Talk:History of Chinese immigration to Canada

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Contents

[edit] Merge Hongcouver article?

Since the topic of racism has been raised by the anonymous moron above, would anyone mind a merger of the offensive Hongcouver article into this article? -- TheMightyQuill 10:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The place to debate your opinion of offensiveness is best left to the talk page of the article in question. Anyways, I don't think a merge is necessarily approropriate. This is already quite a long article, so adding a few more paragraphs and a handful of references to support a very specific sub-topic might be excessive. The two articles are, obviously, extremely related though. I just added a link back here from Hongcouver.
There are examples of other city nicknames that can sustain their own encyclopedic article (e.g. Hollywood North, though Hongcouver already does a much more substantial job than this one.) The Hongcouver article seems to be holding its own with references and a separate discussion to debate its offensiveness. --Ds13 16:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

"Hongcouver" should be merged and deleted, it deserves at most 2-3 lines in this article, and in History of Vancouver or something. "Hollywood North" predates Hongcouver, has wider use and is still in use, unlike Hongcouver. heqs 10:26, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reference for merely soujourners claim?

The early history paragraph currently reads

the first major wave of Chinese immigration started after the Opium War. Most of this first group came from the Taishan County of Guangdong Province to escape from poverty and political instability during the mid-19th century.

It continues (here's where there might be an inconsistency)...

It should be noted that the Chinese who came to Canada had a different mindset from that of their European counterparts. While most of the European settlers planned to start a new life in the new land, the Chinese in Canada were merely sojourners who wished to return to their ancestral homeland back in China.

Can someone cite a primary source for if or why, after escaping poverty and political instability, the Chinese settlers wished to return to China? --Ds13 17:40, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Southern China, Kwangtung Province, particularly was a sphere of British influence (the Opium Wars) and also a very poor part of China. The railway workers were sojourners because the workers were hired through brokers in Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong with an obligation to return. The best source of material on this subject remains Pierre Berton's National Dream and The Last Spike, but basically the Chinese railway workers were sojourners because that was the deal that was offered them, which was better than the devastating poverty in South China but not as good as the right to permanently settle. They had a mindset consistent with their opportunities, which is a comment on the racism surrounding them, rather than on the workers themselves. Many of the people in present-day Hong Kong are descended from former railway workers. Modus Vivendi 19:35, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
so something like "the Chinese in Canada were only allowed to work as sojourners, and were expected to return to their ancestral homeland back in China" would be more accurate? -- TheMightyQuill 08:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
It accounts for the railway workers. Some Chinese attempted to settle here by other paths. The real fun didn't begin until after the railways had been completed and some managed to scrape up the money to repay their debts back home and pay the head tax here. Those people had theoretically won the right to live in BC but doesn't mean the European settlers welcomed them. Modus Vivendi 08:54, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
nobody "had a right". This was the British Empire, not the post-Martin Luther King United States.Skookum1 23:01, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Pay rates grossly misrepresented

In the account of railway construction at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1433-9249/life_society/chinese_immigration/clip8 the pay scales are cited as $1.50/$1.75 a day for white workers (generally Irish and Cornish) and $1/day. How does this jibe with the usual claim that the Chinese were paid only 1/5-1/6 of what whites were paid? (CCNC site and many others). I know, I know, I'll get accused of racism for challenging the prevailing mythologies; the same clip is the one place I've heard in the media where it's admitted that it wasn't whites who employed the Chinese at these rates, but "contractors" in Vancouver, Victoria and Hong Kong - in other words, "snakehead" contractors, none of whom were white. It also is stated in the clip that Onderdonk claimed there were no white workers available, which isn't quite true, although it's true that (as wit the building of the North West America at Nootka Sound in 1788) it took a lot shofter time to voyage from HK to BC than it does from the UK to BC (a few months vs. 18 months); but using the rail crossing of the US, or for that matter the many Britons and Irish who'd worked on the American railroads, this is a straw man argument. And the main reason for the urgency of Onderdonk's need was that Ottawa and the CPR had fudged the earlier timetable to ge the railway built and now had a new deadline to meet; but that was of their own doing, and also had to do with their refusal to assist immigration to BC from the UK (which would have been a threat to the population dynamics of the ON/QC deadlock on the Canadian voting structure, which remains in place to this day). I'm not grinding axes here, just wishing that people would get their noses out of their own ethnic troughs and learn to see (and admit to) the larger picture.Skookum1 21:26, 12 July 2006 (UTC)


    • While I don't have any documents on hand at the moment, one thing worth considering is what else was included in railway workers pay. White workers were housed in railway bunk cars and had meals provided for them. Asian labourers had no such bunk cars, they slept in tents which they purchased from the CPR. To eat, they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway. When looking at earnerings you need to look at the larger scope, beyond just the salary. Once you take other factors into consideration, claiming asian workers earned 1/5 what his white counterpart earned is not all that far fetched.
You're still labouring under the misconception that it's the fault of the whites that the Chinese worked for those wages; they were contracted by Chinese businessmen and were not forced to work for those wages; rather they were hired at them, much to the chagrin of others who would not work for the same (an "other" which included others than whites, including the Hawaiians, native Indians, Mexicans and others present in early BC). And you're wrong about the rice: part of their pay was in rice "mats", which were prepped in China and shipped over, as it was their preferred diet; and again, it was a Chinese contract, not a British Columbian one, that fed/paid them according to these terms (details in J. Morton In The Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia). As for the comparison to white workers re accommodations, given that the bulk of labourers in the Onderdonk contracts were Chinese, the whites in question would be foremen, managers, and of course Onderdonk himself; and while they have had houses in Yale and North Bend and the other canyon towns, this was commensurate with their position and their contracts, and with company policy for managers; the claim that white workers were housed in houses while the Chinese in tents is further proven to be a fallacious "we were victimized" whinge when you look at the construction pictures from Eagle Pass and the Kicking Horse, etc., where large numbers of whites worked (as well as other non-Chinese); you'll see that those construction camps were also tents, and not houses. Yale and North Bend were meant to be company real estate showpieces, and Yale was company HQ in BC until the designation of Vancouver as the terminus, so it behooved the company to build appropriate quarters for itself and its management, not just to establish class/hierarchy (implicit in any organization) but also to sate stockholders that the company was reputable. Also worth commenting on that, from Boston Bar upstream, the area in question is dryland and not prone to rain, unlike Yale (where what Chinese there were lived in houses, i.e. the merchants of Yale's Chinatown); and for the record up around North Bend one Chinatown along the tracks was in earth-houses of a kind very similar to those used by other pioneers; half-dug into the earth, sort of a log root-cellar. And those who lived in caves around Spences Bridge did so because the Chinese contractors who had gotten them there didn't cough up the last pay cheque, or provide means for them to leave the area once construction was done (again see J. Morton). The issue of Chinese working conditions in the railway period cannot be fully and honestly discussed until a reckoning is made with the actions of the Chinese companies/wealthy men who profited from and cheated their own countrymen. Others lived in tents and suffered harsh conditions; it's the nature of the frontier. You weren't singled out and many of the conditions complained about were, as mentioned, contracted for and expected. Tent accommodations in frontier work in BC remains, in fact, common (tree planting, geologists/prospectors, etc etc). What did they expect in 1880s railway construction jobs anyway? Feather beds?Skookum1 06:30, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway

!!The CPR wasn't in the business of importing rice seed, and as already mentioned rice mats were the form of pay and also the food supply. A few Chinese may have tried to go rice, but it mystifies me as to where they did that as I know the Fraser Canyon geography extremely well and, while its growing season is long enough, there's just no water in the quantities needed for rice. And I would have heard of rice cultivation in the Fraser Valley, where while there's water there was also not much in the of usable agricultural land cleared by the 1880s; it took the railway to bring in the settlers necessary for that. What the Chinese did grow for their own use still grows wild along the tracks in areas of the Fraser Canyon and Thompson Country, however: white opium poppy.Skookum1 06:34, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd say the sub-contracting by Chinese businessmen is relevant, but hardly erases blame. Shoe companies like Reebok continue to do the same thing today, claiming they have no control over mistreatment of overseas workers by labour subcontractors: a pretty week excuse, in my opinion. In the case of the railway, when the workers are working in Canada, it's even less excusable. -- TheMightyQuill 16:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Many people here are talking about assigning blame for the plight of whichever group. The purpose of the discipline of history is not to find blame or fault, but to uncover what happened in as unbiased a manner as possible. The Chinese were subject to taxation and eventually faced an outright prohibition on immigration to Canada. We can look at which groups in society pushed for these laws, the justification they gave at the time, and what other motivations they may have had that weren't publicly aired. This is not for the purpose of assigning blame or contributing to a culture of victimization--if such a culture exists--but to contribute to the historical discourse. Articles in tertiary sources such as encyclopedias or general textbooks should refrain from including judgments, ideological or otherwise. If you want a historical essay about popular misconceptions of wages paid to immigrant labourers and its contribution to a contemporary culture of victimization, write an article for one of the amateur historical journals (or a scholarly journal if you are feeling ambitious).
Oh the simple truth, history as it really was. Thanks for your Rankean view, but I'm not really intested. The article doesn't explicitly make judgements, place blame or fault, which maintains NPOV, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be interested, and talk about it in the background. If it has no relevance for today, why should anyone care? -- TheMightyQuill 22:45, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Links

I have reverted the article to my previous version which I had edited according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style, specifically I have removed links to date fragments per WP:DATE and to ordinary words per WP:MOS-L. Ground Zero | t 21:58, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From a letter to the CCNC about their website (re POV)

Italicized bits are quotes from the CCNC's site's "history" content:

"Some say that for every foot of the (hell gate) Fraser Canyon, one Chinese worker died."

That's painting with a pretty broad brush, isn't it? "Some say" - and who was that? The reason I'm being so pointed on this is that, if the Fraser Canyon is reckoned to be from Yale to Ashcroft, which was the difficult stretch (Hell's Gate being only one short stretch of it), that's about 130 miles; 5,280'/mile x 130, that's 1,372,800 dead. More than the population of British Columbia at the time....Even if only the stretch from Yale to Boston Bar - about 25 miles, that's 132,000. The difficult construction, however, was at least twice that far. Even if it's only the "Hell's Gate" stretch of the canyon, let's say from Spuzzum to Boston Bar, that's 10 miles, so 52,800 dead. How many railway workers were brought in from China again?? Hmmmmm... Somebody's playing fast and loose with the figures, I think.....

Sure, you might only be meaning a 2 mile stretch where Hell's Gate is (10,560 dead), but you're making the statement as if it applied to the WHOLE of the Fraser Canyon. And the name is Hell's Gate not "hell gate".

By making such outrageous and obviously incorrect statements - repeating folk myth popular within your ethnic group AS THOUGH IT WERE FACT WHEN IT IS NOT - you are only losing face in the eyes of other Canadians - and when the time comes, in the eyes of later Canadians of Chinese descent who investigate history properly,.instead of with an axe to grind.......

PS on another page in the Head Tax section, you say "t was ironic that many white people depended on the services of the Chinese, yet at the same time the government imposed the Head Tax, discouraging Chinese to immigrate to Canada." This is another typical distortion - "many white people" is not the majority of white people, but specifically those of the upper class and the upper-upper middle class who could afford servants, and who - please note - themselves disapproved of the Head Tax and only, if at all, supported it out of fear of the revanchement of the working class. It was the larger majority of working class whose increasing resentment and agitation against the lower of wages and working conditions engendered by railway-Chinese immgration FORCED the federal government, against its own preferences for continued low-wage immigration from China, to pass the Head Tax in order to protect the Chinese already here from an increase in violence against them from disenfranchised non-Chinese workers. Complicated yes, and not as easy to understand as the comic book-portrayal of whites as bitter racists intent on oppressing the noble and suffering Chinese worker, but a lot closer to the truth than the bald statement that "many white people depended on the services of the Chinese etc", which is another oft-repeated myth without its actual historical context being rightly presented, and implicitly biased against non-Chinese.

And from a similar letter - neither of which a reply was made, or any effort to investiage the TRUTH of the objections described, which are offensive to non-Chinese Canadians who get browbeaten over thigns that DIDN'T EVEN HAPPEN.

I am a specialist on the subject of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush and just had a look at your photo gallery and the accompanying descriptions. The following are my comments on some of the texts:

Quotes from http://www.ccnc.ca/toronto/history/pgallery.html

"The term "A china man's chance" was originated from the white workers who often harassed the Chinese Miners. It describes the slim chance a Chinese miner has of finding gold, because most of the Chinese miners lacked mining experience and they could only mine on areas left behind by the white miners."

This is incorrect if unqualified. Chinese miners worked side-by-side with the many other ethnic groups in the Fraser Canyon, and themselves sometimes harassed others (notably natives). In particular, the goldfields between Yale and Lytton were mostly worked by non-white ethnic groups, including Hawaiians and blacks (African, West Indian, and American) and there was no exclusivity other than prior occupancy of a bar. Further, Governor Douglas and his agents repeatedly enforced the British standard that no ethnic group had a priori rights to the gold-bearing bars and resolved disputes instigated by white Americans towards this end in favour of the Chinese – in the Fraser Canyon, at Rock Creek and elsewhere. And while you might point at the 1886 or 1887 expulsion of Chinese miners from the Tulameen goldfields (near present-day Coalmont, west of Princeton) as proof for your claim, the context to that was the complete exclusion of all non-Chinese miners from the extremely rich Cayoosh Creek godlfield which was found in 1884, and the value of which was not adequately reported by the exclusively Chinese claims-holders and its earnings only first estimated by the local government agent in 1887. The Chinese worked without harassment in other areas of this region, notably on the hydraulic workings along the lower Bridge River and around the town of Lillooet. The only other exclusion in this area was enforced not by whites, but by the chief of the Lakes Band of the Lillooet who threatened a party of Chinese miners away from working the Marshall Creek area of the upper Bridge River; he also drove away parties of Italians and other whites;

One Ah Key, a Chinese miner/businessman in Lillooet, spent $60,000 building a flume to mine the benchlands opposite the town of Lillooet, bringing water about 12 miles around Fountain Ridge; conversion rate for 1860s dollars is 40x1, meaning that wa a 2.4 millioh dollar flume; apparently he made money on that particular hydraulic operation, and have to wonder at the profit margin; and of course he'd earned that money by previous gold mining (and maybe jade; jade was exported in bulk, untaxed and undeclared; another instance of being taken advantage of, one suppose).

Therefore, "They could only mine on areas left behind by white miners" is patently incorrect and tantamount to something between a myth and lie. "Chinaman's chance", so far as I have previously understood the source of the term, originated for some reason from card-games.

"Most of the Chinese immigrants came to Canada in crowded ship with bad ventilation and scarce food supplies."

An experience also enjoyed by nearly all travelers and crews on ships in those days, other than first-class passengers and senior officers.

"The first Chinese gold miners arrived in Fraser Valley, British Columbia from San Francisco. Their arrival marked the establishment of a continuous and vibrant Chinese presence in Canadian culture."

The correct phrase would be "in the Fraser Canyon of British Columbia" – the term "Fraser Valley" refers to the region downstream from Hope, which was entirely unsettled at the time of the gold rush, other than at Fort Langley. Given the timeframe, the ending of this quote should also be "British Columbian culture", as it would be 11 years before BC joined Canada; and in 1858 this was anything but a foregone conclusions. Also, Chinese had been present in Victoria for a number of years already prior to the rush.

"Despite the hard times the Chinese miners faced, they never gave up and some managed to strike gold. It was the Chinese miners who invented the gold separating machine shown here."

MANY managed to strike gold, and worked the Fraser Canyon for longer than any other group and, yes, because of their determination and novel technologies, often found more gold from tailings that had been taken out by previous parties working the site. Many of the Chinese who mined gold in the Lillooet area became major landowners and merchants and dominated the local economy until World War II (then abandoned that town nearly completely).

During the Cayoosh Gold Rush of, estimates of the undeclared total of gold taken from a six-mile stretch of that creek, which Chinese miners systematically excluded others from, including the First Nations people whose territory/salmon creek were destroying, was $7 million dollar, perhaps more; the total official gold revenues for the entire province for that decade was only $1.5 million. Yup, they were taken advantage of all right...Skookum1 23:48, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

You may not like my comments, but they are based in a reading of actual local documents, rather than a repetition of ethnically-biased myths.... Skookum1 23:48, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum

Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to Oregon Country/Columbia District/Pacific Northwest history/historical geography, colonialist/settler/immigrant or aboriginal/indigenous materials/themes/articles/questions, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From the Canadian Pacific Railway wikipage

This posted here from the Canadian Pacific Railway article because it's contrary to material on CCNC site and on previous versions of this page:

Many thousands of navvies worked on the railway. Many were European immigrants. In British Columbia, the CPR also hired workers from China, nicknamed coolies. A navvy received between $1 and $2.50 per day, but had to pay for his own food, clothing, transportation to the job site, mail, and medical care. After two and a half months of back-breaking labour, they could net as little as $16. Chinese navvies in British Columbia made only between $0.75 and $1.25 a day, not including expenses, leaving barely anything to send home. They did the most dangerous construction jobs, such as working with explosives. The families of the Chinese who were killed received no compensation, or even notification of loss of life. Many of the men who lived did not have enough money to return to their families in China, and many spent years in lonely, sad and often poor condition. But those navvies were hard working and played a key role in building the western stretch of the railway; even some boys as young as 12 years old served as tea-boys.

And even it needs fixing, but it's a sight better than the CCNC's material. See also Talk:Chinese Canadian National Council for more on errors/misinformation in the CCNC's content. An excerpt from the above just caught my eye:

The families of the Chinese who were killed received no compensation, or even notification of loss of life. Many of the men who lived did not have enough money to return to their families in China, and many spent years in lonely, sad and often poor condition.

But none of that was the fault of the CPR or white people, as implied and browbeaten all over the media and curriculum since the "anti-racism" revisionism of Canadian/BC history was launched by the CCNC, but of the Chinese contractors who brought them over and were responsible for getting them home; then abandoning them. Publishing false information is not a pretty thing, especially not when it's used to foment political campaigns and cultural/political division/recrimination, as has been the case IMO.Skookum1 07:21, 14 July 2006 (UTC) .

[edit] Typically POV statement

Even though Chinese railway workers were only responsible for 500 kilometres of the entire Canadian Pacific Railway, they were given the most dangerous section of the railway, notably the section that goes through the Fraser Canyon.[citation needed]

The bias implicit in the phrasing of this sentence, as with so many others, obscures the reasons why the Chinese worked on that section; because the CPR had hired Andrew Onderdonk to "get the job done", and Onderdonk, an experience railway contractor, had ties to "labour contractors" (i.e. snakeheads in Taiwan, Canton and Shanghai, as well as in California. It was not deliberate on the part of Canada or BC or the CPR to "give" the "most dangerous section" of the railway to the Chinese; it was pure and simple logistics and cost cutting. The whole point of the railway was the difficult access between BC and the nation it had joined, and since BC's creation the faster travel time to the colony/early province was either via the Orient, or via Cape Horn, and only later on via San Francisco. Chinese also worked on the railway east of the Rockies (see Ha Ling Peak on Bivouac.com, as they could be gotten there via the American railways to the south which had already been constructed; just not in as much numbers, and not straight out of China as was the case with the labourers brought in by the snakehead companies. BC had lobbied Ottawa and London to encourage immigration of Scots, Irish and Geordies (Yorkshiremen) to build the BC section of the railway, but Ottawa was intransigent and London didn't care. One reason for Ottawa's intrasigence was the cost of getting workers from the British Isles to BC; either via Cape Horn, or via Suez-Malacca (which was in fact shorter than via the Cape!), or via the American railways to the US West Coast (which would have involved in-bond transit visas through the US as well as railway fares and ships to carry the workers to British Columbia from Seattle, Portland and San Francisco; so much easier to hire Chinese workers already in North America, or within a few months sail from China (as opposed to eighteen months via the Cape, and over twelve months via Suez-Malacca, and implicitly via Hong Kong/China anyway). This is one reason that the original schedule to build the railway was postponed in the 1870s, prompting calls for BC to abandon Confederation; the other reason was the Pacific Scandal, which brought down the MacDonald government and put the largely anti-railway, anti-BC Liberals under Mackenzie in power (see http://www.dickshovel.com/two.html and http://www.dickshovel.com/two2.html for some nasty details of MacDonald's fiddling with the rival Northern Pacific, which is passed over in the Wiki article on the Pacific Scandal). So, with increasing demands from BC to get the railway built, MacDonald rammed through the Chinese-labour aspect of the project in the debate the quotation from him is from (in response, as I recall, to Arthur Bunster, MP for Vancouver (electoral district) (which meant Vancouver Island, not the city of Vancouver, which hadn't been named yet and, as far as anyone knew in 1882, wasn't even the chosen terminus); Bunster had continued to press (as did other BC MPs) for British labour and the implicit increase in British immigration to BC; which Ottawa didn't care about. So Onderdonk became the contractor (thanks to ties to MacDonald's cronies, I might add), and Chinese companies were hired by him to recruit their own people because of the shorter time it took to get them on-site. And I repeat - it was Chinese businessmen who abandoned the Chinese workers when the railway was finished, even not delivering on the last payroll as well as not arranging for travel home, also as a way to save "costs" which they were bound to by contract, but did not live up to. Blaming this on Canada or BC, and implicitly on non-Chinese Canadians, is utter bull patootie. As for the most dangerous section of the railway, that's debatable; read up on the horrors of the northern Ontario stretch....but implicitly the BC section of the railway was the most geotechnically difficult by definition of the province's geography - a "sea of mountains" in a very literal sense; the choice to use the Fraser Canyon was partly strategic, as the other viable route (via the Cariboo Plateau and Bute Inlet) would not have involved so many canyons and passes); and partly a con on the part of the CPR, which had its eye on waterfront property no one else had claimed yet, which was not the case with the preferred BC railhead at Victoria, which was what BC thought it had bargained for but where the CPR wouldn't have been able to make mondo bucks in real estate promotion, as was the case with the establishment of the City of Vancouver. And another thing - Chinese were not forced to do the blasting; and those who stuck around blast sites without listening to the foreman to clear the site were the ones who died (perhaps because of language difficulties, or a lack of concern by their own shift translators); the myth that "there was one dead Chinese for every foot of the Fraser Canyon", even only the Hell's Gate stretch, would mean there would have been between 10,000 and 100,000 dead. Yet that myth persists, as does the myth that they were "forced" or that they were "given the most dangerous section of the railway". Get some context, and get down off your ethnic-suffering high horses.....

I really wish ethno-Canadians would research the history of this country in a more general sense instead of through the myopic lens of their own perceived suffering/experience of discrimination. I'm speaking as a white Canadian whose ethnicity was also discriminated against, as were others; you weren't alone, but you make it sound like your were the slave class or something here, when in reality your forebearers came because it was a better wage than was possible in China, and for many the opportunity to better life for their families back home. The portrait your ethno-histories paint tries to pretend that the railway labour was something like the slave plantations in the Deep South; that was more the condition they lived under in China; and please note it was the Chinese contractors who were responsible for paying their wages home, and didn't, not Canada, the CPR, or even Onderdon. READ THE ORIGINAL HISTORY instead of the revisionist garbage you're just rehashing here, and which is so wildly at variance with the historical FACTS. Speaking of facts, you might also want to research the role of Irish and other non-Chinese labourers in BC and in the eastern sections of the railway; you might be humbled, and you might also acquire some much-need respect for non-Chinese Canadians and their history....Skookum1 06:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

As a history major specializing in Chinese-immigration to Canada (and as the person who began this article), I respectfully disagree with your view that Chinese-Canadians portray their history as "revisionist" and only view itself as the victims. There was very severe discrimination against ethnic Chinese in Canada before multiculturalism, and I simply stated those discriminations when I began the article. I'd like to point out the following:

  • The Chinese are not the only ethnic group to portray their history from a victim POV (e.g.: Jewish-Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadians, etc.)
  • The Chinese-Canadian experience was one of the best-documented examples of institutional discrimination in Canada (as no other ethnic groups were subjected to a Head Tax for entering Canada)
  • While other European groups were discriminated within Canada, Canada did welcome European immigrations in an effort to encourage Western settlement, as the Canadian government placed ads in newspapers throughout Europe, promising free land in Western Canada. Although there was some discriminations against other ethncities in Europe, they were relatively mild to what the Chinese had experienced.

Thus, I wouldn't exactly mention discrimination against the Chinese and that of the Irish in the same breath. Bourquie 13:18, 23 Nov 2006

Because Bourquie double-posted the above on his own userpage as well as here, I'll copy what I replied on his userpage in order to keep everything in this page, where it belongs, and will add a link on his page, and my page as appropriate, to here:

[edit] Irish and Chinese

Although there was some discriminations against other ethncities in Europe, they were relatively mild to what the Chinese had experienced.
Thus, I wouldn't exactly mention discrimination against the Chinese and that of the Irish in the same breath.

I'll be back at length on my own talk page with much more, but even though I just got up and have had only two sips of coffee I wanted to rejoinder the above comments immediately. You clearly don't know much about history of ethnic and class discrimination in Europe or the British Isles, and about the Irish in particular. Even during the railway-immigration period when the Canadian government promoted free land in the Prairies, the Irish were among the most impoverished and discriminated against of all Western European peoples - the mythical "No Dogs or Chinese" sign in Shanghai (which even the PRC hypesters now admit never existed) DID have its real-world counterpart in the UK, and in Ireland itself - "No Dogs or Irish". I suggest you read some Irish social nd political history (instead of focussing on that of your own ethnic group). But the anti-Irish discrimination I was talking about was in the much earlier period when BC was first being exploited/settled by all comers; you have heard about the Irish Potato Famine, haven't you? The Wars of Religion before that? The socioeconomic status of the Irish in the post-famine era (i.e. after the 1840s) was just before the colonization of BC, and the settlement of the West, and even today the Irish are discriminated against in England, and Catholic Irish to this day in Ulster (and in Britain; similarly the discrimination against their kindred the Scots during the Enclosure Acts is in the same category, although slightly earlier, but it too is one reason there were so many Scots in the fur trade). Irish fled to the United States and even Latin America (there is a large Mexican-Irish element, for example) to escape the crushing and systematic poverty and discrimination caused by British rule of their homeland. And the flip side is the many laws and social attitudes against non-Han in China (it was a virtual death sentence for whites to enter the Middle Kingdom before the Opium Wars, was it not?), particularly "foreign devils" from Europe/Britain who ultlimately made the Emperor and mandarins kowtow to the foreign presence, admittedly by the nastiness of the Opium Wars; but make a comparison between the Opium Wars, when Chinese fought Chinese proxies of the British over the opium trade, vs the outright British control and subjugation of Ireland; it's not incidental that the Opium Wars occurred in the same time period of the Potato Famine, which was a deliberate policy of the British to starve Ireland to death (see J. Swift's A Modest Proposal). On the continent of Europe, the experiences of the Poles and others fall into the same category. I'll leave off here, but YES I CAN speak of discrimination against the Irish in the same breath as that against the Chinese; if you can't you just don't know enough Irish history, or enough BC history or railway history for that matter (check into the labour contracts for the Winnipeg-Sudbury stretch of line, for instance). And I repeat my earlier suggestion - that you should study someone other than your own ethnic group's history!!!! I have quite a bit to say about the status of Chinese in the early province and in the colonial period (a very different equation from the railway period, i.e. post-1880) but I'll save that for my own page; but if you were the guy who put in the since-deleted misinformation that the first immigration to Canada happened because of the Opium Wars (the dates of the First Opium War were given, though those of the Second Opium War DO coincide with the founding of the mainland colony) this is a fallacy, and interestingly omits mention of the Taiping Rebellion at the same time; the reason the Chinese came to BC (not "Canada", which BC wasn't part of at the time) was for gold, not as refugees; and they came from California in the first wave; and those in California were not there as political refugees but in search of gold, like everyone else; including the Poles and Irish and others who were fleeing persecution and violent revolution in Europe. By focussing only on your own ethnic group's context you equivocate "everyone else" into one category/group, which they weren't, and as if they had an easier time of it, which they didn't. Take off your ethnic blinkers if you're really a Canadian now; it's the monocultural focus that each new immigrant community seems to have that irritates the long-time Canadians, including those of gold-rush/railway-era Chinese stock (who are derided by the newcomers by the racist epithet "banana" for having assimilated, and as discussed on Talk:Chinese Canadian are "not Chinese enough". Well, the Irish until this century were "not white enough", and in point of fact were not even considered "white" by the English.... Skookum1 18:45, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Canadian identity posts re this discussion in other webspace

For Bourquie's and whomever's interest/information it happens that similar topics are being debated in http://www.thetyee.ca forums, some of which is relevant to what I've said here and to the general concept of being Canadian vs being a hyphenated Canadian (search for "Skookum1" and you'll find my posts as well as responses, and the things I'm replying to: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/11/22/Islamists/?tyee_message=Comment+added%21#post93319 http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/11/21/Tafler/?tyee_message=Comment+added%21#post93237 older material: http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/06/20/EmilysMonkey/ There's others but I'll have to think of where they are; if you want more ammunition against me, have a look at Talk:Multiculturalism, Talk:Culture of Canada, Talk:Canadian identity, Talk:History of British Columbia. My advice to Bourquie is to not lecture native-born Canadians as to what they "should" do according to government policies, and according to new-immigrant and big-media interpretations of those policies, but talk to people directly; and respect them if they're not fond of the hyphenation thing, which a lot of us find disconcerting and more than a bit insulting, especially when we're lectured about it by a relative newcomer (you'll note the Dano-Norwegian guy in the second Tyee link who has no interest in being hyphenated). I could claim at least four, maybe six, hyphenations, but I don't want them, even though I speak my father's native Norwegian half-assedly (he was born here, though; I'm third-generation) and also French (my mother is of Burgundian stock, her English family is from Quebec, and she was raised in California). I'm just Canadian, no hyphens involved; I happen to identify even more strongly with British Columbia than with Canada as such, but that's a longer story. But I'm not a Norwegian-Canadian or Irish-Canadian or French-Canadian or English-Canadian (i.e. by dint of being of English ancestry, though also being an anglophone English Canadian, sans hyphen that is). Cultural enclaves in this country are not what this country is supposed to be about; but it's being turned into that by reintrepations of multiculturalism from its original open-door context (as discussed in the links above). Fine, you're fascinated by your neighbouring Ukrainian-hyphened-Canadians. Why not also those of English, Irish, Scots, Scandinavian or other ancestries? Why is "assimilate" a bad word? My families ALL assimilated, as did those of my polyglot neighbours and extended family (see the second Tyee three for more on that). Yet "assimilate" is painted as though it's a shameful thing. No, it's about becoming Canadian; not hanging on to where you came from; it's about being part of WHERE YOU ARE.Skookum1 01:29, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/06/20/EmilysMonkey/

[edit] Excerpted material re professions/businesses undertaken

With legislation banning Chinese from many professions, Chinese entered professions that European Canadians did not want to do, like laundry shops or salmon processing.

This is bullshit. Laundry was an entrepreneurial business and not something they were forced to do; they excelled at it and people preferred to have them do it; same as houseboy/chef (the difference between an English cook and a Chinese cook is fairlyi obvious, palate-wise). As for salmon processing - we call it canning, and which was an exploitation of First Nations resources, by the way, which like the gold and the railway were also exploitation of native lands/resources, which the Chinese wilfully took part in like everybody else, canneries had multiethnic crews of First Nations, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians and many others; and again, working in them was a choice, as compared to other forms of work in the province at the time cannery work was steady and relatively well-paying.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

These Chinese

Who? - the ones who worked in the canneries and laundries??? Get your syntax straight!!

opened grocery stores and restaurants that catered to the local Chinese population \

Patently false, as Chinese corner stores were a mainstay of life throughout Greater Vancouver, so much of a public institution that it was part of the shared intercultural identity of the place; you assumed the corner grocer was Chinese; not because they were forced to or for lack of other opportunity, but because of an inside track on produce and other wholesale goods; Chinese skills at market gardening resulted in a lockdown of the produce industry, in which Chinese companies are still the dominant force locally in BC, and such stores and farms served everyone; Chinese grocery stores were everywhere, ESPECIALLY. in non-Chinese neighbourhoods.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC) I'm getting the impression that a lot of this article, like the discussion on Talk:Chinese Canadian, is by people who are relatively recent arrivals who got their education in local history only from their own ethnic organization. So much is bumpf, either misleading or just wildly wrong, that you have to wonder sometimes exactly where they're talking about.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Don't be silly, Skookum. You can't really suggest that Chinese people chose tho engage primarily in laundry shops and canning over higher paid professional positions and other businesses. There was legislation in BC, for instance, preventing Chinese employers from hiring white women as employees. You don't think that affects your business options? They weren't forced to do crappy jobs, just as illegal mexican immigrants in the united states aren't forced to pick produce for slave wages, but they weren't able, for a variety of reasons, to find better work either. What's wrong with that? - TheMightyQuill 22:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
Laundries, market gardening, and grocery stores were not crappy jobs. Laundries and gardening were things they were skilled at, and are more an indication of enterprise than of subjugation, even though that's how they are presented now; one version of this article - it may still be in there - makes it sound like the grocery stores were opened to serve other Chinese; which doesn't explain at all the pervasiveness of the Chinese corner store in non-Chinese neighbourhoods throughout the city historically as well as today, and similarly the presence of Chinese groceries and restaurants throughout smalltown BC (even now in places like Boston Bar, Lytton, Spences Bridge...). And I've just received corroboration that this article was, in fact, started by a recent arrival (Bourquie, arr. 1993) who, IMO, is clearly unfamiliar with the history of non-Chinese groups, despite being a history major. And as for the wages paid to Chinese labourers here, those wage rates were established by the Chinese contractors who brought them over, and were not forced on them; in fact, it was resentment against the Chinese for being willing to be lower rates than anyone else that caused so much resentment; including resentment by First Nations, blacks and other non-white groups as well as whites. And in many cases throughout the Interior Chinese-biased histories point to isolated instances of hostility but neglect to mention that in those locations (Cayoosh/Lillooet, the Forks, Omineca City, Barkerville, McDame, and more) those communities became dominantly Chinese for most of their lifespan; and nowhere in Chinese-written histories is there account of how Governor Douglas intervened in the Fraser Canyon, Rock Creek, Big Bend and Wild Horse Creek goldfields to underscore the rights of the Chinese to stake claims and mine alongside everybody else, i.e. in the wake of the initial hostilities which the Chinese-biased historians like to trot out; without mentioning the Chinese penchant for claim-jumping which initiated those hostilities.Skookum1 19:34, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
You can't really suggest that Chinese people chose tho engage primarily in laundry shops and canning over higher paid professional positions and other businesses.

Yes I can; canneries maybe, but canneries were also not exclusively Chinese, not even in the earliest days. But laundries no one else knew how to do and the Chinese skills/background in that business were established in California; pictures of laundry proprietors in Gastown, Lillooet, New West and Barkerville show prosperous, silk-dressed owners; hardly the result of slave wages. And if they were such shitty jobs how did 60% of private land in the Lillooet Land District come into Chinese hands (the proportion was lower, but not by much, in the Cariboo Land District)? As for the professions, which professions did you have in mind? Law? Really...because lawyers here in those days were British-schooled and not even Canadians (i.e. from east of the mountains) were admitted to the BC bar at first; and certainly Americans and Germans were not, even if they'd been lawyers in their own countries. Doctoring? Chinese doctors established themselves early on, and don't pretend that they "should have been able to practice like Western doctors" because they did, and in many cases people preferred a Chinese doctor to a Western butcher-surgeon; likewise dentists. What other professions? Oh, accounting, right; well, literacy in English and western book-keeping methods might help, but it's given in 20th Century BC that accounting departments in large firms employed Chinese clerks because of their accuracy (and because abaci were so much faster than hand-computation). What other professions did you have in mind? Insurance? Bartending? (as a matter of fact the Chinese merchants in the Interior, New West and Victoria typically dispensed booze from the back counter, as did most merchants of any ethnic origin). Don't forget that others than Chinese were also barred from such professions, either by ethnic prejudice or class distinction, but most often by educational pedigree. I repeat - what other professions did you have in mind that others weren't discriminated in as well? And back to merchants - have a look through the business directories for the 19th Century and go through the small town listings; you wouldn't have a store orr other business if you weren't doing well with it; you wouldn't have been listed; and the Chinese were listed and the history of every small town has a roster of successful and prosperous Chinese merchants/entrepreneurs and landowners who were not discriminated against by the local clientele, and in all cases there are stories of cooperation and neighbourliness; the Yee Yick/Yip Yee stores in Cache Creek and Lillooet were kept going by free credit by white neighbours. But you don't hear about that in Chinese-written/biased histories, do you?Skookum1 19:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bias towards making it sound exclusively difficult for Chinese workers

I'm noticing someone contributing seems to want to make it sound like the Chinese had it more difficult than other manual laborers. A typical example is this statement: "These canvas tents were often unsafe, and rocks fell during the night." Is this a joke? Everyone working remote labor lived in tents, why is this being singled out here for the Chinese? And rocks falling during the night - what's up with that? You might as well state "And bears were eating moose, even though the moose didn't want to get eaten. And a manicurist wasn't available for any of the railway workers." JettaMann 18:46, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Geez, it's been getting lonely here ;-) Thanks, my point exactly. In the case of the rocks falling, the context is the infamous Fraser Canyon - not infamous because of Chinese railway-labour experiences, but as a very difficult stretch of terrain which still gives people nightmares, even with the several-times rebuilt modern highway running through it. During one particularly bad icestorm a decade or so ago it was cut in about 150 places over 100 miles (between the towns of Lytton to Hope, British Columbia by ridgetop-to-river slides; and in its lower depths it's incredibly bad rock, and before the building of the Cariboo Wagon Road (which the construction of the railway partly obliterated) had to be traversed by handholds over long sections, and nightmarish foot-ladders cut into the rocks. But your point about living in tents is so true; it's not as if everybody else had RVs to camp out in, or that living conditions for white workers or any other kind of worker were any better, other than for the bosses. The "victim psychology" that's built into the article, and into the mindset that generated it, is really tiresome, and a-contextual for anybody who actually bothers to learn about the frontier era in BC.Skookum1 20:36, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Further to previous, I've been meaning to go at this bit from the intro section for a while now:
Chinese appeared in large numbers in the colony of British Columbia in 1858, when there was a gold rush in the Fraser Valley. This attracted many Chinese from China itself, and also some who had originally arrived in California.
Aside from the bad geography, apparently cribbed from the CCNC's false-history website, it's the Fraser Canyon, not the Fraser Valley; but what's interesting here is that the gold rush was a HUGE success story for the Chinese, and it was because they were established here that the contacts were available for Onderdonk to engage Chinese entrepreneurs to sigh up their countrymen for the railway; it's not just a preamble to the railway, it's a whole period. And I'm not alone among early BC historians who're of the opinion that it's not talked about much in Chinese ethno-histories because it doesn't provide good examples of how mean white people were to the Chinese; it was embarrassingly successful, given the official-whining position in the media (and Wiki) about Chinese history in Canada. I'll be back to expand this section but just to serve notice that its silence on these issues is another sign of te implicit bias and bad/fuzzy history in the article.Skookum1 21:45, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] personal bias

Too much personal bias I agree with the comment below. Get your facts right, and stop infiltrating Liberal cheerleading. The Chinese Immigration Act is distinguished because it was a racist legislature aimed specifically at one ethnic group. Although countries still have immigration fees, they apply to all applicants. I am not arguing that it is fair - that's a total different conversation. Please acquaint yourself with the issue/topic before you add your two cents into it. I have deleted your own opinion that the criticisms are not valid because (1.) that is not relevant; and (2.) you have no supporting evidence.


Bourquie, you include way too much bias. Please use the proper names of acts. It is the CHINESE IMMIGRATION ACT, not the Chinese Exclusion Act. get it straight so i dont have to keep editing your work.

The nameless individual above (edit log entry 23:29, 3 April 2005 Kilter) should check the facts and keep his hat on. [1] Turidoth 08:00, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

There really IS an act called the Chinese Exclusion Act..I learned it in history class yesterday.

[edit] More POV issues

The length and detail of the railway and "New Millennium" sections are increasingly POV in many ways; if this much detail is the intent of this article, then there's yet more detail to be included. And instead of portraying entirely the Chinese perspective on this history, the arguments within the BC legislature and press, whether strident or rational, should be presented in detail as well; and also the role of the Chinese companies and businessmen who exploited their own people. In the case of the political arguments in BC vs those in Ottawa over the labour issue, contemporary p.c. histories dismiss the debates as "there is no need to recount any of this because it can all be boiled down to racism" - that's a near-quote from either Bowering or Barman, and is to be found in countless academic papers as well; only Morton and a few other books give account of the arguments by Bunster, de Cosmos, Shakespeare, Robson and all the others; who in biased histories are dismissed out-of-hand. Morton also contains specific details for each year of how many arrivals and departures, and also of the specifics of the legislative history, which are glossed over here. The New Millennium section is also highly POV, and while "multiculturally correct" according to the modern doctrines of what Canadians "should" do or think, it also contains a wide variety of POV statements; I took out a section that is clearly partisan revanchism against the Liberals, probably written by a Tory; the Liberals, it should be remembered, were also the ones who opened the doors to Chinese immigration in the '50s and '60s and even moreso re the Handover during the '80s, and also entrenched "multiculturalism". There's a lot more to the POV issues on this page, but for now much of the material has extreme second-language-syntax issues and requires more basic editing.Skookum1 17:14, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Government motives on Head Tax Redress

because the government felt that apologizing would expose itself to unlimited legal liability to other groups.

The excerpted line was removed by TheMightyQuill for being uncited; geez, I wish you'd be assiduous on other uncited stuff that's on this page, or been on it. Am I the only one who reads the newspapers here? The bit above is a summation of many, many articles which have appeared in opinion and editorial columns throughout the period leading up to the Redress package; in fact, it was the standard reason given for why the government was holding back. So, I'm sorry, I don't have time to go back over the last three years of newspapers to find the 50+ mentions of this. But the context that was there before I added that, and made some other word-changes in the surrounding text, portrayed the government's intransigence as just more "white meanness", in other words, some of that white-bashing I was talking about, or in this case white-man's-government-bashing. I also of course took out the partisan comment trying to pin the whole thing on the Liberals, but the Mulroney regime was also unmoved (the issue wasn't yet on the radar during the short-lived Clark government). Again, am I the only one who reads the newspapers here? I wasn't trying to cover for the government when I added that; only trying to make the account less bitchy and one-sided than it was. This whole section ("the new millennium") is overblown and needlessly detailed, and IMO also very POV, especially in its previous form before I took out some of the bitter, revanchist language which has a habit of showing up on these pages. And you challenged me as to whether or not there was white-bashing going on, or Canada-bashing or whatever you want to call it (if not pinnable on "whites" as such, which was your argument); while turning a blind eye to the obviously biased and distorted comments elsewhere in the article; and in the bigoted disparagements of "white Canada" (again, or "just Canada/BC" or whatever) in this and other Chinese-Canada history articles (the Chinatown series, even at one time in the Canadian Chinese cuisine articles). Typical of such distortions are the pronouncements in the last few days from the Chinese-medicine communities protesting that Ontario is enacting legislation to make their profession self-regulating, that such legislation "constitutes a new Head Tax". Excuse me? Self-regulation as a form of discrimination? How twisted is that for an argument? But it's all too typical; and "the rest of us" are waiting for 50 years down the line when the quarter-million dollar "investor immigrant" citizenship buy-in is finally pronounced to have been a "head tax" and demands for redress will doubtless be made. When will it all end? When will the whining elements in this country finally be satisfied. The First Nations have far more legitimate complaints, and ongoing ones too, against church and government; yet I don't see the new immigrant communities being so vocal in support of those claims as they have been in regard to the Head Tax which did not involve them. It's all about race and about communal rivalry/resentment, and another way to play "white guilt" to advance a certain group's profile and cause. Doubtless before long we'll hear about calls for recognizing "the Chinese nation within Canada" because of Harper's polarity-shift on Quebec; again, Quebec/the French and the First Nations have a case; but the way it's phrased, and in the case of the Head Tax Redress' legal language, there are precedents set that every other ethnically-distinct group in the country will be after the same thing. Hell, there's not even enough money to keep Canada Pension and universal medicare going, never mind paying out redress to every group who can drag something up out of the century-old past to complain about. Either this article presents ALL sides of the debate, and not just the ethnic-Chinese one, or it's totally and utterly POV. Bourquie actually went so far as to lecture me on what Canadians SHOULD do because of his interrpetation of multiculturalism and how proud he is of being a hyphenated Canadian. Why not just try being a CANADIAN, pure and simple, no hyphens involved?Skookum1 00:58, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

You know, Skookum, there are online forums (not to mention call-in radio shows) where you can rant about how great assimilation is or whatever other personal politics you have. You might find more enthusiastic responses to your opinions there. =) - TheMightyQuill 02:24, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
This wasn't a "rant" - although your use of that term is a further disparaging comment - but a laid-out set of reasons and sentiments why your removal of the sentence in question was POV: you could have just put the "fact" template in. And as a matter of fact this very argument (what's in the deleted sentence) was field AGAIN tonight on Global National - in reference to the ongoing Head Tax Redress dispute, whereby the families of deceased head-tax payers are now asking for their share of the redress and apology; and even Jack Layton alluded to the notion that there were OTHER potential redress complaints to be settled (other than the Chinese ones), as also was text read by the anchor; and there will be more of the same in the newspapers and TV commentaries in the weeks and months to come. So YOUR deletion of that sentence was a POV action; if it takes a lengthy exegesis to help explain WHY it's POV, that's not a "rant". The "rants" are the content of much of the article overleaf, and the content of Head Tax (Canada) and several other articles, where one distortion/myth after another is presented as fact - WITHOUT someone like you asking for a citation, or bothering with one. But adjust something that doesn't fit the one-sided view presented in these articles and it gets deleted. THAT'S CENSORSHIP. Where are, for instance, mentions of the many Canadians of Chinese ancestry who felt that the Head Tax was money well-spent, or else they would have been born and raised in China; no one was "forced" to pay the Head Tax; they made the CHOICE to pay the Head Tax. There are many who express these views; they are unpolled and uninterviewed by the organizations pressing for redress, and generally also ignored by the media (though not always). Without their views in these articles, and without an unbiased account of non-Chinese views on any of the issues presented (e.g. the railway labour politics in early BC), all these articles are POV - and come off as rants. As for the Head Tax section of this article, which includes the lengthy "new millennium" section (all six years of the new millennium so far), it's almost as lengthy as Head Tax (Canada) and covers the same ground; so does the anti-Chinese legislation before 1947. Merge them all. What THIS article should have in it is stats on entry. It also - unless I put it in there already - fails to mention that the Exclusion Acts did not apply to merchants and businessmen and certain other categories; I may have changed that already but if not and the article says "All Chinese immigration was cut off" or something to that effect, that is a patent falsehood. Rant? No, just the lengthy meat and bones of the truth, and justified responses to the high-handed bias of yourself and Bourquie and others who have written these articles and deride any dispute of the "official" version of history. Yes, there are plenty of forums on the net where I'm sure you'd like to have dissenting opinion go so you don't have to be confronted with it here; it's one of the main problems of Wikipedia: the self-righteous of those who think they have the high moral ground, BUT DON'T.Skookum1 05:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

uh huh. then why don't you put it back in and put a "fact" tag next to it, or better yet, a citation? - TheMightyQuill 05:13, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Don't be smug; I'm pointing out your attitude in making that deletion; deal with it. I didn't want to put it back in only to have you or someone else just go "zip". I wanted to explain why it's valid (download tonights GlobalNational from globaltv.com where precisely the context you deleted was re-stated for the umpteenth time) and also why I think this whole article is POV, and increasingly so with the additions of the lengthy stuff; I'll make a list of all related articles, all OVERLAPPING articles, which in itself is revealing enough. I have more to say on this on an unposted edit (you got that last bit in before I hit "save" on mine) but am taking a break to play some music; you got me all wrong; I'm prolix and speak my mind and am able to type faster than I speak, but if somebody doesn't point out the POV failings of this article, no one else will (hence the volume/length).Skookum1 05:40, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
And get this: I want you to understand I was raised in an extremely liberal, anti-discrimination, anti-war, social justice and community spirit household and town; I am not a redneck, nor ever have been, and I am certainly not a racist, although there are those who will condemn any criticism that way. I had no issues with the Chinese component of British Columbian society until the effects of "the influx", as it's referred often to in coffeeshop lingo, became apparent. I studied Chinese philosophy and took an interest in their history here, as well as in the history of all the peoples who came here (not just my own), and in the First Nations; my hometowns were all multiethnic and integrated, including what Asians there were (in my childhood home the Japanese and Chinese were part of the daily fabric http://www.cayoosh.net/lillooet.html and look for the Chinatown page, which isn't finished yet); both Japanese and Chinese as well as other non-white ethnicities (Malay Dutch, Persian, Hawaiian) were in my extended family and immediate neighbours and also the schools I went to; we were all just Canadians, period. Our household and neighbourhood cuisine reflected that (thank heaven for multiethnic baking, especially at Christmastime!). But I've been around a bit and also know my BC history upside and down - not the kind that you get a history major for, which is all vetted and controlled and thought-policed, but the actual events and personalities, also with an eye to what was going on in the wider world that drove people from anywhere to migrate here. And I know that there are unrepresented views on these pages - and in the range of literature that's part of the standard academic curriculum - both in historical and in current terms. Examples are the descendants of Head Tax payers who appreciate their grandparents or great-grandparents having paid it, or else they woulnd't be here; likewise every day on the bus or at the buck's there are conversations about reverse discrimination and cultural colonization and ghetthoization, or about the distortion of the issues around the Head Tax that gets others so resentful - ALL curiously absent from nearly all the Chinese-Canadian pages (some even included pastiche versions of things that happened in the US; i.e. as if the same conditions applied here, which they certainly did not). Conversely, you hear things like, as on GlobalNational tonight, that the Head Tax will now be an election issue. For who? Surely not the 5000 people still pending settlement - and I do see the point; if anyone is compensated, not only the living should be compensated, of course - but 5000 isn't enough to sway the election, unless maybe concentrated in one or two ridings. It's going to be used as a racial issue to enlist support from voters who share the same skin colour as the original community here. So all this - all in the news - is curiously absent from this article and from all others. Well, not curiously, we all know why; politics is always about expediency, and dividing in order to rule. EVen the p.c.ism in governmment and unions and academia and media and groups is part of that. OK, that's rant, but it's me explaining where I'm coming from; I'm not a redneck, not a racist, I'm just too broadly read and I'm prolix by nature, whether in speech or print (this is being typed somewhere between 80-110wpm, usually without typos); stream-of-consciousness as you will but as my don at UBC long ago told me "write like you speak". And be objective; and part of being objective is realizing when something else ISN'T. And not having complete views on a topic matter, when the views omitted are in conflict with the prevailing perspective of the article, is not objective; it's biased, it's unnPOV. If you needed me to lay this out in point-form instead of my usual ramble, it can't be done; my writing style is a handicap, as I can't help it; I never did learn to think in soundbites, or easy political and cultural cliches of the kind you pick up as a sophomore, and from what I've seen of a lot of academics, still haven't woken up from even after they get their doctorates; hence a whole age of half-awake academics who now can direct curriculum. It's not MY rants that are the problem here - it's theirs.Skookum1 07:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

PS Quill, I got your message, and yeah, I'm worked up, but it's because I'm offended at a lot of the content in all these articles, which are "dissonant" with what I know about our history and also about things in current events and from following opinion and policy debates. "Indignant" might be a better term than worked-up, however; and I'm obviously very expressive and have a lot to say; and these issues have come up in various threads in the Tyee forums in the course of the last few days so they're on my mind (and not only mine, y'see). Yeah, maybe somewhere else in the net (there's been talk of a Canadian issues wiki-thing) and to me there's enough material to write a whole book; but I don't want to focus on negatives, which is my point about these articles; they're all negative in tone, as is so much of academic writing; you'd think there'd be some explanation for the Chinese migration to Canada to have to do with the benefits of such a move, including the many success stories in the gold rush and in business since; but this is all about discrimination and nothing else. I'll sign off as I have to eat, press some shirts and hit the sack. I appreciate your olive-branch, and I was going to suggest to Bourquie that perhaps he might spend some of his history degree researching the phenomenal successes and experiences of Chinese during the gold rush; they made money, they prospered, that's why they were here. If it was just about being discriminated against, they wouldn't have come at all. The gold rush is the archetypal example of something swept under the rug because it's too positive a story, something that doesn't serve a political agenda to talk about.Skookum1 07:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Move/Retitle proposal (or merge....)

This article is now far beyond a history of immigration, espeically with its messianically-titled last section. It's really a History of the Chinese in Canada, not a history of immigration. If it were that, it would include immigration figures and other data and also remained focussed on immigration, not on Chinese political/social issues in general as ithas begun to do so. It also should perhaps be considered for merge with Chinese Canadian as there's little distinction between the eventual contents here andthe eventual contents there.Skookum1 19:34, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it should eventually become History of the Chinese in Canada but I'm not sure the content justifies a move yet. If it were a History of the Chinese in Canada it would feature prominent historical Chinese Canadians, and generally, a lot more on the role of Chinese Canadians in Canada (like politics, enfranchisement, serving in wars, etc?) aside from how they got in (or didn't ;]). Unless there is someone willing to put in the time required to really learn the history of Chinese Canadians in Canada (and I mean their internal history as well, so as to keep it NPOV), it might be better to keep it as is for now. This is kind of an amusing suggestion, since not too long ago I suggested that the History section of Indo-Canadians be split off into History of Indo-Canadian immigration because it doesn't include about any anything aside from immigration. - TheMightyQuill 00:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] D'Arcy Island

I've created a page for D'Arcy Island, the one-time home of a leper colony for Chinese immigrants. From what I saw in a CBC documentary a few years ago, it's quite likely that some people were sent there even without leprosy. It might be worth including here. - TheMightyQuill 00:59, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] recent head tax removals

If we can't compare it to modern costs, or show the value with inflation, can it least be compared to charges for other immigrants at the time? Or perhaps, what that kind of money was worth in China at the time? - TheMightyQuill 18:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

My objection was in regard to not just the dollar values but the kinds of visas/immigration papers being referred to. Especially since "investor immigrant" status wasn't mentioned, as noted in my edit comment - ranging from a payment ("investment") of $350,000 to $500,000, this is one of the main entry means for many new immigrants. Ironically, betweeen 1923 and the rescinding of the Chinese Exclusion Act, "investor immigrants" were not barred from entry and could come and go as they pleased - all that was needed was a corporate entity, whether in Taiwan or HK or anywhere else; this may be mentioned in the article now (I may have adde3d it) but it's a glaring ommission on all Chinese-Canadian historical materials, as if the door was shut entirely. It wasn't (cf. J. Morton's book and others) and the very types of immigrants who now half to fork over half a million were, for most of this century, admitted without any such fee. OK, it's not a fee, but effectively it's a fee, and no doubt in seventy years we'll hear people complaining about being gouged by it and wanting redress. Another glaring absent from Chinese-Canadian media press copy is the many people of Chinese ancestry who came forward to say they were glad their grandparents or whomever got the Head Tax, that it was worth it for the advantages conferred by moving here. Certainly it wasn't a deterrent - Chinese immigration continued to rise even when the Head Tax was increased (which is why the flow was finally shut off, as unemployed ex-soldiers were on the edge of revolt if their interests weren't protected). I'm all for comparison of dollar values; I do it on gold rush pages all the time; but I do object to non sequitur comprisons of modern immigration reqs/visa reqs to the Head Tax; there is no comparison other than to "investor immigrant" status.Skookum1 19:08, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Skookum, you logic is totally flawed.

  1. The problem is not that a fee was charged for immigration, but that it was applied to specific group based on ethnicity. The Chinese Head-tax is not in any way comparable to modern fees for investor immigrants, because as you say, there was as separate investor immigrant option at the time. The head-tax was not classified for those types of immigrants, but purely on other Chinese immigrants. It's different because of it's racial component, related to the racist sentiments in BC at the time.
  2. Descendants of those that paid the head tax may well be glad their ancestors came to Canada, and they may well think it was WORTH paying the head-tax to do so, but that doesn't mean they're glad they had to pay it. That doesn't make any sense. You're glad you have a home, you probably think it's worth the money you paid for it/rent you pay for it, but you probably aren't super happy that you paid the money, and probably would be happier to have kept the money and got the home for free.
  3. Just because immigration increased even when the Head Tax was increased doesn't mean it wasn't a deterrent. It seems quite reasonable that immigration would have been even higher if there hadn't been a head-tax. Just because attendance rates go up, doesn't mean increased university tuition fees are not a deterrent. Just because crime rates go up, doesn't mean jail isn't a deterrent. The opportunity-cost of staying at home vs. paying the head tax was still worth it to those who could afford it.
  4. Nor was the shut off purely out of concern for the interests of unemployed ex-soldiers. Not ALL immigration to Canada was cut off, afterall.

-TheMightyQuill 19:35, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

  1. "racial" or "national origin". Don't forget that Chinese who were British subjects were still admissible SFAIK; Ottawa had turned down BC's draft head tax and other anti-Chinese legislation because it they were racially-defined and against imperial law. It may be that when Ottawa finally (begrudingly) introduced the Head Tax that the legal language stipulates "subjects of imperial China"....it may say "persons of Chinese race" but there must be a rider/clause in that excluding British subjects and others. And the pat phrase "racist sentiments in BC at the time" has always grated on me because at the person-to-person level, particularly in the Interior, were very cordial and cooperative. The anti-racist sentiments which escalated in BC in the wake of the railway can also be shown to originate among Canadians transplanted from places where they weren't used to the Chinese (namely Ontario, esp. re 1907 but also the 1885 riots) and also by American agitators. The doctrinaire viewpoint is somehow that Chinese subjects should have had equal rights with British subjects to settle in British dominions/territories, as if we had an "open door" policy like the US presented itself (falsely) to the world with; the pretense, as voiced by Bing Thom no less (on a TV interview, I remember him sitting in his power yacht on English Bay talking about it with whichver reporter), is that if the Head Tax hadn't been imposed and the Exclusion Act brought in, BC would now be overwhelmingly Chinese as at the time half the population was already Chinese.....the pretext being, as also voiced in recent news copy about the Head Tax, that BC should "rightfully" have been a Chinese settlement colony instead of a supposedly Anglo-Saxon one. But in the 1890s and 1900s and 1910s, ALL nations (especially China) had what could be defined as "racialist" immigration policies. And ironically, most of those Canadians who supported Chinese immigration in that time period were themselves overt racists, e.g. James Dunsmuir or J.A. MacDonald and (althogh American) Andrew Onderdonk); and their racism took the form of embracing the discriminatory pay scales that NOW Chinese complain about, while having contracted for them willingly in the first place, much to the chagrin of ALL other immigrants (and also FN people, who worked for the same wages, sometimes more, than white people did....).Skookum1
  2. Well, I'll just have to find some of those cites because they DID turn up in some news copy, and in letters to the editor. They've been totally ignored by the Head Tax-agitators and I've spoken to some myself on the job site (people whose family/ancestor came over before the railway, no less) and the pretense, as implied by some political commentators about them, is that they're "bananas", i.e. they're denounced in racial terms as being "white on the inside". And I'll repeat - the people I'm talking about said they were GLAD of their predecessor paying the Head Tax, and some said their grandfather or whomever recognized the value because of the money and opportunity and better life in Canada than back in Toishan (where the vast majority came from, up to a certain point).Skookum1
  3. Yes, see above about Bing Thom's opining about how BC would have been dominantly Chinese if the Head Tax was brought in. The counter-issue in BC history is the intransigence of Ottawa towards encouraging immigration to BC from UK/Europe while actively lobbying for low-cost labour from China to build the railway that BC wanted (but didn't want if built with Chiense labour, until such was forced on them by Sir John A.)Skookum1 20:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
  4. No, certainly not; but the largest stream was cut off because it was threatening to completely overwhelm British Columbia and likely lead towards open bloodshed; Ottawa, as Morton and others points out, brought in the Exclusion Act to prevent BC from spiralling out of control into what might have been outright revolution - labour-organization-based revolution, which in the 1920s in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution was scaring the hell out of imperial regimes worldwide. Another thing that also is missing from this article is how Chinese labour competition spurred on the growth of unionism and other labour activism in British Columbia, and how all nearly all early labour struggles were focussed around restricting "Chinese scab labour". As you know this led to violence against whites sometimes, as when James Dunsmuir got the govt to send in the Pinkerton's at Cumberland in 1912 (1910?) - see Ginger Goodwin. You should read up on the Grand Army of the United Veterans re their agitation (not just re Chinese and Sikhs, Japanese, etc but against Italians and Yugoslavs and other wartime immigrant popluations, who'd filled the gaps in the labour force left by the men who'd joined the forces). And don't forget that in the 1920s some immigration flows were REVERSED (Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles), partly for anti-commnist reasons but also because of the same labour-competitoin problems.Skookum1 20:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Postscript: to my knowledge, there were no mass deportations of Chinese as there were of various white ethnicites/nationalities....Skookum1
  1. It doesn't matter if the legislation was introduced begrudgingly, or if it was introduced with a rider excluding british subjects and others. In fact, that suggests that they KNEW it was racist and caved into popular pressure anyway. It also doesn't matter where people in BC were from. I didn't say that there was something inherently racist about westcoast culture, but the fact is people in BC at the time (maybe a lot of them had recently moved west... probably a lot of them considering the population of BC has always had a significant "first generation" population) had real hostility towards Asians. Person to person level race relations is a different (though obviously not unrelated) issue than systematic racism and political/economic exclusion. Person to person relations were great between men and women for thousands of years, but that doesn't mean women were treated as equals, or even legally considered people.

As for an open door policy, the point is that the resentment was not against immigration generally, but against Chinese immigration specifically. Not simply for economic reasons, but social ones as well. Yes, the Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 came in at a time when veterans were in need of jobs, but it also came in a year after Emily Murphy wrote The Black Candle. There was widespread fear of the "yellow invasion" not simply stealing white jobs, but bringing down white civilization. That is part of the concern, as you say, that BC might have become a Chinese settlement colony instead of a supposedly Anglo-Saxon one.

  1. Again, you're quite obviously misinterpreting what was said. There is a very difference between recognizing "the value because of the money and opportunity and better life in Canada than back in Toishan" vs. being happy to have been charged the headtax. I'd be very interested to read the news copy that says otherwise if you find it.
  2. So how can you say it wasn't a deterrent?
  3. I'd like to read more about the fight between labour and immigration. Let me know if you have any good books. I have strong doubts that bolshevik or anarchist Wobbly groups (who were fairly strong in pacific northwest at the time) specifically targeted immigrant populations, since that goes pretty much directly against their ideology. Opposing the use of scabs can be directed against the company as much as against the scabs themselves. On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me that other labour organizations wouldn't hesitate to blame the Chinese for stealing jobs. Plenty of them are still making similar allegations today. =)
  4. What mass deportations are you referring to? - TheMightyQuill 17:40, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Replies follow; I've got to get housecleaning (and stay away from the AFD)....Skookum1 18:00, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

  1. "There was widespread fear of the "yellow invasion" not simply stealing white jobs" But this was near-entirely in BC as the Chinese were, despite the railway, still largely marginal/invisible as a community or a threat to labour east of the Rockies. The fear and agitation was in BC, and that's what Ottawa tried to head off by first the Head Tax, then the Exclusion Act; it does matter that Ottawa brought in the act begrudgingly, as they had also done with the Head Tax explicitly because of the claims by Chinese-Canadian revisionists that the feds were anti-Chinese; in reality the opposite was the case, at least insofar as legislative motives/agenda were concerned. Most people from outside Canada don't understand the difference between federal and provnicial governments, and also don't understand that the BC experience in nearly everything is vastly different than east of the mountains. The drift of modern propaganda is that the feds were racist bastards who discriminated against the Chinese; inactuality the feds were fighting with the province of BC in order to keep discrimination in check (and to keep the associated resentments spiralling out of control into more open violence). It's not accidental that the feds agreed to raise the head tax in the wake of the 1907 riots; more than one historian has commented that they did it to prevent further uprisings in VAncouver, which threatened Confederation's stability even more than it did the Chinese.Skookum1 18:00, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  2. There were some press bits here and there, I don't know where to search for them, but I know they're out there so I'll poke around; probably not in short order but I promise "the truth is out there". But finding it amidst the deluge of political spin over the head Tax is going to be a rough go....I also recall Global and CBC TV having people saying much the same thing in some of their pieces, although no Chinese group/spokesman ever replied to them, or addressed their concerns in print or on air.
  3. There was a column by Terry Glavin in the Straight last year about this; Terry and I may have corresponded over it so I may be able to trace the date of his article from the dates on our emails. There's a book he was reviewing in the course of the article, as I recall. The Wobblies and others didn't adopt a non-racial agenda until the 1920s; the first Canadian labourite group to acknowledge the Chinese rather than condemn them were the CCF, sometimes in the '20s. Leftist agitators were just as much behind the 1907 riots as were the Knights of Labour (the IWW's main rival on the right), and all leftist politicians and unionists in the 1910s remained adamant in their opposition to "Chinese scab labour"; the first Socialist members in BC were all elected (like everyone else) on anti-Chinese platforms. When have the government(s), by the way, sent in troops (Pinkerton's were troops, albeit proviately-owned and contracted ones) against the Chinese as they did against unionists who were protesting their replacement by Chinese labour? Anyway, about the relationship between early labour and the Chinese I think User:Bobanny also knows something about this. The context in Terry's article was that unionism owed its very roots to the right against low-cost Chinese labour being brought in to replace/supplant othere workers (white and otherwise), and it would never have been as succesful in organization had Chinese labour not been there as an antagonizing/coalescing presence.
  4. Don't you know??? Germans, Ukrainians and Poles mostly, some but not all Jews andincluding others such as Finns, were deported in the 1920s for suspected "disloyalty" and revolutionary sympathies; as I recall it was 20,000 Ukrainians alone.Skookum1 18:00, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  1. First, you haven't actually shown that the federal government did so grudgingly, so let's not accept this as fact until you produce some kind of source. If it was grudgingly, then they knew what they were doing was morally wrong, but caved into voters, and did it anyway. Perhaps that means they weren't acting on their own racist motivations, but they did something they knew to be racist and exploited the fact that the Chinese didn't hold any kind of legal/electoral power to stop them. I'm not sure that's in any way better than acting out of pure ignorant bigotry. You say they enacted the law to protect public peace and prevent unrest, but that's really just speculation, unless you have some actual evidence to back it up. That could just be a later-day rationalization, the same kind that are made about Jim Crow laws in Reconstruction period - taking away the full rights of blacks to keep the public peace, preventing violence.
  2. It didn't take me long to find evidence to suggest you're wrong about the IWW.[2] While other unions would not accept non-europeans, this article specifically quotes "Young and old, foreign born and native born, male and female, the black, the yellow, the red, and the white, the home-guard and the blanket stiff, the skilled and the unskilled are alike welcome to our ranks." from Industrial Worker, 24 October, 1912. Certainly, I'm sure there were racist wobblies, and the some of its ideals might be called racist today, but by the standards of the day, it was pretty clearly anti-racist. The main source of IWW memberships were unskilled labourers getting exploited through sub-contractors... sound familiar?
  3. Uhm... no I didn't know. I assume you're not talking about Ukrainian Canadian internment during WWI. Can you point me toward some information about this? - TheMightyQuill 00:13, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
  1. Well, I haven't immersed myself in J. Morton lately but it's definitely in there, and also in other histories of the Head Tax I've come across (by mainstream historians); Ottawa needed good relations with China, and had always dressed down BC for its anti-Chinese agenda (which was really a pro-British settlement agenda but that side is never presented as anything more than "only racism", esp. in media interviews/articles) and threw out all BC's own attempts to legislate head taxes and other measures, only succumbing at a certain point grudgingly (and I think that's even Morton's word, or someone's - not mine). I'll try and think up where else I've seen it; if you dig into fed-provincial relations in BC history it's one of the biggest things in that whole period (1871-1914/1923).
  2. I'll ask Terry; maybe the IWW I'm mistaken about but I don't think so; all the dates I'm seeing so far on the cited link are 1912-1913; I'm talking about 1890-1905; the shift started coming around 1905, and maybe it was the IWW that led the charge; but I'll find bits of Morton about the socialist MLAs that were anti-Chinese labour and so on; I know it's out there.
  3. I'll dig up stuff on deportations. Like so much else in CAnadian history, and current politics as well, there's a lot of dirty secrets and this is one of thtem; I remmber in particular there was a certain number of Jews who were expelled in this period, but more because they were suspected commnist sympathizers, as also with various Germans, Austrians, Poles and others; it's not called ethnic exportations because the anti-communist rationale is the "historical reason" (but Brits and others weren't deported - most were from ex-Central Power states, esp. ex-Austria-Hungary). 20,000 might be the total number of deportations, not the Ukrainians; it's been a while since I read this....Terry will also be a good source, or will know where to point me towards....Skookum1 04:59, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
  1. Which James Morton wrote this book? I took a class with a Professor James Morton at UVic, but there's also a more famous James Morton based out of Ontario, I believe.
  2. According to wikipedia, the IWW wasn't founded until 1905.
  3. I don't know about deportions of Jews in the 1920s, but I know Canada accepted less German Jews (a few thousand) than most major countries, including smaller ones like Argentina and Colombia, in the 1930s after the Nuremberg laws were set up. Mackenzie King wrote in his diary "We must...seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood..." and avoid "creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one." He told his cabinet that allowing Jews into the country might cause riots, and would exacerbate relations between the deferal gov't and the provinces. He was just doing his job, protecting the public peace, right? - TheMightyQuill 02:25, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
  1. Morton is in the refs cited overleaf, publ. J.J. Douglas. I have the book somewhere around this place but it's not at my finerprints or I'd look at the flyleaf/frontispiece to see if it gives his credentials/where he teaches/taught. Book is vintage '707s and edespite its title is more about the politicians and the politics; it's where I learned I loved the story/character of Arthur Bunster and I just hvaen't had time to add stuff from Morton to his bio. All of my recent additions to this page are out of Morton, and I suppose I should do page-no. cites for each item just to prevent citation templates (which are more cluttery than ref marks, obviously....), and there's more; as alluded to he's got details of how many arrivals (and departures back to china) every year, built into the text, and IMO that should be a part of this article, maybe as a table but I'm not sure he has all years, only certain ones. The book was a real eye-opener, despite or perhaps because of bein vintage and the p.c. movement wasn't yet in full bore, nor the historical revisionism/lying that's become entrenched since.
  2. Then it's its predecessor organization(s) I'm thinking about - the One Big Union? It might be in Morton, actually, the first mention of labour organizations NOT being anti-Chinese; in fact I'm certain it is. (you have seen the afd at English language names for Chinese people, haven't you? With that and general life bullshit I've been busy last night and today so haven't written Terry yet for his article/thoughts.
  3. Material on deportations yet to come; not just from Terry, I'll have to think where to look; x-ref "enemy aliens" or the equivalent Canadian phrase in the natiohal archives online database maybe, but I doubt it's there......I know this is the case; I'm pretty sure it's in An Unauthorized History of the RCMP, which is an amazing and frightening 1970s ppbk from two U.Sask profs; hard to find, needless to say, and never commercially circulated since....Skookum1 02:42, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Prolematic text on tents

The core information about tents in the following passage I'd like to know where it's from, fopr starters; I emended it as there were some obvious realities concerned; I've takend out the closers on my line comments so they're visible here:

This stretch of the CPR construction is considered by some to be the most dangerous section of the railway[citation needed] )!--sez who? Northern Ontario was more dangerous, and more fatal--, especially the area that goes through the Fraser Canyon. As with railway workers on other parts of the line in the Prairies and northern Ontario, most of the Chinese workers lived in tents. These canvas tents were often unsafe, and did not provide adequate protection against falling rocks or severe weather in areas of steep terrain.--POV--

Ah, where to start?

  1. "considered by some" I'm sure HQG if he/s patrollling here will recognize as "weasel words" (by his own definition of any phrase with "some" in it); whether or not the Fraser Canyon was the most dangerous stretch of the CPR to build is highly detable; the Kicking Horse and Rogers Pass and most of all the Kenora-to-Sudbury stretch involved huge danders and largely fatalities (and next-to-no Chinese workers). So who says it's "the most dangerous". The original implcation here was also that the Chinese "were given the most dagenrous ttretch of railway to build" as if it were intentional; actually it was ewtirely to do with practicality, as they weren't needed east of the Rockies because of available labour in the Canadas and Maritimes; they were only needed on the build-upstream from what was to be Vancouver; that it happened to be dangerous and difficult was why the railway was being built. It's still a dangerous and difficult route, as this last winter's slides demonstrate; main point - the insinuation that sch placement was delibarete will no doubt return to this article; it's an insinuation not based in fact.
  2. now as for tents "not providing adequate protectiong agaisnt falling rocks". Yeah, indeed, but it's not like all Chiense were housed in the path of rockfall; that rocks fall in canyons was as much a peril to non-Chinese as Chinese; the kind of rocks that fall int he Fraser Canyon are not pebble and can crush a house or a boxcar. Personally, I'd rather be in a tent where I might stand a chance of getting out. That being said, this comment is made (drawn from the CCNC's badly-written and misleading site, I think) as if this was a common occurrence. But I know where many of the camps were - on benchland, and/or with no overhaning cliffs. So the big question is, if this is so important, how many men were killed and injured by rockfall piercing their "inadquate" tents. Or is ithis just another whine/insinuation about mistreatment/neglect of safety of Chinese by their white employers (and again, tehcnically neither the CPR nor Onderdonk were their employer, but rather the Chinese bosses who'd brought them in).
  3. I almost took the tent thing out = it's uncited, it's qualitative, it makes it sound like this was more common than not; certainly between Yale and Boston Bar/Siska, and up the Thompson, there's spots where if somebody put a tent up without looking up the mountain first.....well, I'm sorry, but you can't help where people who don't know better pitch their tents, and it's not as if a canyon by definition was stable ground to start with (the Fraser Canyon still has hundreds of slides a year...); and in areas where sleeping in tents is unsafe, believe me, sleeping in cabins or walled tents or even boxcars is NOT going to help (quite the opposite). But melodrama sells politics, so the hype in this case is "gasp, we had to live in dagnerous tents!" (like most everybody else; look at any picture of a goldfield town...or any other railway camp east of Eagle Pass, i.e. where there were no Chinese railway workers...). I have yet to see a truly safe tent, by the way - especially one that's; adequate against rockfall.....Skookum1 05:32, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some prejudidicial/POV text removed

There's more in need of serious trimming here to remove the overall POV slant of the article; "it was naive that" is inherently POV but I left it in and asked for a cite; naive is not an abstraction, it is a judgment, and this is entirely uncitable but also typically prejudicial. I removed the claim that the Benevolent Assn's formation was due to growing white prejudice, which is bullshit; it's an offshoot of the Benevolent Cos. of San Francisco, which existed when the Chinese first arrived in BC (where Chinese rights were upheld by Gov Douglas vs the usual American treatment, remember?? This was a statement making a causative claim, ENTIRELY uncitable except on POV/prejudicial sources (i.e. judgements/resentments/opinions parading themselves as facts). Likewise the removal of the POV reason given for why/how Chinese settled east of the Rockies, as if white resentment was the reason why (doesn't make sense from a logical point of view; Canadians east of the Rockies were - and are - more racist in general than those in BC, and many of the anti-Chinese disturbances in BC were promulgated by workers and others from the other parts of Canada; if they were trying to escape white resentment, east of the Rockies was the WRONG place to go. The reason is much more straightforward - no available method of (mass) travel for anyone from BC eastwards until the railway was built; other than by long arduous wagon roads, and not very good ones, the only way to Eastern Canada or the Prairies from BC in those days was via the US. And it's in the parliamentary record, I think from a quote by Arthur Bunster or another early BC parliamentarian, in response to something John A. MacDonald had said, that there were only three Chinese east of the Rockies at the time of the railway's construction. THAT is the reason; no access. It's very much like the now-removed claim that the Chinese were "forced" to work on the "most dangerous" part of the railway (see above); a prejudicial interpretation has been presented as fact, and is not even citable in the first place. Skookum1 19:39, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Section headings changed

"Early history" really only applies to the North West America; I was going to add that no one knows what happened to them; apocryphal tradition says they may have settled in among the Nuu-chah-nulth but the Nuu-chah-nulth have no such oral history; there is no record of their return to China. Chinese did not appear in BC again until 1858 with the onset of the gold rush; retitled that section, which needs major expansion, and retitled the 19th Century section vis a vis the railway's construction being the division point for eras, i.e. pre-railway/gold rushes and post-railway.Skookum1 —Preceding comment was added at 20:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Was working on a limited-time public library which ran out of time and auto-shutdowned before I could complete that...main point is that there is virtually no 'early history' (in the usual sense of early BC history, i.e. pre-gold rush/1858, the exploration and fur trade eras) other than the Nootka Sound thing, maybe one or two (known) shipwrecks (and rumours of older ones hinted at by some native traditions). Prior to that there's perhaps the story of Hui shen and Fusang that could be mentioned, though nothing is proven in that department. Section dates are/should be x-1857 (with zip all from c. 1790 to 1857...), 1858-1881 (beginning of railway-contract labour immigrants, and 1882-1923, and then 1924 to 1961 (?), and then since.Skookum1 22:47, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other stuff missing

The Morton book has arrival figures for individual ships and years, also some departure notes, i.e. numbers. He also details the seven of the top ten of Victoria's first tax rolls being Chinese, and also stuff like the Camp 23 incident, where Chinese workers massacred a white foreman during CPR construction, and details of events such as the 1885 winter riots and their consequences; the Wade book recently sited also has some fairly detailed stuff on the Chinese presence in the Cariboo, as does the Skelton book; that Chinese ran their own courts is part of Barkerville's standard history, though the reality is that Begbie allowed all groups trial by their respective peers, i.e. Scandinavians by other Scandinavians, Irish by other Irish, Americans by other Irish, blacks by other blacks; but according to the Barkerville Chinese Museum the Benevolent Association there ran its own courts, out of Crown proceedings, and also taxed its members and ran autonomous social services. Similarly the scale of Chinese settlement in the Cariboo and Lillooet Land Districts - over 60% of land in the latter was Chinese during the 1870s and its Chinese body politic was not without power, either political or economic....the gist of all this is that the pre-railway section has a LONG way to go, but I'm a long way from BC, and so from any resource books on this; it's clear that the ethno-biased accounts have some pretty spurious judgements, e.g. the causalities criticized and removed by myself (see above), but it's material in the general way that's still so much missing. ESPECIALLY if this is supposed to be on the history of immigration (not just of the Chinese community within Canada); that's why the immigration-number details are not only important but happen to be available and would make a nice table maybe; i.e. without fudging them as was done with the employment-attrition on the railway which previously suggested that the drop from 5000 initial workers to 1500 had to do with injuries and accidents; it didn't - it had to do primarily with desertions for the goldfields (as with everyone else). These are just notes for some other editor/contributor to follow up on, I won't be taking the time other than trying to fix the ongoing POV rant this article largely remains, despite various fixes; but part of what makes it POV is the selective (or merely ignorant) omissions of relevant material, and the inclusion of much that is neither relevant - nor true.....Skookum1 22:45, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV edits by IP user

Sigh. Tweak here, tweak there, fudge here, twist there.....any chance the IP-only user who's been making strategic edits here care to identify themselves? And any chance you might care to justify your edits with actual citations? As it is the prejudicial language and selective-evidence content of this page continues unabated, and shamelessly so. My removal of "many Chinese were left without work" plus "as a result" has to do with the FACT that that is not the reason the Head Tax was passed at that time; this is like the silly claim, edited out a while ago, that Chinese moved east of the Rockies to escape racism in BC (as if there weren't any east of the Rockies). Everybody else was out of work in 1885, too, kiddies, and they were ALL "immigrants" not just the Chinese (who at least had been working while those they displaced could not....).Skookum1 (talk) 17:48, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Hey Skookum, the IP edits seem to be coming from a pretty big variety of domains. I'm not sure why you're convinced it's one person. (no, it wasn't me). Calling the Chinese immigrants isn't specifically wrong, just because everyone (well, the hwanitum anyway) was an immigrant... I don't see why you find that inflammatory or POV. And, just out of curiousity, why do you think the head tax was imposed? The reasoning behind it should probably be included in the article, no? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 20:31, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Inflammatory NO, POV YES - because it's an implication that they were "immigrant" within other immigrants, i.e. "immigrant" is now commonly used to mean "visible minority" (as apposite to "Europeans" who are not referred to as immigrants, except in FN-written histories) without any sense of its historical context; I have the new CBC book on the gold rush and it apes Barman's noxious usages, where everybody but the Europeans are "immigrants" - even though everybody was, even Canadians (she somehow makes an exception for Portuguese, as if Joe Silvey weren't somehow regarded as an equal by his neighbours, which he was). In any case "Chinese immigrants" is redundant, unless ALL other groups are referred to in the same way; and in point of fact, immigrant is the wrong word because many at the time were contract labourers, who were NOT "immigrating" but on the equivalent of a work visa; an immigrant is someone who applies for citizenship, period, despite its latter-day quasi-derisive use by academics. And just out of curiosity, have you taken time to read Morton's book, which details out all the various attempts (before 1885) to pass a head tax, as well as all the reasons why it was argued for and against by BC politicians? If you want an answer, get the book and friggin' read it, you'll see why I don't like the language I deleted. In pure semantic/grammatical terms it wasn't because there were many unemployed Chinese that the Head Tax was passed (it wouldn't have affected them since they were already in the country); it was because the boatloads of "immigrants" hadn't let up despite the railway contracts being over and done with; most of these headed for the Cariboo and Fraser Canyon goldfields, where they continued to make the money the CCNC insists they didn't. Morton's book is an eye-opener and, although written in the PC-mode of the early '70s, is one of the few books around which actually lays out the British Columbian position on things like the head tax instead of condemns it knee-jerk across the board. AIRC Ottawa reluctantly imposed the Head Tax and reluctantly later raised it - reluctant because of trade/diplomatic sensitivities with China, as also today - but it wasn't bnrought in because Chinese were employed; rather the contrary.Skookum1 (talk) 22:27, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't have time to read Morton's book. You are saying then, that the Canadian government imposed the Head Tax because they didn't want to share the wealth/resources with Chinese immigrants? They were, at the same time, encouraging immigration from England, were they not? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 23:52, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

My wikibreak is about to (half-) end so I'll be around more, but as I'm in Halifax now and waht remains of my library is still in BC I can't source the passages in Morton's book I've been thinking of paraphrasing, or even quoting directly, about this or that; and adding detailed immigration data which is in his book and interestingly not in the PC-passive-aggressive academic writing since. Your closing questions indicate the misperceptions that these poorly written and highly biased output of writing have created and fostered. It['s one of the fallacies about talking about all white people collectively in Canadian/BC history, because there are different elements, not a single common racial agenda; rather a range of reasons, and in the case of BC's position on labour and immigration a very different one from Ottawa; and the businessw powers even within BC's white elements (Onderdonk and the CPR were carpetbagger-interlopers) the positions of the Dunsmuir clan were very and those of pre-railway settlers very different from those who came in either to work on it or after its completions; the gangs which comprised the winter riots of 1885-86 ("Chinese MacDougall incident") were Ontarians and Maritimers, not BCers, for instance; Dunsmuir liked to hire Chinese labour, though for different reasons than Ottawa had ordered it. Ordered it, and the reason was that BC's expectations that British labour, specifically Cornishmen and Welshmen and Geordies, be used to build the BC section of the railway was rejected by Ottawa was too expensive; this is one of the "Carnarvon Terms" of the original constiututional agreement that, in being rejected or ignored by Ottawa, nearly resulted in BC's leaving Confederation in the mid 1870s (hence the famous 'Carnarvon Terms or Separation" arch which Gov Dufferin refused to pass under); Ottawa's forcing railway construction ahead - MacDonald's doing so, betraying his Victoria constituency's interests and desires - caused the importation of Chinese labour to work on the railway; it was not BC's idea, nor popular among even the business class in BC; their immigration policy was primarily pro-British, and only by consequence (being on the maritime doorstep of China since the maritime fur trade first linkedd the PacNW and Canton...) was it necessarily anti-Chinese. Ottawa - or rather the magnates of Montreal and Toronto who controlled it - could hagve cared less about seeing BC settled by British immigrants; it was and is only incidental to their empire, BC only an acquisition to give the industrial cities a Pacific railhead. They may have actively promoted British migration in other parts of Canada, but BC was noty a priority; and it was Britons who mobilized to settle the Okanagan, not central Canadian interests, who only see BC as a resource region and a port ever since then, just as you have above ("sharing in the resources" etc....what about building a common society????). BC's many attempts to pass a head tax of its own were at first overturnedc by the Privy Council (in colonial days; and actually under Doughlas there was an attempt to impose a head tax on EVERYONE because of the American/European, i.e. non-British, influx) and after 1871 rejected by Ottawa. Ottawa only installed the Head Tax, and raised it, to mollify the risk of open political rebellion, even social/labour rebellion, in BC, and also to mollify China and imperial Britain's relations with it. it grates me that this complex history is boiled down to "white European policies against [insert minority] were always racist" is just BUNK and I'm tired of it. None of hte evidence indicates this; it's only the opinions of heavily-ide4ologized academic writing which has obscured the truth, all in the name of the "new history", as they like to call it, "History is being rewritten" and all other kindfs of creepy 1984-ish newspeakisms. The head Tax policy had f**k all to do with:

the Canadian government imposed the Head Tax because they didn't want to share the wealth/resources with Chinese immigrants?

....which is a gloss of the usual cant about white greediness and selfish. The Chinese had been freely partaking of the wealth/resources of BC since 1858, with (as in Morton) sevne of the ten wealthiest on Bictoria's first tax rolls being Chinese, adn by the 1870s and 1880s the goldfields as well as most of the agrictultural alienations in the Interior in Chinese hands; and remained so in some areas. The head tax was about railway labour, about uncompetitive wages and contract monopoly; resistance to Chinese labour in rfact is at the core of BC's labour movement growth from the 1880s through to the Great War, it was not about "not wanting to share wealth/resources". It was about "jobs for the boys" and wanting a British-European flavouredsociety rather than an Asian one; it's not as if there was any moral onus on British Columbian colonists to build a colony open to anyone (don't forget it had been created to keep it from being American...), no moral onus other than the one imposed by post-modern academics posthumously upon them like some kind of post-rationalists Judgement Day against evildoers. All religion, really, and like other religions based more in emotion than fact. "didn't want to share the wealth/resources" etc etc - hell, people in those days didn't think like that. They were building a global British society? Why in hell wopuld they want to be settled by as many people from a completely different culture, who unlike the Scandinavians and Germans and italians and Hawaiians and others (irrespective of colour, and inclouding Americans of all colours) readily assimilated. Bear in mind also that "immigrant", again, is highyly unsuitable for a group whose formal organizations referred to BC as "the Colonies of T'ang (China)" (i.e. of free, non-Qing China)....even held their own courts, and with Begbie's mandate and cooperation. But gold-rush era settlers all got along, famously, and BC society had accommodated the dominance of Chinese merchants, miners and also things like freighting companies and more (including the house servant, laundry and produce/grocery complex). That's all for now; what I'm tryhing to get you to understand is that modern perspectvies - terminologies such as those you have used - are prejudicial by nature, seeking to JUDGE an age gone by without adctually knowing much more about it than the easy judgements of "the head tax was imposed so white people did not have to share resources with Chinese immigrants). No, it was imposed to keep BC from becoming much as a Chinese colony as BC would have been if the numvbers of Americans in teh 1850s-1860s had remained high; the logic was that these were subjeftgs of the Celestial Emperor, not of Her Brittanic Majesty. Simple enough; the head tax was meant to discourage immigraiton. Obviously didn't work, even once it was raised. yet it's portrayed as the next best thing to slavery or the death camps of the Nazis, as if it were that heinous, as well as overblown and hysterical, as well as misinformed. I'm gonna play some music now. It's late....Skookum1 (talk) 05:33, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Valuable resource on goldfields

I knew about this paper (In the colonies of Tang : historical archaeology of Chinese communities in the north Cariboo district, British Columbia (1860s-1940s) / by Ying-ying Chen, c.2001) a while ago; I thought it was here where I changed Gum Shan to Colonies of T'ang as the Chinese name for BC; Gum Shan is primarily a California ref (according to its article, which may just be a USPOV problem). "Colonies of T'ang" is used in the manifesto of the Chinese Benevloent Association on display in the Barkerville Museum; the author of said paper worked for/with the Barkervile museum/archives in the course of his thesis research. Now I have to go figure out which article that was, as this cite is needed there....Skookum1 (talk) 16:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese-language interwiki

I"m increasingly curious what the Chinese-language version of this article says/claims, also its talkpage. Could someone here please translate this (and the takpage) before I run it through a mechanical translator? I love those things, the renderings can be hilarious (had some especial fun with Brazilian Portuguese to English and vice versa...). Anyway I'm very curious, given the wide variance between the popular mythology and the hard facts...I would image btw that the Chinese-language eequivalent of Talk:Tibet is probably even more or sa swamp than its English-language counterpart. Maybe put the translation up as a sandbox page off this talkpage?.Skookum1 (talk) 21:55, 1 May 2008 (UTC)