Chinese head tax
It was announced yesterday that the Canadian government will finally issue a formal apology over the Chinese head tax.
In a nutshell, the Chinese head tax was a crippling charge applied solely to Chinese immigrants between the years 1885 to 1923. It came into effect immediately after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway; after using thousands of Chinese workers for cheap hard labour to build the railroad, the head tax was created specifically to prevent more Chinese immigrants from entering the country. (In 1923, Canada barred its gates to Chinese immigrants entirely, not reopening them until 1947.)
The charge began in 1885 at $50 per person but was raised to $100 and, by the turn of the century, to $500 -- a fortune at the time. The term "head tax" is actually a euphemism, because in effect it was a mortgage placed on the lives of Chinese immigrants. From Wikipedia:In the early 1900s, the value of $500 was enough to purchase two homes in Montreal, or a 1/4 section of land in many provinces. These penalties, or "taxes," never actually benefitted the original payers as the funds went into a Consolidated Revenue Fund and were spent on 'public' facilities from which Chinese were generally barred--and, who, later, also had their right to vote taken away, as "dis-enfranchised" subjects (i.e., taxation, without representation).
According to Wikipedia, in the 38 years that the head tax was in place, the Canadian government collected a total of $24 million (face value) from its Chinese immigrants - which, if converted to 1988 dollars, is an estimated $1.2 billion. The impact the tax had on the Chinese communities in Canada is immeasurable: families were separated for decades because the men -- both those who had survived the hard labour of the railroad and those who immigrated later and paid the head tax -- could not afford to send for their wife or children.
Over 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid the head tax. Today, only 20 are still alive to hear the apology.
What was once a semi-relevant news item for me three months ago has become an issue close to my heart, now that I have been to rural China and, specifically, the Guangdong province -- my ancestral home, and also where the vast majority of Canada's Chinese immigrants are from. The province is wealthy now (relative to other provinces), but it was a different story as early as thirty years ago. And I cannot at all imagine what it was like to suffer during the last 200 turbulent years of China's history.
My own parents left Guangdong to escape the poverty brought on by Mao and his devestating Cultural Revolution. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Chinese workers who sold their lives to the Canadian railroad or paid the head tax had immigrated to Canada in order to flee a China ravaged by civil war, illegally pryed open for trade by Western colonial powers (the Opium Wars), humiliated by foreign concessions and ill-governed by the aging Qing dynasty. The unrest caused by these events and the widespread famine in Guangdong forced its impoverished citizens to leave, or die. (No one leaves their homeland because they want to. They leave because they must.)
Today, many descendents of Chinese immigrants in North America can trace their lineage back to a single cluster of peasant villages: the Taishan county in Guangdong. Taishan must have sent tens of thousands of its sons overseas -- they were to die in the mines and mountains of Canada. Of the first wave of 5000 Chinese labourers brought over to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway, less than 1500 survived, to set up their own marginalized communities in Canada's major cities. Canadian establishments slammed the door in their faces. In the mid-20th century, my own distant family had to set up a bank for Chinese immigrants in Toronto, because none of the Canadian banks would have them as customers.
You can still see where this bank used to be: an old Victorian house at 63 Grange Ave. It's now a boarding house for new immigrants. (When my familycame to Canada, we lived on the second floor; I spent the first seven years of my life in that house.) The bank's wooden Chinese banner still hangs above the entrance, though. You can also still hear the Taishan dialect of Cantonese spoken in Toronto's Chinatown.
In a nutshell, the Chinese head tax was a crippling charge applied solely to Chinese immigrants between the years 1885 to 1923. It came into effect immediately after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway; after using thousands of Chinese workers for cheap hard labour to build the railroad, the head tax was created specifically to prevent more Chinese immigrants from entering the country. (In 1923, Canada barred its gates to Chinese immigrants entirely, not reopening them until 1947.)
The charge began in 1885 at $50 per person but was raised to $100 and, by the turn of the century, to $500 -- a fortune at the time. The term "head tax" is actually a euphemism, because in effect it was a mortgage placed on the lives of Chinese immigrants. From Wikipedia:In the early 1900s, the value of $500 was enough to purchase two homes in Montreal, or a 1/4 section of land in many provinces. These penalties, or "taxes," never actually benefitted the original payers as the funds went into a Consolidated Revenue Fund and were spent on 'public' facilities from which Chinese were generally barred--and, who, later, also had their right to vote taken away, as "dis-enfranchised" subjects (i.e., taxation, without representation).
According to Wikipedia, in the 38 years that the head tax was in place, the Canadian government collected a total of $24 million (face value) from its Chinese immigrants - which, if converted to 1988 dollars, is an estimated $1.2 billion. The impact the tax had on the Chinese communities in Canada is immeasurable: families were separated for decades because the men -- both those who had survived the hard labour of the railroad and those who immigrated later and paid the head tax -- could not afford to send for their wife or children.
Over 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid the head tax. Today, only 20 are still alive to hear the apology.
What was once a semi-relevant news item for me three months ago has become an issue close to my heart, now that I have been to rural China and, specifically, the Guangdong province -- my ancestral home, and also where the vast majority of Canada's Chinese immigrants are from. The province is wealthy now (relative to other provinces), but it was a different story as early as thirty years ago. And I cannot at all imagine what it was like to suffer during the last 200 turbulent years of China's history.
My own parents left Guangdong to escape the poverty brought on by Mao and his devestating Cultural Revolution. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Chinese workers who sold their lives to the Canadian railroad or paid the head tax had immigrated to Canada in order to flee a China ravaged by civil war, illegally pryed open for trade by Western colonial powers (the Opium Wars), humiliated by foreign concessions and ill-governed by the aging Qing dynasty. The unrest caused by these events and the widespread famine in Guangdong forced its impoverished citizens to leave, or die. (No one leaves their homeland because they want to. They leave because they must.)
Today, many descendents of Chinese immigrants in North America can trace their lineage back to a single cluster of peasant villages: the Taishan county in Guangdong. Taishan must have sent tens of thousands of its sons overseas -- they were to die in the mines and mountains of Canada. Of the first wave of 5000 Chinese labourers brought over to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway, less than 1500 survived, to set up their own marginalized communities in Canada's major cities. Canadian establishments slammed the door in their faces. In the mid-20th century, my own distant family had to set up a bank for Chinese immigrants in Toronto, because none of the Canadian banks would have them as customers.
You can still see where this bank used to be: an old Victorian house at 63 Grange Ave. It's now a boarding house for new immigrants. (When my familycame to Canada, we lived on the second floor; I spent the first seven years of my life in that house.) The bank's wooden Chinese banner still hangs above the entrance, though. You can also still hear the Taishan dialect of Cantonese spoken in Toronto's Chinatown.