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Harry Livingstone's forgotten men : Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War
\"During the First World War, more than 80,000 Chinese labourers were secretly transported from China across Canada to the Western Front where they built bridges and roads, repaired tanks, unloaded supplies, and then, after the war, cleaned up the grisly battlefields. Though the use of Chinese labourers for the war has been known, the story of their journey and their work, and the role of Canadians in recruiting and transporting them, has not been fully told--until now. In Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War, Dan Black, co-author of Old Enough to Fight, describes the perilous journey taken by the Chinese labourers from their remote villages in China, across the North Pacific, the vast country of Canada from Vancouver to Halifax, and across the North Atlantic to the battlefields of Europe, and then back again. For political reasons--it was a time of deep discrimination against the Chinese in Canada-- and to prevent them from escaping, the Chinese labourers were locked into cattle cars and forbidden to disembark during the journey. The Canadian public, too, was kept in the dark about the trains. But their experience is indelibly evident--in graves across the country from Vancouver Island to Thunder Bay, and Petawawa to Halifax. One Canadian in particular plays a central role in this story--Captain Harry Livingstone, a small-town doctor from Listowel, Ontario. Livingstone joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1917, at the age of 28. His first assignment was to go to northeast China to a recruitment depot, where he examined poor, young Chinese men to ensure they were fit for service. He later joined them on their journey across the North Pacific to a quarantine station on Canada's West Coast. Drawing on the diaries written by Livingstone, and the letters of the Canadian missionaries who served as temporary officers with the corps in Europe, Dan Black traces the experience of the Chinese Labour Corps and sheds new light on the mistreatment and racism they faced in Canada and in wartime Europe.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Coolies and cane : race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation
2007 Winner of the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award of the Organization of American Historians, 2006 Winner of the History/Social Science Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies How did thousands of Chinese migrants end up working alongside African Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories of these workers, Coolies and Cane advances an interpretation of emancipation that moves beyond U.S. borders and the black-white racial dynamic. Tracing American ideas of Asian labor to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Moon-Ho Jung argues that the racial formation of \"coolies\" in American culture and law played a pivotal role in reconstructing concepts of race, nation, and citizenship in the United States. Jung examines how coolies appeared in major U.S. political debates on race, labor, and immigration between the 1830s and 1880s. He finds that racial notions of coolies were articulated in many, often contradictory, ways. They could mark the progress of freedom; they could also symbolize the barbarism of slavery. Welcomed and rejected as neither black nor white, coolies emerged recurrently as both the salvation of the fracturing and reuniting nation and the scourge of American civilization. Based on extensive archival research, this study makes sense of these contradictions to reveal how American impulses to recruit and exclude coolies enabled and justified a series of historical transitions: from slave-trade laws to racially coded immigration laws, from a slaveholding nation to a \"nation of immigrants,\" and from a continental empire of manifest destiny to a liberating empire across the seas. Combining political, cultural, and social history, Coolies and Cane is a compelling study of race, Reconstruction, and Asian American history.
eBook
Chinese migrants and Africa's development : new imperialists or agents of change?
China's recent stepping up of relations with Africa is one of the most significant developments on the African continent for decades. For some it promises an end to Africa's dependent aid relationships as the Chinese bring expertise, technology, and a stronger business focus. But for others it is no more than a new form of imperialism. This book is the first to systematically study the motivations, relationships, and impact of this migration. It focuses not just on the Chinese migrants but also on the perceptions of, and linkages to, their African 'hosts'. By studying this everyday interaction we get a much richer picture of whether this is South-South cooperation, as the political leaders would have us believe, or a more complex relationship that can both compromise and encourage African development.
Book
Labour migration from China to Japan
Chinese students are the largest international student population in the world, and Japan attracts more of them than any other country. Since the mid-1980s when China opened the door to let private citizens out and Japan began to let more foreigners in, over 300 thousand Chinese have arrived in Japan as students. Student migrants are the most visible, controversial and active Chinese immigrants in Japan. The majority of them enter Japan's labour market and many have stayed on indefinitely.
Based on the author's original fieldwork data and government statistics, this book gives a comprehensive portrayal of an often neglected group of international migrants in a society that for decades has been considered a non-immigrant country. It introduces Chinese students' diverse mobility trajectories, analyses their career patterns, describes their transnational living arrangements, and explores the mechanisms that give rise to their identity as 'new overseas Chinese'. This book contributes to our understanding of international migration and international education in an age of globalization. It points out that student migrants are key to the internationalization of Japanese society, and potentially in other countries where immigration is still considered a challenging reality.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Sociology and Labour Studies.
eBook
The coming man from Canton : Chinese experience in Montana, 1862-1943
\"Christopher W. Merritt combines and highlights the historical and archaeological records of the Overseas Chinese experience in Montana, beginning with the arrival of Chinese immigrants in 1862 to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.\"--Provided by publisher.
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The Coolie Speaks
Introducing radical counter-visions of race and slavery, and probing the legal and philosophical questions raised by indenture,The Coolie Speaksoffers the first critical reading of a massive testimony case from Cuba in 1874. From this case, Yun traces the emergence of a \"coolie narrative\" that forms a counterpart to the \"slave narrative.\" The written and oral testimonies of nearly 3,000 Chinese laborers in Cuba, who toiled alongside African slaves, offer a rare glimpse into the nature of bondage and the tortuous transition to freedom. Trapped in one of the last standing systems of slavery in the Americas, the Chinese described their hopes and struggles, and their unrelenting quest for freedom.
Yun argues that the testimonies from this case suggest radical critiques of the \"contract\" institution, the basis for free modern society. The example of Cuba, she suggests, constitutes the early experiment and forerunner of new contract slavery, in which the contract itself, taken to its extreme, was wielded as a most potent form of enslavement and complicity. Yun further considers the communal biography of a next-generation Afro-Chinese Cuban author and raises timely theoretical questions regarding race, diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization.
eBook
Ghosts of Gold Mountain : the epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad
\"A ... history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Coming Man from Canton
InThe Coming Man from CantonChristopher W. Merritt mines the historical and archaeological record of the Chinese immigrant experience in Montana to explore new questions and perspectives. During the 1860s Chinese immigrants arrived by the thousands, moving into the Rocky Mountain West and tenaciously searching for prosperity in the face of resistance, restriction, racism, and armed hostility from virtually every ethnic group in American society. As second-class citizens, Chinese immigrants remained largely insular and formed their own internal governments as well as labor and trade networks, typically establishing communities apart from the main towns. Chinese miners, launderers, restaurant keepers, gardeners, railroad laborers, and other workers became a separate but integral part of the American experience in the Intermountain West.Although Chinese immigrants constituted more than 10 percent of the Montana Territory's total population by 1870, the historical records provide a biased and narrow perspective, as they were generally written by European American community members. Merritt uses the statewide Montana context to show the diversity of Chinese settlements that has often been neglected by archival studies. His research highlights how the legacy of the Chinese in Montana is, or is not, reflected in modern Montana identity and how scholars, educators, professionals, and the public can alter the existing perception of this population as the \"other\" and perceive it instead an integral part of Montana's past.
eBook
Concealed chains : labour exploitation and Chinese migrants in Europe
This book exposes the hidden world of Chinese irregular migrants in three European countries: France, Italy and the United Kingdom. Chinese workers migrating to Europe pay huge sums of money to intermediaries, often leaving them trapped in debt before they even begin their journey. Exposed to various risks during their migratory process, they can arrive in the destination country vulnerable to extreme exploitation and sometimes even forced labour. Through analysis of the employment relationship between the different actors in the labour market, the book seeks to understand the links that connect vulnerable Chinese workers to European labour markets and a complex international production chain.
eBook