The “Chinese Question” – A Call for a New Direction

 

Construction of a Chinese camp on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Kamloops, British Columbia, circa 1885

http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/sn-283FF15/cgi-bin/text2html/.visual/img_txt/dir_121/d_04712.txt

 OAH 2012 

In late April, the historian Mae M. Ngai delivered a paper at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) 2012 conference entitled “Chinese gold miners, the coolie question, and the propaganda of history.” The paper can be found here:

http://annualmeeting.oah.org/pdf/ngai.pdf

I want to highlight this paper because I think it provides not only an excellent overview of the historiographical issues, but persuasively argues for a new direction in our understanding of the “Chinese Question.”

In this blog post, I want to explore some of the key points that Mae M. Ngai makes about the historiography as well as examine her argument further in regards to my own research on Chinese railway labourers.

Historiography

First the historiography. Mae M. Ngai makes a salient point about the disjuncture between Chinese American social history and American labour history. She notes that there is little contact between the two fields because they have focused on different questions. According to Ngai, Chinese American social historians have mostly been concerned with “community formation, transnational social and cultural practices, and politics; and less so with labor, especially in the nineteenth century.” Labour historians on the other hand, Ngai notes, “do not understand the social organization of Chinese American communities and have done neither primary research nor read the secondary literature to learn more about it.” The exception to the rule is Moon-Ho Jung, whose work on Chinese labourers in the South after the civil War, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, is arguably an essential study in both fields.

Argument

Reviewing the historiography, Ngai argues that our understanding of Chinese labour “must be tackled empirically as well as discursively.” She does so in her paper by studying Chinese gold miners. While Ngai agrees that the introduction of Chinese gang labour in the 1860s “reinforced the view that Chinese labor was unfree,” her research on Chinese gold miners reveals that were neither “unfree or coerced.”

My own studies on Chinese labour support Ngai’s argument. A particular incident involving Chinese railway labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), I believe demonstrates that Chinese labour was neither “unfree or coerced.”

Yale, BC – May 14, 1881

On May 14, 1881, around one o’clock about two hundred Chinese labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) entered the town of Yale, British Columbia.  They headed toward the “China Department in the Warehouse,” a store for goods that were supplied to the railway labourers.  Approximately a dozen of the men tried to enter the warehouse and confront G.P. White, an overseer stationed at the warehouse. Flanked by two assistants, White resisted attempts by one “riotious character” to “force an entrance.”  In the ensuing tumult the Chinese labourers began “breaking the windows” and “chopping down the doors” to the warehouse.  White responded to the threat, firing two or three shots from his pistol into the crowd.  Soon the police “interferred and quieted them [the Chinese] down, marching several of the ringleaders to gaol.”*

* Daily Colonist, May 17, 1881.

On May 16, 1881, two defendants were brought to trial at the Yale court of assizes.  Ah Loom “the ringleader of the mob of the attack” and Ah King who assaulted a police officer when trying to rescue Ah Loom confronted the prosecution.  Faced with a barrage of evidence against them, both men were held for further trial at a higher court.  On May 17, 1881, G.P. White, the overseer at the warehouse who fired into the crowd of Chinese labourers, faced prosecution.  During the trial several Chinese labourers who were at the warehouse on the day of the violence were called to testify.  Their testimony, translated into English for the court, was reproduced in the Inland Sentinel on May 19, 1881.

The following passages have been extracted from the testimony.  Ah See was the first sworn in.  He testified:

I was there in the afternoon, there were lots of Chinamen there; I saw several Chinamen go in the store; I did not go in; I saw Mr. White shove one Chinaman out of the door, down the steps; I saw White shut the door; I saw one or two Chinamen pushing the door; there were lots of other Chinaman there, who, did nothing. I saw White at the window, a few Chinamen were then standing beside me-15 or 16-I was then on the opposite side of the road, about 17 or 18 yds; I heard three shots fired, it was the first shot that passed my head; there were about two minutes time between each shot; the shots all came from the same window.

Implying that G.P. White as the person who shot into the crowd, Ah See was cross-examined by the defense on the time of the incident and why he was at the warehouse in the first place. Ah See replied:

This happened about 1 p.m.; I came down to see about the two per cent commission, I saw some parties pushing at the door with their hands; I saw no stones thrown at the door or building; did not see anyone attempting to break the door with an axe or crowbar; I stood directly in front of the window, about 18 yds. off; I saw White shut the door before I heard the shooting; I saw three other persons at that time in the store with White; I saw stones thrown at the window; I did not know the names of any of the men I saw about me; I did not know if White intended to shoot me or some one else; I did not see anyone throwing stones at the window, until White fired the shot; the window was closed. I saw the window raised, a shot fired, and then shut down again.

Ah See lay the blame for the violence on the actions of G.P. White (White fired the first shot and incited the crowd to throw stones at the warehouse).

The next Chinese labourer to testify was Ping Sing.  Answering the question why he was at the warehouse, Sing stated:

I came here last Saturday. I came down to the China store to collect some money. I on first going in saw White. I saw the contractor, Lee Lum, and Ah Soon. I was one of the first who entered the store followed by several others, I saw White pushing some of them out; the door was then shut and some Chinamen outside were pushing against it. I was then inside; there were 5 whitemen and 5 Chinamen in the store; White was one of the whitemen. I saw White raise up the window and shoot off a pistol; he fired 3 shots; could not say in what direction he fired. I know there were lots of Chinamen outside; as soon as the first shot was fired, lots of rocks came in; I distinctly swear that the shot was fired before the rocks were thrown into the building, and that there were 3 shots fired. I saw a pistol in White’s hand, an ordinary one.

Sing’s closeness to the action meant he could identify White as the shooter. The defense cross-examined further, trying to pick holes in Sing’s original testimony.  Sing replied:

I went in the store for my 2 per cent. I cannot tell how long I remained in the store; I was there during the whole of the disturbance; cannot tell how long it was from the time the stones were thrown until the crowd left; there were some goods in the room; I stood in the room on the left hand side; White was walking around the room; when White shut the door I was standing at the side of it. I did not arrange to give any evidence at this court to-day. White told me to go out of the store into the next room, but not till after the shooting and rocks had been thrown.

Clearly frustrated by the questioning, Sing stated that he did not “arrange to give any evidence.“  The final Chinese labourer to testify was Ah Lin.  Like Ping Sing, Ah Lin identified G.P. White as the shooter of the pistol.  Ah Lin testified:

I was at the Chinese store on Saturday; I came down to see about my wages. I came to see Ah Soon, the agent; White asked us to go in; lots of Chinamen followed; someone stopped them from coming in; I saw the door shut; someone outside tried to push open the door; I saw White raise the window, and look out; then raise the pistol and fire, I am positive that White did not order us out until all the trouble was over.

After further cross-examination, Ah Lin stated:

I was in the front part of the room when the shooting was going on. I was about 6 feet from White when he fired; cannot say what kind of a pistol he used; heard 3 shots, could not see into the street. I saw nothing but White shooting, and then I left that part of the building. There were 5 whitemen and 8 Chinese in the room at the time. I knew 2 of the Chinamen within the store. I can see 2 whitemen in the court room whom I recognize as 2 I saw in the store. White ordered 3 of us out after the trouble was over, the axe I had in my hand on Saturday at the store I left there, inside the store.

Conclusion

The testimony from these Chinese labourers clearly demonstrates that they were not held in servitude, that they acted in self-interest (e.g. they were by definition “free labor”). Yet, as Ngai concludes in her paper, “our analysis remains limited if our aim is to establish simply that Chinese had ‘agency’.” Something else is going on in regards to Chinese labour. As Ngai notes, Chinese miners “need to be understood in their specificity and on their own terms, and not forced into the Orientalist binary of free and unfree labor; for they are not comprehensible as either.”

This is a useful starting point from which to explore the meaning of the “Chinese Question.”

Historians and the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882

The majority of studies on Chinese labour in the United States have been occupied with answering a somewhat narrow question, why was the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 passed (the Act excluded Chinese labourers from entering the United States).^⁠1  The first to address the Chinese Exclusion Act was not a historian but a sociologist, Mary Roberts Coolidge in 1909. Coolidge argued that California and its working people were the key agents in instigating the Act. Workers, and in particular Irish immigrants, led by Denis Kearney, the president of the Workingmen’s Party of California, and his call of “The Chinese Must Go!” created an atmosphere of racial hatred and discrimination. This, Coolidge concluded, “was sufficient to change the policy of a nation and to commit the United States to a race discrimination at variance with our professe[d] theories of government.”^⁠2  Thirty years later in 1939, Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer’s Anti-Chinese Movement in California reaffirmed Coolidge’s thesis on Sinophobia but argued that the anti-Chinese sentiment crossed all classes in California. Investigating the cause of the racism, Sandmeyer argued that Chinese customs were incompatible with American norms, consequently laying the cultural grounds for racial hostility and ultimately the Exclusion Act of 1882.

The core arguments of these publications, all written at a time when the Exclusion Act was still enforced (it was not repealed until 1943), prevailed until the late 1960s and early 1970s.  New broader approaches, chronologically and geographically, were taken by Alexander Saxton with The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California and Stuart Creighton Miller’s The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882.^⁠3  Alexander Saxton traced the roots of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the working class ideology of the Jacksonian era.  This ideology was steeped in racism, for when the white working class of California encountered not blacks but Chinese they transferred racial hostility towards the perceived economic threat of the newly arrived immigrants.  For the white working class of California, the Chinese represented the “indispensable enemy” of American labour, a common foe that people could unite against.  Stuart Creighton Miller took an approach from an intellectual history perspective, examining thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers from the nineteenth century.  Miller found numerous negative stereotypes of the Chinese, images that long preceded their arrival in North America.  From this catalogue of primary sources, Miller concluded that anti-Chinese prejudice was well established and nationwide. It was this prevalence of anti-Chinese imagery that ultimately led to the Exclusion Act in 1882.

Many of the methods and approaches deployed by Alexander Saxton and Stuart Creighton Miller have been utilised by historians such as David Roediger.  Roediger openly acknowledges the influence of Saxton’s “new social and cultural history of race and labor,” while at the same time tackles sources in the manner of Creighton Miller.  Roediger notes, “the use of racial language and racist precedents … ran through the postbellum labor movement.”  So much so that, “the labor and anti-Chinese movements overlapped so thoroughly as to be scarcely indistinguishable in California, where the exclusion issue provided the basis for labor unity at key points.”^⁠4

The focus on Sinophobia and the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act has created a historiography that mirrors the debate over white working class racism.  While historians such as Gwendolyn Mink have forcefully made the connection between national organized labour and the passing of the Exclusion Act, others such as Andrew Gyory have dismissed the connection.^⁠5  Gyory instead argues that politicians used Chinese immigration as a smoke screen.  In a period of rising class conflict, Gyory contents that politicians aimed both to propitiate working-class voters and to deflect attention from genuine national problems-economic depression, mass poverty, and growing unemployment.  This culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.^⁠6

Two articles published in the journal New Politics typify the historiographical debate; the first, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” an attack on Andrew Gyory’s Closing of the Gate by Stanford Lyman; and the second, Andrew Gyory’s response to Lyman’s accusations.^⁠7  Lyman sets forth his argument, pointing the finger at white working class racism for the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.  For Lyman, Gyory’s thesis, effectively laying the blame on politicians for the Exclusion Act, amounts to the denying of the racist tradition in the white working class.  Gyory’s reply charges Lyman with a lack of evidence.  The debate, fierce and often personal, is regarded by Gyory as an “ideological Cold War.”  For Lyman it is a battle over whether organized labour’s history was from “left multiracial” roots or from “right-racist vices.”

References

¹ See Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 1.

² Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: 1909), 182.

³ David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 10-11; Matthew Frye Jacobson’s analysis although focusing on European immigrants mirrors that of Stuart Creighton Miller.

⁴ David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 179.

⁵ See Joanne Pope Melish, “Workers and Whiteness Revisited,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5:4 (2008), 65-68.

⁶ Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 15.

⁷ Stanford Lyman, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” New Politics 4:28 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue28/lyman28.htm>; Andrew Gyory, “A Reply to Stanford Lyman,” New Politics 1:29 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue29/gyory29.htm>.

Benchmarking “free labor” in the age of emancipation

In her pivotal book, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, Amy Dru Stanley insightfully explores the ideological condition of the American labour market in the aftermath of the end of the Civil War. Notably Stanley remarks that the “American labor question was profoundly marked by the problem of slavery and emancipation.”(p.60) Carefully connecting the cause of the Civil War (the slavery question) with Reconstruction’s “labor question,” Stanley argues that “Americans turned to the labor question in the wake of abolition” because “they claimed that it followed inevitably from the slavery question.”(p.60) As such, Stanley deduces that the “labor questions in the postbellum North and South” can be “understood as one.”(p.61) In that both were “ideologically framed by the antithesis of slavery and freedom-the opposition between the principle of human chattel and the ideal of contract freedom.”(p.61)

Stanley’s argument is convincing. However, the end of slavery did not necessary define the meaning of “free labor.” In fact, the end of slavery arguably caused a crisis in “free labor” ideology. What exactly did “free labor” mean now that slavery did not exist?

This question increasingly became problematic in the industrial North, on the plantations of the South, as well as the overlands of the West.  Despite the different labour markets in the North, the South, and the West, during the late 1860s each region looked to answer their own “Labor Question” with Chinese labour.  In fact, I would argue that the subsequent debate over Chinese labour (the “Chinese Question”) during the mid 1870s witnessed a benchmarking of the meaning “free labor” across the United States – a process that would inform capital/labour relations into the twentieth century.

References

Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

The “Labor Question” – A Timeline

A really useful tool to timeline historical events is BEEDOCS.

Here is an example of charting the development of the “Labor Question” from 1865-1869: Labor Question

 

Chinese immigration: Rethinking the “push and pull” paradigm

For the past thirty years, the cornerstone of immigration history has tended to rest on the “push and pull” paradigm, weighing up the factors that forced migrants from their homeland and drew them to a new world. However, I would suggest that the history of Chinese immigration to North America during the mid-late nineteenth century points to a need to build on the “push and pull”paradigm by focusing on the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they did not totally leave behind.

Recent studies have shown that the majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States during the mid-late nineteenth century came from the districts of Guangdong.^⁠1  Significantly these areas underwent an economic and social metamorphosis as the influence of Western capital began to infiltrate the local economy.  The resulting growth in free-market capitalism established a new economic order that not only altered the social fabric of China but the purpose of Chinese immigration to North America.

The Commercialisation of Traditional Chinese Agrarian Society

Traditional agrarian society centred on close family ties and connections.  At the hub of the system was the land itself.  Farming was a well-respected occupation and agriculture formed the core of subsistence living and family life.  Families subdivided the land amongst themselves, industriously harvesting their livelihoods from the soil.  By the turn of the nineteenth century though, access to the land came under strain from a burgeoning populace and the free-market’s expanding control over the land.  The population of the Guangdong region increased by 76 percent (from sixteen million in 1787 to twenty-eight million in 1850), causing the population to land ratio to decrease below the national average: 1.67 mou (0.15 acres) per person compared to 2.19 mou.^⁠2  As pressure upon the land increased, the resulting re-orientatation of small-peasant farming laid the foundation for despair and revolt.

Taiping Rebellion

From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion led by the self-proclaimed Son of God, Hong Xiuquan, swept across the Gunagdong districts, claiming the lives of between twenty and thirty million people.^⁠3 An official from the government, Yung Wing, travelling through countryside at the time witnessed the despair.  Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale), had been born to a poor family near Macao and knew the area well.  Recalling the experience, Yung Wing wrote, “As we ascended towards Taiping, the whole region presented a heartrending and depressing scene of wild waste and devastation.  Whole villages were depopulated and left in a dilapidated condition.  Out of a population of 500,000 only a few dozen people were seen wandering about in a listless, hopeless condition, very much emaciated and looking like walking skeletons.”  For Wing it was almost like a “storm” had “swept away the bulk of the population.”  Wing was not sure of the extent people had suffered.  However, “one significant fact” struck him; the “sparseness of the population,” was “at variance with my preconceived notions.”⁴  Those “swept away” from the land had lost the opportunity to make a subsistence existence.  Instead they were now part of a new landscape.  Addressing this issue Yung Wing wrote, “The labor question … has been so radically disorganized and broken up,” concluding that the changes had, “virtually taken the breath and bread away from nine-tenths of the people of China.”⁵  Many of those without “breath and bread” moved to the coastal ports to find employment. From 1842 to 1895, more than a hundred industrial enterprises were established.  The great majority of these, including shipyards, docks, silk filatures, bean mills, sugar refineries, and other export-import processing industries, were closely related to Western trade with China.^⁠6

Of course, there were winners and losers in this period of industrialization.  Those on the brink, faced a tough decision; to remain in China or to emigrate abroad where there was sanctuary from the domestic troubles and the possibility to work for a higher wage.^⁠7  An estimated 200,000 Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast of America between 1842 and 1882.^⁠8  One migrant gave his own account of the painful events led him to leave China:

There were four in our family, my mother, my father, my sister and me.  We lived in a two room house.  Our sleeping room and the other served as a parlor, kitchen and dining room.  We were not rich enough to keep pigs or fowls, otherwise, our small house would have been more overcrowded. How can we live on six baskets of rice which were paid twice a year for my father’s duty as a night watchman?  Sometimes the peasants have a poor crop then we go hungry … Sometimes we went hungry for days.  My mother and me would go over the harvested rice fields of the peasants to pick the grains they dropped … We had only salt and water to eat with the rice.^⁠9

A New Paradigm?

So “push and pull” factors were crucial in the decision to emigrate, but in the case of Chinese immigrants “push and pull” factors did not separate the new world from the old world. In fact, the new world became a means to support life in the old world. Wage rates for employment in North American appeared on leaflets distributed in Chinese port cities as well as newspaper advertisements placed by labour agents.  Comparatively, a North American based income could sustain a Chinese family.  As the Reverend Augustus Loomis observed the high pay was such that, “will support them and leave something over to send back to the father and mother, or to the wife and children, left at home.”^⁠10 So instead of a paradigm that separates old and new worlds, the experience of Chinese immigrants suggests a need to investigate the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they physically left behind but maintained strong ties with.

References

¹ Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 32; June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong to California, 1850-1882,” in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism Asian Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) , 232.

² Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 33

³ W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (London: Robson Books, 2003), 167.

⁴ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 126-127, 127, 93.

⁵ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 84-85.

⁶ Yen-p’ing Hao, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (California: University of California Press, 1986), 349.

7 John Newsinger, “The Taiping Peasant Revolt,” Monthly Review (Oct 2000) Online. Internet. 10 Apr. 2004. Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1132/5_52/66937933/p1/article.jhtml

⁸ Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 214.

⁹ Kil Young Zo, Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-1880 (New York, 1971), 62.

¹⁰ A.W. Loomis, “How Our Chinamen Are Employed,” Overland Monthly, Vol. 2 (March 1869), 231.

Henry George, John Stuart Mill, and solving the “knotty labor question”

In May 1869, the New York Tribune published an article by Henry George detailing his views on the “Chinese Question.”  Arguing that the introduction of Chinese immigrants into the labour market “[was] to the interest of capital and opposed to the interests of labor,” George initially detailed his objections to Chinese immigrants on economic grounds.  While others argued that the employment of Chinese immigrants would not harm the existing labour force, George suggested; “If this position is correct, then the knotty labor question is indeed solved; the interests of labor and capital are indeed identical.”  However, for the George the position did not seem correct.  Rather for George, the “Labor Question” remained unsolved.  The low wages that Chinese immigrants received and the assumption that all profits, rents, and alike would be reduced by the same proportion as the reduction in wages, was to George a manifestly absurd fallacy.  Instead, he argued that “when we speak of a reduction of wages in any general and permanent sense, we mean this, if we mean anything – that in the division of the joint production of labor and capital, the share of labor is to be smaller, that of capital larger.” Adding, “this is precisely what the reduction of wages consequent upon the introduction of Chinese labor means.”  From this juncture in the article, the meaning of Chinese labour took a racial turn. “The population of our country [is] welded into a homogeneous people,” George declared, preceding to note that, “to a certain extent the Chinese become quickly Americanized; but this Americanization is only superficial.”  The superficiality of Chinese Americanization implied a lack of willingness to become citizens and in general a transient and temporary nature of being.  This condition, in George’s eyes, was unwelcome in a nation being reconstructed.  “A population born in China, expecting to return to China, living here in a little China of its own, and without the slightest attachment to the country” declared George, were “utter heathens, treacherous, sensual, cowardly and cruel.”  For George the future of the United States looked bleak because of the Chinese.  He argued that, “they will bring no women with them (and probably will not for a little while yet) except those for the purposes of prostitution; and the children of these, of whom there are some hundreds in California, will exercise upon the whole mass but little perceptible influence, while they will be in all respects as essentially Chinese as though born and reared in China.”^⁠1  The solution to the “knotty labor question” was apparent to George; the Chinese must be excluded from the United States.

Henry George, who had been inspired by the work of British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, decided to sent a copy of his article to Mill.^⁠2  Mill responded to George in a letter published in the National Standard during July 1870.  The reply agreed in principle with the economic side of George’s polemic, but also laid out a plea to regard Chinese immigrants as citizens.  If an “overwhelming” influx of Chinese immigrants occurred, Mill believed that it would be “economically injurious to the mass population; that it must diminish their wages, and reduce them to a lower stage of physical comfort and well-being.”  In Mill’s mind, the severity of an influx was such that workers should rally against immigration, stating that, “if the working-men have not combined to prevent this, it is time they should.”  However, Mill also believed that granting immigrants citizenship was a principle that should be upheld, declaring that “every immigrant of every race must be admitted citizenship.”  In an appeal to George, Mill argued that admitted citizenship would strengthen the labour movement.  Mill insisted that, “all men equal, equally free to carve each his own career, and entitled to all the aid his fellows can give.”^⁠3

References

¹ New York Tribune, May 1, 1869.

² Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 100-103.

³ National Standard, July 30, 1870.

Was the credit-ticket scheme a form of slavery or even indentured servitude?

During the mid-late nineteenth century, the majority of Chinese immigrant workers in the United States were under the supervision of a labour agent.  According to Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, labour agents were “shrewd, business men” who essentially advised “their subordinates where employment can be found on the most favorable terms.”^⁠1 The labour agents themselves operated collectively under an organization known as the Chinese Six Companies.  Based in San Francisco, the Six Companies commanded a vast network of intermediaries in both China and California, possessing a virtual monopoly on the migrations of nearly all U.S. bound Chinese immigrants.^⁠2

Credit ticket scheme

The power of the Chinese Six Companies stemmed from the scheme that financed the immigration process. The majority of Chinese immigrants financed their voyage across the Pacific using the debt inducing credit-ticket scheme.  The cost of the voyage was approximately $40, a sum of money out of the reach of the average Chinese migrant.  The credit-ticket scheme effectively became the only way migrants could cross the Pacific. Notably, labour agents cut deals with the steamship companies making sure that no Chinese immigrant could return without the debt being repaid.  This meant that immigrants became financially tied to labour agents, empowering labour agents to redirect immigrants into unskilled labour, such as railroad construction.

Similarities to Indentured Servitude

To many contemporaries, the credit-ticket scheme reduced Chinese immigrants to the status of slaves or a derivative of slaves, “coolies.”^⁠3  However, I would argue that the credit-ticket scheme was essentially a reinvention of indentured servitude.^⁠4

Indentured servitude had been the dominant form of European migration to North America during the eighteenth century.  European migrants who could not pay the cost of the voyage to North America with their own money or were unable to borrow funds from other individuals or financial institutions, turned to indentured servitude to facilitate their migration to the New World.  Through merchants, migrants could borrow the cost of their passage as an advance against their future labour.^⁠5

The credit-ticket scheme followed a similar strategy in regards to repayment of the cost of passage. However, there are some noticeable differences between the two systems.

Differences to Indentured Servitude

The key difference between indentured servitude and the credit-ticket system was the method in repaying the cost of passage.  While indenture servitude rested on migrants being bound to an employer for a length of time in order to pay off the debt, the credit ticket system simply obligated Chinese immigrants to repay the debt rather than to serve a term of years.  As the U.S. Senate reported, “They [Chinese immigrants] often borrow money to get here, and agree to pay high premiums or interest, but the agreement is in the amount of money rather than in the number of years of service.”^⁠6  Frederick Low added, “If I am correct in my supposition, these contracts do not bind them to work for any specific length of time; they only bind them to refund a certain sum of money, and when that money is paid they are as free as you and I.”^⁠7

This still leaves the question, why was indentured servitude reinvented in the mid-late nineteenth century?

Debt and the creation of a new American workforce

The answer perhaps can be found with debt and the creation of a new American workforce. As Sven Beckert has shown in his recent study of cotton production after the Civil War, debt was a powerful tool in re-energising the labour force of the South and developing a new system of labour.  Through schemes such as sharecropping Beckert notes, “[cotton] cultivators were now nominally free,” but, “networks of credit … captured them in an ongoing cycle of indebtedness that required them to grow cash crops.”^⁠8

I believe a similar analogy can be used for understanding the role of the credit-ticket scheme and Chinese immigrants. For Chinese immigrants to escape the cyclical debt of the credit-ticket scheme, meant not only finding work but also sustaining employment. Interestingly, expectations regarding employment were low.  As one contemporary noted, the immigrants hoped “for the present at least, to perform the most common and unskilled labor.”^⁠9

References

¹ Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. Statement made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior of the Progress of the Work (Sacramento: H.S. Crocker & Co., Printers, 92 J Street, 1865).

² Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51.

³ See David Gouter, “Drawing Different Lines of Color: The Mainstream English Canadian Labour Movement’s Approach to Blacks and Chinese, 1880-1914,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (2005), 55-76.

⁴ Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1940); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Jan Lucassen, “Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview,” in Free and Unfree Labor, ed., Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linder, and Jan Lucassen (Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993), 7-18.

⁵ D.W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History XLIV (1984), 16-17.

⁶ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 405.

⁷ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 83.

⁸ Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (December 2004), 1428.

⁹ Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 55.

Gambling, opium, and life as a Chinese railroad hand

The hard labour of clearing the right of way, grading, laying track or tunneling through granite demanded a release.  Many Chinese hands found that release through gambling.  A variety of games were played like battling bulls, with each man rolling the dice to determine who should throw the dominoes first.  But mostly fan-tan was played.  The dealer placed a small handful of buttons from a pan on the ground under a cup.  After bets were laid down, the cup was lifted and the buttons counted out four at a time.  The men who guessed how many buttons would be left; one, two, three, or none would be the winners.^⁠ Gambling drew the ire of local authorities.  In Washington territory, gambling was outlawed, but “Chinamen continued to take the chances.”  As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer  noted the consequences were that, “Chief Woolery and officer Thompson lit down on two of them and arrested the dealers and captured considerable money.”^⁠1  The two arrested were fined $10 each.

The smoking of opium was another way to take away the painful drudgery of everyday life on the railroad.  Although, according to a Chinese merchant called to testify at the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, opium smoking was “not as injurious as drunkenness,” the drug did have addictive qualities that had negative consequences for its users.^⁠2  One railway contractor stated that he had seen labourers “under the influence of opium,” as such they risked impaired judgment at often dangerous work-sites.  Another problem was over use.  One contractor commenting on the advantages of the contract system touched upon opium abuse, noting, “if the boss had to have a certain number of men at the railway the fact that ten of his men might be sleeping off an opium debauch would not prevent ten others being in their places.”^⁠3   After waking the reality for the ten sleeping off the “opium debauch” would have hit, no wages for that day and competition to regain employment on the line.

 

References

¹ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 31, 1883.

² Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), 172.

³ Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), xxvii.

The dangers of railroad construction

Blasting could cause vast amounts of shrapnel to rain down on the labourers, causing all sorts of injuries and even death.  In March 1881, the Portland Standard reported that a “most deplorable and fatal explosion,” had occurred on the 10th inst. at Grange City, beyond Walla Walla, on the Northern Pacific Railroad.  Barrels of giant powder had been moved close to a fire in a deliberate attempt to thaw the contents.  “Suddenly a flash was seen and a terrible report rang out upon the startled air, tearing up the earth in great fragments and hurling them about in every direction.”  The barrels of giant powder had exploded.  Two Chinese labourers standing close to the fire “were violently sent up into the air and killed, their bodies being almost unrecognizable from the effects of the explosion.”  Another labourer survived the blast but was “discovered horribly mutilated” and was doubtful whether he would survive his injuries.  The explosion created “immense hollows and deep cavities” in the ground and was “heard for a distance of twenty miles.”  While the Portland Standard declared it “hard to determine who is responsible for the sad catastrophe,” the truth was the dangers of the railroad construction could strike at anytime and anyone.^⁠1

 

Reference

¹ Portland Standard cited in Inland Sentinel, March 31, 1881.

Railroad construction and the problem with white labour

The low wages and poor working conditions associated with railroad construction appealed to few white labourers across North America during the mid-late nineteenth century.  Contractors for the Central Pacific Railroad, the Mendocino Railroad, and the Canadian Pacific Railway all placed advertisements for white labour in respective local newspapers.  The respond was typically minimal.  An interview with the Mendocino Railroad contractor, Mr West Evans, revealed a lack of desire by white workers to take up railroad employment.  The type of work that made up the bulk of railroad construction simply did not appeal.  A transcript of the interview details why the contractor turned to Chinese labour to construct his railroad:

Q. Are you the West Evans who advertised extensively in a newspaper a year or two ago, for white laborers?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What success did you meet with?

A. I got very few.

Q. How many did you advertise for?

A. I wanted a hundred.

Q. How many did you get?

A. Twenty or thirty. I sent more than a hundred up to work, but they would not work when they got there.

Q. For what reason?

A. They thought it was too hard work.

Q. Do you think there is a surplus of white laborers in the State?

A. I have not been able to employ it. I want men now and cannot get them.

Q. White men can do any work that the Chinamen could do?

A. Oh, yes; but, understand me, I tried to get white men to do this work and failed.^⁠1

 

Reference

¹ Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), xxii.