How Chinese Slaves became the legal replacement for Black Slaves

Under law men are equal, but some more so than others.

( Read in:中文 ) The late 19th and early 20th centuries were tumultuous times around the World.  Events in this period set precedent for an upcoming chain of events that would shape not only the face of Asia but also that of the entire world.  Empires were vying for power, old rivalries were growing stronger, and new Enemies were being made.  Of course through all these events, it was the common folk that suffered the most and that had the most to lose. The banning of slavery in the United Kingdom and later in the United States of America would inadvertently create a demand for cheap labour that could be exploited while finding legal loopholes in the explicit laws that had prohibited slavery.  It wasn't long before, a new host was found for this parasitism, it was the dying Empire of Qing.

The Qing Dynasty was not Chinese in the true sense of the word because Qing emperors were actually from Manchuria.  By the late 19th Century, Qing has been crippled by the forced drug trade of opium by the British who were essentially holding the country hostage, the Germans who had annexed Qingdao and the Japanese who were seeking to make inroads and to influence the throne as much as possible while occupying neighbouring Korea. They saw the weakness of Qing as a golden opportunity to expand their own Empire which was undergoing Meiji Reformation. To make matters worse, Qing had already suffered many internal problems due to corruption and the populace was fractured with certain ethnic groups supporting the throne and others secretly holding resentment due to the heavy-handed tactics of corrupt local officials that the Qing Empire was turning a blind eye to. 

Corrupt local officials began turning a blind eye to organized crime groups who would then prey on the local population and were more than willing to work with foreigners in order to gain maximum profits. By the time the 20th century came around, a number of organized crime syndicates had sprouted up, most famously the Axe Gang in Shanghai (on which many martial arts films now base their villains, although the gang only started in the 1920s, other similar organisations had already existed) as well as several in Canton which is now Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. Local officials and police turned a blind eye, either for monetary gain or for concerns over their own safety. The British had also gained control of a number of regions and began to force Qing rulers to trade tea for the massive reserves of Opium that they were unable to offload in Europe but that they nonetheless wanted to profit off. Britain could therefore claim they weren’t stealing the tea but were in fact trading for it.

While drug running and prostitution were profitable in China, the foreign investors were seeking a different type of investment, one based on human capital, especially to fulfil the deficit now left over in the wake of slavery bans. This was especially true now that a new craze had begun, the Gold rush. 

The discovery of untapped gold in the United States (along with silver mines) and shallow gold reserves in Australia led to a sudden demand in labour. Slavery had been banned and newly formed mining corporations knew that sourcing labour from the black population was likely to draw government attention and cause, in their view, needless interference in attempts at maximum profits. Slavery laws existed, but law surrounding indentured labour were much vaguer and much more appealing for exploitation, this meant that the Qing Dynasty instability would provide the perfect opportunity to legally enslave Chinese workers via unfair and exploitative contracts.

So-called recruiters that worked for organized crime organizations in China would be paid for the amount of workers that they could gather to be shipped off to gold fields in the United States and in Australia. Many times “recruiters” would lie by telling potential workers about the “wonderful conditions” they would experience overseas. They would then make the worker go into debt to pay for the voyage to the United States or Australia, charging an exorbitant price for the voyage so that the worker would have no choice but to essentially work without payment in order to repay the debt.  Ships would be filled with as many workers as possible in cramped and dangerous conditions so that many died on the voyage or after arriving at the destination.  This contract system, worked as a loophole in getting around existing slavery laws because individuals had supposedly willingly come with a contract under their own volition.  As a matter of course, the demand for workers would often outweigh the supply of willing participants that could be tricked into indentured labour, in such cases gangs kidnapped boys and men to fulfil their quota.  Documents would then be forged to pretend that they had willingly signed contracts or they would be forcibly coerced into signing the contracts themselves. 

This worked surprisingly effectively because neither Australia nor the United States were particularly concerned with the welfare workers or authenticity of documents. So while slavery was technically illegal, the practice continued. There were of course individual and more wealthy Chinese that paid for their own journeys to the United States and Australia however for brevity we shall only discuss the system that acted as a de facto crutch for Chinese slavery in the West.

Interestingly, supporting documents from the period show that immigration of Chinese women was very low, the Chinese were expected to work, not to breed. Once census shows that of more than 5000 workers on a particular goldfield, that only one Chinese woman was present. Chinese women immigrated with more wealthy families that tended to be found in small Chinese communities that were located in cities. Poor treatment of Chinese people in general lead to Chinese communities forming Chinese Associations that would help Chinese people address any difficulties they faced and appeal to police and local governments with varying success.

In general, the treatment of indentured labourers was very poor. Local miners saw them as a threat to livelihood and a “foreign menace”, likewise, companies saw them as expendable. Evidence suggests that of the two, American conditions were significantly worse than Australian mining conditions which may well relate to the type of mining.

In Australia, mistreatment came from fellow labourers however injuries and deaths from mining were statistically lower than America because in the Australian case, the majority of mining at the time was panning (sifting gold from rivers and streams) or opencast type mines where collapse is less likely and where less dynamite is used.

In America, while panning was used, other types of mining that made use of explosives were also widely employed. In some cases, casualties may have been causes by miscommunications in language but in many cases the lax approach taken by corporations was because the Chinese were seen as expendable. Many, many Chinese died working on the American railroad projects that were aggressively expanding at the time. When Chinese workers complaining about the extremely dangerous conditions, lack of water and proper food and other issues, they were forcibly repressed and Chinese were often smeared as “lazy” or “tricksters” with local governments more than happy to go along with the pretence so that rather than improve conditions, Chinese were unfairly targeted with racist policies.

Chinese were also sought to work on plantations and as early as in 1862 during the Civil War, the Republican-controlled Congress sought to prevent southern plantation owners from replacing their enslaved African American workers with unfree contract or "coolie" labourers from China.

APPROVED, February 19, 1862.

At this point the law was designed to prevent a resurgence of slavery. To prevent the law from being misread, Section 4 of the Act stated “And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act hereinbefore contained shall be deemed or construed to apply to or affect any free and voluntary emigration of any Chinese subject, or to any vessel carrying such person as passenger on board . . . .”

While the law was meant to prevent slavery-like conditions, it was never actually implemented because it was very difficult to prove who was a “coolie” and who was not.

Ironically, despite the caveat, the law that was meant to protect people later came to be used for the purpose of pushing the 1882 Chinese Labourer Exclusion Act which fuelled anti-Asian sentiments and racism.

Jung (2005) states: “The legal exclusion of Chinese laborers in 1882 and the subsequent barrage of anti-Asian laws reflected and exploited this consensus in American culture and politics: “coolies” fell outside the legitimate borders of the United States . . . .  A year before Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he emblematized this consensus by signing into law a bill designed to divorce “coolies” from America, a little known legislation that reveals the complex origins of U.S. immigration restrictions. While marking the origination of the modern immigration system, Chinese exclusion also signified the culmination of preceding debates over the slave trade and slavery, debates that had turned the attention of proslavery and antislavery Americans not only to Africa and the U.S. South but also to Asia and the Caribbean.”

In the early days in Australia, convicts sent from Britain made up the majority of slave labour however this legal slavery began to dry up and plantation owners began feeling the pressure due to a lack of labour. In 1837 a Committee on Immigration proposed coolie labour from India and China as possible means to meet the demand of labour in the industry. Initially, Indians were the first to be “imported” with 56 Indians arriving in a state of starvation in 1846. Coolies suffered harsh treatment and even assaults and imprisonment, when reported on by a local newspaper, a slave-owner wrote an angry response letter that was published in the newspaper claiming that it was the Indians own fault and that they had too many demands. Public outcry led to India being discontinued as a source of labour.

The first shipment of 150 Chinese coolies arrived in Melbourne in 1847 aboard the brig Adelaide and another 31 arrived in Perth a year later. Toward the end of 1848, Nimrod and Phillip Laing brought a further 420 mostly Chinese coolies into the Port Phillip District. Many of these coolies were abandoned, perished in the bush, were jailed, or were found wandering the streets of Melbourne with no food or shelter.

Robert Towns and Gordon Sandeman were main organisers of the trade in coolies, they organised for 1500 Chinese coolies to be shipped into Australia up to the year 1854. Unsurprisingly their corrupt practices led to a number of scandals occurred that caused a government select committee to be formed to investigate the importation of Asiatic labour. The governmental inquiry found that 70 coolies had died aboard the ship called the General Palmer during the voyage from Amoy to Sydney and that others had died from sickness once in Australia. There were no berths, bedding, medical, or toilet facilities available on the vessel. It was further discovered that the so called “recruitment process” involved “a great deal of kidnapping” and that many did not understand why they had been brought to Australia or what the contracts they had signed in English even meant. The scandal caused the end of Chinese labourers being sourced until the gold rush began and where the flow of workers restarted in 1858.

The untold story of Asian slavery remains, well, mostly untold. Today, anti-Asian sentiments begin to repeat the past prejudices that targeted Asians unfairly and viewed them as expendable. We do well to address these biases, if indeed we have them, by taking a moment for some honest introspection to see if we are not being shaped by the anti-Asian narratives and propaganda being pushed in the media.

Moon-Ho Jung, “Outlawing “Coolies”: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation,” American Quarterly 57, No. 3 (Sep., 2005): 678.

Aarim-Heriot, Najia (2003). Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and racial anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. University of Illinois Press. p. 121. ISBN 0252027752.

Barnwell, R. G. (August 1866). "Coolies as a Substitute for Negroes". Debow's Review, Agricultural, commercial, industrial progress and resources.: 215–217

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