Status Updates From The Chinese Question: The G...

The Chinese Question in Australia and California, although ostensibly resembling each other, emerged in distinct contexts and centered around different concerns.

Fascinating, there is a strong “Anti-Transportation Movement” in mid-19th century Australia, as free workers feared the introduction of any form of semi-free labor, especially the coolie system (with explicit reference to post-slavery British Caribbean as a model to be avoided at all costs).

The Chinese question in Australia “emerged in context of a perceived clash between two empires in Asia, British and Chinese.”

Much of the anti-Chinese sentiment growing in California in the mid-1850s was a proxy for fear of large capital-intensive mining companies coming in and pushing small collectives and individuals off of claims yielding increasingly less.

It became a “bedrock principle of the Democratic Party in California.”

As early as 1853, the “Chinese question” was shaping electoral politics in California.

Chapter 3 is sort of a neat version of Abina and the Important Men.

Euro-American missionaries played important roles as translators to Chinese in places like San Francisco.

“Australian white society respected Chinese merchants who married white women because their unions bespoke a European bourgeois sensibility about proper gender and family relations. Most of these Chinese also became Christians.” In California, anti-miscegenation laws prevented this.

Chinese enjoyed more favorable legal and social conditions in Australian colonies than California, including no restrictions on marriage with whites (although uncommon, because Chinese migrants tended to keep conjugal households at home in China).

Mass remittances being sent back to southern China from gold fields, in a year and a half at the height of the boom in Australia, Victoria customs reported 830,000 pounds sterling worth of gold dust remitted. At its peak, average annual per capita remittances were greater than the annual cost of living in southern China (roughly 10 pounds sterling). Notwithstanding loads of gold carried home unreported.

Neat point about merchants gaining status within Chinese community because their standing in the Anglo-American societies of the gold field countries meant they could stand up for Chinese rights, and that this percolated back to China; alternatively, many in China decried merchants as enablers of a violent and degrading coolie trade.

“The diversity of Chinese mining practices also highlights the problem of thinking about labor in rigidly opposing categories of free and unfree.”

In 1884, the federal court in San Francisco banned hydraulic mining (which silted up rivers), the first environmental court ruling in US history.

Links closely with Macauley’s Distant Shores, migrant networks between southern China and Dutch Indies and mining operations there formulate certain forms of cooperatives, and strengthen the fraternal societies in China that linked migrants. These networks/societies extended to Australia and California, bridging modes of production/work unique to each place. And tied to the mass departures of the Taiping Rebellion.

Gold mining was “most commonly taken up not by individuals working on their own, as the stereotype..suggests, but in partnerships and other group arrangements.”

Hong Kong’s first Chinese-language newspaper (Chinese Serial) was a missionary publication.

Interesting point that Gold Rush migrants were generally financially-stable farmers, craftsmen, etc. (and overwhelmingly men, even as the gender ratio began to equalize among European and American migrants to the gold fields), whereas those truly desperate primarily ended up in the coolie trade working on Caribbean plantations (awful work).

While the Australian and California Gold Rushes radically broadened trans-Pacific networks of movement (physical, financial, material), at first they actually shut things down. Sailers with “Gold Fever” deserted in droves. In 1852, only 3 out of 35 foreign ships outside Melbourne could muster a full crew.

Contract and unfree labor was initially rampant in the California Gold Rush, but quickly collapsed because slaves, indentured Chinese and Native Americans, etc. could simply up and leave given the challenging physical environment and ability to make one’s own fortune in the hills.

Although there had long been cross-Pacific movement, the Gold Rushes “exploded” networks, creating the modern trans-Pacific by creating huge diaspora communities and movements of people, products, and finance particularly between the nodes of San Francisco, Sydney, and Hong Kong. It’s interesting that this doesn’t include Shanghai. Perhaps the city is better integrated into imperial networks linking west?

“…Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global capitalist economy, but an integral part of it.”