Panel 36: The Cold War and the Overseas Chinese/Chinese Overseas: Ideology, Nation and the Political Subject
Organizer: Yew-foong Hui
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
The Cold War has not only divided nations, but also bifurcated overseas Chinese communities. In many countries of Southeast Asia, Chinese communities caught up in the ideological dynamics of the Chinese dimension of the Cold War chose their political alignment with either the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) that had gained control over mainland China, or the Republic of China (ROC) led by the Kuomintang that had retreated to the island of Taiwan. For the PRC and ROC, the battle for the hearts and minds of the overseas Chinese was a contest for international legitimacy and influence. From the perspective of the overseas Chinese, at stake was also which polity represented the “authentic” Chinese nation, and which was able to protect their interests in their host countries.
But the sway that the PRC or ROC had on any of the countries in Southeast Asia depended on how the country in question positioned itself during the Cold War. In the case of Indonesia, for example, different Prime Ministers and their cabinets, depending on whether they were left or right of middle, were friendly with the PRC or the ROC respectively, which in turn led to the respective ascendency of the PRC-oriented or ROC-oriented faction within the Indonesian Chinese community. However, because Indonesia had early on recognized and formed diplomatic ties with the PRC, and because President Sukarno was becoming increasingly authoritarian and left-leaning, the pro-PRC Chinese in Indonesia became more dominant under his watch. This trend took an abrupt about-turn when the anti-communist General Suharto took the reins of power in 1965, and the China-oriented political activism among the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia became muted.
The fluctuating positions of countries over the course of the Cold War affected how they related to the PRC and ROC, and in turn, how they related to and defined the Chinese populations within their borders. This panel will examine the extent to which the overseas Chinese/Chinese overseas (or huaqiao/huaren) became political subjects that were caught between ideologies and nations in the course of the Cold War, and how some of them sought to resolve the impasse experienced through the crossing of borders.
The historical trajectories that will be taken up through this panel include: the displacement of Aceh Chinese at the onset of the anti-communist Suharto regime and their ill-fated repatriation to the PRC; the provision of education for returned overseas Chinese in the PRC and how this was changing in tandem with both domestic educational developments and shifting international relations; the marginalization of Indonesian Chinese in the PRC and how they resisted the symbolic violence imposed by socialist state mechanisms; and how leftist Chinese from Sarawak (East Malaysia) went underground and crossed the border with West Kalimantan (Indonesia) to contest the anti-communist stance of the state. Through these studies, this panel will bring to the fore the position of overseas Chinese/Chinese overseas as political subjects governed by states that adopted fluctuating positions over the course of the Cold War.
Between Nations: The Political Vicissitudes of the Aceh Chinese
Yew-foong Hui
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
As the Cold War was heating up on the international scene, an anti-communist witch hunt was taking place in Indonesia in the aftermath of the abortive coup of September 30, 1965, allegedly orchestrated by the Indonesian Communist Party. Chinese all over Indonesia were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers, and many bore the brunt of both symbolic and real violence under the Suharto regime. In Aceh, 10,000 Aceh Chinese were displaced from their homes and cooped up in refugee camps in Medan and its outskirts. Subsequently, more than 4,000 left via repatriation ships for China, while others had to remain behind and rebuild their homes on the grounds of the refugee camps. This paper will trace the migratory trajectories of the Aceh Chinese, and reflect on their political plight of being caught between two nations at the height of the Cold War.
This paper will examine the vicissitudes of the Aceh Chinese from three different angles. First, it will look at how states define and contest issues of nationality and citizenship, and how displacements of people are one of the ways in which uncertainties related to such issues are resolved. Second, it will consider the ethnic Chinese community, in terms of how it acted and organized itself in the midst of this crisis, and how it related to the Indonesian and Chinese governments, caught as it were between different ideologies and nations. Third, it will dwell on the Chinese subject, with multiple identifications as Aceh Chinese and overseas Chinese, among others, fragmented because the modern nation-state cannot tolerate such uncertainties among its subjects. In examining an event and a time when the processes of the nation-state were not yet fully rationalized, this paper will demonstrate how the Chinese as a minority in Indonesia was constructed out of the embers of the Cold War.
The Ambivalent Homecoming: Migration of Ethnic Chinese From Indonesia to the People’s Republic of China, 1950-1964
Taomo Zhou
Nanyang Technological University
Between the early 1950s and early 1960s, an estimated 60,000 ethnic Chinese students in Indonesia went to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for higher education. From 1959 to 1960, more than 100,000 ethnic Chinese, most of whom lost their licenses to operate retail business in the countryside due to the Indonesian government’s nationalist economic policy, boarded ships heading to the PRC. Before their departure from Indonesia, almost none of these more than 160,000 ethnic Chinese had any real life experience living or working in socialist China. But mainland China had been the ancestral motherland that long-existed in their imaginations. This paper looks at how this much-anticipated homecoming materialized into an uneasy journey to an unfamiliar land.
Before their migration to the PRC, many of the ethnic Chinese were “progressive elements” of their local Chinese communities in Indonesia and were active participants in political activities oriented towards Beijing. However, once relocated to China, they were labeled as “petty bourgeois” and became easy targets of political campaigns. Socialist China, which once occupied the central place in the spiritual worlds of many ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, scrutinized the political backgrounds of the returnees with suspicion. Their expertise in business, their unfamiliarity with manual labor, their love for folk music and dance, for rich-flavored cuisine and colorful batik clothing, even their habits of taking two showers a day were all deemed as politically “backward” and therefore harshly criticized. Once marginalized as an ethnic minority in Indonesian society, these ethnic Chinese from Indonesia found themselves at the margins of the Chinese state due to their socio-economic background. For many of these migrants, ironically, their emotional distance to socialist China became greater after they finally overcame the physical distance.
This article examines the tension between the Chinese state’s efforts to assimilate the ethnic Chinese from Indonesia into the socialist system and the migrants’ attempts to resist state penetration into their personal lives, in forms as varied as creating and circulating sarcastic songs and slogans, secretly beginning retail business ventures, participating in illegal border-crossing to Hong Kong, and committing suicide. It reconstructs the processes through which the Chinese government endeavored to transform the hearts and minds of the ethnic Chinese from Indonesia by introducing a new political vocabulary and the organization of a socialist economy, as well as the processes through which the ethnic Chinese became disillusioned with their painful adjustment to the new social order and became determined to protest against the socialist state mechanism.
The Chinese of Sarawak and West Kalimantan Under the Cold War: Impacts of the September 30th Incident, 1965
Toshio Matsumura
This presentation examines how the alleged Communist coup on September 30th, 1965 in Indonesia affected the plight of Chinese on both sides of the border in Sarawak and West Kalimantan. This historical episode can be traced back to the early 1960s, when the northern part of Borneo Island (Sarawak, Brunei and the North Borneo) was undergoing the process of decolonization. The people in the region were seeking independence, and opposed being integrated into the Federation of Malaysia. However, the British authority established Malaysia on September 16th, 1963, in spite of opposition from the people in the colonized lands of Borneo, especially of Sarawak.
At that time, Sukarno’s Indonesia fiercely opposed the formation of Malaysia, and provided ammunition to Sarawak youths (mainly Chinese), who were being trained in guerrilla tactics on the border between Sarawak and West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Moreover, under the circumstances of the Cold War, China was also encouraging the guerrillas. However, the loss of Indonesian support after the September 30th incident dealt them a mortal blow. After the incident, Malaysia and Indonesia cooperated militarily, and Sarawak’s guerrilla forces, which had formerly enjoyed freedom of movement in Indonesian territory, were hunted by Indonesia’s military. In the event, many of these local Chinese guerrillas moved frequently across the border so as to elude the military on both sides.
After the September 30th incident, the communist movement in Sarawak started losing support both domestically and internationally (especially support from Indonesia). Eventually, most of the guerrilla fighters (482 persons) gave up their struggle in the wake of the Sri Aman Operation of 1974. The remaining guerrilla force (around 180 persons) continued to fight, but in 1990 managed to negotiate a cessation of the armed conflict (not a surrender) with the Malaysian government. Throughout this historical episode, the ethnic Chinese played critical roles and negotiated their position on both sides of the border, which will be elucidated in this paper.
Educating the Overseas Chinese in the PRC, 1949-1966: Between “Education Revolution” and Changing Sino-Southeast Asian Ties
Els van Dongen
Nanyang Technological University
the newly-founded People’s Republic of China (PRC) to study. They had returned to China as a result of the political influence of pro-PRC schools among Chinese communities overseas. This influx of young overseas Chinese had led to increased provisions by the Ministry of Education—including the foundation of primary and secondary schools—in light of the recognition of the importance of education for the returned overseas Chinese (guiqiao) and their dependents (qiaojuan). In 1958, after having been established in Nanjing, Shanghai, and Fujian province before 1949, Jinan University was re-established in Guangzhou as the tertiary institution for overseas Chinese education. It became “the cradle of overseas Chinese students,” with specific attention being paid to Chinese language education and research on Southeast Asia, the latter being institutionalized in the Southeast Asia Research Institute. Using Jinan University as an entry point, this presentation discusses the symbiotic relationship between changes in overseas Chinese education between 1949 and the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the return migration of overseas Chinese, which is couched in both domestic educational developments and shifting international relations. Domestically, an “education revolution” (jiaoyu geming) served the revolutionary efforts and socialist construction. Internationally, the Bandung conference of 1955, and the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty in particular, signified a shift in Sino-Southeast Asian ties that shaped the trajectory of overseas Chinese education during this important period.
Panel 37: Opera, Parades and Feasting
Transporting the Sacred Body: Cantonese Opera Costumes as Ritual Agents in Performance and Print
April Liu
Museum of Anthropology at The University of British Columbia
This paper examines the visual and aesthetic qualities of early 20th century Cantonese Opera costumes in the context of their global travels across the Pacific, from Hong Kong to British Columbia. By tracing their transnational biographies, I will examine the shifting roles of these objects as agents of ritual power, regional identity, and the marking of sacred time and space. Drawing on Catherine Bell’s theories of ritual performativity, I will argue that the costumes perform ritual agency in a variety of contexts that go far beyond the physical confines of the theater, especially in the realms of popular print culture and the mass media. What kind of gaze did the costumes engender as they appeared in performance or print? How did they materialize and transport the ritually efficacious presence of specific deities into new spaces and contexts for global audiences?
By unpacking these questions, I will argue that the costumes are not merely theatrical props or artefacts of a bygone era, but rather contested sites of meaning making that reflect the politics of memory amongst the Chinese in diaspora. As deterritorialized, transnational objects, they point to both the survival and erasure of ritual histories as Western scholars, curators, and journalists reframe the costumes as cultural curiosities, objects of art, superstition, or entertainment paraphernalia.
From Cantonese Religious Procession to Australian Cultural Heritage: The Changing Chinese Face of Bendigo’s Easter Parade
Tsan-huang Tsai
The Australian National University
Chinese processional and musical performances in Australia (including dragon/lion dances, musical ensembles, and fluttering flags) are the subject of several key studies, however, the origin of the performances or their continuation during the ‘White Australia’ policy era and their transformations over time are neglected. This paper investigates the Chinese processional performances that have featured at the Bendigo Easter Fair since the late nineteenth century, the only surviving example with continuous tradition outside Greater China, and outlines three stages in the transformation of the procession from a Chinese religious procession to a performance of Bendigo’s cultural heritage.
Firstly, nineteenth-century sources on Cantonese processional performance, as well as reports on the contemporary situation in Guangdong province are discussed and compared with the Bendigo case to illustrate how the Chinese transplanted the processional performance from Canton to Victoria in the nineteenth century. Secondly, newspaper reports, film footages, and the museum collection are further used to reconstruct and analyse Chinese participation at the annual fairs during the period of the ‘White Australia’ policy, the paper shows the transformation of the Chinese processional performances in Bendigo, especially the changing soundscapes and social implications of three critical stages of the transformation. The history of the Chinese procession in Bendigo during the ‘White Australia’ policy era is essential as it enables us to unlock the peculiar process of its transition from an activity largely involving the Chinese to the current multi-ethnic composition. Finally, I shall argue the changing soundscapes not only reflect the identity (re)modification among the Chinese in Bendigo, but also the long process of social negotiation between the Chinese and non-Chinese communities. The case shows a dynamic, bi-directional relationship between the Anglo-Celtic and Chinese communities that predates the ‘White Australia’ policy and continued throughout the era.
To conclude, I discuss the Bendigo case as demonstrating how a religious performance originating in Southern China was adopted to express a Chinese collective cultural and ethnic identity overseas, and subsequently transformed again to become part of a city’s cultural heritage, maintained and enjoyed in a new multicultural context, regardless of the ethnicity of its practitioners. The changing soundscape is a direct outcome of the transformational process. In the closing remarks, I offer some reconsiderations for the study of Chinese transnational communities: the importance of culture in establishing transnational networks, the role of music in maintaining and recreating cultural identities, and the importance of the Chinese processional performance in multicultural Australian history.
Filming Chinatown Opera Theater: Identities and Transnational Perspectives
Nancy Rao 饒韻華
Rutgers University
_White Powder and Neon Lights_ (1946) is a San Francisco film about the life of Chinatown opera theaters, directed by Wong Hok-Sing, a performer of the local Mandarin Theater, produced by Joseph Sunn Jue’s Grandview Film, a US-based company founded in 1933. It provides an entry into the sequestered backstage of ethnic theater. Through the juxtaposition of actors appearing on stage in opera costume with their donning chic 1940s fashions going about San Francisco as typical Chinese-Americans, the film richly revealed the opera performers’ complex roles and aspirations in the transnational community. It invited the spectators to see the contradiction inherent in the shifts among different hats. The new twists in the traditional opera songs featured in the sound track subtly reflected that incongruence.
This analysis places the movie’s reconstruction of performers’ life in the context of Chinatown theaters’ prosperity since the 1920s. Two large theaters were built in San Francisco (Great China and Mandarin Theaters), while Vancouver had one or two theaters on a regular pace (one of which was called Mandarin Theater), many other cities, from New York to Havana all had vibrant Chinatown theaters. The paper considers the multiple facets of the fluidity, complexity and logistics of Chinese theaters in North America. Performers became to the part of the theaters. While the temporary nature of their stays and the limitations of their legal status as non-citizens made them transient figures, opera performers were nevertheless significant to the community’s cultural production and identity. The intention to stay and the duration of the stay are neither absolute nor useful markers of their cultural and individual ‘identity’ in American music landscape. The transnational encounter necessarily involved both the oscillation between these two positions—ethnic minority and Chinese national—and the “translation” of a culture of the nationalist subject to that of an ethnic space.
Panel 38: Food Heritage and Evolutions
Social Circuits and Re-invention, the Language of Chinese Cookery
John Eng-Wong
Brown University
Over the course of the 20th Century the language of cookery in America changed, not least in the somewhat sequestered province that surrounded Chinese food and kitchen practice. This paper traces the evolution of Chinese cooking in the US Chinese diaspora, through an examination of three texts: the first is a promotional piece printed in 1928 for customers of the Chin Lee Restaurant in Times Square in New York City; the second was a full blown guide to Chinese cuisine published first in 1945, becoming one of the most durable titles of its kind, republished in various formats over the next three decades; and the third, a text written first as a hand illustrated wedding gift that went on to win awards but survived only one imprint.
- A Chinese Art by Chin Lee
- How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Buwei Yang Chao
- Every Grain of Rice by Ellen Blonder and Annabel Low
In recounting what is known of the histories of these publications, and the authors who composed them , we intend to explore the following questions and themes;
- Cookbooks and Identity Who speaks for China?
- The problem of authentic agents?
- Creating credibility
- Finding voice
- Identity in the Diaspora.
- The role of editors
The paper draws on ongoing research about the life of Chin Lee who operated restaurants successively in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island, and finally in New York City. In addition the paper extends a previous study about the role of Buwei Yang Chao and her husband Y.R. Chao in promoting Chinese cookery in the US by utilizing archives of the John Day Company who published the first edition. Lastly this paper will also draw on correspondence with Ellen Blonder, co-author and illustrator.
Toy’s Chinese Restaurants: Exploring the Political Dimension of Chinese Identities Through the Built Environment
Hongyan Yang
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Since the late 19th century, restaurants, as important venues, have helped facilitate the immigration of many Chinese people. Restaurants were the second most common occupation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries United States. These minority enclaves were physically and culturally distinguished from the rest of the space through the food they served to the built environment and the general atmosphere. While there has been substantial research on the histories of Chinese restaurants through food, not much attention has been drawn to the built environment. The built environment embodied the agency of Chinese entrepreneurs and their representations of racial identities.
This paper explores the political dimension of Chinese identities through studying three Chinese restaurants owned by the Toy family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I argue that the representations of Chineseness can be seen through the built environments, changing based on social contexts. The three Chinese restaurants were operated in different time periods: The Toy Building (1913-1933, Fig.1), Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant above Walgreens (1938-1968, Fig.2) and Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant on North Third St. (1968-1992, Fig.3). I conducted analysis on the historical photographs, architectural plans, and newspaper archives of the three restaurants. Secondary sources on immigrants’ histories help contextualize and explain the changes.
The results reveal: 1) Despite the anti-Chinese sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charlie Toy challenged the derogatory Chinese stereotype, and provided the western clients with classy imaginations on China through luxurious built environment of the Toy Building. He enhanced the visibility and cultural distinctiveness of the building, featuring great efforts in representing Chineseness. 2) The second restaurant above Walgreen—Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant—went the opposite direction, showing more efforts in embracing the American mainstream culture and a reduction of Chineseness. The dining setting was quite a standardized American dining place. 3) Quite different from that, Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant on North Third St. featured a revival of Chineseness, staging and celebrating the Chinese culture. This paper highlights the significance of built environment in studying immigrant histories and how that can be done through tracing one immigrant family’s restaurant businesses over time.
Figure 1: The Toy Building in 1922
(Courtesy of Milwaukee County Historical Society)
Figure 2: Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant above Walgreens
Figure 3 : Toy’s Chinatown Restaurant in 1984
(Courtesy of Milwaukee County Historical Society)
TBA
Lok Siu
UC Berkley
Panel 39: Indentured Workers and Coolies, Part 1
Chinese Contract Labourers in Cuba: Neo-Slavery or Transition to Free Labor?
Evelyn Hu-DeHart
Brown University
While conventional wisdom characterizes the nearly 125,000 Chinese laborers under 8-year contracts (“coolies”) who worked in Cuba from 1847 to the 1880s as basically slaves, thus the coolie system an extension of slavery or a new form of slavery, this paper examines life after expiration of the original contract and discovers options not available for slaves, and which led some to become not only free men with families, but naturalized Spanish citizens (Cuba being a Spanish colony until the final years of the 19th century).
Chinese perspectives on their own rights as indentured labourers – Southeast Australia, 1840s and 1850s
Paul Macgregor
Convenor, Melbourne Studies Group
At least 4000 Chinese came to Southeast Australia in the 1840s and 1850s, bonded to work as indentured labour in a variety of rural occupations. Beginning prior to the Australian goldrushes, this was the first major immigration of Chinese to Australia, and was the commencement of a considerable engagement of Chinese in the agricultural economy that lasted through until the early 20th century.
Much of the description by historians of this early indentured workers project has focused on the reasons why Europeans in Southeast Australia wanted indentured labour, how this practice was managed, and debates in colonial and global European society about the merits and rights of this form of bonded employment. This paper will focus instead on how the Chinese employed in these arrangements viewed the nature of their employment conditions. Far from evincing the ‘docility, patience, untiring industry, frugality and perseverance’ as advertised by those promoting the use of Asian workers, Chinese labourers often demonstrated concern for their working conditions, umbrage at low wages, and indignance at mistreatment. Many absconded from their positions; some even threatened suicide. Their concerns, recorded in the colonial press and court reports, were often couched as direct responses to individual circumstances, and framed in British debates about labour and humanitarian rights. Yet there was also a Chinese history of practice and discourse on labour rights, and abuse, which informed the Chinese protagonists in their complaints to employers and authorities, and this paper will explore how Chinese and British views of rights enmeshed in the colonial Australian labour landscape.
Riots, Race and Rights in Late-Colonial Malaysia and British Guiana
Sascha Auerbach
University of Nottingham
This paper compares two labour disturbances in the final decades of Britain’s global indentured labour system. The first, involving Indian sugar-plantation workers, took place in British Guiana in 1872. The second, involving Chinese miners, took place in 1902 in the Federated Malay States. Both instances began as collective complaints about work conditions, contract violations, and the treatment of labourers by their direct overseers and by British authorities. In each case, these initial grievances escalated into violent confrontations that left, in total, more than a dozen workers dead. Through a comparative perspective, this paper examines what these two occurrences can tell us about the nature of indentured labour, the views of workers, and the sources of conflict between them, their employers, and British colonial authorities. I will also probe some deeper issues about the archive of indentured labour, the current position of overseas labour migrants in the history of the British Empire, and how the parallels and contrasts between the two incidents might usefully inform our current understanding of indentured labour as a global system and the experiences of those who participated in it.
Transmitting Chinese Medicine to Cuba: A Byproduct of the 19th Century Coolie Trade
Po-San Wan
Kin-sheun Louie
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Between 1847 and 1874, about 140,000 Chinese arrived in Cuba. Known as “coolies”, they formed the earliest Chinese community and for a long period also the largest one in the Americas. The majority of them were peasants but many others had expertise in various trades. Chinese medicine was one of the new skills they brought to the far away continent. Some preliminary and fragmented enquiries were attempted on the topic by, for example, Corbitt in his book about the Chinese in Cuba. Related folklore also exists in the Cuban society, such as the Cham Bom-bia legend. The aim in this paper is to investigate the earliest transmission of Chinese medicine through an examination of three historical documents which recently came to the authors’ attention, which had hitherto not yet been studied. The first is an 1847 document hand-written in Spanish, in which the Inspecciòn de Estudios de Cuba reported several observations on a “medico Chino” who practiced medicine in Havana. This document is in the digital depository of Arizona State University. The second document is a contract of 1867, written in Chinese and Portuguese and issued in Macao, which engaged a Chinese doctor to work on a coolie ship. The third document is the report of Chen Lan-bin, the Chinese official who was sent by the Imperial Qing Government to Cuba in 1874 to investigate the conditions of the Chinese coolies there. The full text of the report lies in the National Library in Beijing. In it, Chen recorded testimonials from 1,665 coolies, a number of whom were practitioners of Chinese medicine. This study sheds light on the origin of the Chinese medicine in Cuba, the practice of which persisted with the continued presence of the Chinese community on the island.
Panel 40: Indentured Workers and Coolies, Part 2
The Secret Story of Chinese Coolies in Peru
Rudolph Ng
University of Cambridge
A document long assumed missing or even not to exist, the Peru Commission Report (1874) in its original form has been rediscovered. This report details the journey of one of the two Qing diplomatic delegations that traveled to Latin America in the 1870s to investigate allegations of abuse of Chinese indentured laborers, both of which contributed to the collapse of the global coolie trade to Latin America. The secret Peru Commission, headed by Yung Wing – the first Chinese graduate of an American university – collected evidence of abuse of Chinese at various plantations and factories, including oral and written testimonies of the coolies themselves. With a network of transnational experts, Yung Wing was able to gather a sizeable amount of evidence given by Chinese merchants, Chinese coolies, British diplomats, American doctors, and Chilean managers of these indentured laborers. The report has now finally established the existence of this secret commission in 1874 and its wide-ranging activities in Peru.
This paper structurally presents the findings of the Peru Commission Report, which, I posit, calls for us to reassess the history of the first generation of Chinese migrants to South America and the development of Chinese associations in Lima, as well as make important comparisons to the widely known Cuba Commission Report. Diverging from the conventional interpretation of this latter report, the paper argues that the Zongli Yamen, Yung Wing, and his team knew about the abuses long before the team’s departure, and that the report was written specifically to discredit the Sino-Latin American coolie enterprise and composed so as to maximize international sympathy toward the Qing government.
Refuge, Unfreedom, and Removal: The Politics of Madness and Unfree Military Labor in the Early Twentieth Century US-Mexico Borderlands
Ethan Blue
University of Western Australia
This paper examines the conditions of Chinese exclusion, survival, and expulsion in the US- Mexico borderlands during the Mexican Revolution and First World War. After Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa led a raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, U.S. General “Black Jack” Pershing led a “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico to hunt and kill Villa. Denied logistical support by the Mexican government, Pershing’s overextended forces relied on local Chinese merchants and laborers for supplies and intelligence. Many Chinese migrants had been refused entry to the United States due to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but made lives in Mexico, or supported others who traveled through as a means of covert entry to the USA. But in the face of the revolution’s fiercely racist nationalism, Mexico’s Chinese denizens suffered brutal violence. Pershing failed to find Villa, and returned to the United States with more than five hundred Chinese refugees displaced by war and endangered for having aided the US military. Employing highly paternalist language, Pershing lobbied for special dispensation to permit their entry into the United States despite legislated Chinese Exclusion. Known condescendingly as “Pershing’s Chinese,” these migrant refugees escaped revolutionary violence, but entered a liminal world of relatively unfree labor on US military bases across the American southwest. Their unfree military labor was ironic, because Chinese Exclusion was based on the manufactured white fear of Chinese subservience and entry into unfree labor, poorly suited to a white man’s liberal democracy. This paper tells the story of Luey Mo, one of these Chinese migrants, for insight into the broader experience of Chinese global travels, and traces his experience with the structures of gendered white supremacy in Mexico and the United States. From the military camp to the county jail, from the insane asylum to the deportation state’s mobile, carceral regime, it limns the borders Luey Mo crossed and subverted—borders of race and nation, of sexuality and madness, of unfreedom and liberation—but which also confined him.
Chinese Labourers in Europe During WWI: Colonial or Allied Workforce?
Olga Alexeeva
Kristian Gauthier
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)
When the First World War broke out in Europe, China was in a semi-colonial state. All major foreign powers had carved spheres of influences out of its national territory where they claimed special rights and privileges and where the Chinese government had no authority and only very limited control. Although China decided to stay neutral in the conflict, thousands of the Chinese were transported to Europe where mobilization and casualties had created a severe shortage of labour. Between 1914 and 1917, the Allies have recruited over 240, 000 Chinese labourers to toil behind the front lines in France and Russia. Recruited at home on the basis of written contracts, they were often used in or near danger zones and performed all kinds of works related to the Allied war effort, even though their standard contract stipulated otherwise. They dug trenches, rebuilt roads and railways, worked in powder factories, arsenals and ammunition plants, loaded and unloaded boats and trains, etc. At the Eastern front, they also had to carry munitions to the battlefield and occasionally to help Russians to close the gaps in battle lines. To accommodate this workforce in war conditions, the Allied authorities had to generate a number of new measures, rules and regulations. They had to think about the rights and responsibilities of the Chinese labourers, which appeared to be different from that of a colonial and national workforce. Just as the Russians, the French had used the Chinese labour long before the war, within the large-scale slavery-like trade in indentured workers, known as “coolie trade”. This system of indenture was driven and funded by the important demand for labour in European colonies, whose economies were threaten by the suppression of the slavery. How the Allied recruitment during the war was different from the practices of 19th century? Were these Chinese workers considered as colonial or as foreign labour by the Allied administration? What role the use of the Chinese labour during the war has played in the creation of a new analytic and legal framework for understanding labour migrations in Europe? Based on the study of the archives in France and Russia, this paper will try to answer those questions by analysing the recruitment and the use of the Chinese during the First World War within the larger history of Chinese overseas labour.
A Lasting Monument to the Chinese Labourers on the Transcontinental Railroad
R. Scott Baxter, Principal Investigator, Cultural Resources
Rebecca Allen, Cultural Resource Director, Environmental Science Associates
The role and achievements of Chinese laborers on the Transcontinental Railroad have become almost mythical in their retelling. Chief among these achievements was the building of the railroad over the 7000 foot (2134 meter) high Donner Pass of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At this remote mountain location the workers built a small community known as Summit Camp. From 1864 to 1869 they resided there, excavating a series of tunnels over and through Donner Pass. The most substantial of these tunnels was Summit Tunnel which measures more than 1600 feet (488 meters) in length.