This one-reeler isn't quite as bad as it sounds with a title that includes a racial slur and as directed by D. W. Griffith, the same who went on to make the racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). I've seen quite a lot of Griffith's oeuvre, though, and it seems that films such as this Biograph short may be a better representation of his muddled racial views than the perverted history he adapted from Thomas Dixon and President Woodrow Wilson for his most notorious feature. Sure, it's still based in stereotypes and ultimately supports the white-supremacist system, but it's against racial violence, and the racial "other" is depicted with some sensitivity--albeit in yellowface and in melodramatic fashion where racial minorities or the poor must always sacrifice themselves for the well being of the higher-class white couples. So many melodramas do this; it's a big trope. This time, the character devotes himself to aiding his white saviors, who stopped a bunch of cowboys from shooting at him. The title card mocking "2,000 years of civilization" for the white characters is a nice bit of sarcasm from 1910, though.
Basically, the supposed Chinese man depicted here is like the "faithful souls" in "The Birth of a Nation," the black slaves who remain loyal to their masters even after nominal emancipation. That seems to be how Griffith most often handled non-white characters, or he otherwise employed them in minstrel-show type comic relief (the blackface in "One Exciting Night" (1922), e.g.). Such shorts as "His Trust" and "His Trust Fulfilled" (both 1911) do the same thing with an African-American character as this one does with the Chinese one, or as Griffith would do again with the Chinese character in "Broken Blossoms" (1919). The genre conventions of melodrama that Griffith advocated surely dictate much of this. In addition to African Americans, the depiction of Native Americans in his films could vary from relatively sensitive if stereotypical to offensively violent depending on the genre dictates of the white characters' plight--whether being attacked by a tribe in "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch" (1913) or condemning Indian removal in "The Red Man's View" (1909).
Otherwise, this isn't one of Griffith's more technically-sophisticated pictures, either. The editing, including some crosscutting, is relatively quick for the era, if not necessarily for Griffith, though. That especially stands out to me now since I've just finished watching a bunch of Alice Guy's Solax productions. Her being a director more in what one might term the European mode or tableau tradition focused on mise-en-scene over montage, and Griffith being the opposite--the so-called pioneer of the American way.