Arrival and Settlement

Immigration by the Chinese to Canada can be divided into three periods that roughly correspond to major shifts in the receiving country’s legislation with respect to their civil rights. The first period covers sixty-five years from the earliest arrivals in 1858 to the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act in 1923. During this time the Chinese were victims of institutional racism and legislative controls. The second period, from 1924 to 1947, may be described as the exclusion era because, as a result of the 1923 legislation, no Chinese were allowed to immigrate to Canada. The years after World War II constitute the third period. During this era the discriminatory laws against the Chinese were repealed, and they gained civil rights and enjoyed an improved social status. Throughout this history, Canadian government policy towards the Chinese and the reception accorded them by other Canadians largely determined the character of the Chinese community.

Written records in China indicate that as early as 499 a Chinese monk named Hwui-Shan may have visited a wilderness region now thought to be Canada. However, Chinese immigration to this country did not begin until 1858. The initial wave was in response to the discovery of gold in the Fraser valley of British Columbia. Some of the first Chinese migrants came from California, where they had already been mining gold. As the yield there depleted, they were attracted to the new opportunities farther north. During 1860s and 1870s, many Chinese came as independent miners and workers; others were recruited as contract or indentured labourers. The exact terms of their contracts are unclear, but it is believed that the recruiting company would advance money to the workers, arrange their employment in work teams under the supervision of overseers, and collect the money owed from their monthly pay.

Large-scale immigration of Chinese did not begin until the western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway was constructed. Over eleven thousand Chinese arrived in Victoria by ship in 1881 and 1882 alone. Although some workers eventually returned to the homeland, this second wave of immigration substantially increased the number of Chinese in Canada, which more than doubled in the official census records from 4,383 in 1881 to 9,126 ten years later. By 1901 the figure had reached 17,314. With the exception of a few merchants, most of the newcomers were from the lower stratum of Chinese society. Records of immigrants entering Canada between 1885 and 1903 indicate that male labourers made up 73 percent; merchants and storekeepers, 5.7 percent; and cooks, farmers, laundrymen, miners and others for the remaining.

Of the 15,701 Chinese estimated to have entered the country between 1881 and 1884, about 6,500 were directly employed by contractors building the CPR. The initial crew was recruited by Andrew Onderdonk, who was in charge of the British Columbia section. He hired fifteen hundred men from the area around Portland, Oregon, in 1880 and two thousand from Hong Kong in 1882 through the Lian Chang Company, organized by Li Tian Pei, a Chinese merchant living in the United States. Two other Chinese companies, Tai Chong and Lee Chuck, were involved in contracting Chinese workers from Hong Kong in 1882, and the firms of Stahlschmidt and Ward and Welch and Rithet brought them to Canada; of the eight thousand Chinese who landed in Victoria in 1882, over five thousand were transported by Stahlschmidt and Ward. After their arrival in Canada, the Chinese workers travelled in organized groups to railway labour camps, where an agent of the contracting firm resided. These camps were set up at Yale, Port Moody, and Savona’s Ferry (Savona), with as many as a thousand workers in each.

Not all the Chinese who entered Canada in this period came as contract labourers. Some were employed as miners, merchants, domestic servants, or service workers in various industries. For example, among the 10,000 Chinese in British Columbia in 1885, 2,900 were railway workers, 1,468 miners, 1,612 farm labourers, 700 food canners, and 708 lumber workers. Store owners and merchants accounted for 121 of the Chinese in the province at that time.

In the early period, many Chinese settled in the mining communities of British Columbia, where they established areas characterized by Chinese shops and residential buildings. As more immigrants arrived in Victoria, New Westminster, and later Vancouver, so-called Chinatowns developed in these communities. Some scholars have questioned the use of the term on the grounds that it is a nineteenth-century European concept superimposed upon a group that was seen as racially inferior and culturally debased. The expression was widely used in the press, often with a negative or exotic connotation, and its application to Chinese districts was widely accepted by white Canadians. Over time, both Europeans and Chinese came to accept it as a legitimate concept.

Chinatowns served as commercial areas and community centres. Businesses drew their customers from the residents of the district and from a transient population of Chinese miners and labourers from more remote areas. In many respects, the neighbourhoods were ethnic ghettos. Living conditions were unsanitary and overcrowded, and violent crimes such as murder and kidnapping occurred. In addition to the legitimate businesses, illegal activities, including gambling, opium smoking, and prostitution, could be found in these Chinese enclaves. (It should be noted that the smoking of opium had been introduced to China by Britain around the 1830s, and it was not illegal in Canada until the enactment of the Opium Act of 1908.) By the 1880s the most developed Chinatown was in Victoria, which contained about two thousand inhabitants and over one hundred stores. There were also fifteen opium dens, eleven hotels serving the Chinese, and three companies performing Chinese opera. The growth of this district was directly related to an increase in the Chinese population, which by 1881 accounted for about one-third of Victoria’s six thousand inhabitants.

Undoubtedly, racism and exclusionary laws prevented Chinese from being accepted in many white communities. Chinatowns therefore served as areas where they could live and carry on businesses. Although the majority of Chinese were labourers, a class structure controlled by an elite of exclusively merchants was evident in these early communities in urban Canada. The rest of the community was composed of working-class Chinese, including transient miners and labourers who used the Chinese quarter as a base when they were not employed. The merchants controlled the trading companies and formed neighbourhood associations to promote their influence in the community. Some of the firms were involved in recruiting Chinese workers for white employers. The trading companies also sent remittances and letters to China on behalf of workers. The Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration in 1902 provided evidence to suggest that some merchants were involved in the opium trade and operated factories that processed the drug.

Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese in Canada were viewed by the white population as aliens who could be utilized in menial jobs but were not to be trusted as equals. Anti-Orientalism was particularly strong in British Columbia, where the Chinese tended to concentrate. Virtually every social evil was blamed on them at one time or another, including epidemics, overcrowding, prostitution, opium smoking, and moral corruption. The Chinese were also accused by the labouring class of depressing wages, since they were generally paid less than white workers and at times were used as scabs in labour disputes.

From the outset, the “Chinese question” was in essence how to exploit a cheap source of labour when the supply of white workers in the west was erratic. Thus, at hearings of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration in 1885, the Chinese were often described as taking away opportunities deemed to belong to white workers. The same attitude prevailed at hearings of the 1902 royal commission. The commissioners asked the question, “Will the prohibition of further immigration of Chinese labour injuriously affect the various industries of the country?” The two commissions came to the same conclusion regarding the Chinese, who were perceived as undesirable and non-assimilable because of alleged cultural and social peculiarities. Their labour had been needed in mining, forestry, railway construction, canning, and other industries where white workers were not available, but the increasing numbers of Europeans greatly reduced the need to import Chinese. Therefore both commissions recommended restrictions, in the form of a head tax, to control further immigration. The commissioners in 1902 concluded that “this class of immigration falls far short of that standard so essential to the well-being of the country. From a Canadian standpoint it is injurious, and in the interest of the nation any further immigration ought to be prohibited ... There is a surplus of this class of labour at the present time ready to enter any avenue of unskilled labour that may open.”

Between 1875 and 1923, British Columbia passed numerous laws restricting the rights of the Chinese. A bill in 1884 disallowed them from acquiring Crown lands and diverting water from natural channels. The Coal Mines Regulation Amendment Act of 1890 prevented them from working underground and an amendment in 1903 forbade them from performing skilled jobs in coal mines. The Provincial Home Act of 1893 excluded Chinese from the public home for the aged and infirm. They were prohibited from being hired on public works in 1897. An act of 1900 stipulated that they could not hold a liquor licence. Since their names were excluded from the provincial voters’ list, Chinese were also barred from obtaining a hand logger’s licence. One of the conditions in the sale of Crown timber was that Asians not be employed. The Chinese were also barred from the professions of law and pharmacy. Because the provincial voters’ list was used as a qualification, they were excluded from municipal office, school boards, jury service, and election to the provincial legislature. The 1920 Provincial Elections Act reaffirmed that all Chinese were disqualified from voting.

In addition to the legislative exclusions, there were other efforts in British Columbia to reduce directly or indirectly the competition from Asian labour. For example, the Civil Service Act of 1917 stipulated that no one could work in the civil service who was not a British subject. The Factories Act of 1922 forbade night employment in laundries and restricted the hours of operation from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Since Chinese hand laundries operated late at night, they were most severely affected by this law. The same year the British Columbia Fisheries Commission recommended that Asian fishermen be eliminated from the industry by reducing the number of licences issued to them. British Columbia was not the only province to pass legislation against the Chinese. In Saskatchewan they were disenfranchised in 1908, and four years later the provincial legislature passed an act disallowing the employment of white females in restaurants and other businesses owned or managed by Chinese. The bill prompted the governments of Ontario and British Columbia to pass similar legislation in 1914 and 1923 respectively.

The first federal legislation against the Chinese was in the form of a head tax introduced in 1885, after the Canadian Pacific Railway was built. Prior to the completion of the railway, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had been unwilling to take any measure that might jeopardize the project, despite political pressure from British Columbia. As he stated in the House of Commons in 1883, “It will be all very well to exclude Chinese labour, when we can replace it with white labour, but until that is done, it is better to have Chinese labour than no labour at all.” The 1885 act imposed a tax of $50 on virtually every Chinese person entering the country. It also stipulated that vessels docking in Canadian ports could carry no more than one Chinese for every fifty tons of cargo. Those who entered Canada were given a certificate, which had to be handed in to the controller in exchange for a certificate of leave when they left Canada, even temporarily; otherwise they would not be allowed to return. The head tax was raised to $100 in 1900 and to $500 three years later at the recommendation of the 1902 royal commission. Between 1886 and 1924, 82,380 Chinese entering Canada paid a head tax, and 7,960 Chinese were exempted. In total, the immigrants produced about $22.5 million in revenue in these years, mostly in head tax.

In 1923 the federal Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, the most comprehensive legislation ever enacted to exclude Chinese from entering the country and to regulate those already here. The act stipulated that entry to Canada by persons of Chinese origin, regardless of citizenship, would be restricted to diplomats, children born in Canada, merchants, and students; all others were in essence excluded. The act also required all Chinese in Canada to register with the federal government within twelve months and obtain a certificate. The penalty for failing to register was a fine of up to $500 or imprisonment for up to twelve months. Furthermore, any individuals who intended to leave the country temporarily had to give written notice to the controller before their departure, specifying the foreign port that they planned to visit and the route that they intended to take. Those who had so registered would be permitted to return within two years. Until its repeal in 1947, the 1923 act virtually stopped Chinese immigration to Canada. The Chinese population in this country declined since no new immigrants were admitted and some returned to China. It peaked in 1931 at 46,519, eight years after the passing of the act. From then on, it decreased to 34,627 in 1941 and to 32,528 ten years later. The numbers would rise again only in the fifties when, after World War II, Chinese immigrants were admitted once more (see Table 1).

Towards the end of the war, the discriminatory policy had become an embarrassment for Canada, since many Chinese Canadians had contributed to the war effort and China was an ally. The denial of civil rights based on race also contradicted the statement on human rights embodied in the charter of the United Nations. The United States had repealed its Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and now admitted 105 immigrants annually. In 1945, a year after the federal government had called up Chinese Canadians in British Columbia for compulsory military training, the provincial government made a concession by granting the right to vote to soldiers of Asian origin in the Canadian armed forces. The passing of the Canadian Citizenship Act in 1946 also made it difficult for the country to maintain second-class status for its Asian population. The following year, Parliament repealed the Chinese Immigration Act, lifting an exclusion that had lasted for twenty-four years. The Chinese in British Columbia were allowed to vote in 1947, and those in Saskatchewan four years later. By the fifties most of the discriminatory laws against the Chinese had been removed.

Although restrictions against Chinese immigrants were lifted, the federal government did not consider them the equals of those from Europe and the United States. In the decade after the war, Canada maintained an immigration policy that favoured Europeans and discouraged those from Asia and other non-white countries. Prime Minister Mackenzie King explained this policy to the House of Commons on 1 May 1947: “Large-scale immigration from the orient would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population. Any considerable oriental immigration would, moreover, be certain to give rise to social and economic problems . . . apart from the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act and the revocation of [the] order in council . . . regarding naturalization, the government has no intention of removing the existing regulations respecting Asiatic immigration unless and until alternative measures of effective control have been worked out.”

The Chinese were placed under the same restrictive conditions of admission as other Asians. An order-in-council of 1930 had prohibited “the landing in Canada of any immigrant of any Asiatic race” except the wives of Canadian citizens and unmarried children under the age of eighteen. A subsequent regulation in 1950, which specified the categories of admissible immigrants to Canada, stipulated that the provisions did not apply to “immigrants of any Asiatic race.” The Cold War and the Sinophobia of the 1950s gave the government further justification for maintaining a restrictive policy towards Chinese immigrants. As John Whitney Pickersgill, minister of citizenship and immigration from 1954 to 1957, stated, “The only reason that admission was confined to unmarried children was, of course, that a chain of migration would have been set up that would have been very hard to control because of the lack of facilities of any kind that could be made available in China to provide accurate information ... As I say, in order to make sure ... that our limited immigration was not permitted to become an avenue for the back door infiltration of communist agents ... it was felt by the government responsible at that time, and has been felt by the present government since, that these controls had to be maintained.”

In the years after 1947, a relatively small number of Chinese entered Canada. Between 1949 and 1955, 12,560 immigrants were admitted, about 60 percent of whom were wives and children. Many who came in the fifties were family members who had been separated from husbands and fathers during the period of exclusion. In 1950, for example, 60 percent of the 1,036 Chinese immigrants to Canada were children and 32 percent wives. The following year, out of a total of 2,182 immigrants, 60 percent were children and 25 percent wives. As more families were reunited, the proportion of children entering Canada gradually declined to 35 percent of the total in 1952 and to 17 percent three years later. In all, between 1949 and 1955, 4,247 children and 3,325 wives entered Canada. By contrast, the percentage of Chinese destined for the labour force in this period was only 21 percent. This wave of immigration gradually altered the size and composition of the Chinese community in Canada. According to the 1951 census, there were 32,528 Chinese in the country, with a ratio of 374 men to 100 women (see Table 1). As a result of post-war immigration the community rose to 58,197 by 1961, and the ratio between the sexes greatly improved to 163 men for every 100 women. A sizable second and third generation also began to emerge.

It was not until changes were made to immigration policy in 1962 that Chinese could apply independently to enter Canada, but there was still a discriminatory clause that permitted a wider range of sponsorship for those from Europe and the United States. Between 1956 and 1967, a total of 30,564 Chinese immigrants came to Canada, many as part of a family unit. After 1967, when Canada adopted a universal point system for assessing potential immigrants, the Chinese were finally admitted under the same criteria as people of other origin. These changes brought record levels of immigrants to Canada. Between 1968 and 1984, 170,720 Chinese are estimated to have entered the country from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the next seven years, another 176,197 individuals came from these areas; they made up about 16 percent of the total immigration for the period. By 1991 an estimated 388,651 Chinese had immigrated to Canada since the Chinese Immigration Act was repealed in 1947.

Hong Kong, and not mainland China, became the major source of Chinese immigrants in the post-war decades. Between 1977 and 1984 about 64 percent of those who immigrated to Canada were estimated to have come from Hong Kong, and between 1985 and 1991 it supplied over 70 percent of the estimated total. A sizable number of Chinese also came to Canada as refugees from Indochina in 1979–80. In response to the growing refugee population displaced from Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea (Cambodia), Canada in 1978 had announced a plan to accept 50,000 refugees from southeast Asia. By April 1980 it had increased its intake by 10,000. In all, Canada accepted 60,049 Indochinese refugees between 1979 and 1980, about 30 percent (18,021) of whom were linguistically Chinese; Cantonese speakers made up about 20 percent (12,212) of the total.

Source: Canadian census data, 1911–91.

*Note: Total number of Chinese in Canada for 1991 is based on single- and multiple-origin figures combined.

Coming mainly from Hong Kong, but also from mainland China, Taiwan, and other southeast Asian countries, post-war Chinese immigrants had a more diversified occupational and educational background, and many were accustomed to a sophisticated urban culture. Data on the intended occupations of those who entered Canada between 1954 and 1984 indicate that as many as 25 percent were professionals. Clerical and sales occupations made up another 21 percent. Overall, managerial, professional, and white-collar occupations accounted for 53 percent of the Chinese destined for the Canadian labour market in these years. About 18 percent came as service workers, probably in the restaurant and food-service industries. No more than 5 percent were unskilled workers, whereas skilled workers made up 16.4 percent of the total. These post-war Chinese immigrants transformed the Chinese community and contributed to the multicultural composition of Canadian society.

In 1978 Canada amended its immigration policy to allow for the admission of entrepreneurs as immigrants without assessment on the basis of occupational demand or arranged employment. To qualify, a person had to establish or purchase a controlling interest in a business in Canada that could provide employment to at least five Canadians; the entrepreneur was required to participate in the daily management of the business. But it was not until 1985 that the policy of admitting business immigrants was expanded to include investors and self-employed persons. Investors had to have a successful record in business or commercial undertakings, have accumulated a net worth of at least $500,000, and have made an investment of at least $250,000 in direct business ventures in Canada or through private investment syndicates or government-administered venture capital. These changes in policy greatly facilitate the flow of immigrant capital into Canada.

A large proportion of the business category to Canada has been from Hong Kong and to a lesser degree from Taiwan. In 1983, 19 percent, including dependents, came from Hong Kong and another 4 per cent from Taiwan (see Table 2). Within two years the number of business immigrants from Hong Kong more than doubled to 2,821 and made up about 44 percent of all those admitted. The volume of business immigration to Canada continued to increase; in 1989 alone, Canada admitted 17,564 business immigrants and their dependents, about 30 percent of whom came from Hong Kong and 13 percent from Taiwan. In that year, business immigrants from the two areas constituted about 43 percent of all immigrants admitted under this category, and in 1990 they made up about 50 percent.

Note: “Total business immigrants” includes principal applicants and dependants who entered Canada as entrepreneurs and self-employed and from 1896 also includes investors.

By 1971 the Chinese-Canadian population had reached 124,600; ten years later it had expanded to 285,800 and by 1986 to 412,800. At the time that the 1991 census was taken, there were 652,645 persons of Chinese origin. In 1901 only 14 percent of Chinese in Canada had resided outside British Columbia. The proportion of those living in other provinces increased to 30 per cent in 1911 and to 41 percent ten years later. Since World War II, like other recent immigrants to Canada, the Chinese have tended to settle in metropolitan centres. The 1986 census indicates that 89 percent of the Chinese lived in a Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), that is, a continuously built-up area that serves as the main labour market of an urbanized core of 100,000 or more in population. Toronto alone accounted for 35 percent of the Chinese population in Canada and Vancouver another 26 percent. The 1991 census further shows that 90 percent of the Chinese in Canada reside in three provinces, with 47 percent in Ontario, 31 percent in British Columbia, and 12 percent in Alberta.

As more Chinese have entered Canada since the late 1960s, a new community has emerged. Some of its features can be traced to the history of Chinese immigration to Canada. Other aspects are distinct and reflect the characteristics of the more recent arrivals.

Largely as a result of the exclusion of the Chinese between 1923 and 1947, but also because of the large volume of immigration in recent years, the Chinese-Canadian population continued to be predominated by those born outside the country. Despite its long history in Canada, therefore, the community has some social and linguistic features characteristic of more recent immigrant groups. As family immigration increased in the 1950s, the Canadian-born segment of the population grew from 31 percent in 1951 to 40 percent ten years later. However, the large volume of Chinese immigration in the late 1960s and thereafter substantially increased the foreign-born stock. As a result, Canadian-born Chinese began to decline in relative terms to 38 percent by 1971 and to 25 percent in the next decade, and they only increased again to 29 percent in 1986 as the population base of first-generation Chinese expanded enough to produce a new generation. The total Chinese population in Canada more than doubled between 1971 and 1981 and almost doubled again during the following decade. By the time the 1991 census was taken, 652,645 persons claimed their ethnic origin as Chinese. These demographic changes suggest that, since the 1960s, immigration played a larger role in total population growth than natural increase.

The vast majority of the Chinese population continues to be foreign-born. Data from the 1986 census indicate that 71 percent of the Chinese in Canada were born outside the country. The majority came to Canada only after 1967. Sixty percent of the total Chinese population, including those born in Canada, immigrated to Canada in the eighteen years between 1968 and 1986. Counting only those born outside Canada, as many as 85 percent of the first-generation Chinese entered the country in the post-1967 period. This pattern tends to depict the Chinese as recent immigrants to Canada, despite their presence in the country as early as 1858.

There is further evidence to suggest that the growth of second and subsequent generations of Chinese Canadians is a recent phenomenon. The age structures of those born outside Canada and those born in the country reveal that native-born Chinese tend be concentrated in the younger age groups. In 1986 those between thirty and sixty-four years of age accounted for 54 percent of all Chinese born outside Canada. However, among those born in the country, as many as 61 percent were under sixteen years of age, and another 26 percent were between sixteen and twenty-nine. In short, for the Canadian-born Chinese, as many as 87 percent were under thirty years of age in 1986. These statistics suggest that the native-born Chinese population in Canada is relatively young, and second and subsequent generations of Chinese Canadians began to expand as the population of first-generation Chinese surged upward in recent decades.