Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902-10

Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle

R. Bright

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230303775
• eBook ISBN: 9781137316578
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book explores the decision of the British Empire to import Chinese labour to southern Africa despite the already tense racial situation in the region. It enables a clearer understanding of racial and political developments in southern Africa during the reconstruction period and places localised issues within a wider historiography.

1

Chinese Migration and ‘White’ Networks, c. 1850–1902

In 1902 the idea that a British administration would organise the migration of tens of thousands of Chinese to a ‘white colony’ seemed impossible to imagine. The entire controversy over Chinese migration, and why the scheme in South Africa seemed so unlikely, related to the development of overlapping, but often conflicting ideas of democracy, whiteness, and Britishness which developed in the settler colonies and the United States. As Bridge and Fedorowich have explained, ‘being British anywhere meant exercising full civil rights within a liberal, pluralistic polity, or at least aspiring to that status. “Whiteness” was a dominant element’.¹ The development of identifications and networks based upon whiteness and Britishness, and the occasional conflict between these identities, largely depended on an African or Asian ‘other’. While indigenous peoples were the ‘others’ of the early nineteenth century,² each colony had a distinct, and in most colonies a decreasing, ‘native problem’, whereas Asian migration increasingly became the issue which could unite disparate parts of the settler colonies around a network of exclusionary whiteness. While the African ‘other’ remained predominant in southern Africa because they made up the majority of the population there, the debate over Chinese labour importation into the Transvaal briefly transcended local racial issues and created a unique inter-colonial dialogue about the relationship between the settler colonies and Britain. It is thus essential to explain the controversy surrounding Asian migration within the burgeoning ‘white’ colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to understand both why the Transvaal Chinese indentured labour scheme was considered and why it became a major global news story.

To understand the issue of Chinese migration during this period, the ‘network’ metaphor is particularly useful. On the one hand, Britain made the laws and so held a central position in debates. At the same time, Britain was itself largely absent from taking an active role in these debates. I choose to use this term ‘network’ because specific migration and communication flows led to shared imagery and ideological discourses. ‘White’, largely English-language, networks of people and information disseminated shared concepts of ‘Asians’³ in southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This ‘white’ network largely transcended class barriers, uniting the working classes with the intellectual and political elites in the self-governing colonies through a shared concern.

This chapter deals with this particular network at a particular time. Subsequent chapters address overlapping yet different networks of ideas and peoples in relation to the Chinese indentured labour scheme in South Africa. Whiteness was not always so dominant in these discourses, nor did Britain always play a marginal role, yet at the same time, networks between these places were often created and sustained precisely because Britain was at the centre, at least in terms of governance.

With these points in mind, this chapter will first explain how Asian indentured labourers came to be seen as desirable while also seeming to threaten ‘white’ dominance, largely from the 1850s when European and ‘free’ (unindentured) Asian migration increased to the temperate zones, which were thought most suited to European settlement.⁴ It will then chart how this ‘white’ network reacted to Asian migration and how shared stereotypes were developed and spread throughout the world. The chapter closes by demonstrating how interlinked the issues of imperial federation, burgeoning nationalism and suffrage had become within this network.

Asian migration

In the nineteenth century, about 50 million Europeans, 50 million Chinese and 30 million Indians migrated globally.⁵ Of these, almost 750,000 Chinese and 1.5 million Indians were formally indentured to European employers for use in their colonies.⁶ Indentured labourers, or ‘coolies’,⁷ were first used by European colonials in the Dutch East Indies in the 1600s. So valued did the Chinese ‘coolies’ become that within two weeks of arriving at the Cape in 1652, Jan van Riebeeck, in charge of founding a Dutch settlement there, wrote in his diary that he longed for Chinese gardeners to help.⁸ In the British colonies, it was only following the 1833 abolition of slavery that plantation owners looked to Asia due to the sizeable and impoverished populations there.⁹ The Mauritian and West Indian sugar industries were the first in the British colonies to successfully secure labour from British-controlled areas of India, while Peru and Cuba imported Chinese.¹⁰ As shipping became more organised, cheaper, and faster mid-century, indentured labour was also adopted in places without a history of slavery. Small numbers of Pacific islanders and Chinese were imported into New South Wales (NSW) between 1848 and 1852, to replace convict labour and assist the European wool industry. Natal too began an Indian indenture scheme in the 1860s as one of their first acts as a self-governing colony, to help work their sugar plantations.¹¹ This labour aided colonial businesses and most settlers accepted it as a commodity necessary for economic success, because the climate allegedly did not allow for whites to do physical labour or because of a general labour shortage.

While most indentured labour was considered desirable, ‘free’ Asian migration (especially Chinese) to the self-governing colonies was almost universally viewed negatively. ‘Free’ is a slight misnomer, but essentially meant they operated their own loan systems to organise and control migration, outside the direct control of Europeans.¹² Indentured labourers too could become ‘free’ once their period of service had ended, and increasing numbers chose to do so. From 1848, a series of gold discoveries in California, British Columbia, and Australia attracted increasing numbers of ‘free’ Chinese men to work, placing them in direct competition with European settlers. While indentured imports were usually limited to manual rural labour, with little chance to compete directly with white settlers, ‘free’ migrants went primarily to urban areas. McKeown estimates that 135,000 Chinese migrated to Australia and California in the 1850s alone, all ‘funded and arranged by Chinese capital (albeit transported on European ships)’.¹³ In 1851, the Chinese government repealed the law which had made migration outside China a criminal offence, punishable by death, further increasing the flow outwards. The Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1860s also strengthened European, especially British, control of Chinese ports from which potential labourers could be recruited. And ‘free’ migrants tended to follow their indentured fellow nationals, regularly working as traders or artisans either servicing ‘coolie’ needs or benefiting from the good reputation for work which their indentured predecessors had.¹⁴ It is no wonder that Richardson called the use of such labour in the Transvaal ‘one of the most important African episodes in this process of intracontinental labour mobilization’.¹⁵ But such a focus only reveals part of the story. This was not merely a case of cheap labour mobilisation by an increasingly globalised economy or about easier transportation. It was equally about the global movement of ideas.

Asian stereotypes

The long European tradition of stereotyping nations like China and India already existed in the settler colonies before they were a physical reality.¹⁶ Stuart Creighton Miller, for instance, has demonstrated how stereotypes spread in America, gathered from travellers, traders, missionaries, and newspapers, before the Chinese had actually arrived.¹⁷ The predominant view by the mid-nineteenth century regarded ‘China as an exotic, backward, only semi-civilized, and in some ways rather barbaric country’.¹⁸ The place and its people were initially objects of curiosity and some ridicule but certainly not a threat, denoted by the Chinese indenture trade being called the ‘pig trade’ and the Chinese male hairstyle as a ‘pigtail’.

When ‘free’ Chinese started arriving in large numbers in the settler colonies mid-century, pre-existing stereotypes about the Chinese nation were applied and adapted to the ‘threat’ they posed. Such a process of knowledge exchange and stereotyping was not new, but it did accelerate and harden during this period. And since race was always an unstable identification, it was natural for settlers to develop stereotypes about each other. These shared stereotypes were fostered by a common language and a steady flow of migration and information, especially between the mines.¹⁹ The increasingly international business of book and newspaper publishing and dissemination, growing literacy rates and the improved speed of railway and ship travel only aided this flow.²⁰ Steamboat services regularly carried news and people along the Pacific and Indian coastlines; border control was almost non-existent. Many of the growing number of colonial newspapers based their international news on ‘verbatim reprints from British papers that had arrived by ship’.²¹ The spread of Reuters’ services around the world also ensured an increasing uniformity in many newspaper’s coverage, with English-language newspapers increasingly inserting the same stories from Reuters, which in turn ensured a globalisation of many discourses.²² The Colonial Office (CO) rarely supplied information to colonies about each other and there simply was no official system for them to communicate with each other, so information networks were largely informal in nature and, in the case of Chinese stereotypes, largely bypassed Britain while incorporating the United States, particularly the West Coast.

One phrase in particular was often repeated over the next 50 years in all these places to sum up Chinese stereotypes: the Chinese were disliked as much for their virtues as for their vices. This duality of fearing and admiring the Chinese reflects Sander S. Gilman’s argument that negative and positive stereotypes are always connected. The virtues are ‘that which we fear we cannot achieve’ and the vices are ‘that which we fear to become’.²³ The vices were usually connected to ‘immorality’, especially sexual. The Chinese were also feared and desired because they were perceived as hard-working and cheap and there were many of them; these were clearly admirable traits, but ones which became points of anxiety. In Sydney, the governor of NSW, Charles Augustus Fitzroy, claimed that the ‘free’ Chinese there had easily found employment as servants, gardeners, and shepherds ‘and have generally proved to be an industrious and harmless class of men – giving satisfaction to their employers’.²⁴ In British Columbia, their labour was considered so essential to the railways that 5000– 6000 Chinese were specifically imported from Hong Kong in 1882, under contract to the Canadian Pacific Railway.²⁵ As the economist Persia Campbell explained, when an employer ‘required a labour force he could go to a Chinese merchant and contract for it’. A Chinese go-between would then supply the required number of workers and if any problems occurred, the ‘coolie was removed … [the manager] was always in a position to secure the same number of substitutes’.²⁶ The seemingly endless supply of Chinese labour and the ease by which one labourer could be substituted for another was an obvious attraction for the growing industrialisation of the colonies, especially when they were often paid lower wages than their European counterparts.

However, it was one thing for ‘coolies’ to work on plantations, doing work which whites could or would not do, but quite another for them to compete in the more lucrative industries of trade and gold mining. ‘The struggle was perceived not simply as between Europeans and Chinese, but between white labour and capitalists using Chinese as their pawns’ to lower wages and prevent the spread of labour unions.²⁷ And because these things were broadly perceived to be happening throughout the self-governing colonies and in the United States, a similar imagery was evoked to describe their situations, ‘fuelled by the human rivers of migration’ from both Asia and Europe and growing unionisation.²⁸ When diamonds were discovered in Kimberley in southern Africa, miners there quickly mirrored the sentiments of their counterparts in Australia, California, and elsewhere:

Chinamen are industrious, saving, sober, peaceful people; and they succeed in making a livelihood, and even in acquiring what is to them wealth, where an Englishman would starve. But on the other hand, they rarely or never take root in the country where they settle; they leave their women behind them, and they invariably endeavour to carry out their own laws and social system – by secret means, if necessary – in the place where they have temporarily taken up their abode.²⁹

Clearly the network of European labour between the mining communities was important in developing a sense of commonality among the settler colonies and the United States, and in developing a rather standardised view of what Chinese immigration would mean for white settlers. ‘It was this conjuncture which created a context in which defining themselves and their labour market interests as “white” could seem an advantageous option to organised workers.’³⁰ The Chinese were the firm ‘other’, as much the enemy of working class interests as employers were thought to be.

Exclusionary policy adopted

Once ‘free’ Chinese migrants were deemed undesirable by mostly working-class and male whites, they sought to establish exclusionary measures.³¹ California was the first to implement legal restrictions on Chinese migrants through local mining codes in the 1850s, although illegal expulsions of Chinese from mining communities had begun in 1849, almost as soon as any Chinese had arrived. However, by 1860, the Chinese population in California was 35,000, roughly a quarter of the mining population, and the most clearly ‘foreign’ looking of the diverse group there.³² When Victoria and NSW had similar migration patterns during their gold rushes in the 1850s and 1860s, they both adopted anti-Chinese legislation modelled on California’s, including poll taxes and limits on the number of Chinese any single ship could import at a time.³³ As Guterl and Skwiot have noted, with only a little exaggeration: ‘By the end of this story, no policy was singularly original.’³⁴

The appeal of Chinese exclusion was not limited to mining communities, however. If it had been, no exclusionary legislation would have been enacted. In none of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Images
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Chinese Migration and ‘White’ Networks, c.1850–1902
• 2. The Transvaal Labour ‘Problem’ and the Chinese Solution
• 3. Greater Britain in South Africa: Colonial Nationalisms and Imperial Networks
• 4. A Question of Honour: Slavery, Sovereignty, and the Legal Framework
• 5. Sex, Violence, and the Chinese: The 1905–06 Moral Panic
• 6. Adapting the Stereotype: Race and Administrative Control
• 7. Political Repercussions: Self-Government Revisited
• Conclusion: Racialising Empire
• Appendix: List of Key Figures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index