Immigrants and Minorities in British Society by Colin Holmes

Author:Colin Holmes [Holmes, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317384403
Google: t9m9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-16T05:59:43+00:00

5 The Chinese in Britain, 1860–1914

by J. P. May

Social historians have paid little attention to the Chinese in Britain: at first sight, this is strange. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century press commented on the dramatic impact of their presence in Australia and the United States of America, and accounts of the Chinese in Britain frequently referred to their exotic or potentially provocative habits such as opium taking, gambling and sexual relations with ‘white women’ and girls. The possibility of an interesting tension between Britain’s first Chinese residents and the wider community is given apparent support by the most outstanding manifestations of public feeling towards them. During the 1906 general election campaign, hostility to Chinese labour in the Transvaal was widespread, and in a night of rioting in 1911 all of Cardiff’s thirty or so Chinese laundries were destroyed.

Available evidence of the day-to-day relations of the Chinese and the rest of the community, however, reveals that this was not the whole picture. Although occasional notes of disquiet were expressed with respect to the Chinese presence, there is other evidence which would suggest that attitudes of indifference and even acceptance were present. Indeed, it has been suggested that the reason for the apparent lack of interest in Chinese immigrants ‘would seem to be largely that they have not appeared to pose any sort of minority problem’.1 An attempt is made in the following pages to assess the relations between the Chinese and British society and to speculate upon the factors which conditioned them.

Apart from diplomats and occasional visitors, the Chinese first came to Britain in the late 1860s. A number of Liverpool lines—and especially the Ocean Steam Ship Company’s Blue Funnel Line—began to trade with China from 1865 onwards and from an early date employed Chinese seamen. Even so, the number of the Chinese remained in three figures until the twentieth century, and in nineteenth-century Britain interest was focused almost entirely upon the Chinese abroad.

In the second half of the nineteenth century frequent reference was made in a variety of newspapers and journals to Chinese emigration. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Chinese had begun to emigrate in substantial numbers. By 1870, when the first groups of Chinese workers began to appear on the east coast of America, Chinese communities numbering some tens of thousands could be found in Australia and in California. An American correspondent of The Times advised that a congressional committee inquiring into Chinese immigration had estimated that there were 35,000 Chinese in San Francisco alone;2 whilst in Australia the immigration of substantial numbers of Chinese into Victoria had begun in the 1850s, and a correspondent of The Times in New South Wales complained in 1877 that there were 17,000 Chinese in that state alone where ‘All the working-classes instinctively resent the idea of a Chinese “proletariat”’.3 Living conditions in China, reported as little above subsistence level, and sometimes not even that, provided a strong motive for emigration, and these Chinese emigrants could easily be perceived as the thin end of a wedge comprising 350 million of their compatriots.

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