Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Orientalism Unleashed
Chinese migrants began to enter British Columbia from California and
direct from China during the 1858 Gold Rush. Many remained in the
region and some were later recruited by syndicates as railway labourers.
David Lai (1988) has shown that the majority of migrants originated in
four Cantonese-speaking counties in Guangdong Province in South China,
where they had eked out a precarious existence as peasants and the sons of
peasants. Their movement to North America was through the well-defined
channels of family networks; Lai (1988: 58-9) estimates that from the early
decades of settlement into the 1940s, the Li, Huang and Ma clans alone
contributed 30 percent of Chinese in British Columbia. Among those who
landed toward the end of the nineteenth century almost three-quarters
declared their intended occupation as 'labourer' with much smaller num-
bers listing themselves as farmer, cook, laundryman or merchant (Lai
1988). By 1901, 17,300 Chinese were recorded in the Dominion census,
86 percent of them living in British Columbia, primarily in Vancouver and
Victoria.
The cold reception these immigrants received and the undiluted racism
they confronted - north and south of the 49th parallel - have been thor-
oughly recounted on the Canadian side (Ward 1978; Roy 1989, 2003, 2007;
Anderson 1991; Li 1998; Ng 1999; Yee 2006). The social and ideological
presuppositions of a white settler society would not allow any position for
Chinese migrants other than on the margins - even better, out of the terri-
tory altogether. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the screws
were fastidiously tightened on the freedoms and civil rights of Chinese in
British Columbia as they were systematically excluded from the franchise,
from ownership of Crown land, from professions and other employment
including the civil service and through restrictive covenants from choice in
residential settlement. Their market wage was habitually below the going
rate - half or less of the white wage on the building of the railway, and for
the most dangerous work - thereby antagonizing a white working-class who
feared the undercutting of their own modest incomes.
Kay Anderson (1991) has well described this wretched status as one of
minimal entitlement. Injustice was inevitable before an unrelenting racist
ideology that regarded the 'Orient' and 'Orientals' as not only inferior but
as the source of contamination to European morals, values and civilization.
Therefore it was an imperative that numbers be contained, that breeding
be controlled. The punitive head tax on entry to Canada, imposed upon
Chinese alone, rising successively from $50 in 1885, to $100 in 1900, and
to the astonishing level of $500 in 1903, had the effect of limiting legal
entry not only for poor single men but even more so for their dependents.
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