Early Chinese Migrants to Australia: A Critique of the Sojourner Narrative on Nineteenth-century Chinese Migration to British Colonies

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the issues surrounding nineteenth-century Chinese migration to British colonies, especially Australia. The issues discussed in the paper include the origin of the term “sojourner” and its relationship to Western colonialism, and the origin of the term huaqiao (overseas Chinese) and its relationship to Chinese nationalism. By being critical of the narrative of the “sojourner” for its cultural essentialist approach to Chinese migration, the paper highlights two important aspects of Chinese migration patterns and behaviour that are often neglected by the sojourner narrative: socioeconomic circumstances at the origin of migration and Western colonialism at the destination of migration. The paper argues that the Chinese publications by the migrants and what happened in Hong Kong at that time demonstrate the consequences of the combination of these two aspects of history. The paper finally observes that the little understood behaviour of the Chinese peasantry migrants appears to be post-modern and transnational.

本文对围绕十九世纪中国移民原英国殖民地特别是澳大利亚的几个议题作出评价。这几个议题包括：把中国移民称为“寄住者”的来源和它与西方殖民主义的关系，把中国移民称为“华侨”的起源和它与中国民族主义的关系。 本文对“ 寄住者”话语的文化本质论持批评态度。本文认为，“寄住者” 话语忽略了中国移民起源地的经济和社会状况和中国移民目的地的西方殖民主义对中国移民模式和行为的决定因素。从中国移民自己和与之有关的出版物以及香港的发展都可以看出移民起源地的经济和社会状况以及移民目的地的西方殖民主义两者影响的后果。本文最后点出了一个有趣但是没有引起注意的现象： 十九世纪那些行为不能被西方理解或是被嘲笑的中国农民移民跟后现代的精英跨国移民很相似。

Keywords:

• Chinese migration
• China–Australia
• sojourner
• huaqiao
• overseas Chinese
• colonialism
• nationalism
• transnational identity
• diaspora
• essentialism

Acknowledgments

This paper is one outcome of a study on early Chinese migrants to Tasmania carried out in conjunction with Professor Casandra Pybus and Dr Adrienne Petty at the University of Tasmania. I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the regional editor of this journal for their constructive, professional and scholarly comments, criticism and suggestions, most of which have been taken up in the final revision. Of course, any errors or inaccuracies in the final version are entirely my own. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Michael Barr for his professional and efficient handling of the review process.

Notes

1. The “Chinese Question” was a controversial and significant issue in the United States at that time as well. See Hoexter (1976).

2. The treaty was signed in 1895 between Japan and China as a result of China’s defeat in its war with Japan in 1894–95. The treaty forced China to give up its protection of Korea and hence Korea became a Japanese colony. Another humiliating condition forced on China was that China had to cede Taiwan to Japan.

3. Ci hai. Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1979, p. 123.

4. I appreciate an anonymous reviewer’s reminder of this important historical fact.

5. According to Chen Yuzheng, President of the Guangdong Overseas Chinese Association, in 2003 Guangdong attracted US$15.8 billion, of which US$12 billion was from overseas Chinese. Since 1978, donations to Guangdong from overseas Chinese, including those from Hong Kong and Macao, have reached 30 billion RMB, and have built more than 18,000 schools and half a dozen universities and colleges, 3,361 bridges and 18,537 kilometres of roads (Xinhua Guangzhou News, 21 June 2004).

6. Guangdong has the most extensive and well-resourced qiaoban because the province, until recently, had the most overseas Chinese connections. There is a prestigious qiaoban at every level of government administration from township to county and the provincial government.

7. “The most significant problem in Hawaii, at least according to Hawaiian missionaries, was the abandonment of wives and children in Hawaii by men returning to China” (Adams, 1937).

8. The Maoris were treated better than the Chinese were as a social and racial group, and were included as part of nation building, partly because of the Waitangi Treaty, and partly because of the guilt the whites felt for reducing the Maori population by more than half in a matter of a little over a decade. “In 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, Maori far outnumbered British immigrants, with a population of 115,000. By the 1850s the Maori population had fallen to 50,000, the result of ravages of wars and disease” (Ip, 2003, p. 230).

9. One woman from London was disowned by her family when she married a Chinaman. After the woman passed away the husband Lum Liu smuggled their sons Bill and Charlie to China. They were at first treated as foreign devils by the villagers. Only after Bill was first to put his hand up in his class of Chinese boys when the teacher asked who would sacrifice his life for the sake of China was he accepted as a Chinese (Grassby, 1985, p. 97). Another English woman who was married to a Chinese market gardener for 12 years, after giving birth to her seventh daughter, kissed all her children goodbye and then shot herself (TWN, 31 July 1901, p. 3), presumably because she could not cope with her circumstances any more. Tragic stories such as this are only footnotes to the construction of the sojourner discourse that disregarded ordinary Chinese settlers who wanted and tried hard to make a life in white colonies.