Salient

Good Ol’ Kiwi Racism

By Tania Sawicki Mead | 11 Aug, 2008

For much of New Zealand’s history, Chinese immigrants in New Zealand were treated appallingly by their host country. Facing discrimination from both the law and private citizens, and racism at every turn, Chinese were never made to feel welcome. But discriminatory restrictions were also made to regulate Chinese immigration, as though it were in itself a social ill – restrictions faced by no other race in the world. Salient Feature Writer Tania Sawicki Mead investigates.

It is an embarrassing fact that too many New Zealanders rarely, if ever, engage thoughtfully with the icky details of race relations within our country over the last two centuries. When we do, it is all too easy to fall into mild apologism; acknowledging that while indigenous rights are an ongoing blight on our country’s political record, we at least have no documented history of outright apartheid or slavery. While blatant ignorance of the Treaty of Waitangi and similar documents of a heavy nature is rampant, even more shameful is the silence on one of the most disgusting chapters of our colonial past. I’m referring to something that I am guilty of being completely ignorant about until very, very recently, (at least in my understanding of the gruesome details) – the poll tax on Chinese immigrants to New Zealand.

Anyone with a semi-evolved race-dar will be aware that pockets of our happily multicultural nation continue to harbour some serious race-based prejudices, particularly towards the Asian community. Tragically, this is no recent development owing to increasing levels of international students or looser immigration laws. In the dark days when the term ‘racial purity’ was bandied about with wanton disregard for its scientific inaccuracy, Chinese immigrants to New Zealand suffered the most.

It all began with the shiny allure of gold. Most of the Chinese who migrated to Pacific-rim countries such as New Zealand came from the Pearl River delta area in the province of Guangdong. The Californian gold rush in 1848 lured thousands of Chinese to the United States, and when gold was found in Australia and New Zealand, the migration continued to the Pacific. When New Zealand’s business activity in mining areas took a dive, the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce sought to bring Chinese miners living in Victoria to Otago. By 1869 there were over 2,000 Chinese miners living in the province of Otago, joined by immigrants coming directly from China.

But natural resources have a tendency to be finite. By the late 1880s many miners began to look for work outside of the Otago minefields. They moved up north to bigger towns and settlements, many of them making a living in fruit shops, market gardens, laundries and commodity stores. This increased visibility in public life fuelled the bigotry and ignorance that marked the Chinese experience in urban, colonial New Zealand.

Anti-Chinese prejudices in the West had continued to ferment with the expansion of the British Empire, and the quasi-religious fervour with which many British subjects viewed their racial and societal superiority. Prominent European intellectuals such as the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed that the Chinese civilisation was retrogressing;

The history of China has shown no development, so that we cannot concern ourselves with it any further … we are faced with the oldest state in existence, and yet with one which has no past, but exists at the present time in exactly the way as we hear of it from antiquity… to this extent, China has no real history.

Nigel Murphy, a historian concerned with the anti-Chinese legislation, writes that the image of the Yellow Peril was the zenith of European racial hatred. It was fuelled by the fears of European leaders such as Lord Wolseley and Kaiser Wilheim II.

These people warned that China was a sleeping giant just waiting to be awakened by the guiding hand of some oriental Napoleon. The vision of hundreds of millions of Chinese sweeping down upon countries such as Australia and New Zealand was extremely potent in the nineteenth century mind.

Both the mining community and the working classes in Pacific nations were the most affected by the anti-Chinese paranoia, in part out of fear of competition for jobs in trades. While the middle classes baulked at the extremity of these views, they had sympathy for the cause, creating a powerful force of interests to keep Chinese immigrants at bay. To exacerbate the matter, the settlement of New Zealand was seen by some as a kind of holy mission to create a ‘more perfect Britain’ in the South Seas. Racial and religious purity were therefore integral to Keeping New Zealand Beautiful(ly White).

We can turn to a founding father to put this succinctly for us: George Grey, Premier and former Governor of New Zealand:

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the future of the islands of the Pacific Ocean depends upon the inhabitants of New Zealand being true to themselves, and preserving uninjured and unmixed that Anglo-Saxon population which now inhabits it . . this can only be accomplished by New Zealand possessing a population of a superior character

The presence in this country of a large population of Chinese … would exercise a deteriorating effect upon its civilisation

(AJHR 1879 D-3 session 1)

And so we come to the poll tax. In order to keep the ‘heathens’ out, the Chinese Immigrants Act 1881 imposed a ten pound entry tax on Chinese immigrants, as well as a restriction on ships’ passengers – one Chinese passenger per ten tons of cargo. In 1896 the ratio was reduced to one passenger per 200 tons of cargo, and the tax was pushed to a hundred pounds. Immigrants arrived under the credit ticket system, where a guarantor (relative, village elder or prospective employer) advanced the fare and also the poll. Most immigrants took years to pay off the tax.

The prejudice did not stop there. After 1907 all Chinese arrivals were required to sit an English reading test. Naturalisation of Chinese was stopped in 1908 and did not resume again until 1951. Permanent residency was denied from 1926, and Chinese were denied the old age pension until 1936. In addition to specifically targeted laws, the Opium Act 1901 gave police the power to search any Chinese person’s home without a warrant if they believed the occupants were smoking opium. Naturally, if the occupants were non-Chinese, the police required a warrant. In 1910 it also became illegal to sell any opium preparation that could be made suitable for smoking to ‘any person of the Chinese race’.

As if institutionalised racism wasn’t enough, various Anti-Asiatic leagues began to form around New Zealand to protest against Chinese immigration in the late 19th century and into the 20th, including the Anti-Chinese Association, the Anti-Chinese League and the White New Zealand League.

The esteemed Sir Robert Stout, founder of this very University, was the President of the Anti- Chinese League during the passing of the Asiatic Restriction Act 1896. According to the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Stout was “a man of commanding presence, natural dignity, and genuine kindliness of heart”. Except when it came to the Chinese, that is. During the debates on the Asiatic Restriction Act, he said “I am in favour – have always been in favour – of passing stringent laws against the Chinese … the reason I object to them is first, on racial grounds … and secondly, they have a lower civilisation, which, if introduced into the colony, is bound to affect our civilisation.” Interestingly, his wife Anna was infinitely less biased, telling the Lyttelton Times that Chinese immigrants were highly desirable on account of their “honesty, sobriety, industry, thrift and kindness”.

Sadly, measured voices such as that of Anna Stout did not win through. The poll tax was not waived by the Minister of Customs until 1934, and only completely repealed in 1944. Nigel Murphy believes that the Anti-Asiatic lobby groups would have convinced a sympathetic government to continue this persecution, were it not for New Zealand’s “constitutional straightjacket”. Britain still held the power of Royal Assent in matters pertaining to international affairs, and her treaties with China forbade a complete exclusion of Chinese from New Zealand. It really wasn’t until China and Britain fought together in the World War II that Western sentiments began to take a significant turn.

The Chinese community of New Zealand had to wait until 2002 for a formal apology from the government, finally made by Helen Clark at a function marking Chinese New Year at Parliament. She acknowledged the “considerable hardship” that the poll tax imposed on Chinese immigrants and their families, and that the actions are seen today as “unacceptable”. It was a long wait for such an admission, and it’ll be interesting to follow the outcomes of the government’s proposed contribution to the restoration of Chinese culture and heritage in New Zealand.

Knowing now the extent to which Chinese people were persecuted during the last two centuries in New Zealand, it is easier to understand some of the vitriolic claims that have been thrown at Salient recently, owing to our ‘provocative’ depictions of Hu Jintao amongst other things. While I still believe that both that image and the accompanying article were neither intentionally offensive nor racist, the link that some readers made between those provocations and historical blights such as the poll tax is genuine. When we criticise the Chinese government for its (significant) human rights abuses and repression of civil liberties, Chinese citizens in New Zealand have every right to cough about hypocrisy. It pains me to wonder if significant amounts of the debate surrounding the China Free Trade Agreement were thanks to the resilient strands of prejudice that still run through certain Kiwi communities (as opposed to genuine concerns about worker conditions in China, for example). It’s a timely reminder, in the run up to the much contested Beijing Olympics, that if we scratch at the surface of any seemingly harmonious society, history will reveal an unpleasantly lucid piece of bigoted legislation. Protesting about human rights in China is as relevant today as it ever was, but in pointing the finger ahead it can be easy to forget our once backward ways.

References:

Murphy, Nigel The Poll-tax in NZ. Published by Office of Ethnic Affairs, Wellington.

Ip, Manying Dragons on the Long White Cloud. Tandem Press, Auckland.