Panel 31: Chinese migrants in Latin America/Caribbean and Africa: Examinations of Race, Class, Gender in Inter-group and Intra-group Relations
Part 2
Discussant: Huamei Han
Simon Fraser University
Role of Female (Pioneer) Migrants in Lesotho
Sarah Hanisch
University of Vienna
My paper looks at female Chinese migrants in Lesotho. Since the 1970s, several waves of Chinese migrants came to Lesotho. While men occupy most of the important social positions such as head of community associations, and are usually the formal business owner or manager, numerous businesses were actually founded by female pioneer migrants from China. These female pioneers arrived with little or no knowledge of Lesotho, but with a keen sense for business opportunities. They established successful businesses, and invited family and relatives to join them in Lesotho to expand the business together. During this latter process, the female pioneer migrants retreated into the ‘back office’, and important representative social functions were taken over by their male counterparts. To provide possible answers explaining the reasons why the female migrants stepped back, I analyze the migrants’ ideas about their roles and responsibilities towards their nuclear and extended family. I show that these ideas are closely related to the traditional practices and gender roles in their places of origin. Consequently, I conclude that the stories of these pioneer migrants cannot be understood only within the context of Lesotho.
Intra-Migrant Economy: Chinese Restaurant Entrepreneurship and Zimbabwean Migrant Workers in South Africa
Tiffany Ying-ying Liu
Carleton University
South Africa is one of the wealthiest countries on the continent, which attracts many immigrants seeking economic opportunities including people from China and Zimbabwe. There are now an estimated between 350,000 – 500,000 Chinese and between 1.5 – 2 million Zimbabweans in South Africa (Crush el al. 2012; Park 2012), the majority of them living in the more economically-vibrant urban areas such as Johannesburg. It is also where one finds Zimbabweans disproportionately working in Chinese restaurants’ kitchens. I use the term “intra-migrant economy” to refer to the phenomenon that a large number of Chinese small business entrepreneurs employ primarily undocumented Zimbabwean migrants, instead of South Africans. Due to South Africa’s apartheid past and current high crime rates, the criminalization of blackness is rooted in both South African mainstream and Chinese discourses of racial bigotry, which are often reflected by the tense working relationship between Chinese employers and Zimbabwean employees.
By investigating Chinese restaurants as a productive site where racial/ethnic identities, cultural performances, and economic practices meet and negotiate, this in-progress ethnographic research reveal: 1) the division of labour and structure of Chinese restaurants is highly gendered, racialized, and hierarchical; and 2) while Chinese restaurants might produce and perpetuate “inauthentic Chinese” images, it is constructed to satisfy the dominant cultural imagination of “Chineseness” (Cho 2010). I employ Stuart Hall’s concept on cultural identity (2003[1990]), which argues that although diaspora identity is shaped by their actual and symbolic linkages to the homeland, their current living situation in a host society also influences the reproduction of diasporic identifications. I also draw on David Goldberg’s (2002) Foucauldian analysis on the intersections between power, knowledge, and discourse to show how the “normalization of race” works in South Africa. From these theoretical perspectives, this paper also explores how the Chinese and Zimbabwean migrants negotiate and re-construct economic and labour relations, as well as the process of becoming a diaspora, rather than originating, in one of the most notable racialized states in history.
Chinese Mexican Railroad Braceros in the United States During the Second World War
Fredy Gonzalez
University of Colorado Boulder
From 1943 to 1946, an estimated 650 Chinese Mexicans – about one in twenty Chinese residents in the country – signed up at recruiting stations in Mexico City, Mexicali, and Tampico, from whence they traveled to isolated railroad and agricultural camps in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. There, they cooked Mexican food for hungry and lonely Braceros, in their own way connecting with their countrymen and performing Mexicanness. They had been hired specifically to serve as “Mexican cooks”, staff who could provide the Mexican workers of the railroad bracero program with food from home, could speak to them in Spanish, and could help them feel comfortable outside of their homelands.
Chinese Caribbean Intimacies and Models of Progress in Cuba and Jamaica
Kathy Lopez
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
In this paper based on preliminary research, I build from my 2013 book Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History, which follows Chinese migrants as they transitioned from indentured to free workers in the Spanish slave society during the nineteenth century, took roles as citizens in the formation of the emerging Cuban nation, and developed transnational and diasporic communities in the twentieth century. Narrowing the chronological and broadening the geographical scope, I interrogate how gender, class, and color shaped elite and popular attitudes toward Chinese migrants in the region through portrayals of their local-born children. Despite the fact that most government officials had no intention for male Chinese laborers to permanently settle in Caribbean societies, from the nineteenth century onward, many lived and worked alongside local women of lower social strata, producing a second and later generations of multiracial descendants. For some local elites, these children of Chinese became potential models of progress and modernity. In Jamaica during the 1930s, for example, colonial planter society depicted local-born Chinese, especially young women, as civilized, educated, and capable of preserving Eurocentric socio-cultural values in the face of a rising black working-class consciousness. In Cuba, with its different trajectory of national development and racial inclusion, both Chinese and black middle and upper classes could inscribe their search for legitimacy upon images of children of Chinese descent.
Panel 32: Power and Charity: Chinese Migrants and Imperial Agendas
Across the Nanyang: Colonial Rescue Homes and Chinese Female Migration in British Malaya, 1890-1939
Sandy Chang
University of Texas at Austin
This paper explores the history of colonial projects of rescue and rehabilitation aimed at trafficked Chinese women and children in Singapore and Penang. Between 1890 and 1939, hundreds of thousands of Chinese females crossed the South China Sea (Nanyang) as wives, domestic bondservants, and sex workers to Malaya in an era when human trafficking was first articulated as a pivotal international and colonial concern. The conventional practice within British Empire at the time was to repatriate foreign prostitutes and trafficked victims. Yet in the Straits Settlements, the colonial government, jointly with the Anglo-Chinese community, adopted a policy of rehabilitation. Missionary groups and various social purity organizations also worked alongside to reintegrate trafficked Chinese females into the “respectable” realms of colonial society. Rescue homes, like the Po Leung Kuk, routinely functioned as informal marriage bureaus and adoption agencies, supplying local Chinese men with wives, servants, and children. Drawing on emigration and labor records, government proceedings, and rescue home documents, this paper investigates the seemingly paradoxical attempt to “rescue” trafficked victims while making them “useful” for the Empire. It asks two interrelated questions: (1) How were these policies reflective of the colonial state’s gendered preoccupations with laboring bodies and border management? (2) How did Chinese females circumvent or take advantage of colonial philanthropic projects?
Most scholarship on labor migration and the Chinese diaspora has, to date, excluded women and children working in the sex trade from its purview. Historians of colonial prostitution, on the other hand, have yet to examine thoroughly its intersection with broader mobility patterns. As a consequence, current literature unintentionally associates labor migrations exclusively with productive labor, rendering sex work illegitimate, to be viewed solely through the lens of criminality and exploitation. My paper uses instead the idea of intimate labor to undercut binary interpretations that categorize female migrants either as wives or trafficked persons, and labor as either legitimate or illegitimate. It argues that although modern migration control produces a proliferation of social categories, itinerant Chinese females moved fluidly across these boundaries, blurring official distinctions between wives, servants, and sex workers. By interrogating the colonial logic behind projects of rehabilitation, “Across the Nanyang” demonstrates how Chinese females are central to our understanding of the history of migration in the Nanyang world despite their marginalization in extant literature.
Adopted by the World: The Chinese Diaspora and the Origins of International Adoption and Child Sponsorship (1937-1945)
Jack Maren Neubauer
Columbia University
This paper examines the creation of “international adoption” programs to fund child welfare work in China during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese child welfare institutions pioneered a new form of child welfare work in which private citizens around the world “adopted” Chinese children by paying for them to live in orphanages in China while exchanging frequent letters using familial terms of address. Promoted by the cosmopolitan elite of the Chinese diaspora, adoption programs attracted participants from across North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Emulating similar programs operating on a local scale throughout China, Chinese child welfare organizations initially framed adoption programs in terms of Confucian universalism and Chinese traditions of adoption. But as the war stretched on, Chinese community leaders in cities like New York, Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore rearticulated the adoption program in the languages of humanitarianism and Christian love in a highly successful effort to attract more widespread international support. After WWII, numerous international organizations adapted the adoption model for their own child welfare work across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, transforming what was once a particularly Chinese form of child welfare work into the global phenomena of international adoption and child sponsorship, which remain among the most significant forms of global humanitarianism today.
A small body of recent scholarship locates the origins of international adoption and child sponsorship with American organizations working in post-WWII Europe, Japan, and Korea. These works share the basic argument that in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of youngsters around the world, international adoption and child sponsorship constituted key facets of American empire during the Cold War. My paper shifts both the chronology and the geography of this story. It argues instead for tracing international adoption and child sponsorship back to adoption programs created by Chinese child welfare organizations at the outset of the Sino-Japanese War and spread across the world via Chinese diasporic networks. By interrogating the all-but-forgotten history of these programs, my paper will reveal some of the crucial but often unrecognized ways in which China and the Chinese diaspora have shaped global humanitarian practices. Moreover, it will show that these programs were not merely facets of American empire but powerful tools deployed by local actors to secure funding and build international coalitions for their own political, social, and religious projects.
Chinese Refugees and American Aid in Cold War Hong Kong
Peter E. Hamilton
University of Texas at Austin
This paper interrogates the provision and receipt of US aid to Chinese refugees in Hong Kong during the 1950s. With the conclusion of the Chinese civil war and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong received nearly one million refugees from the Chinese mainland. Simultaneously, this small British colony emerged as the new principal platform through which the United States spied on and conducted espionage against “Red China.” As a result, Hong Kong’s refugee humanitarian crisis quickly became an international headline and a key object of US concern and Cold War aims in Asia. Through charity, US officials hoped to foster these refugees’ settlement in Hong Kong so as to prevent their return to China and simultaneously dampen their desires to emigrate to the United States—in 1950 alone, over 100,000 people in Hong Kong had applied for US visas as derivative citizens.
Yet, out of fear of provoking Beijing, the British colonial regime restrained heavy-handed US efforts to capitalize on Hong Kong’s refugees for anticommunist propaganda. As a result, over the course of the 1950s, Washington pivoted to funneling funds through American missionary organizations to an array of new Chinese-led churches and charities that were then taking shape in Hong Kong. These organizations were predominantly led by elite US-oriented Chinese émigrés who had attended college in the United States or studied in the American missionary colleges throughout Republican and Nationalist China. By subtly sponsoring these émigrés’ churches, community centers, and schools, the United States sought to demonstrate its benevolent leadership of the ‘Free World’ and to co-opt Hong Kong’s one million refugees to stay in this industrializing enclave. Yet, how did ordinary Chinese refugees think about this array of Christian institutions and outreach projects? Simultaneously, this American charity helped empower these elite émigrés of former Nationalist China into the new social leaders of this British colony-in-crisis. This collaboration between American Cold Warriors and Hong Kong’s elite émigrés recasts how we understand both US imperial expansion in Asia and the influence of postcolonial elites over the Pacific’s terrains of power.
Panel 33: Chinese Immigrants in Canada: Status, Integration, and Community Development
Organizer: Lloyd Wong
University of Calgary
Changes of Chinese Canadians’ Social Status and Progress of the Rule of Law in Canada
Yigong Liu
Dalian University of Technology
Canada is an immigration country with different ethnic groups, languages, and cultures. In the British colonial period and the early federal period, Canada implemented a series of discriminatory and assimilationist policies. Chinese began to immigrate to Canada as early as 1880s. In order to prevent Chinese from continuing to immigrate to Canada after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian government passed “Chinese Immigration Act of 1885”, which became “Chinese Exclusion Act” in 1923. Early Chinese immigrants experienced hardships of life, their social status was low, and their legal rights were not guaranteed. After the World War II , the Canadian government actively committed to the elimination of ethnic inequality and racial discrimination, and passed a large number of relevant legislation, including the “Canadian Citizenship Act,” “Canadian Bill of Rights,” “Canadian Multiculturalism Act,” “Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “etc. Today, Canada is a leading country in eliminating inequality and discrimination in the world. Since World War II, following a large number of highly educated Chinese immigrants entering Canada, the social status of Chinese immigrants have been improving greatly, and they have taken part in various works in Canada and played more important role in the Canadian society.
Two Way Process of Social Integration and Structural Barriers to Access: A Comparison Between Migrant Workers in China and Recent Chinese Migrants in Canada
Li Zong, University of Saskatchewan
Renzhong Yang, Tianjin Normal University
Traditional approach to social integration of migrants focuses on individual barriers experienced by migrants, including the inability to adapt the new environment and local culture and to meet occupational entry requirements, and an inadequate command of local language. Although the individual approach has elucidated some personal difficulties, it has not explained how the structural factors pertaining to policies, criteria, and procedures for evaluation also contribute to disadvantages for new migrants. Failure to locate individual barriers in social conditions and structural arrangements tends to assign blame to migrants themselves for their disadvantages in the labour market and lower social and economic status in the society. A fundamental debate is whether the responsibility for migrants’ disadvantages is on such individual attributes or on institutionalized barriers.
Recent Chinese migrants in Canada and migrant workers in China present two different geographic mobility types occurred in different social settings: the former is international migration from one country to another country, while the latter is domestic migration from rural area to urban area within the country. Despite their differences, there are some similarities in terms of social integration of migrants.
Based on surveys and field research conducted in Canada and China, the paper compares recent Chinese migrants in Canada and migrant workers in China by focusing on their social integration. Findings demonstrate that social integration of migrants is a two-way process: on the one hand, migrants need to adapt the new social and cultural settings; on the other hand, the society has to accept the new migrants and treat them equally and fairly. Migrants’ individual barriers can be overcome over time through their personal efforts, but structural barriers appear not to be susceptible to individuals’ attempts or time. Structural barriers such as unequal opportunity, exclusive policies and criteria for evaluation and discriminations are major factors affecting migrants’ disadvantages and unequal access in the society. Structural obstacles, which leave them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and marginalized in the labour market, not only include laws, policies, and practices of the government and other social institutions but are also related to stereotypes and cultural bias in the public sphere.
Chinese Immigrants and Community Development in Saskatchewan
Yixi Lu
Li Zong
University of Saskatchewan
This article is developed based on a community research project which provides an all-round picture of Chinese immigrants’ history and life experiences in Saskatchewan with a special focus on the Chinese community in Saskatoon. The intention was to fill the gap in lacking historical records and studies on the Chinese community in Saskatchewan. The project uses three types of data: secondary published information from government publications, academic and non-academic publications, and newspaper articles; primary interview data; and secondary interview data. The discussion is developed based on three themes: historical background and the demographic changes of the Chinese immigrant in Saskatchewan; the socioeconomic changes of the Chinese population in Saskatchewan; and the development of the Chinese organizations in Saskatoon.
Panel 34: The Nexus of Transnationalism: People, Places, Time, and Context of Cantonese Transmigration
Kuang Fuzhuo (Fong Foo Sec鄺富灼1869-1938)：Experiences of Transmigration of a Cantonese from Taishan, Guangdong
Yuen Sang Leung
Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper examines the life of Kuang Fuzhuo (1869-1938) and analyses his transmigration experiences in America and China focusing on his conscious efforts in making social and cultural adjustments and the process of evaluation of values. Born in Taishan in southern Guangdong, Kuang was a Cantonese educated in Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture in his early childhood. However, following the trend of Chinese labour migration after mid-nineteenth century, he left China in 1882 for America where he spent the next two decades, converting to a new religion, learning new things and picking up new values and new lifestyles. After graduating with a Bachelor degree from the University of Berkeley (the first Chinese to do so) and a Master degree from Columbia University, he then returned to China where he eventually settled down in Shanghai where he spent the last thirty years of his life. This paper will analyse the processes of adjustment and readjustment of Kuang when he first arrived in America and after his return to China, and see how he dealt with the changing situations of the external environment and the expectations and intellectual commitments of himself.
Between Ghost and Ancestor: Grand Universal salvation Rituals of the Cantonese Chinese in South China, Hong Kong and British Strait Settlements
Chi Cheung Choi
Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper studies the Grand Universal Salvation Rituals celebrated by the Cantonese Chinese in South China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The Ritual was a response to the late 19th and early 20th century anti-superstition movement in China. Instead of pacifying wandering ghosts annually in the lunar 7th moon, the Ritual which shared similar religious function was publicized as a memorial event and organized irregularly by public Institutions. It was adopted by the Cantonese migrants in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia since the 20th century. The Ritual was organized in Hong Kong until the 1960s and is still organized by the Cantonese Chinese Institutions in Penang and Singapore. This paper will reconstruct the history and current practices of the Ritual, from South China to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. It aims to find out how the deaths are remembered or forgotten by the Cantonese Chinese overseas from the late 19th century to present day. I shall further discuss how popular religion as a cultural resource facilitates the consolidation of an ethnic community and as a mechanism to solve ritual dilemma of the Overseas Chinese majority who cannot afford an ancestral hall to accommodate spirits of remote distance.
Early Practices of Cantonese Homebound Burial in North America: Cases of the U.S. and Canada
Hon Ming Yip
Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Tung Wah Coffin Home Archives in Hong Kong testify to the existence of a global network of repatriation of bones and remains of deceased overseas Chinese to their hometowns for burial during the time span from the late 19th century and the early 1950s. This network of the global Chinese world with Hong Kong as its centre was also a network of migration, shipping transportation, information flow, and cultural exchange. With a focus on its function to facilitate the homebound burial custom the present study explores in depth how the history of death cannot be separated from the history of survival. Factors for emigration are as important as reasons for return. As a case of comparison, this study uses the examples of life conditions and death management to demonstrate that besides traditional custom, religious beliefs and emotional attachment to hometowns, life experiences in the host countries also constitute the explanation for the almost obsessive ultimate concern of overseas Chinese for the return of their bodies, and more importantly, their souls, back home eventually.
Panel 35: The Chinese and Contemporary Post-1949 Issues
Refugees and the Remaking of Chinese Migration Flows during the Cold War
Madeline Hsu
University of Texas (Austin)
This discussion examines how the parallel processes of decolonization and the aggrandizement of American and Soviet empires changed the political stakes of Chinese migrations and Chinese overseas, producing new options of immigration and conditions for settlement.
The Making of Anti-Communist Refugees in Taiwan: War, State Narrative, and the Displacement of Dachen Islanders in Coastal Zhejiang, 1950-1955
Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang
University of Missouri- Columbia
In early 1955, in the midst of the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek’s regime evacuated 18,000 fishermen, farmers, and their families to Taiwan from the Dachen Islands in coastal Zhejiang Province. The relocation was carried out by the US Seventh Fleet and partially assisted by the US Far East Refugee Program. In Taiwan, the Nationalists lauded the Dachen Islanders as “righteous compatriots” or yibao—a model for anti-communist refugees. The islanders were treated favorably compared to other mainland refugees. The KMT constructed new villages for the evacuees and assisted them in building new livelihoods in Taiwan. Consequently, oral history offered by the Dachen migrants and their descendants later on usually underscores the “special bond” between the KMT and the Dachen people. The initial trauma of war and displacement was erased from the collective memory. Based on recently declassified archival documents, as well as media sources, this working paper explores the way in which ordinary fishing and farming communities on Dachen were ravaged by war and transformed into a tightly controlled militarized society before the forced relocation to Taiwan. It illustrates the substantive impact of “ideological battle” during the Cold War in governing population movements and transforming people and communities.
Integration or Exclusion: An Investigation into the Overseas Chinese Farms of the PRC (1950-1960)
Joshua Tan
New York University
Among numerous studies of overseas Chinese farms (huaqiao nongchang) in the PRC, scant attention has been paid to the first farms set up immediately following the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949. My paper focuses on these farms, which were established for the purpose of resettling incoming Chinese immigrants from overseas. I have found that, contrary to what scholars have argued about the farms in general, between 1950 and 1960– when relatively few immigrants were relocated there, and the number of farms in existence was small— farm residents experienced a relatively smooth integration into the new Communist regime.
Based on fieldwork conducted at the site of one of the first overseas Chinese farms in the PRC- Wanqingsha overseas Chinese farm in Guangdong province- as well as on published oral histories and newspaper sources, my study contends that the circumstances of the earliest incoming immigrants served to positively integrate them into the PRC in its initial years of socialism. In this period, this group of immigrants were predominantly Malayan Communist party members or alleged sympathizers; they therefore identified with PRC state scripted narratives of a patriotic returning diaspora, and were able to transfer their socialist allegiances to support the Chinese Communist Party. In this sense, they were uniquely positioned as committed socialists, with cultural and linguistic affinity to the place of their relocation, and a perceived ability to contribute to the nation in its socialist construction. Differences in administration and class identity were much less pertinent to the ordinary lives of these domestic overseas Chinese, amidst the optimism and idealism that pervaded both the overseas Chinese farms and rural China in the PRC’s earliest years.
My essay situates this first wave immigration in the context of resettlement to overseas Chinese farms established from 1960 onwards, where unfavorable local conditions clashed with shifting immigrant demographics, resulting in an increasing policy of exclusion and segregation from mainstream Chinese society. The first wave immigrants were comparatively much better integrated by this time, and therefore present a unique set of historical experiences which must be understood independent from subsequent waves of immigration and resettlement.
Hong Kong 1949: New China’s Linkage with the Chinese Overseas
Siu-lun Wong
University of Hong Kong
The People’s Republic of China [PRC] was established in 1949. But the new government did not take back Hong Kong at that time. Why was Hong Kong spared? The main reason, in my view, hinged on the historical role played by Hong Kong as the key hub connecting China and the Chinese overseas. In this regard, the PRC apparently intended to make use of Hong Kong as a British colony for three main purposes. The first related to capital. Hong Kong could serve as the main channel for the PRC to tap into the capital pool consisting of overseas Chinese remittances and other forms of foreign exchange earnings. The second related to talents. Many of the Chinese intellectuals educated and working abroad could be induced to return to the PRC through Hong Kong. The third related to ideas. The PRC could export its revolutionary ideology through Hong Kong so as to extend its influence to other parts of Asia. In the main part of the paper, I shall substantiate on these three aspects with case studies of prominent personalities and families involved. Then I shall examine the following questions: How successful was the PRC in realizing these policy objectives through Hong Kong? How compatible were these objectives with one another? What were the tensions involved and how did they affect the consolidation of power of the new Chinese leadership and Hong Kong’s role within the Chinese overseas network during the first decade after 1949?