the principle of equal protection under the law (that would later benefit all races and ethnic groups). Another important precedent was set in 1898 when Wong Kim Ark, a "Chinaman" born in San Francisco, was recognized as a US citizen based on the 14th amendment of the US constitution (he had been denied reentry after traveling outside the USA). The Chinese American Citizens Alliance was formed in San Francisco in 1895.

San Francisco's Chinese intellectual elite, advocating for democracy in China, had its own newspaper, Chinese World, originally established in 1892 as the Mon Hing Yat Bo, and renamed Sai Gai Yat Po in 1908, written in both Chinese and English.

Founded in 1900 by Chinese Americans, the Chinese-Western Daily (Chung Sai Yat Po) remained the largest Chinese newspaper in the USA for several decades. Its editor, Ng Poon Chew, became the unofficial spokesman of the Chinese-American community.

Chinese rights activists Wong Chin Foo, "the Chinese Martin Luther King", born in Shandong province, raised by a missionary couple and brought to the USA in 1867, one of the first Chinese immigrants to be naturalized in 1874, founded a weekly magazine in New York in 1883, the Chinese American, the first Chinese-language newspaper of the East Coast, and in 1892 started the Chinese Equal Rights League of America, which soon had members also on the West Coast. He also fought against opium, gambling and prostitution in Chinese communities, and was a frequent target of Chinese criminal organizations.

The fight against sex trafficking was led in San Francisco by Presbyterian missionary Donaldina Cameron, who in 1897 became the head of the Mission House and set out to rescue as many Chinese girls as possible, helped by Tien Fuh Wu, a former abused girl. One of them, Bessie Jeong, later became the first Chinese-American woman graduate when she graduated from Stanford in 1927.

In 1905 something new happened: the Chinese in China protested against anti-Chinese racism in the USA. Chinese intellectuals had already been irked in 1904 when the Chinese delegation to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis had been humiliated. Then in July 1905 an emigrant, Feng Xiawei, killed himself in front of the US consulate of Shanghai, an event that moved the entire city. A boycott of US products started in Shanghai and spread in multiple Chinese cities, eventually joined by the Chinatowns of California. During this time the Chinese cities were flooded with stories of abuses suffered by the Chinese immigrants in the USA. Until then the ties between the immigrants the motherland had been tenuous at best. This grass-roots protest strengthened the ties between China and its California emigrants, but also encouraged the Chinese in California to stand up for their rights and injected a sense of national pride in their communities.