History

Emigration from China was once a capital crime - because surely only enemies of the imperial court would choose to abandon the greatest civilization on Earth. In 1712, the emperor decreed that anyone who settled overseas should go back to be beheaded. Leaving China was also regarded as un-Confucian. Sons were meant to stay in the home village, to keep the ancestral graves clean and the clan's lineage unbroken.

In 1788, British explorer John Meares landed at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island with 70 Chinese carpenters he brought from the Portuguese colony of Macao. They built him a boat and then, it is thought, married into native communities on the island, their cultural traces soon lost. They were the first Chinese to set foot in Canada, and the last for 70 years.

The story of the Chinese who decamped for Canada really begins in the mid-19th century. Agricultural productivity in China could not keep pace with rapid population growth, and wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small land-owning class. The Qing dynasty, weakened by defeat in the 1839-42 Opium War with Britain, was pressured into concluding emigration treaties with Western powers.

The United States, for one, was scouting for a new pool of cheap labour following the abolition of slavery, and found it in China's pauperized landless peasantry. The migrants came mostly from the densely populated coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. They traded poverty and social unrest at home for a life of hard labour and racism abroad.

The first major wave of Chinese immigrants to North America was swept up in the gold rush. They began arriving in San Francisco - Gold Mountain in Chinese - in 1849. A decade later, California's gold veins were drying up as fast as anti-Oriental feeling was growing. When word filtered down of a gold strike in the Fraser River Valley in 1858, Chinese prospectors were among those who pursued the rumour north. They didn't know they would be allowed to work the mines only when white miners had moved on.

In 1860, others began to arrive in British Columbia directly from China. The following year, the first Chinese-Canadian baby was born.

Few of the men squeezed out of tumultuous, overcrowded southeast China in the 19th century had any intention of sinking roots abroad. Called coolies - from kuli, "bitter strength" - some left China willingly, while others were kidnapped by press-gangs. But many did end up staying in the New World. As well as seekers after gold, they were builders of the daunting B.C. section of the Canadian Pacific Railway; 700 of them died in the process. The 17,000 Chinese who helped build the railway were paid half as much as white workers. This wage differential was the norm for Chinese in Canada well into the 1930s.

Chinese migrants also worked as cooks and launderers. Their reputation in both spheres harks back to the early mining and railway camps, where they filled the gaps in those lopsided communities - they could have the "women's work" and welcome to it. They toiled in fish canneries. Or they worked for wealthy white families. They often show up in early photographs - it was a status symbol to have a Chinese houseboy hovering at the edge of a family portrait.

The Chinese were tolerated when they were a useful source of cheap labour. In 1861, a Victoria newspaper was welcoming: "We have plenty of room for many thousands of Chinamen. … There can be no shadow of a doubt but their industry enables them to add very largely to our own revenues."

But in 1885, after the last spike was struck at the end of the CPR track, many thousands of labourers were laid off. And at a Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, Chinese were often described as taking work away from white workers. Later that year, Canada imposed a head tax on Chinese seeking to enter the country. After the railway work ended, many Chinese drifted eastwards within Canada, and some returned to China.

Chinese labourers were at the centre of a little-known chapter of Canadian First World War history. For a year, beginning in April 1917, close to 80,000 men were shipped from China to British Columbia, then transported across the country by rail and dispatched from east-coast ports to the trenches of France. One of the governments ruling China at the time had joined the war on the side of the Western allies and offered some of the labourers it had in spades to the war effort. After the armistice, the Chinese labour battalions were repatriated along the same route. In both directions, they were transported in sealed cars lest they try to "jump train" and avoid the $500 head tax levied at the time against Chinese immigrants.

After the First World War, wartime industries closed, and demobilized soldiers were looking for work. On July 1, 1923, amid a post-war recession, Chinese became the only people Canada has ever excluded explicitly on the basis of race. For the next 24 years, virtually no Chinese were allowed to immigrate to Canada, and Chinese Canadians observed July 1 as "Humiliation Day", closing shops and boycotting Dominion Day celebrations.

In this era of discrimination, many Chinese created opportunities for self-employment. Family-run businesses, such as restaurants and laundries, sprang up both in small towns and in the Chinatowns that had emerged in the bigger cities across Canada. These small businesses became havens for Chinese people, both to operate and to work in. Discriminatory laws encouraged Chinese-only enterprises - in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario, for instance, Chinese employers were prohibited from hiring white females.

Vivienne Poy, the first Chinese-Canadian appointed to the Senate, devoted her February 1999 inaugural speech to the history of the Chinese in Canada. "During the Depression, the Chinese in Alberta received relief payments of $1.12 a week, less than half the amount paid to the rest of the population in need," she said. "Despite that, many prairie farming families owed their lives to the credits given to them by the Chinese store owners in their purchase of daily necessities during those difficult years."

Depression-era Chinatowns were lonely places. Those were the bad old bachelor-community days, when the immigration restrictions prevented Chinese men from bringing in their wives and families. In 1931, there were 1,240 men to every 100 women in Chinese Canadian communities. Census data show that most of the men were married. But their wives were in China and prevented from joining them.

For years, the president of the Vancouver Chinese Benevolent Association made an annual trek to Ottawa to petition for the law to be amended. "What we ask is not an open door to all Chinese who wish to come," Foon Sien told the authorities. "Our appeal is that the Chinese Canadian may have his family with him - a complete family, not one part in Canada and the other part in Hong Kong or China." With no new immigrants allowed in and some returning to China, the Chinese population of Canada declined from 46,500 in 1931 to 32,500 in 1951.

China had been an ally in the Second World War, and 500 Chinese Canadian men served in the Canadian army. The Chinese Exclusion Act - which contravened the United Nations charter of human rights that Canada signed after the war - was now out of step with the times. It was repealed in 1947, four years after the United States lifted a similar ban.

In the next few years, most of the other legislation that discriminated against Chinese Canadians was dismantled. They had, for instance, been disenfranchised during the First World War. Before he died at age 94, Won Alexander Cumyow - that first Canadian-born Chinese baby, born in Port Douglas, B.C., in 1861 - got his chance to cast a ballot. Chinese Canadians regained the right to vote in federal elections in 1947.

In the 1950s, most immigrants from China were wives and children of men already settled in Canada, and Chinese communities started to become less overwhelmingly male. But against the backdrop of Cold War-era anti-Chinese feeling, immigration policy still favoured Europeans over Asians. It was not until 1967, when the points system was introduced for selecting immigrants, that Canada began admitting Chinese using the same criteria as for any other applicants.

Changes to the immigration law in 1978 and 1985 promoted the arrival of wealthy entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They had to show a net worth of at least $500,000 and investment in a Canadian business venture of at least $250,000. The changes were introduced just as Hong Kong money was growing twitchy about the approach of the colony's July 1997 handover to China. In 1990, fully half of all business-category immigrants admitted to Canada came from Hong Kong or Taiwan.

In recent decades, however, most new Chinese Canadians have actually been middle-class rather than super-rich. Indeed, in the past 50 years, more than half the Chinese who have immigrated to Canada have been in white-collar occupations. They have tended to settle in suburbs of major cities, particularly Toronto and Vancouver. The last national census, in 1996, put the Chinese Canadian population at more than 920,000, with 46 per cent in Ontario and 34 per cent in British Columbia. Highly educated and upwardly mobile, the recent arrivals have transformed Canadian society and the Chinese communities within it.

On Dec 10, 2003 Inky introduced legislation, Bill C-333, entitled the Chinese Canadian Recognition and Restitution Act.  The purpose of the enactment is to recognize and apologize for the treatment that early Chinese immigrants received despite the extraordinary contribution they made in the building of Canada.

It provides for restitution to be made for the application of a head tax and the operation of the Chinese Immigration Act, 1923.  The restitution is to be devoted to educational materials on Chinese history and other projects agreed with Chinese groups.

Bill C-333 has the full support of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians.