Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923
This is the 100th year since the implementation of the Chinese Immigration Act, or better named, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923. It is not a milestone to be celebrated, but one to be remembered to ensure that it never occurs again. This Federal legislation of Canada was brought into effect on Canada Day, July 1st, 1923 and was the law of the land until its repeal in 1947. During the 24 years of its existence, the Act essentially prevented all persons of Chinese origin or descent, with very limited exceptions, from immigrating or even entering Canada. The legislative ban on immigration and entry was thoroughly effective as statistical information reveals that during that period, less than 50 persons of Chinese origin or descent came to Canada from 1923 to 1947.
As the Act was brought into effect on Canada Day, for the Chinese diaspora, during that period Canada Day became known as Humiliation Day, as Chinese were not treated as second class citizens but in fact not treated as citizens at all. One of the primary impacts of the Exclusion Act was that during its impact those persons of Chinese descent or origin were not allowed Canadian citizenship regardless of how long they had lived in Canada.
The historical context of this legislation is important, as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 did not spring forth because of a sudden racist sentiment, but had its seeds in the mid 1800s. The first major rush of Chinese immigrants occurred during the gold rush, of 1858, that brought many fortune hunters to the shores of British Columbia. It was during this initial rush of Chinese immigration that Canada became known as “Gim San” which literally translated as Gold Mountain in Southern China in the Toishanese dialect spoken. The second major wave occurred between 1881 – 1885 when the Canadian Pacific Railway required a labour force that was not available in Canada at the time, so they advertised for positions in the Southern Province of Guang Dong, and in particular a tiny area known as Toishan, from which the majority of Chinese immigrants came to Canada to work on the railway. This area was heavily recruited by CPR recruiters who travelled to China and enticed Chinese workers to come to Canada. The recruiters were paid according to the number of workers that they recruited. They worked especially impoverished areas of China as they had greater chance of success in those areas.
I believe that the Chinese Exclusion Act of Canada was modelled in part on the Chinese Exclusion Act of the U.S. passed in 1882. This was not an absolute ban on immigration but required the obtaining of permission to emigrate from the government of China. During that period it was a hard document to obtain. Also the U.S. Act limited the exit of U.S. Chinese to 2 years or risk losing their status in the U.S. The U.S. Act continued in effect well into the 1900’s until 1924 when the US Immigration Act set forth immigration targets for each nation, thereby setting the basis for modern immigration in the U.S. today.
Chinese workers in Canada endured severe hardships and soul shattering isolation. They were discriminated against by the main population who treated them as a cheap labour force that were there solely to provide physical labour. They were also there to take dangerous jobs such as transporting nitroglycerin into the blasting sites, resulting in phrases that are remembered to this day of “not having a Chinaman’s chance”.
After the completion of the railway in 1885, the general Canadian population felt the need to restrict Chinese immigration as the media and general sentiment was against Chinese immigration, referring to it euphemistically as the “yellow peril” or the “yellow hordes”. Many discriminatory laws were enacted proviprovincially andrally that restricted the rights of Chinese residents. Provincially, businesses that were almost exclusively Chinese, such as hand laundries would be subject to taxation that non-Chinese businesses would not be subject to.
The most overtly racist and historically offence of these laws was the Federal Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 that levied a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants only. This amount grew to $100 in 1900 to $500 in 1903. To provide some context on how punitive these head taxes were, $500 in today’s terms would be worth $17,445 currently. Or put another way, during the building of the railway Chinese workers earned about 1/3 of the wages of other workers, and were paid about .75 cents to $1.25 per day. While wages grew modestly afterwards, jobs were hard to come by, and by and large $500 was an enormous amount to pay in 1903, at a time when no other immigrants were subject to payment.
Despite the head tax the Chinese population tripled from 13,000 in 1885 to 39,587 in 1921 and therein was the problem that the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mckenzie King was facing. This government of the day gauged the anti-Chinese sentiment and on July 1st, 1923 enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the humiliation and suffering of the Chinese population of Canada. At that time there was approximately 40,000 Canadians of Chinese origin or descent in Canada. Of those persons less than 10% of this population was female and so the vast majority of Chinese Canadians would have been Chinese men, no longer able to bring their wives and children to Canada.
The suffering of the Chinese diaspora of that age was immense and it started with the fact that the Chinese population in Canada were heavily discriminated against and would not be offered positions that they were suitable for. Anything related to a skilled trade or office positions were not open to them. While this was not legislated, it was discrimination by the majority population against a visible minority. As a consequence, Chinese largely became self-employed, in hand laundries and later in Chinese restaurants and grocery stores. These hand laundries were brutally difficult to operate as they were entirely done by hand, with physical washboards attached to washtubs and 10-pound hand irons. Chinese laundry owners would work seven days a week from morning until well into the night, washing, ironing and drying clothes. They would live in their laundry businesses to save money on rent. Alone without their families they did this relentlessly, without rest or help of any kind from the government.
The Chinese did band together to help each other, in the form of Tongs or Benevolent Associations. These associations had several purposes, the most important one was to help members in times of financial hardship, to provide some social life in the form of get togethers to talk or play mah-jongg, and to advocate for common political causes, including the fight against the Chinese Exclusion Act.
During the period of economic depression, the Chinese suffered even worse than the general population in that social assistance for those unable to find work, was actually significantly lower for Chinese than for the rest of the population. Subsidy or social welfare payments controlled by provincial governments were often about half of what the general population was able to access during times of economic depression.
The greatest suffering during the period of 1923 to 1947 was caused by the core provisions of the Exclusion Act which forbid the immigration and transportation of persons of Chinese descent or origin into Canada. The primary effect that this had was to create a discriminatory wall at the border upon which no Chinese person could pass through.
Further, it also required a requirement to register as a Chinese person in Canada, and to always carry this ID, the failure of which could result in immediate deportation. Consider the chilling parallel of this policy in the context of what Nazi Germany did as an opening step of their treatment of the Jews in Germany and lands that they came to control. Jews were initially required to register, and then carry identification cards and finally to wear the yellow stars. For Chinese Canadians they were clearly a visible minority, but they made the requirement to register the fact that they were Chinese living in Canada, for clearly discriminatory purposes such as requiring that persons holding such documents would only be allowed to leave Canada for a limited period of two years, after which they would lose their status to return to Canada. Also, such registration meant that they could not become Canadian citizens pursuant to the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
During the 25 years that the Chinese Exclusion Act was in existence, the largely male population of Chinese Canadians lived alone in their suffering. Most did not have the benefit of their parents, their spouses, and their children in Canada as they had come in previous decades to work and benefit Canadians with the fruits of their back breaking labour. Underpaid and certainly underappreciated, they were then expected to carry on alone in Canada for an unforeseeable future that would last 25 years and go through a depression and a world war. During that time, many were living a life of abject poverty and deprivation and yet, a lot of them faced with this misery remained in Canada. At the beginning of the Exclusion Act there were about 40,000 Chinese Canadians living in Canada, most of them in larger centers of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. By 1941, that number had dipped to 35,000 even though Chinese immigration was essentially nonexistent. Some would have passed away, and a very few gave up and returned to their families, but most of the Chinese Canadian population stayed, choosing only to return to China for brief periods before coming back.
Why did they stay, despite their immense suffering? Why didn’t they turn their backs on Canada when Canada effectively turns their backs on them. I don’t have a definitive answer to that question, but I do have some facts of interest. Firstly, the Chinese Canadians of that era came almost exclusively from Toishan, where my family originates. This is a rural area of China near Hong Kong and Guangdong that had its own dialect, local culture, food preferences and society. That population was as a group, homogenous, poor, and focused primarily in feeding their families back in China. My first thought confirmed by speaking with some elder Chinese Canadians is that they stayed, or their fathers stayed during the middle 1900’s because they had to, in order to feed their families in China. So first was necessity, but also, I got a sense that they felt a sense of righteous indignation. That they were treated unfairly and instead of giving up and going home, they suffered in Canada in hopes of changing a racist policy. So secondly, they stayed to fight the injustice. That took the form of clan or tong associations that were organized as societies to help each survive and to advocate for common causes. The most common cause that they spoke out against was the Exclusion Act. Thirdly, and I believe in many ways the most important was that this generation was rock hard and tough. Remember, these were the same people that either built the railway or stayed afterwards to eke out a living in a harsh new frontier, and nothing was going to stop them from succeeding. They fought for everything they got and had nothing handed to them.
When the Second World War came, Canada was fighting as an ally of China who was fighting the Japanese for their territorial integrity in the areas formerly called Manchuria along the East Coast. Southern China was impacted as the fighting spread throughout the southern area including Hong Kong which fell to the Japanese during the War. Toishan was a few kilometers from this fighting and the Chinese Canadians felt compelled to enter the War as Canadian soldiers to fight wherever they were assigned. The debate amongst the Chinese diaspora was why they should fight given that they had no rights, no citizenship and were treated so poorly by the general population.
However, because Chinese Canadians fought in the second World War, after the war ended they voiced their complaint that they died for Canada, why would they not receive rights of citizenship of other Canadians. Eventually this argument turned the tides of public sentiment.
After they were finally granted entry into the Canadian armed forces, over 600 Chinese Canadians served in World War II. On 14 May 1947, the federal government repealed the Exclusion Act and subsequently other discriminatory laws against the Chinese. The 1962 immigration policy opened the door to Chinese immigration. As a result, new Chinese immigrants rose from 876 in 1962 to 5,178 in 1966.
What is interesting from a personal perspective is that I was born in 1959 in Canada, because my mother arrived at that time with my two older brothers. They had been living in Hong Kong as they couldn’t initially come as a family. I learned much later in life that the reason why they couldn’t come is that my father arrived as a paper son. This euphemism was as a result of a raging market in the 1950s of persons in Canada claiming children that weren’t really their sons, to come to Canada, because after the Exclusion Act was lifted, it was still hard to immigrate. Initially only those persons who were directly related to immigrate to Canada, specifically, children of Chinese Canadians. This was continuing to be a discriminatory policy as other groups could freely immigrate without limitation, so the Chinese Canadian population had this paper sons route. My father had a last name on his immigration and citizenship papers that was not the same one that I have today. What happened eventually, is that the paper sons were granted amnesty in 1962 by an Act of parliament. I believe as a result of that, my father would have gone to Henry Beaumont a lawyer who acted for many Chinese Canadians in Calgary and gotten his amnesty to live under his real name. I take from my personal history is that Chinese Canadians of my parent’s generation felt that cheating the system was not cheating when the system was inherently overtly racist and discriminatory. The Federal Government in granting the amnesty gave legal credence to that concept.
From a personal perspective, what did Canada get out of the deal of my father coming as a paper son. My parents ran a Chinese restaurant for 25 years, and retired at age 55, never to have ever taken a social welfare payment. My older brother Norman has retired as former associate dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary. My brother John ran the same restaurant for another decade and then ran off to US to become a PH D and research scientist for Pfizer, better known as the inventors of Viagra and I am still soldiering away in my 40th year practicing law in Calgary. Our future generations are in the process of writing their stories in Canada. Today 1.7 million Chinese Canadians live in Canada from a population that had gone down to 35,000 in 1941. This increase in the Chinese Canadian population is a testament to the resilience of the Chinese immigrant and as well the later policies that treated Chinese immigration equally with other people immigrating to Canada. Immigrants from the People’s Republic of China are consistently in the top 3 source countries to Canada.
The story of Chinese immigration has a hopeful end, as in the year of Canada’s Confederation Centennial, 1967, all of the final vestiges of immigration policy by race, origin or other discriminatory aspects were eliminated. In 1982 with the implementation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is clear that the Chinese Exclusion Act could never be implemented as the law of the land today.
In 2006 Stephen Harper stood up in the house of commons and apologized to all Canadians for the racist policies of the head tax and the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act. He spoke of the suffering of the Chinese Canadians of that era, and the injustice of charging the fees to Chinese to immigrate and then banning them outright. We hope that Canadians today will remember the history of suffering of the Chinese Canadians to prevent it from ever happening to any group in the future.