Vol. 80/No. 29 August 8, 2016
Vancouver meeting discusses struggles of
Chinese overseas
AND PATRICK BROWN
The event took place in a region where Chinese immigration has had a substantial weight in history. Today about half the population of Richmond, a city of 213,000, is Chinese-Canadian or Chinese immigrants, the highest proportion in Canada.
The majority of conference participants came from the United States and Canada. Others hailed from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, while smaller numbers attended from Europe, Latin America and Africa. Some 90 additional participants from China had been expected but were unable to secure government funding for travel expenses.
The narratives of Chinese overseas involve not only a “sorry history of repression,” ISSCO founder Ling-Chi Wang told the conference, but years of “civil rights struggles in Chinese communities across the world.” Wang is a retired professor of Asian-American Studies who headed the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California at Berkeley for many years.
In a keynote speech closing the conference, co-founder Prof. Wang Gungwu, of the National University of Singapore, focused his remarks on China’s continuing rise as a major modern power, and the likely impact it will have on communities of Chinese overseas.
The experience of Chinese settlers in British Columbia, starting with the 19th century gold rush, was a theme running though the conference. Many participants took part in tours organized in conjunction with the conference to the historic Chinatown area of downtown Vancouver and the fish canneries and shipbuilding yards where many Chinese worked in the early 20th century.
Another tour focused on another conference theme, the historic links and intermarriage between Chinese immigrants and the indigenous peoples of the region that is today British Columbia. A rafting and bus trip along the Fraser River allowed participants to visit large-scale gold mining sites that had been worked by Chinese prospectors.
Chinese workers in Canada
Many of some 50 conference panels — more than a dozen in Mandarin — and several films took up contributions and struggles of the Chinese in Canada, including the increase in immigration from Hong Kong that accelerated with the return of that formerly British colony to Chinese sovereignty.From C to C: Chinese Canadian Stories of Migration, screened at a panel session, captured the crucial part of Chinese laborers in building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. On completion of that massive project, the Canadian government imposed a head tax on all Chinese immigrants. Initially set at 50 Canadian dollars in 1885, it rose to CA$500 by 1903, the equivalent of two years’ pay for most workers.
In 1923 the Canadian government adopted a Chinese Exclusion Act, banning all immigration from China, which remained in effect until 1947. Chinese-Canadians in British Columbia were also denied the right to vote and faced many other forms of discrimination.
In 2006 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper — under pressure from a public campaign — officially recognized the historical injustice of the tax, while offering no more than symbolic payments to the 35 surviving head taxpayers and 360 surviving widows.
Chinese immigrants to the United States, New Zealand and Australia, among other countries, faced similar measures. Would-be Chinese immigrants to Australia were obliged to write out a passage in a European language dictated to them by an immigration official, a de-facto bar to Chinese immigration, recounted Michael Williams of University of Western Sydney.
Other topics of conference panels ranged from overseas Chinese literature, to challenges faced by Chinese students in other countries, to the experience of overseas Chinese returning to the People’s Republic of China. One particularly interesting presentation looked at the 1965-66 massacre of Chinese in Indonesia as General Suharto drowned in blood the Communist Party there and crushed the resistance of workers and peasants for several decades.
Discussion spilled over into a display area where a number of sponsoring organizations had tables. These included the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre-Museum of Migration, the Richmond Museum Society, and Pathfinder Press.
The conference concluded with an ISSCO business meeting and elections, and a special brief presentation on Nagasaki, Japan, the site of the next regional conference, to be held Nov. 17-19, 2017.
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