“Chinese Labour” and the Imperial Dimensions of British Racial Discourse

Abstract

The initial public debates over Chinese immigration and labor highlighted the interrelationship between high politics and popular opposition and between empire and metropole in the evolution of race relations in Britain. In these debates, the term “Chinese labour” rapidly accrued powerful symbolic meanings that extended well beyond the measurable economic impact of Chinese workers. “Chinese labour” served as a foil to the image of a pan-imperial “white labour” interest that politicians and union leaders employed to justify Chinese exclusion across the British Empire. In Britain, public discussions of race, law, and the protection of “white labour” against the encroachment of “Chinese labour” in Australia and South Africa popularized two specific arguments concerning Chinese immigrants. The first was that they were fundamentally incompatible with white communities and could therefore never assimilate with them. The second was that since Chinese immigrants represented the vanguard of an almost limitless population, they were threatening out of all proportion to their numbers in any given region. Law and the use of legal authority were central to these debates, which combined elements of the “scientific racism” of Anglo-Saxonism with economic opposition and moral concerns.KeywordsUnion LeaderChinese ImmigrantLanguage TestChinese WorkerImperial DimensionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.