Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  When their appeals to the emperor went unanswered, the Chinese on Cuba joined others in rebellion. Two thousand fought in the Cuban forces in the first war of independence in the 1870s.7 Some of the Chinese soldiers must have had battle experience, probably from the Taiping Rebellion, and they played a substantial role in the struggle for Cuban freedom up to 1902. A monument to the fallen Chinese in Havana has the following inscription: “There was not one Cuban Chinese deserter, not one Cuban Chinese traitor.” But in spite of the gratitude of the new nation, the Cuban Chinese prospered only very gradually. Frustrated, many joined Fidel Castro’s rebel forces in the 1950s. The best known, Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, rose to become generals in the Cuban army, later fighting in Venezuela, Angola, and Nicaragua. The majority of the Chinese-Cubans did not see Castro’s regime through rose-tinted glasses, though; there are now less than 7,000 left—the rest have fled the island for better opportunities in Florida or New York.

  The English-speaking Caribbean received far fewer Chinese migrants than Peru or Cuba, but the commercial opportunities there turned out to be far greater. These countries have strong Chinese organizations and many community and business leaders of Chinese origin. In Guyana, Arthur Chung was the first president of the country, from 1970 to 1980—and the first ethnic Chinese head of state of any country outside Asia. Most remarkably, there has been a significant remigration of highly educated Chinese Caribbeans back to China over the past generation. But even before then, a striking example of remigration took place: Eugene Chen, born in Trinidad in 1878, served as China’s foreign minister several times in the 1920s and 1930s, though he spoke no Chinese. One of his sons, Percy Chen, became a committed Communist and one of the Comintern’s key Chinese agents (under his Russian name, Pertsei Ievgenovich Tschen). Even in and around China, the Caribbean stayed transnational.

  In the Pacific islands, the first Chinese came on ships as sailors, cooks, and carpenters. In Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, and Tahiti, workers were brought in from Guangdong province to labor on plantations or in construction. Today there are about 20,000 people of Chinese descent in the Pacific, and they have a significant and increasing influence both on business and politics. In Fiji, most hotels and restaurants are owned by Chinese from Fiji, from Southeast Asia, and from China. Sir Julius Chan was twice prime minister of Papua New Guinea. Anote Tong is the current president of Kiribati. Gaston Tong Sang is the president of French Polynesia. The ancestral homes of all three are within a small area of northeastern Guangdong.

  Australia and New Zealand were favored destinations for Chinese sojourners or emigrants. But—as in the United States and Canada—the white authorities increasingly tried to exclude them. In New Zealand entry was restricted from the 1880s and almost impossible from the early 1900s—one law required all who entered to be able to read one hundred randomly chosen words in English. By the 1910s there were concerted efforts to force even naturalized citizens of Chinese descent out. In Australia the situation was similar. In the middle part of the nineteenth century, Chinese were attracted by opportunities for work and for learning skills; half a generation later the new state, based on a racist foundation, tried to throw them out. What was different in Australia was that in some parts of the labor movement anti-Chinese agitation did not really catch on, and some Chinese-Australian workers were able to organize and fight back against the government’s systematic discrimination. The Australian-born journalist Vivian Chow (Zhou Chenggui), who became one of the key newspaper editors in China in the 1930s, was not surprised: “Send a Chinese to America and he tries to become a monopolist because of the ambitious example set before him; send him to British Singapore and he strives to become a contractor with designs on knighthood. . . . Send a Chinese to Australia, he becomes a labor leader and a booster ‘for the working man’s paradise.’”8

  EVERYWHERE THEY WENT, Europeans dominated the world that the Chinese entered into. Through their colonial empires and their ethnic offshoots in the Americas, Australasia, and eastern Russia, people of European origin ruled the roost in terms of politics, the economy, and military affairs. Chinese mostly wanted to work or settle outside Europe—where there were more opportunities and easier access—but the European continent itself pulled them through a combination of fascination and abhorrence. Those who came were impressed, to the point of profound shock, by the might of European industry and weapons. They marveled at the products that were available to those who could afford them, and felt dizzy at the speed and intensity of changes in production and in landscape. But they also were dejected by what they saw as Europe’s lack of universal moral rules and personal sincerity, and by the racism directed against them as Chinese. Europe was a conundrum, ever attractive and ever repellent.

  Chinese had visited Europe for centuries and some had settled there. British ports, such as Liverpool, Bristol, and London, had a Chinese population in the eighteenth century, as had Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Most of the early settlers engaged in different forms of trade, and by the late nineteenth century they had been joined by other immigrants from their home areas in small Chinatowns in the main European cities. The first big influx of Chinese to Europe, however, was not workers but students, hundreds of whom arrived every year by the 1890s. In the first part of the twentieth century, the largest number of Chinese students went to Germany, followed by France and Britain. They mostly studied engineering or technical subjects, and some stayed, forming the first Chinese-European intelligentsias. Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore went mostly to Britain, for obvious reasons. By 1960 the Chinese-British population was around 40,000 and it is ten times that today. Britain is by far the most favored European destination for Chinese immigrants.

  After 1980, when China became more open to foreign contacts, travel to Europe started up again. Some came as tourists, with Britain and Italy the favorite destinations. Some chose to stay. The Italian city of Prato, in Tuscany, now has a population of more than 25,000 Chinese—about fifteen percent of the total population—who work in the garment industry. In Hungary, where there was a total of nine registered Chinese before Communism fell in 1989, there are now 27,000. As Europe’s own population declines, more Chinese are likely to be attracted by good salaries and decent working conditions within the European Union. The cultural attraction may be waning, though. One Chinese tourist, who had saved a lifetime to visit France in 2007, was not impressed. According to an article in Der Spiegel:

  When she was a young girl, Liu learned to admire the French as a people worth emulating, because of their polish and elegance. But now, as she stands on the Champs-Élysées with her video camera, she sees them as nothing but ordinary, jostling city dwellers, many of them out of shape and poorly dressed. Bits of paper and plastic bags float around on the street. “My dream has been destroyed,” she says.9

  More than ninety percent of all Chinese who emigrated went to do simple forms of menial work. They cleared forests, dug mines, and laid railroad tracks. In some countries, as we have seen, they worked on plantations, growing sugar, cotton, or opium. Though the majority came of their own will, some were press-ganged into going abroad, and some went before they were old enough to properly consent to the fate that awaited them. A significant number—possibly as many as a third of the total Chinese emigration—were contracted out as labor gangs during their initial period abroad, often for seven to eight years or more. The majority of those who went abroad returned to China, though some left again later in life. Most never got rich, except in experiences and impressions that their clansmen and neighbors who stayed at home never got, except through those few who traveled.

  As with other groups of migrants, Chinese often thought they were going abroad only for a time and would then return to China. These sojourners in a foreign country often turned into permanent emigrants and residents. They worked, got married, learned the local lifestyle, and got entangeled in a thousand bonds that made it difficult for them to leave the new country behind. What i
s remarkable is the number who insisted that their sojourn abroad was for limited time and did go back. A set of “reverse” push and pulls contributed: racism and exploitation abroad, attempts to push them out when their contracts finished, and the attraction of family, ancestors, and fields in the old country. For most uneducated Chinese emigrants, encounters with foreign customs and societies were a shock. They found attitudes and behavior (not to mention food) hard to stomach, and longed for home. One of them, arriving in New York around 1900, had been warned he would meet people who were

  Wild and fierce and wicked, and paid no regard to the moral precepts of Confucius and the Sages; neither did they worship their ancestors, but pretended to be wiser than their fathers and grandfathers. They loved to beat people and to rob and murder. In the streets of Hong Kong many of them could be seen reeling drunk. Their speech was a savage roar, like the voice of the tiger or buffalo. Their men and women lived together like animals, without any marriage or faithfulness, and even were shameless enough to walk the streets arm in arm in daylight.10

  And still the immigrants kept coming. Just like those who went from their villages to work in factories in the Chinese cities, they often found their new environment repulsive, but it contained opportunities that their villages simply did not have. Funding for their travel was usually paid by clansmen who already lived abroad or through a credit-ticket system, in which migrants first borrowed to pay for their trip. The debt was then sold to employers in the new country, whom the workers had to repay through their labor. A number of middlemen, mostly Chinese, profited in the process, and diasporic networks were created around the trafficking of migrants. It often took long to repay the debt, but most workers learned skills in the process that they could later use abroad or at home.

  Exploitation of Chinese migrant labor in their new countries was rampant. Some was considerably worse than that encountered by other immigrant groups. Causes included racism and the opportunity to exploit innocent villagers who knew nothing about the country or its laws. But there was also considerable exploitation of Chinese by other Chinese who had arrived before. Criminal gangs were ubiquitous in some Chinese communities abroad, and even established native place organizations or self-help societies exploited new arrivals for the profit of their elders through arranging work or housing at an added cost. Many new immigrants were entirely dependent on the advice of those who had arrived before them. Even though a surprising number of Chinese emigrant families did well in the second generation through their own labor, their fathers and mothers often struggled to learn a few basic truths about some of their countrymen. Just as in China itself, “Confucian values” or “common good” were fine phrases that could be used as covers for exploitation.

  The immigrants’ response to poor working conditions was often resistance and rebellion. The image of docile Chinese coolies abroad simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Not only did Chinese join the opposition against their oppressors, as we have seen in South America and Southeast Asia, but they also sometimes formed that opposition themselves. In places where it was difficult to join the established labor unions—because these very unions were campaigning against Chinese immigration—Chinese organized among other Chinese, often to confront foreign as well as Chinese employers.

  Much of the conflict within Chinese immigrant communities—which local authorities often wrote down to family feuds or gang conflict—was class based. Many who returned to play key roles in Chinese revolutions first earned their spurs organizing Chinese workers in Europe. Zhu De, who had been a soldier in China, arrived in Berlin in 1922, and became an organizer of Chinese workers there even before he joined the Communist party. In 1928, after he had returned to China, he helped found the Communist People’s Liberation Army. Several of Zhu’s fellow organizers of Chinese in Europe fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War; about a hundred Chinese from all over Europe served in Spain.11

  Chinese played a significant role in the wars that engulfed the world in the twentieth century, and not only in those that were fought in China. During World War I, large numbers participated in Europe, and during World War II Chinese and people of Chinese ancestry fought on all fronts. War destroyed and opened opportunities at the same time. For many Chinese Americans, World War II was the first time they felt they were treated as equals, not least because their skills were much needed in the war effort. “The war made a world of a difference to everyone. Not only to us, but mostly to us Chinese people. It was a lot of help,” said Tommy Wong, a US-born Chinese who served as a navy mechanic in the Pacific.12 War—especially a war in which the United States and China were fighting on the same side—became the great equalizer for a minority that felt under pressure. Unlike their Japanese fellow-citizens, Chinese Americans generally had a good World War II.

  But it was the First World War that had introduced Chinese to foreign wars and foreign ways of killing. Some 150,000 Chinese were recruited to serve as laborers on the Western Front in Europe, and at least 50,000 served on the Eastern Front, in Russia. The recruitment happened as part of an elaborate Chinese government plan to buy favors with the Allied Powers, which they thought would win the war. The first Chinese workers arrived in France in August 1916, officially as employees of private companies, since China was still neutral in the war (it waited to declare war on Germany until August 1917). As Allied losses increased, the need for Chinese workers grew exponentially. By the time the war ended, the Chinese served not just with the French army, but with the Russian, British, and American armies, too. They dug trenches and airfields, worked in munitions factories, steel mills, and mines, and helped bury the dead. At least three thousand died on the Western Front or on their way there. How many died in the East we do not know.

  The life of Chinese workers in Europe during World War I was tough. Many had been recruited among students and teachers eager to see Europe, and not from among the working class. The work was back-breaking, and carried out under military discipline, with little reward and many forms of punishment. The Chinese workers were supposed to return to guarded camps after work, though the camp system soon broke down. Many felt the harshness of European racism, being laughed at in the street or kicked by their commanders. The Times of London reported that though “a capable worker . . . the Chink, like the Kaffir, has to be kept under ward when he is not working. He gives little trouble if rightly managed, gambles a good deal, but does not get drunk or commit crimes of violence and is docile and obedient. But he must be restrained from contact with Europeans, and he has his own little tricks and dodges. . . . He is also taught to conform to British ideas of sanitation, cleanliness and discipline.”13 No wonder many Chinese felt their stay in Europe to be one long sorrow, undertaken for China’s sake. A song, often sung in the camps, showed their sadness:

  Thick mist now hides the sun

  And gentle dropping on pattering spots

  Urges the dull day on14

  But there were important exceptions to the general misery. By early 1917 evening classes were set up, and Chinese newspapers began to be published, at least on the Western Front, bringing news from home. The Chinese workers learned to organize, and the first strikes and protests took place against poor working conditions, low pay, and overt racism. Contacts with French and Belgian civilians increased. Some Chinese got local girlfriends, whom they later married. One worker, Zhang Changsong from Jiangsu province, married his French girlfriend in 1920; their marriage produced thirteen children and lasted sixty years. Many stayed long periods after the war, in part because of a lack of capacity to repatriate them to China, and often used the time to learn important skills. More than three thousand remained indefinitely in France, joining with the Chinese who arrived as students, and forming the first Chinese labor organizations in Europe.

  There are a number of little-known international connections between China and World War I. One involves Chinese labor transports to the Western Front in Europe going through Canada. Canadian authorities made every ef
fort to squelch defections and fraternization between ordinary Canadians and the transiting Chinese, but for the visitors these journeys meant the discovery of Canada, a country that over time would become a favorite for Chinese emigrants. Another unexplored story is that of Chinese workers on the Eastern Front. Most of them probably came from the eastern parts of the Russian empire, or from Russian-held areas of Manchuria and were sent to the western Russian borders beginning as early as 1915. Many joined the armies there, especially after the Russian Revolution, with most ending up fighting for the Bolsheviks in the Baltic region and along the Romanian front. Even though they made their careers with the Bolsheviks, the survivors suffered in Stalin’s great purges because of their foreign origin, with at least 11,000 arrested and 8,000 internally deported back to the eastern areas.15

  Besides workers, the other big group to go abroad from China was students. From the first students who were sent by the government in the late nineteenth century up to the explosion of Chinese brilliance in the world’s top campuses in the twenty-first century, some of China’s most vital links with the world have come through engaging with educational institutions abroad. As a group, students have been more mobile than any other part of the population—most have to travel to a new city in China, and some go abroad. Ideas travel with them, including new concepts of how to do things and of how things should be. While workers have populated China’s immigrant communities, students have given them their edge. They, more than any other group, have come to represent China to the world and the world to China.

  The explosion in numbers of Chinese going abroad to study started in the early twentieth century. Already by 1911 there were at least 10,000 students overseas, with the majority in Japan and the United States. Although the figure declined during the depression and the war with Japan, it is likely that by 1949 at least 150,000 Chinese had studied abroad. Of these roughly half returned to China. By 2010 the total number of those who have studied abroad exceeds 1.5 million, but during the first twenty-five years after China began to open up in 1978, only twenty-five percent of students abroad returned to their country.16 As with laborers, many students trained abroad live their lives between China and other countries, setting up families that are Chinese and transnational at the same time. Except in the period from 1950 to 1980, most Chinese students have traveled abroad on their own accord, supported by their families rather than by the government. And most of them have done well, struggling through a foreign language and a foreign culture to end often near the top of their class.