Talk:History of Chinese immigration to Canada

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Contents 1 Merge Hongcouver article? 2 Reference for merely soujourners claim? 3 Pay rates grossly misrepresented 4 Links 5 From a letter to the CCNC about their website (re POV) 6 BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum 7 From the Canadian Pacific Railway wikipage 8 Typically POV statement 9 Excerpted material re professions/businesses undertaken 10 Bias towards making it sound exclusively difficult for Chinese workers 11 personal bias

[edit] Merge Hongcouver article?

Since the topic of racism has been raised by the anonymous moron above, would anyone mind a merger of the offensive Hongcouver article into this article? -- TheMightyQuill 10:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The place to debate your opinion of offensiveness is best left to the talk page of the article in question. Anyways, I don't think a merge is necessarily approropriate. This is already quite a long article, so adding a few more paragraphs and a handful of references to support a very specific sub-topic might be excessive. The two articles are, obviously, extremely related though. I just added a link back here from Hongcouver.

There are examples of other city nicknames that can sustain their own encyclopedic article (e.g. Hollywood North, though Hongcouver already does a much more substantial job than this one.) The Hongcouver article seems to be holding its own with references and a separate discussion to debate its offensiveness. --Ds13 16:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

"Hongcouver" should be merged and deleted, it deserves at most 2-3 lines in this article, and in History of Vancouver or something. "Hollywood North" predates Hongcouver, has wider use and is still in use, unlike Hongcouver. heqs 10:26, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reference for merely soujourners claim?

The early history paragraph currently reads

the first major wave of Chinese immigration started after the Opium War. Most of this first group came from the Taishan County of Guangdong Province to escape from poverty and political instability during the mid-19th century.

It continues (here's where there might be an inconsistency)...

It should be noted that the Chinese who came to Canada had a different mindset from that of their European counterparts. While most of the European settlers planned to start a new life in the new land, the Chinese in Canada were merely sojourners who wished to return to their ancestral homeland back in China.

Can someone cite a primary source for if or why, after escaping poverty and political instability, the Chinese settlers wished to return to China? --Ds13 17:40, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Southern China, Kwangtung Province, particularly was a sphere of British influence (the Opium Wars) and also a very poor part of China. The railway workers were sojourners because the workers were hired through brokers in Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong with an obligation to return. The best source of material on this subject remains Pierre Berton's National Dream and The Last Spike, but basically the Chinese railway workers were sojourners because that was the deal that was offered them, which was better than the devastating poverty in South China but not as good as the right to permanently settle. They had a mindset consistent with their opportunities, which is a comment on the racism surrounding them, rather than on the workers themselves. Many of the people in present-day Hong Kong are descended from former railway workers. Modus Vivendi 19:35, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

so something like "the Chinese in Canada were only allowed to work as sojourners, and were expected to return to their ancestral homeland back in China" would be more accurate? -- TheMightyQuill 08:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

It accounts for the railway workers. Some Chinese attempted to settle here by other paths. The real fun didn't begin until after the railways had been completed and some managed to scrape up the money to repay their debts back home and pay the head tax here. Those people had theoretically won the right to live in BC but doesn't mean the European settlers welcomed them. Modus Vivendi 08:54, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

nobody "had a right". This was the British Empire, not the post-Martin Luther King United States.Skookum1 23:01, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pay rates grossly misrepresented

In the account of railway construction at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1433-9249/life_society/chinese_immigration/clip8 the pay scales are cited as $1.50/$1.75 a day for white workers (generally Irish and Cornish) and $1/day. How does this jibe with the usual claim that the Chinese were paid only 1/5-1/6 of what whites were paid? (CCNC site and many others). I know, I know, I'll get accused of racism for challenging the prevailing mythologies; the same clip is the one place I've heard in the media where it's admitted that it wasn't whites who employed the Chinese at these rates, but "contractors" in Vancouver, Victoria and Hong Kong - in other words, "snakehead" contractors, none of whom were white. It also is stated in the clip that Onderdonk claimed there were no white workers available, which isn't quite true, although it's true that (as wit the building of the North West America at Nootka Sound in 1788) it took a lot shofter time to voyage from HK to BC than it does from the UK to BC (a few months vs. 18 months); but using the rail crossing of the US, or for that matter the many Britons and Irish who'd worked on the American railroads, this is a straw man argument. And the main reason for the urgency of Onderdonk's need was that Ottawa and the CPR had fudged the earlier timetable to ge the railway built and now had a new deadline to meet; but that was of their own doing, and also had to do with their refusal to assist immigration to BC from the UK (which would have been a threat to the population dynamics of the ON/QC deadlock on the Canadian voting structure, which remains in place to this day). I'm not grinding axes here, just wishing that people would get their noses out of their own ethnic troughs and learn to see (and admit to) the larger picture.Skookum1 21:26, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

• • While I don't have any documents on hand at the moment, one thing worth considering is what else was included in railway workers pay. White workers were housed in railway bunk cars and had meals provided for them. Asian labourers had no such bunk cars, they slept in tents which they purchased from the CPR. To eat, they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway. When looking at earnerings you need to look at the larger scope, beyond just the salary. Once you take other factors into consideration, claiming asian workers earned 1/5 what his white counterpart earned is not all that far fetched.

You're still labouring under the misconception that it's the fault of the whites that the Chinese worked for those wages; they were contracted by Chinese businessmen and were not forced to work for those wages; rather they were hired at them, much to the chagrin of others who would not work for the same (an "other" which included others than whites, including the Hawaiians, native Indians, Mexicans and others present in early BC). And you're wrong about the rice: part of their pay was in rice "mats", which were prepped in China and shipped over, as it was their preferred diet; and again, it was a Chinese contract, not a British Columbian one, that fed/paid them according to these terms (details in J. Morton In The Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia). As for the comparison to white workers re accommodations, given that the bulk of labourers in the Onderdonk contracts were Chinese, the whites in question would be foremen, managers, and of course Onderdonk himself; and while they have had houses in Yale and North Bend and the other canyon towns, this was commensurate with their position and their contracts, and with company policy for managers; the claim that white workers were housed in houses while the Chinese in tents is further proven to be a fallacious "we were victimized" whinge when you look at the construction pictures from Eagle Pass and the Kicking Horse, etc., where large numbers of whites worked (as well as other non-Chinese); you'll see that those construction camps were also tents, and not houses. Yale and North Bend were meant to be company real estate showpieces, and Yale was company HQ in BC until the designation of Vancouver as the terminus, so it behooved the company to build appropriate quarters for itself and its management, not just to establish class/hierarchy (implicit in any organization) but also to sate stockholders that the company was reputable. Also worth commenting on that, from Boston Bar upstream, the area in question is dryland and not prone to rain, unlike Yale (where what Chinese there were lived in houses, i.e. the merchants of Yale's Chinatown); and for the record up around North Bend one Chinatown along the tracks was in earth-houses of a kind very similar to those used by other pioneers; half-dug into the earth, sort of a log root-cellar. And those who lived in caves around Spences Bridge did so because the Chinese contractors who had gotten them there didn't cough up the last pay cheque, or provide means for them to leave the area once construction was done (again see J. Morton). The issue of Chinese working conditions in the railway period cannot be fully and honestly discussed until a reckoning is made with the actions of the Chinese companies/wealthy men who profited from and cheated their own countrymen. Others lived in tents and suffered harsh conditions; it's the nature of the frontier. You weren't singled out and many of the conditions complained about were, as mentioned, contracted for and expected. Tent accommodations in frontier work in BC remains, in fact, common (tree planting, geologists/prospectors, etc etc). What did they expect in 1880s railway construction jobs anyway? Feather beds?Skookum1 06:30, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway

!!The CPR wasn't in the business of importing rice seed, and as already mentioned rice mats were the form of pay and also the food supply. A few Chinese may have tried to go rice, but it mystifies me as to where they did that as I know the Fraser Canyon geography extremely well and, while its growing season is long enough, there's just no water in the quantities needed for rice. And I would have heard of rice cultivation in the Fraser Valley, where while there's water there was also not much in the of usable agricultural land cleared by the 1880s; it took the railway to bring in the settlers necessary for that. What the Chinese did grow for their own use still grows wild along the tracks in areas of the Fraser Canyon and Thompson Country, however: white opium poppy.Skookum1 06:34, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd say the sub-contracting by Chinese businessmen is relevant, but hardly erases blame. Shoe companies like Reebok continue to do the same thing today, claiming they have no control over mistreatment of overseas workers by labour subcontractors: a pretty week excuse, in my opinion. In the case of the railway, when the workers are working in Canada, it's even less excusable. -- TheMightyQuill 16:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Many people here are talking about assigning blame for the plight of whichever group. The purpose of the discipline of history is not to find blame or fault, but to uncover what happened in as unbiased a manner as possible. The Chinese were subject to taxation and eventually faced an outright prohibition on immigration to Canada. We can look at which groups in society pushed for these laws, the justification they gave at the time, and what other motivations they may have had that weren't publicly aired. This is not for the purpose of assigning blame or contributing to a culture of victimization--if such a culture exists--but to contribute to the historical discourse. Articles in tertiary sources such as encyclopedias or general textbooks should refrain from including judgments, ideological or otherwise. If you want a historical essay about popular misconceptions of wages paid to immigrant labourers and its contribution to a contemporary culture of victimization, write an article for one of the amateur historical journals (or a scholarly journal if you are feeling ambitious).

Oh the simple truth, history as it really was. Thanks for your Rankean view, but I'm not really intested. The article doesn't explicitly make judgements, place blame or fault, which maintains NPOV, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be interested, and talk about it in the background. If it has no relevance for today, why should anyone care? -- TheMightyQuill 22:45, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Links

I have reverted the article to my previous version which I had edited according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style, specifically I have removed links to date fragments per WP:DATE and to ordinary words per WP:MOS-L. Ground Zero | t 21:58, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From a letter to the CCNC about their website (re POV)

Italicized bits are quotes from the CCNC's site's "history" content:

"Some say that for every foot of the (hell gate) Fraser Canyon, one Chinese worker died."

That's painting with a pretty broad brush, isn't it? "Some say" - and who was that? The reason I'm being so pointed on this is that, if the Fraser Canyon is reckoned to be from Yale to Ashcroft, which was the difficult stretch (Hell's Gate being only one short stretch of it), that's about 130 miles; 5,280'/mile x 130, that's 1,372,800 dead. More than the population of British Columbia at the time....Even if only the stretch from Yale to Boston Bar - about 25 miles, that's 132,000. The difficult construction, however, was at least twice that far. Even if it's only the "Hell's Gate" stretch of the canyon, let's say from Spuzzum to Boston Bar, that's 10 miles, so 52,800 dead. How many railway workers were brought in from China again?? Hmmmmm... Somebody's playing fast and loose with the figures, I think.....

Sure, you might only be meaning a 2 mile stretch where Hell's Gate is (10,560 dead), but you're making the statement as if it applied to the WHOLE of the Fraser Canyon. And the name is Hell's Gate not "hell gate".

By making such outrageous and obviously incorrect statements - repeating folk myth popular within your ethnic group AS THOUGH IT WERE FACT WHEN IT IS NOT - you are only losing face in the eyes of other Canadians - and when the time comes, in the eyes of later Canadians of Chinese descent who investigate history properly,.instead of with an axe to grind.......

PS on another page in the Head Tax section, you say "t was ironic that many white people depended on the services of the Chinese, yet at the same time the government imposed the Head Tax, discouraging Chinese to immigrate to Canada." This is another typical distortion - "many white people" is not the majority of white people, but specifically those of the upper class and the upper-upper middle class who could afford servants, and who - please note - themselves disapproved of the Head Tax and only, if at all, supported it out of fear of the revanchement of the working class. It was the larger majority of working class whose increasing resentment and agitation against the lower of wages and working conditions engendered by railway-Chinese immgration FORCED the federal government, against its own preferences for continued low-wage immigration from China, to pass the Head Tax in order to protect the Chinese already here from an increase in violence against them from disenfranchised non-Chinese workers. Complicated yes, and not as easy to understand as the comic book-portrayal of whites as bitter racists intent on oppressing the noble and suffering Chinese worker, but a lot closer to the truth than the bald statement that "many white people depended on the services of the Chinese etc", which is another oft-repeated myth without its actual historical context being rightly presented, and implicitly biased against non-Chinese.

And from a similar letter - neither of which a reply was made, or any effort to investiage the TRUTH of the objections described, which are offensive to non-Chinese Canadians who get browbeaten over thigns that DIDN'T EVEN HAPPEN.

I am a specialist on the subject of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush and just had a look at your photo gallery and the accompanying descriptions. The following are my comments on some of the texts:

Quotes from http://www.ccnc.ca/toronto/history/pgallery.html

"The term "A china man's chance" was originated from the white workers who often harassed the Chinese Miners. It describes the slim chance a Chinese miner has of finding gold, because most of the Chinese miners lacked mining experience and they could only mine on areas left behind by the white miners."

This is incorrect if unqualified. Chinese miners worked side-by-side with the many other ethnic groups in the Fraser Canyon, and themselves sometimes harassed others (notably natives). In particular, the goldfields between Yale and Lytton were mostly worked by non-white ethnic groups, including Hawaiians and blacks (African, West Indian, and American) and there was no exclusivity other than prior occupancy of a bar. Further, Governor Douglas and his agents repeatedly enforced the British standard that no ethnic group had a priori rights to the gold-bearing bars and resolved disputes instigated by white Americans towards this end in favour of the Chinese – in the Fraser Canyon, at Rock Creek and elsewhere. And while you might point at the 1886 or 1887 expulsion of Chinese miners from the Tulameen goldfields (near present-day Coalmont, west of Princeton) as proof for your claim, the context to that was the complete exclusion of all non-Chinese miners from the extremely rich Cayoosh Creek godlfield which was found in 1884, and the value of which was not adequately reported by the exclusively Chinese claims-holders and its earnings only first estimated by the local government agent in 1887. The Chinese worked without harassment in other areas of this region, notably on the hydraulic workings along the lower Bridge River and around the town of Lillooet. The only other exclusion in this area was enforced not by whites, but by the chief of the Lakes Band of the Lillooet who threatened a party of Chinese miners away from working the Marshall Creek area of the upper Bridge River; he also drove away parties of Italians and other whites;

One Ah Key, a Chinese miner/businessman in Lillooet, spent $60,000 building a flume to mine the benchlands opposite the town of Lillooet, bringing water about 12 miles around Fountain Ridge; conversion rate for 1860s dollars is 40x1, meaning that wa a 2.4 millioh dollar flume; apparently he made money on that particular hydraulic operation, and have to wonder at the profit margin; and of course he'd earned that money by previous gold mining (and maybe jade; jade was exported in bulk, untaxed and undeclared; another instance of being taken advantage of, one suppose).

Therefore, "They could only mine on areas left behind by white miners" is patently incorrect and tantamount to something between a myth and lie. "Chinaman's chance", so far as I have previously understood the source of the term, originated for some reason from card-games.

"Most of the Chinese immigrants came to Canada in crowded ship with bad ventilation and scarce food supplies."

An experience also enjoyed by nearly all travelers and crews on ships in those days, other than first-class passengers and senior officers.

"The first Chinese gold miners arrived in Fraser Valley, British Columbia from San Francisco. Their arrival marked the establishment of a continuous and vibrant Chinese presence in Canadian culture."

The correct phrase would be "in the Fraser Canyon of British Columbia" – the term "Fraser Valley" refers to the region downstream from Hope, which was entirely unsettled at the time of the gold rush, other than at Fort Langley. Given the timeframe, the ending of this quote should also be "British Columbian culture", as it would be 11 years before BC joined Canada; and in 1858 this was anything but a foregone conclusions. Also, Chinese had been present in Victoria for a number of years already prior to the rush.

"Despite the hard times the Chinese miners faced, they never gave up and some managed to strike gold. It was the Chinese miners who invented the gold separating machine shown here."

MANY managed to strike gold, and worked the Fraser Canyon for longer than any other group and, yes, because of their determination and novel technologies, often found more gold from tailings that had been taken out by previous parties working the site. Many of the Chinese who mined gold in the Lillooet area became major landowners and merchants and dominated the local economy until World War II (then abandoned that town nearly completely).

During the Cayoosh Gold Rush of 1884-87, estimates of the undeclared total of gold taken from a six-mile stretch of that creek, which Chinese miners systematically excluded others from, including the First Nations people whose territory/salmon creek were destroying, was $7 million dollar, perhaps more; the total official gold revenues for the entire province for that decade was only $1.5 million. Yup, they were taken advantage of all right...Skookum1 23:48, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

You may not like my comments, but they are based in a reading of actual local documents, rather than a repetition of ethnically-biased myths.... Skookum1 23:48, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum

Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to Oregon Country/Columbia District/Pacific Northwest history/historical geography, colonialist/settler/immigrant or aboriginal/indigenous materials/themes/articles/questions, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From the Canadian Pacific Railway wikipage

This posted here from the Canadian Pacific Railway article because it's contrary to material on CCNC site and on previous versions of this page:

Many thousands of navvies worked on the railway. Many were European immigrants. In British Columbia, the CPR also hired workers from China, nicknamed coolies. A navvy received between $1 and $2.50 per day, but had to pay for his own food, clothing, transportation to the job site, mail, and medical care. After two and a half months of back-breaking labour, they could net as little as $16. Chinese navvies in British Columbia made only between $0.75 and $1.25 a day, not including expenses, leaving barely anything to send home. They did the most dangerous construction jobs, such as working with explosives. The families of the Chinese who were killed received no compensation, or even notification of loss of life. Many of the men who lived did not have enough money to return to their families in China, and many spent years in lonely, sad and often poor condition. But those navvies were hard working and played a key role in building the western stretch of the railway; even some boys as young as 12 years old served as tea-boys.

And even it needs fixing, but it's a sight better than the CCNC's material. See also Talk:Chinese Canadian National Council for more on errors/misinformation in the CCNC's content. An excerpt from the above just caught my eye:

The families of the Chinese who were killed received no compensation, or even notification of loss of life. Many of the men who lived did not have enough money to return to their families in China, and many spent years in lonely, sad and often poor condition.

But none of that was the fault of the CPR or white people, as implied and browbeaten all over the media and curriculum since the "anti-racism" revisionism of Canadian/BC history was launched by the CCNC, but of the Chinese contractors who brought them over and were responsible for getting them home; then abandoning them. Publishing false information is not a pretty thing, especially not when it's used to foment political campaigns and cultural/political division/recrimination, as has been the case IMO.Skookum1 07:21, 14 July 2006 (UTC) .

[edit] Typically POV statement

Even though Chinese railway workers were only responsible for 500 kilometres of the entire Canadian Pacific Railway, they were given the most dangerous section of the railway, notably the section that goes through the Fraser Canyon.[citation needed]

The bias implicit in the phrasing of this sentence, as with so many others, obscures the reasons why the Chinese worked on that section; because the CPR had hired Andrew Onderdonk to "get the job done", and Onderdonk, an experience railway contractor, had ties to "labour contractors" (i.e. snakeheads in Taiwan, Canton and Shanghai, as well as in California. It was not deliberate on the part of Canada or BC or the CPR to "give" the "most dangerous section" of the railway to the Chinese; it was pure and simple logistics and cost cutting. The whole point of the railway was the difficult access between BC and the nation it had joined, and since BC's creation the faster travel time to the colony/early province was either via the Orient, or via Cape Horn, and only later on via San Francisco. Chinese also worked on the railway east of the Rockies (see Ha Ling Peak on Bivouac.com, as they could be gotten there via the American railways to the south which had already been constructed; just not in as much numbers, and not straight out of China as was the case with the labourers brought in by the snakehead companies. BC had lobbied Ottawa and London to encourage immigration of Scots, Irish and Geordies (Yorkshiremen) to build the BC section of the railway, but Ottawa was intransigent and London didn't care. One reason for Ottawa's intrasigence was the cost of getting workers from the British Isles to BC; either via Cape Horn, or via Suez-Malacca (which was in fact shorter than via the Cape!), or via the American railways to the US West Coast (which would have involved in-bond transit visas through the US as well as railway fares and ships to carry the workers to British Columbia from Seattle, Portland and San Francisco; so much easier to hire Chinese workers already in North America, or within a few months sail from China (as opposed to eighteen months via the Cape, and over twelve months via Suez-Malacca, and implicitly via Hong Kong/China anyway). This is one reason that the original schedule to build the railway was postponed in the 1870s, prompting calls for BC to abandon Confederation; the other reason was the Pacific Scandal, which brought down the MacDonald government and put the largely anti-railway, anti-BC Liberals under Mackenzie in power (see http://www.dickshovel.com/two.html and http://www.dickshovel.com/two2.html for some nasty details of MacDonald's fiddling with the rival Northern Pacific, which is passed over in the Wiki article on the Pacific Scandal). So, with increasing demands from BC to get the railway built, MacDonald rammed through the Chinese-labour aspect of the project in the debate the quotation from him is from (in response, as I recall, to Arthur Bunster, MP for Vancouver (electoral district) (which meant Vancouver Island, not the city of Vancouver, which hadn't been named yet and, as far as anyone knew in 1882, wasn't even the chosen terminus); Bunster had continued to press (as did other BC MPs) for British labour and the implicit increase in British immigration to BC; which Ottawa didn't care about. So Onderdonk became the contractor (thanks to ties to MacDonald's cronies, I might add), and Chinese companies were hired by him to recruit their own people because of the shorter time it took to get them on-site. And I repeat - it was Chinese businessmen who abandoned the Chinese workers when the railway was finished, even not delivering on the last payroll as well as not arranging for travel home, also as a way to save "costs" which they were bound to by contract, but did not live up to. Blaming this on Canada or BC, and implicitly on non-Chinese Canadians, is utter bull patootie. As for the most dangerous section of the railway, that's debatable; read up on the horrors of the northern Ontario stretch....but implicitly the BC section of the railway was the most geotechnically difficult by definition of the province's geography - a "sea of mountains" in a very literal sense; the choice to use the Fraser Canyon was partly strategic, as the other viable route (via the Cariboo Plateau and Bute Inlet) would not have involved so many canyons and passes); and partly a con on the part of the CPR, which had its eye on waterfront property no one else had claimed yet, which was not the case with the preferred BC railhead at Victoria, which was what BC thought it had bargained for but where the CPR wouldn't have been able to make mondo bucks in real estate promotion, as was the case with the establishment of the City of Vancouver. And another thing - Chinese were not forced to do the blasting; and those who stuck around blast sites without listening to the foreman to clear the site were the ones who died (perhaps because of language difficulties, or a lack of concern by their own shift translators); the myth that "there was one dead Chinese for every foot of the Fraser Canyon", even only the Hell's Gate stretch, would mean there would have been between 10,000 and 100,000 dead. Yet that myth persists, as does the myth that they were "forced" or that they were "given the most dangerous section of the railway". Get some context, and get down off your ethnic-suffering high horses.....

I really wish ethno-Canadians would research the history of this country in a more general sense instead of through the myopic lens of their own perceived suffering/experience of discrimination. I'm speaking as a white Canadian whose ethnicity was also discriminated against, as were others; you weren't alone, but you make it sound like your were the slave class or something here, when in reality your forebearers came because it was a better wage than was possible in China, and for many the opportunity to better life for their families back home. The portrait your ethno-histories paint tries to pretend that the railway labour was something like the slave plantations in the Deep South; that was more the condition they lived under in China; and please note it was the Chinese contractors who were responsible for paying their wages home, and didn't, not Canada, the CPR, or even Onderdon. READ THE ORIGINAL HISTORY instead of the revisionist garbage you're just rehashing here, and which is so wildly at variance with the historical FACTS. Speaking of facts, you might also want to research the role of Irish and other non-Chinese labourers in BC and in the eastern sections of the railway; you might be humbled, and you might also acquire some much-need respect for non-Chinese Canadians and their history....Skookum1 06:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Excerpted material re professions/businesses undertaken

With legislation banning Chinese from many professions, Chinese entered professions that European Canadians did not want to do, like laundry shops or salmon processing.

This is bullshit. Laundry was an entrepreneurial business and not something they were forced to do; they excelled at it and people preferred to have them do it; same as houseboy/chef (the difference between an English cook and a Chinese cook is fairlyi obvious, palate-wise). As for salmon processing - we call it canning, and which was an exploitation of First Nations resources, by the way, which like the gold and the railway were also exploitation of native lands/resources, which the Chinese wilfully took part in like everybody else, canneries had multiethnic crews of First Nations, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians and many others; and again, working in them was a choice, as compared to other forms of work in the province at the time cannery work was steady and relatively well-paying.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

These Chinese

Who? - the ones who worked in the canneries and laundries??? Get your syntax straight!!

opened grocery stores and restaurants that catered to the local Chinese population \

Patently false, as Chinese corner stores were a mainstay of life throughout Greater Vancouver, so much of a public institution that it was part of the shared intercultural identity of the place; you assumed the corner grocer was Chinese; not because they were forced to or for lack of other opportunity, but because of an inside track on produce and other wholesale goods; Chinese skills at market gardening resulted in a lockdown of the produce industry, in which Chinese companies are still the dominant force locally in BC, and such stores and farms served everyone; Chinese grocery stores were everywhere, ESPECIALLY. in non-Chinese neighbourhoods.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC) I'm getting the impression that a lot of this article, like the discussion on Talk:Chinese Canadian, is by people who are relatively recent arrivals who got their education in local history only from their own ethnic organization. So much is bumpf, either misleading or just wildly wrong, that you have to wonder sometimes exactly where they're talking about.Skookum1 00:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Don't be silly, Skookum. You can't really suggest that Chinese people chose tho engage primarily in laundry shops and canning over higher paid professional positions and other businesses. There was legislation in BC, for instance, preventing Chinese employers from hiring white women as employees. You don't think that affects your business options? They weren't forced to do crappy jobs, just as illegal mexican immigrants in the united states aren't forced to pick produce for slave wages, but they weren't able, for a variety of reasons, to find better work either. What's wrong with that? - TheMightyQuill 22:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bias towards making it sound exclusively difficult for Chinese workers

I'm noticing someone contributing seems to want to make it sound like the Chinese had it more difficult than other manual laborers. A typical example is this statement: "These canvas tents were often unsafe, and rocks fell during the night." Is this a joke? Everyone working remote labor lived in tents, why is this being singled out here for the Chinese? And rocks falling during the night - what's up with that? You might as well state "And bears were eating moose, even though the moose didn't want to get eaten. And a manicurist wasn't available for any of the railway workers." JettaMann 18:46, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Geez, it's been getting lonely here ;-) Thanks, my point exactly. In the case of the rocks falling, the context is the infamous Fraser Canyon - not infamous because of Chinese railway-labour experiences, but as a very difficult stretch of terrain which still gives people nightmares, even with the several-times rebuilt modern highway running through it. During one particularly bad icestorm a decade or so ago it was cut in about 150 places over 100 miles (between the towns of Lytton to Hope, British Columbia by ridgetop-to-river slides; and in its lower depths it's incredibly bad rock, and before the building of the Cariboo Wagon Road (which the construction of the railway partly obliterated) had to be traversed by handholds over long sections, and nightmarish foot-ladders cut into the rocks. But your point about living in tents is so true; it's not as if everybody else had RVs to camp out in, or that living conditions for white workers or any other kind of worker were any better, other than for the bosses. The "victim psychology" that's built into the article, and into the mindset that generated it, is really tiresome, and a-contextual for anybody who actually bothers to learn about the frontier era in BC.Skookum1 20:36, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Further to previous, I've been meaning to go at this bit from the intro section for a while now:

Chinese appeared in large numbers in the colony of British Columbia in 1858, when there was a gold rush in the Fraser Valley. This attracted many Chinese from China itself, and also some who had originally arrived in California.

Aside from the bad geography, apparently cribbed from the CCNC's false-history website, it's the Fraser Canyon, not the Fraser Valley; but what's interesting here is that the gold rush was a HUGE success story for the Chinese, and it was because they were established here that the contacts were available for Onderdonk to engage Chinese entrepreneurs to sigh up their countrymen for the railway; it's not just a preamble to the railway, it's a whole period. And I'm not alone among early BC historians who're of the opinion that it's not talked about much in Chinese ethno-histories because it doesn't provide good examples of how mean white people were to the Chinese; it was embarrassingly successful, given the official-whining position in the media (and Wiki) about Chinese history in Canada. I'll be back to expand this section but just to serve notice that its silence on these issues is another sign of te implicit bias and bad/fuzzy history in the article.Skookum1 21:45, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] personal bias

Too much personal bias I agree with the comment below. Get your facts right, and stop infiltrating Liberal cheerleading. The Chinese Immigration Act is distinguished because it was a racist legislature aimed specifically at one ethnic group. Although countries still have immigration fees, they apply to all applicants. I am not arguing that it is fair - that's a total different conversation. Please acquaint yourself with the issue/topic before you add your two cents into it. I have deleted your own opinion that the criticisms are not valid because (1.) that is not relevant; and (2.) you have no supporting evidence.

Bourquie, you include way too much bias. Please use the proper names of acts. It is the CHINESE IMMIGRATION ACT, not the Chinese Exclusion Act. get it straight so i dont have to keep editing your work.

The nameless individual above (edit log entry 23:29, 3 April 2005 Kilter) should check the facts and keep his hat on. [1] Turidoth 08:00, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

There really IS an act called the Chinese Exclusion Act..I learned it in history class yesterday.