Migration

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, upheavals in China contributed to massive Chinese emigration overseas to southeast Asia and other parts of the world including Canada. In the decades after World War II, Chinese immigrants to Canada mainly came from Hong Kong, but also from Taiwan and, after the 1970s, from mainland China. These post-war Chinese immigrants, generally better educated and more cosmopolitan than their predecessors, were able to immigrate because Canada changed its post-war immigration policy to abolish racial or national origin as criteria and to stress human capital and family reunification. Changing political conditions in their homeland, such as the social turbulence of the Cultural Revolution felt in Hong Kong in the late 1960s, the uncertainty of Hong Kong prior to its return to China in 1997, and the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, also triggered large emigration.

As with other international migrations, a combination of “push and pull” forces in China and the receiving states propelled the Chinese into other parts of southeast Asia, the Pacific islands, and North America during the nineteenth century. That was an era that saw the decline of slavery in plantation societies as capitalism transformed many individual farms into corporate enterprises. The coolie trade – the procurement of contract labourers, mainly from India and China – replaced slavery as a system of recruiting cheap labour. The pauperized population of China provided a source for such workers. Between 1845 and 1873 an estimated 322,593 Chinese contract labourers were shipped overseas, 89 percent of whom embarked from Hong Kong or Macao. Despite an imperial edict that imposed a stiff penalty on those who left China without a special permit, many from the southeastern coastal provinces of Guangdong (Kuang-tung) and Fujian (Fu-chien) ventured abroad to seek a better living. The proximity of these two provinces to the sea provided outside contacts and easier access to ports, but poor economic conditions and social instability were the major reasons why many left the home country, even though it was for a life of labour overseas.

Most of the Chinese who came to Canada in the nineteenth century originated from a small number of counties in the southern province of Guangdong, particularly Taishan (T’ai-shan), Kaiping (K’ai-p’ing), Xinhui (Hsin-hui), and Enping (En-p’ing). It has been estimated, for example, that about 23 percent of the Chinese in British Columbia around 1884–85 were from Taishan, and in the following two decades as many as 45 percent of the Chinese entering Canada came from that county. Several factors explain why people from Taishan were particularly receptive to migrating overseas. The county was particularly hard hit by natural disasters in the second half of the nineteenth century; between 1851 and 1908 it suffered fourteen major floods, seven typhoons, four earthquakes, two droughts, four plagues, and five famines. In addition, a local war between clans in the years 1856–64 was directly responsible for the deaths of twenty to thirty thousand people. Pushing many peasants to the brink of starvation, these natural and social calamities made them vulnerable to recruitment for the overseas labour market.