Vol. 71/No. 11 March 19, 2007
For decades Ottawa refused to admit that forcing Chinese immigrants—and no one else—to each pay between $50 and $500 to come to Canada between 1885 and 1923 was unjust.
The head tax was aimed at limiting Chinese immigration into Canada. It was imposed just after the Canadian Pacific Railway was built, using the labor of some 16,000 superexploited Chinese workers.
Last June Prime Minister Stephen Harper admitted that the law had been a violation of fundamental human rights. The government agreed to compensate living head tax payers, or their surviving spouses, $20,000 each for the terrible consequences of its policies.
However, the head tax was ended in 1923, and very few of those who actually paid it are still alive. Only 37 head-tax payers have been given the promised compensation.
Meanwhile the government hasn’t paid one cent to any of the 337 widowed spouses who also applied.
Doug Hum, one of those fighting for redress to all head-tax families, said it took his father and uncle more than 10 years to pay off the $1,000 debt they took on to pay the head tax when they immigrated in 1912. They then were able to save just enough money to return to China and get married. But they couldn’t bring their wives to Canada because of passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923. This law banned virtually all Chinese immigration for the next 25 years, separating families, like that of Doug Hum, for decades.
Only 44 Chinese immigrants were able to enter Canada legally between 1923 and 1947, when the racist law was finally repealed.
Last July 1—Canada Day—those fighting for head-tax redress held demonstrations in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal. Protesters carried signs proclaiming, “It’s Still Humiliation Day.”
The first “Humiliation Day” protests took place across Canada on July 1, 1923. The day was then called Dominion Day. For years, Chinese Canadians refused to celebrate this day.
These protests were not isolated events but part of the long history of struggle of Chinese Canadians and Chinese immigrants against the injustices they face.
Yet many Canadian historians claim that Chinese Canadians were “docile.” For example, prominent labor historian Desmond Morton says that “Chinese labor, with its bare subsistence needs and docility, offered competition that no white worker could match and few white employers could resist.”
These claims are false. Chinese immigrants fought for their rights and for more than “bare subsistence” from the moment they arrived, beginning in the 1860s.
In the 150 years since then, Chinese Canadian workers have participated in, and in many cases led, scores of strikes, fights to establish unions, and struggles for equal pay for equal work, for a shorter workweek, and for the organization of industrial unions.
These battles reinforced struggles by the Chinese community against a host of racist laws and policies. For example, in 1922 the Victoria, British Columbia, school board decided to segregate the senior grades and put all Chinese students in separate schools. (The first four grades were already segregated.)
The board claimed that having Chinese children in the same schools as whites led to the “retardation” of white children’s progress as well as being “unsanitary.” Worst of all, the local Chamber of Commerce warned, “White children sitting side by side with Orientals tended to develop the idea of social equality.”
When school principals tried to march all the Chinese students to a separate Chinese school, students refused to go. The Chinese community organized the Anti-Segregation Association (ASA).
The ASA led a yearlong boycott by Chinese students of the schools. They forced the school board to retreat from its attempt to create a completely segregated school system. However, some Chinese students still had to go to separate schools or classes until after World War II.
Robert Simms contributed to this article.
Related articles:
Thousands of Chinese protest racist report by N.Y. TV station
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