"KEEPING BRITISH COLUMBIA WHITE:" ANTI-ORIENTALISM IN THE WEST, 1858-1949
Stephen M. Beckow
The clash of Asian and European cultures in North America was neither a series of localized incidents nor a footnote to world history. On the contrary, it was an important outgrowth of vast and signifcant human events taking place in the nineteenth century - the development of rapid ocean communication; the opening of western North America; the crisis of Asian overpopulation; and the Asian incursions of European powers. The coincidence of these events sent thousands of Asian emigrants across the Pacific Ocean, some of whom came to Canada. Many of them, coming in search of opportunity, found only strife. Although the brevity of this study permits only the barest outline of once-compelling issues, we will be attempting to recapture at least the fears and frustrations endured by all parties to the controversy.
When white British Columbians pointed to the existence of an "Oriental problem", they compressed into that phrase many levels of feeling and emotion. The "Oriental problem" was an economic question and a cultural question; it was a dilemma on the personal and the interpersonal level. It threatened livelihoods, contemporaries believed, and it promised the end of the dream of Anglo-Saxon purity and dominance in western British North America. "Oriental'' was the term applied to all peoples from Asia, and was often applied to peoples inhabiting the Near East as well. It included in its meaning the third major Asian group, the "Hindu". But for the most part the paranoia that gripped white British Columbians was aimed at the Chinese and Japanese.
This was so for two particular reasons: first, the East Indians were few in number compared with the other two groups. By 1908, the year in which restrictive laws closed off immigration channels between India and Canada, only about 5,000 East Indians had entered the country, and many of these were en route to the United States. By 1911 the number of East Indians in Canada had fallen to 2,342, compared with 9,021 Japanese and 27,774 Chinese. Second, East Indians came from a colony of the British empire. As British subjects they could be legislated against with an ease impossible in the case of either mainland Chinese or Japanese. As a subjugated people, moreover, they did not present the picture of racial aggressiveness that many whites superimposed on the Japanese. Consequently, the Chinese and Japanese were the two principal Asian groups preoccupying the minds of British Columbians during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.
In Stanford Lyman's words, distress at home and opportunity abroad persuaded a large number of Chinese to leave their homeland during the second half of the nineteenth century. Natural calamities and political rebellion in Kwangtung and Fukien provinces forced masses of people into the coastal cities where, hearing of the California gold strikes of 1847, a portion of them paid $25-$50 for ship's passage to San Francisco. From there they journeyed to the gold fields as traders and prospectors. Out of their midst came the first Chinese to enter the crown colony of British Columbia in 1858, also drawn by the news of gold discoveries; this time on the Fraser River. Following the British Columbia gold rushes, Chinese immigration slowed down. When it increased again after 1881, the Chinese came not as free prospectors and merchants, but as contract labourers, bound to work off the debt they incurred for their ocean passage by serving on the railway construction crews. Early merchant houses, like Kwong Lee and Company of Victoria. serviced the demand for gangs of contract navvies. The man who arranged for the first large shipment of labourers was the C.P.R.'s Andrew Onderdonk, who brought nearly 16,000 navvies into Canada between 1881 and 1884 to build the Pacific section of the railroad. Most Chinese left their homeland with every intention of returning after raising a capital stake, and it is estimated that half the number who journeyed to British Columbia before World War I actually did return to China.
Meanwhile, in Japan's southern Honshu and northern Kyushu districts, overcrowding and political turmoil forced landless peasants and impoverished fishermen to seek their fortunes abroad. As in China, the incursions of western imperialists had weakened the central regime: but, unlike the Manchus, the Tokugawa shogunate did not survive the initial turbulence. In 1867 the imperial Meiji dynasty was restored. One of its first measures served to liberalize emigration policies. Numbers of Japanese moved first to the island of Hokkaido, then to mainland China and Asiatic Russia, and finally to the island of Hawaii. In the years before 1898, when Hawaii was annexed to the United States. the islands served as a funnel through which Japanese emigrants entered the United States and Canada. It was to cut off this source of immigration (and that from British Chinese colonies) that Canada, in 1908, enacted its measure denying entry to any immigrant who had not made a continuous voyage from his native country, a measure which halted East Indian immigration as well. Although Japanese had fished Canadian waters as early as 1877, their numbers had increased slowly, reaching only about 1,000 by 1896, but multiplying rapidly thereafter. By 1901 five times and, by 1911, ten times that number had entered the country.
Completion of the Pacific railway in 1885 may have ended the need for large gangs of Chinese navvies, but it did not end the use of Asian labourers in other sectors of the economy. The new interior mines, fostered by the network of railways and feeder lines after 1885, and the older industries like coal-mining and salmon-canning clamoured for cheap Asian labour. At the same time an increasing number of white labourers entered the province from eastern Canada, the western United States, and Europe. Those from the American West, especially the miners, had reacted to the oriental presence with violence. In the worst outbreak of anti-Chinese violence, twenty-eight Chinese had been slaughtered in 1885 by striking workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, an act which prompted the U.S. government to offer reparations of nearly $277,000 to China. This incident and the very pale reflection of it which occurred in Vancouver two years later indicated how Asians were becoming scapegoats in a war between Iabour and capital.
The people who supported the immigration of Orientals, as labour spokesman repeatedly pointed out, were the men who profited by employing them or by using them to split the labour movement. In the ranks of those favouring Oriental immigration were the wealthy and the influential, from premiers to bankers, shipowners to industrialists, labour contractors to ranchers and farmers. While the composition of this group was to change after World War I, it remained until then a strong lobby working against Oriental exclusion.
Financiers and industrialists watched the growth of the Iabour movement with undisguised alarm. They found in the unorganized worker in British Columbia, including the Oriental, a weapon with which to divide and disrupt the ranks of trade unionists. The non-union worker could be used to man the posts of the strikers, allowing intransigent employers to weather periods of labour unrest. The friction generated by the use of Oriental labourers threatened not only to split the trade-union movement, but also to deflect criticism from "union-busting" employers to their "scabs" and "coolies". Workers applauded measures that deprived the Oriental of the rights and privileges of citizenship, and employers found nothing objectionable in these measures; indeed disenfranchisement allowed employees to escape any feeling of obligation about work conditions and wage levels in regard to their "alien'' Asian employees. Disenfranchisement, then, had the effect of increasing the marginality of Oriental workers, and of dashing their hopes of securing any redress from vote-conscious politicians.
But organized labour was worried about more than just wage levels. Unions also worried about the overall implications of the use of contract labour. If employers successfully maintained their right to import men from abroad bound by contract to work under poor conditions at starvation wage levels, British Columbian workers foresaw the dawning of an age of "industrial serfdom''. White workers did not feel any concern for the fate of the "coolies'' under such an order; indeed, if contracted workers had only remained in occupations which white labourers spurned, no objection to contract labour per se would probably have been raised. In this regard white workers had raised no objection to Chinese working to pack fish, haul coal, wash dishes, cook, and launder - occupations "too menial" or "unpleasant" for whites. But contract labour was being imported to fill jobs which white workers wished for themselves. To have competed for these jobs in a free Iabour market would have meant losing all that workers had won in the last one hundred years. It would mean, they complained, a return to "feudalism", the rise of a new order dominated by industrial "robber barons''. Labour leaders and sympathetic middle-class intellectuals set themselves against such an event.
As early as 1878 a worker's group had been organized to fight Chinese immigration. The Victoria Workingmen's Protective Association announced its intention to strive for "the mutual protection of the working class of British Columbia against the great influx of Chinese" and expressed its readiness "to use all legitimate means for the suppression of their immigration''. As the violent Vancouver riots of 1887 and 1907 and the Nanaimo strike of 1913 proved, British Columbia's workers were also prepared to use force to intimidate Orientals who failed to heed their warnings.
In their battle against Asian immigration, labour won support from two other groups in Canadian society. Ostensibly these two groups opposed the Oriental presence for ideological rather than economic reasons; both groups were composed of businessmen who did not profit from trade with or employment of Orientals together with a number of politicians, militia officers, civil servants, journalists, professionals, and clergymen. The first group concerned itself with the issue of race dominance; they saw British Columbia as an outpost of the British Empire on the Pacific, whose Anglo-Saxon makeup was endangered by the influx of Asians. The second group concerned itself with the issue of social well-being; they saw British Columbia as an outpost of Western Christendom, whose Christian standards and living conditions were threatened by "heathen immorality". While workingmen scrutinized wage scales, the friends of the Anglo- Saxon "race" pondered immigration tables, and the religious and social reformers sifted through health and crime statistics. A quasi-scientific juggling of facts confirmed spokesmen from these two groups in their firm belief that, as the young R.B. Bennett put it after the Vancouver riots of 1907, "British Columbia must remain a white man's country".
In framing their strategy, the foes of the Oriental encountered two obstacles. In the first place they could neither overcome the ignorance of eastern Canadians regarding the "Oriental question", nor generate any interest through their efforts to "educate the east". The reason lay partly in the fact that Orientals formed between seven and eleven per cent of the total British Columbia population but only a fraction of one per cent of the population of other provinces in the years before the immigration closures of the nineteen twenties. It also lay in the fact that the rest of Canada worried more about the impact of the arrival of the "men in sheepskin coats". Whatever the reason, British Columbia came to feel its isolation on the anti-Oriental issue.
In the second place anti-Oriental whites found themselves hampered by the division of powers between federal and provincial governments. The British North America Act gave control of immigration matters, foreign affairs, and trade and commerce to the Dominion government. Provincial attempts to bar or discriminate against Chinese nationals were overruled by Macdonald's Conservative administration as being outside British Columbia's legal competence. Later, Laurier's Liberal administration, overestimating the trade possibilities with Japan, struck down measures singling out Japanese nationals. Although this situation proved a continuing source of frustration for anti-Oriental whites in the western province, they found indirect means of legislating against Chinese and Japanese residents. Matters relating to property and civil rights, provincial and municipal works, crown lands and Iicencing remained under provincial jurisdiction. Laws touching on these matters could be framed in such a way that Chinese and Japanese only would be affected by them. Whereas laws worded to affect Japanese nationals, for instance, were ruled invalid, those laws on matters within provincial competence affecting the Japanese in general were accepted by the federal government as legally valid. Using this ploy, anti-Orientral legislators began to restrict Asian ecomomic activity within the province.
Thus the opponents of Oriental immigration and settlement could take one of two tacks - either they could work for the ending of immigration from Asian countries or else they could work for the crippling of Asian economic efforts within the province. Before 1885 the demand for Oriental exclusion met with little success beacause the federal government remained convinced that importing large numbers of navvies was essential to the completion of the Canadian Pacifc Railway. But in 1884, with the end of construction in sight, the Dominion government consented first to an investigation and second to a tax on Oriental immigrants. A $50 head tax was initiated in 1885, raised to $100 in 1900, and to $500 in 1903.
The head tax slowed the pace of immigration for a while; then appeared not to impede it at all. By 1911 thousands of Chinese were entering the province again, and investigators found that the existence of the tax merely buoyed up the wages of those already in the country, allowing them to subsidize the emigration of friends and relatives. Although the First World War slowed immigration again, after its close workers and returned soldiers joined with farmers, fishermen, and small businessmen (with whom Orientals were increasingly competing) to demand the exclusion of Chinese. In 1923 the federal government responded with an act which effectively sealed off the country to Chinese immigrants. Between 1925 and 1940 only eight Chinese entered Canada.
Blocking the entry of Japanese immigrants proved more difficult. For one thing Canada, as part of the British Empire, incurred certain treaty obligations under the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance. For another the Laurier government had visions of encouraging trade with Japan. Legislation aimed at Japanese nationals was opposed by Great Britain as running counter to Canadian and imperial interests. When, after the Vancouver riots of 1907, restriction finally did come, it took the form of a "gentleman's agreement" between Canada and Japan in which Japan voluntarily undertook to restrict the numbers emigrating to Canada to 400 annually. However, as more Canadian Japanese left the resource and construction industries to compete with whites in commerce and agriculture, new agitation persuaded the federal government to renegotiate the agreement. In 1928 the power of discretion in immigration matters was transferred to Canadian consular authorities in Japan, and the annual limit was lowered to 150 immigrants.
The 1931 census, the first following the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, revealed that males in the Chinese community outnumbered females by the ratio of ten to one. This led many whites to believe that the Canadian Chinese community would eventually die out. In contrast, the same census, the first since the 1928 revision of the gentleman's agreement, revealed that the Japanese community had a ratio of ten males to seven females, and what appeared to be an unusually high birthrate. These figures persuaded whites that the Japanese community would succeed not only in perpetuating itself but also in multiplying its numbers. As the Japanese empire assumed an increasinly menacing posture in world affairs, many British Columbians advocated a policy of action against the Japanese enclave in the province. In contrast, concern over the Chinese community all but disappeared, due partly to its alleged moribund state but partly also to awakened sympathy over Japan's victimization of China.
Meanwhile, with Oriental immigration all but ended, anti-Asian whites tended to emphasize the second category of strategies - the restriction of civil and economic freedoms. While agitating for immigration restrictions, whites had also moved to deny the provincial franchise to Chinese and Japanese residents. Automatic disabilites flowed from disenfranchisement. Orientals were not permitted to stand for elected office. They could not sit on school boards and they could not serve on juries. Along with these automatic consequences of non-voter status, anti-Asian whites contrived new penalties. Enfranchisement was made the basis of admission to certain professions like law and pharmacy. Orientals were excluded by tacit agreement from the teaching profession, the civil service, and a number of other areas of employment. No Chinese were allowed to Iabour on public works. The licensing of handloggers was tied to the franchise. A departmental campaign was begun through which the issuance of fishing licenses to "other than white British subjects and Canadian Indians'' was intentionally slowed down. One measure simply vexatious in intent was linked to the 1924 British Columbia Factories Act. Under that piece of legislation, laundries operating for profit were classified as "factories", and required to observe limits on the maximum hours of operation. The net effect of this act was to hit Chinese laundries whose employees were usually family members, and who depended on being able to operate evenings and holidays. As proposals became policy or law which had little economic and much social content, the covert purpose of anti-Oriental discrimination became apparent. Thus, the closure of the provincial schools to Chinese children in 1907 and the closure of the provincial home to the Oriental elderly and impoverished in 1936 brought into the open the essentially discriminatory nature of a large number of ostensibly "regulatory" measures.
While organized labour stood behind many of these initiatives, a number of the techniques used by non-labour groups also stemmed from practices initiated by trade unions. The idea of sealing off a trade, for instance, derived from labour's use of the closed shop. Moreover when farmers toyed with the idea of stamping Oriental produce in 1921, they had before them the example of the union label, first used in 1871 by San Francisco cigarmakers to distinguish their products from those of Orientals. Organized labour succeeded in having Orientals excluded from provincial municipal works and from the more lucrative underground mining jobs. They also succeeded in having the importing of contract labour made illegal in 1907. And in 1925 they won a minimum wage act which reduced the numbers of low-wage Asian workers employed in the extractive industries. Some labour-inspired measures failed to become law - for instance, the proposed measures against men who wore their hair in queues, shipped the bones of their dead to another country, carried shoulder baskets, or spoke a non-European language. Other Iabour-supported initiatives became law only after being taken up by middle-class reformers. William Lyon Mackenzie King, who as deputy minister of labour chaired the inquiry into the 1907 riots and subsequently into the illegal entry of Asian immigrants into Canada, came away from Vancouver bent on limiting Oriental immigration and crippling the opium trade. The two seemed linked in King's mind, and, in the subsequent agitation which he and Edmonton judge Emily Murphy ("Janey Canuck") led against opium traffickers, Chinese were portrayed as the subverters of Canadian health and welfare. Canada's first series of anti-narcotics acts were introduced through their efforts, the effect of these pieces of legislation being felt almost exclusively by the Chinese community. Speakers in the debate pointed out the anti-Oriental bias of this kind of measure by showing the negligible impact of the opium trade on occidental Canada compared to the profound impact of patent remedies and prescription medicines. Thousands, they argued, used opium medicines without hinderance or stigma. The net effect of the narcotics measures, however, was not to limit the ability of any significant numbers of Chinese to earn a living (the aim of so many labour initiatives), but to paint the Chinese community with the brush of social deviance.
As far as the labour movement was concerned, their success in reducing the general competitive effectiveness of Orientals by the 1930's and in barring them altogether from certain trades altered the situation between white and Asian workers. During that decade organized labour changed its tactics, supporting the enfranchisement of Asians and enrolling Orientals in trade unions. In 1931 the Trades and Labour Congress accepted the affiliation of the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union. In 1935 the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the political voice of Iabour, called for granting Asians the vote. One CCF candidate explained the rationale behind the new strategy by asking workers "whether you prefer an Oriental with a vote who will have to come up to your standard of living to an Oriental without a vote who can be used to break down your unions and your working conditions."
If the economic campaign of organized labour had changed in method and emphasis, the social campaigning of non-labour groups had gained in intensity and broadened in support. In the 1920's, other groups had joined the Asiatic Exclusion League (the force behind the 1907 Vancouver riots) in agitating against Asians. The Native Sons of British Columbia, the White Canada Association, and the Ku Klux Klan received a great deal of publicity not only in the province but also in the rest of Canada. While eastern Canadians looked upon British Columbia's agitation as a curious phenomenon, anti-Oriental journalists and pamphleteers asserted their seriousness, and were joined by municipal and provincial politicians who translated social concern into the familiar demands for sanctions against Orientals. But the new situation in British Columbia of the 1920's and the 1930's persuaded these non-labour anti-Oriental leaders to demand revocation of Oriental business Iicences and the deportation of all Asian residents. In refusing to tolerate such moves the chairman of one committee of the provincial legislature likened the actions of local politicians to those of Hitler and dissociated himself from the anti-Oriental campaign.
The composition of the board of one of the anti-Asian organizations reflected the altered character of Oriental opposition. In the early 1930's the board of the White Canada Association included a representative of the Retailer's Association, the Cloverdale Farmer's Association, and the Fishermen's Protective Association together with a farm engineer and a rural real estate dealer. The battle which these groups waged might have remained a war of words had not an actual war tranformed it. The entry of Japan into the Second World War, signalled by the bombing of Pearl Harbor and brought home by the capture of the Canadian garrison at Hong Kong made anti-Japanese sentiment not only legitimate but patriotic. White racists, economic foes, and ambitious politicians whipped up anti-Japanese sentiment, using Canadian Japanese as their target. While the Japanese community looked to the federal government for the maintenance of order and the meting out of even-handed justice, the administration of William Lyon Mackenzie King showed itself negligent regarding the welfare of the Japanese community. The King government ordered the removal of all Japanese nationals and Japanese Canadians from the coastal areas of British Columbia. All that families had saved, all that they had built was lost in the relocation. The treatment of the Japanese Canadian community contrasted with that of the Italian and German Canadian communities in that no distinction was made in the case of the Japanese between foreign-born and Canadian-born individuals.
Although a post-war revolution in attitude destroyed the wall of discrimination raised against Canadians of Oriental descent, the men and women of the Japanese community who had suffered so severly received little compensation for their losses. Despite the fact that a Canadian prime minister, Lester Pearson, admitted the injustice of their treatment, no satisfactory settlement was ever made. The publicity given Nazi atrocities, the founding of the United Nations, and the passing of human rights legislation were seen as evidences of change of sentiment. In 1947 Chinese, and in 1949 Japanese Canadians received the citizenship and franchise rights previously denied them, and immigration with Asia resumed on the basis of skills rather than race. In the larger context, however, Asian immigrants still received less preference than those from Europe, and Canadians of Oriental background still encountered covert and informal discrimination.
Perhaps no event carried more symbolic significance than the seating in the House of Commons of the first Canadian of Oriental descent. Douglas Jung, a Canadian Chinese, defeated the incumbent minister of defence in the election of 1957, and held his seat again in elections the following year. Awarded his degree by the University of British Columbia faculty of law, he practiced in a profession previously closed to men and women of his ethnic origin. Douglas Jung is one of many Canadians of Chinese and Japanese ancestry contributing to Canada's professional, business, labour, sports, and entertainment life and finding rewarding careers in areas closed for generations to Orientals.
