Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Two
Transition: From the Orient to the
Pacific Rim
The ascension of Chinese immigrants from a position of marginality and
disentitlement to an incorporated 'model minority' of resourceful citizens is
one of the more remarkable stories of twentieth century nation-building in
Canada and the United States. Needed, but not wanted, in the late nine-
teenth century, 'Orientals' on the West Coast of North America were
recruited and harshly treated in the dangerous work of railway-building
through the Rocky Mountains; 600 are said to have died during the con-
struction of the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1881 and 1885. With
characteristic insensitivity, the same year the railway was completed the first
of a series of disciplinary immigration laws was enacted, introducing a head
tax upon Chinese landing in Canada.
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Legislation became increasingly
restrictive until in 1923 the Chinese Immigration Act blocked virtually all
legal entry to Canada until its repeal in 1947.
Yet forty years later in 1988, British Columbia, the region most aggres-
sive in anti-Chinese sentiment and punitive provincial legislation, appointed
a Hong Kong immigrant, David Lam, as its Lieutenant Governor, the high-
ranking official representative of the Queen, while in 1999, Adrienne
Clarkson (née Poy), also born in Hong Kong, became Governor General of
Canada, de facto Head of State as the Crown's representative in Ottawa. In
2006 Prime Minister Stephen Harper made an official apology in Parliament
to survivors of the head tax legislation and their descendents and offered a
limited cash settlement as restitution. Canada was a more cosmopolitan
and egalitarian nation by 2006, while the Orient had become Asia Pacific,
and instead of closed doors to Asia, government was pouring money into
Vancouver transportation infrastructure to extend its open door gateway
strategy to the trade of the Pacific Rim. Where trade led, investment and
migration followed. This chapter will show how and why such spaces of
global flows dislodged earlier spaces of closed national containment.