The importation of more than 60,000 Chinese laborers to work in the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa between 1904 and 1910 remains an obscure episode in the history of Asian indentured labor in European colonies.Footnote 1 Yet the experience of the coolies on the Rand reverberated throughout the Anglo-American world and had lasting consequences for global politics of race and labor. At one level, the Chinese laborers themselves resisted their conditions of work to such a degree that the program became untenable and was canceled after a few years. Not only did the South African project fail: Its failure signaled more broadly that at the turn of the twentieth century it had become increasingly difficult to impose upon Chinese workers the coercive and violent exploitation that had marked the global coolie trade in the era of slave emancipation. At another level, the Chinese labor program on the Rand provoked a political crisis in the Transvaal and in metropolitan Britain over the “Chinese Question”—that is, whether Chinese, indentured or free, should be altogether excluded from the settler colonies. Following the passage of laws limiting or excluding Chinese immigration to the United States (1882), Canada (1885), New Zealand (1881), and Australia (1901), Transvaal Colony and then the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, likewise barred all Chinese from immigration—making Chinese and Asian exclusion, along with white rule, native dispossession, and racial segregation the defining features of the Anglo-American settlerism.
The Transvaal Chamber of Mines turned to indentured Chinese labor for work in the gold mines in order to solve a native-labor shortage after the South African war (1899–1902).Footnote 2 In fact, the “shortage” resulted from native African resistance to returning to the mines, where postwar wages had been slashed by as much as one-third, and conditions remained oppressive. John Higginson aptly called it a general strike.Footnote 3 Although the Randlords publicly described the Chinese labor importation program as a short-term and experimental project to get the mines running again, they privately harbored hopes that Chinese labor would become a permanent feature of the industry.Footnote 4 They planned to import 100,000 Chinese a year in order to check native wages and to stabilize the workforce with workers less inclined to desertion. Chinese labor promised a measure of control and coercion that had been, to date, impossible to impose directly upon African workers.Footnote 5 To address concerns among whites that Chinese would end up settling in South Africa and become another race problem, the program prohibited Chinese mine laborers from working in any other occupation and from owning or leasing land, and required repatriation at the end of the contract.Footnote 6
The Transvaal Chamber of Mines initially tried to recruit workers from southern China, the traditional source of transcontinental emigrant labor, but recruitment there proved impossible. Negative publicity from South Africa circulated in the local press, which warned that the mines were a “living hell.”Footnote 7 An extensive commentary written by Cantonese in Johannesburg in the reform periodical Xinming Congbao reiterated the long history of discrimination against Chinese merchants in the South African colonies. It suggested that the mine owners were using Chinese in a racial gambit and that paying Chinese even less than Africans would surely drag Chinese down to level of savages and slaves.Footnote 8 The viceroy of Liangguang (Guangdong and Guangxi provinces) banned recruiters from the British labor contracting firm Butterfield and Swire; the magistrate of Xinning (Taishan), the largest source of Chinese emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, arrested its agents operating in the county.Footnote 9 Finally, Chinese in the southern provinces enjoyed other options for labor emigration, notably short-term contracts in southeast Asia. Stymied in its quest for indentured workers, the chamber turned to northern China, mainly Shandong and Hebei, where the short-term labor market in Manchuria had been disrupted by the Russo-Japanese war.Footnote 10 Nearly ninety-eight percent of the workers recruited to the Transvaal came from northern China.Footnote 11
By the end of the first year, there were some 28,000 Chinese at 27 mines on the Rand. The population of Chinese miners peaked at 53,838 in 1907. In all, nearly 63,000 Chinese men worked at a total of 55 mines, including those owned by the largest mining companies.Footnote 12 They worked at depths of one thousand to two thousand feet underground for ten hours a day, six days a week, on narrow, claustrophobic stopes, where they attacked the rock face with a hand drill and a chisel. The workers lived in segregated compounds on the mines and were permitted to leave mine premises just once a week and with a pass. The starting wage was a shilling a day, with an increase to one shilling and six pence a day or fifty shillings a month after six months. The ordinance allowed, alternatively, for piece work, “at rates to be mutually agreed on” by workers and mine owners. Most mines used a piece-rate system for underground drilling, which required laborers to drill a minimum of twenty-four to thirty-six inches a day in order to be paid at all.Footnote 13 Wages were upwards of five times the wages for common labor in China, but living expenses in South Africa were also much higher (indeed, higher than in England). Many mines paid their workers in scrip (iron tokens) that could be redeemed for sterling only at the end of the contract, limiting them to company stores where prices were high and goods were shoddy.Footnote 14
British authorities in the Transvaal government and in the colonial office in London had taken some pains to devise a recruiting system and a contract that would ensure that Chinese labor would be voluntary, remunerated fairly, and treated decently. But recruits were often not told that they would be working in deep underground mines.Footnote 15 Companies often cheated workers of their wages.Footnote 16 Despite the FLD's boasts that food was plentiful and nutritious, in practice both quantity and quality of the food deteriorated. The meat ration at some mines was short by nearly half.Footnote 17 By 1905 workers were refusing to eat tasteless meat and rotten vegetables.Footnote 18 They may have consumed the rice and supplemented it with food bought at nearby stores, such as jerky and boiled calves feet, purchases that would have taxed their earnings.Footnote 19
The men did what they could to enliven their surroundings, sometimes growing small flower gardens with plants that they dug up on the veld; a number of men kept birds.Footnote 20 At five or six compounds laborers formed theater groups, which performed Chinese operas on wooden stages erected in the compound courtyards. Elaborate productions took place on holidays, but these festivities came but once or twice a year. The common daily source of entertainment was gambling, the prime activity of male work camps, where boredom and cash reign.Footnote 21
Everyone looked forward to Sunday, the day of rest. Representatives from several churches visited the mine premises to worship with the small number of Roman Catholics and Protestants, reflecting the late-nineteenth-century missionary presence in north China.Footnote 22 But for most workers, Sunday was the day to go off the mines. Starting at noon they went out with passes in hand, dressed smartly in outfits brought from China or in Western-styled suits purchased locally. They took strolls through the woods, organized picnics on the veld, or visited friends and relatives at other compounds. Some went into town, especially Ferreirastown, the location of Johannesburg's small Chinese quarter. Observers described Chinese from the mines engaged in window shopping, eating at Cantonese restaurants, and riding bicycles through the streets, their queues streaming in the wind. The Chinese reportedly freely spent their earnings on cigarettes, foodstuffs, cooking equipment, bicycles, watches, and apparel.Footnote 23 They also purchased sex at one of the two brothels catering to Chinese.Footnote 24 Most likely the big spenders comprised Chinese in the privileged jobs—policemen, headmen, and kitchen workers—who earned higher wages and, importantly, received their pay in sterling rather than in scrip. These workers amounted to ten to twenty percent of the Chinese population on the mines, perhaps five thousand at peak employment, so their conspicuous presence in town would have obscured the fact that ordinary mine laborers lacked the means to enjoy the same pleasures.
Workers who complained that they were not properly paid, of poor conditions, or abuse by white supervisors found that the system offered few avenues for redress. The Transvaal Foreign Labor Department, which was responsible for overseeing the program, never had sufficient staff to inspect the mines.Footnote 25 It was said that Chinese policemen—a privileged stratum known for corruption—tore up messages left in complaint boxes.Footnote 26 The Qing consul stationed in Johannesburg, Liu Yulin, visited the mines and reported complaints, but had no powers of enforcement. Transvaal authorities generally tried to keep him at bay; for example, they rebuffed his efforts to obtain death benefits for families of workers who died in the mines, regardless of cause.Footnote 27 Members of the Johannesburg Cantonese Club, comprising local merchants, sent representatives to investigate conditions on the mines; the club's secretary, Xie Zixiu, took a job as a clerk with the foreign labor department and then as “adviser” with the East Rand Proprietary Mines, working at the New Comet Mine. Frustrated with his inability to improve conditions, he quit after six months and went to London, seeking a meeting with Zhang Deyi, the Chinese Ambassador to Great Britain. He later published a scathing critique of conditions on the mines, one of the few extant documents from a first-hand Chinese observer.Footnote 28 Other local Chinese were also thwarted when they tried to advocate for the workers. A laundryman named Ah Bu was arrested at the New Comet Mine and charged with holding an unauthorized meeting with the laborers, inciting them to not work, and, after he refused to leave, for trespassing. He was convicted and sentenced to six weeks in jail.Footnote 29
Rioting and Loafing
Despite their isolation and lack of support, the laborers resisted their conditions both individually and collectively. Riots frequently erupted, mostly over wage disputes and work conditions. In the first six months of the program, FLD superintendent William Evans reported fourteen disturbances at nine out of the ten mines employing Chinese.Footnote 30 For example, after a mine explosion killed two workers on July 22, 1904, at one of the East Rand Proprietary Mines, the night shift refused to turn out and threw stones at mine officials who tried to induce them to go to work.Footnote 31 Other disturbances erupted against abusive Chinese policemen, when meals were not served, and against forced overtime on Sundays or contracted holidays. Many of these incidents involved thousands of workers who fought compound guards and mounted police with stones, bricks, and jumpers (iron rods used to start a drill hole).Footnote 32 They also staged work actions, including occasional strikes (which were illegal)Footnote 33 and, in the most well-known case, a dramatic “work to rule” at the North Randfontein mine in March–April 1905, where 1300 workers drilled twelve inches and no more to protest the pay structure and battled police sent to arrest them for an entire day.Footnote 34 In general, work actions were organized either by the Chinese headmen, who led the work gangs, or by the yihui (righteous societies), mutual aid associations that existed on every mine.Footnote 35 The Chinese laborers were neither ignorant nor docile: They knew the terms of the contract, they were capable of nearly total solidarity, and they were tactically sophisticated in both negotiation and combat.
Individual resistance was widespread. Resistance included deserting the mines—usually for a day or two, as a break from work or as refusal to work with a mean boss; one local official claimed that “it is well known that 30% of Chinese laborers are absent at one time from the majority of mines.”Footnote 36 On occasion, workers deserted for weeks at a time before apprehended. A large group of forty to sixty deserters lived in an old, unused mine shaft on the Princess Mine in the West Rand for months before they were discovered.Footnote 37 Chinese who had secret relationships with African women may have stayed with them for extended periods.Footnote 38 One worker (recorded only as “Coolie No. 38,695”) held the record for desertions: He deserted six times between June 1905 and May 1906, including sojourns of twenty, thirty, and fifty-five days. For his transgressions he spent a total of twenty-two weeks in jail. Mine managers reported with incredulity that No. 38,695 had been on the Rand for over a year but had logged only forty to fifty work shifts.Footnote 39
Most commonly, the Chinese resisted simply by not drilling as many inches as their bosses demanded of them. In the parlance of industrial management the world over, this was “loafing.” In one blatant example, a laborer on the night shift at the Nourse Deep Mine “would drill only 24 inches, to insure receiving pay and then would go away from his working place to sleep.”Footnote 40 One observer remarked that the Chinese trammers and shovelers worked much more slowly than native workers or simply sat down when the supervisor wasn't watching.Footnote 41 “Loafing” was pervasive, as indexed by managers’ constant complaints and the use of punishments—typically floggings and withholding food—meted out for failure to drill more than the minimum. Although corporal punishment was prohibited unless ordered by a magistrate after conviction for a crime, it was nonetheless widespread on the mines. Workers at a West Rand mine petitioned the Chinese government in 1907 to protest punishments for loafing. The biggest insult, they averred, was that the mine companies did not see them as human beings. They added, “Those who drill 3 feet, those who drill one or two feet, are considered loafers. … Even of those who could drill 8 or 9 feet, who would be willing to put in the extra effort?”Footnote 42
Within six months, a crisis of labor discipline and social control loomed over the Chinese labor program. A spiraling dynamic had set in, characterized by resistance begetting punishment, punishment begetting more resistance begetting yet harsher punishments, and so forth. News of floggings and other humiliating punishments filtered to Great Britain in the fall of 1905, stoking a public outcry there over conditions akin to “slavery.” But floggings, if dramatic, were just one instrument in an expanding repertoire of coercion. The Transvaal government passed a new ordinance in September 1905 which expanded the number of punishable offenses, allowed for detention and trial of workers on the mines rather than at a magistrate's court, and authorized the summary repatriation of troublemakers and other bad elements (such as suspected homosexuals). The ordinance also authorized the arming of Afrikaaner farmers—who had been disarmed since the conclusion of the war in 1902—to protect themselves from “outrages” committed by deserters (break-ins, robberies, assaults on farmsteads) and to assist the police in apprehending Chinese deserters roaming the countryside.Footnote 43
Between 1904 and 1907 nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese laborers—more than one-third of the total number of Chinese to work on the Rand—were convicted of various offenses, including refusing to work, rioting, staging work actions, deserting the compounds, as well as assault, manslaughter and murder. Forty-five were sentenced to jail terms of ten years or more, executed, or shot dead during disturbances.Footnote 44 By 1906 the superintendent of the Transvaal Foreign Labor Department, James Jamieson despaired that supervising Chinese mine laborers was a “hopeless” endeavor, an assessment that signaled the impossibility of satisfying mine production goals and local demands for public safety while not looking like slavery.Footnote 45
By 1906 the pace of local and metropolitan politics was fast outstripping the efforts of the FLD and the colonial government to bring order to the Rand. The Chinese labor problem became something quite larger than the specific demands of the mining labor program. It assumed the incendiary symbolic force of the “Chinese Question,” building on a half-century of European experience with Chinese emigration to New World settlements while also imbuing it with new features and, in the process, perfecting a global anti-Chinese ideology.
Cutting the Painter
There were two complementary strands of opposition to Chinese labor among South African whites. The first came from the Dutch-descended, or Afrikaaner, farmers, who were hysterical over “outrages” by armed Chinese deserters. The question of public safety was just the tip of the iceberg. It brought to the fore long-simmering controversies over the mine-labor shortage and the economic security of South African whites, whose relationship to the mining industry had been problematic since the discovery of gold in the 1880s. To be sure, gold had opened a range of economic opportunities on the Witwatersrand, but only a minority materially benefited to any significant degree. Only a few Afrikaaners found fortune in gold, and while urban and industrial growth increased the demand for farm produce, the quickening of capitalist agriculture dispossessed many tenants and pushed increasing numbers of poor Afrikaaners into the towns.Footnote 46 The postwar reconstruction policies of Lord Alfred Milner, governor of Transvaal colony and high commissioner of Southern Africa, had done little to improve the economic situation of white Afrikaaners, especially those of limited education and without training for a trade. The general view that the state was responsible for ensuring that all whites benefited from white supremacy substantively, not just symbolically, informed Afrikaaners’ approach to economic policy in general and to the Chinese question in particular.Footnote 47
The Randlords believed that using white labor in unskilled jobs was simply too costly for mining to be profitable, but, lest this appear too self-interested, they emphasized that the further development of mining would increase the absolute number of skilled positions for whites on the mines and, moreover, that increased prosperity of the colony would generate more jobs for whites in the towns. The argument had carried the day in 1903, when the proposal for using indentured Chinese in the mines was first debated. But even as the industry again prospered, white unemployment remained a serious problem. By 1905–1906, Afrikaaners had lost what little patience they had had with the promise that Chinese labor would increase white employment. They became more firmly committed to the belief that the state served the greed of the mining magnates at the expense of the white population.Footnote 48 Jan Smuts, former Boer commando, and now leader of the Afrikaaner nationalist party, Het Volk, told Lord Selborne, who succeeded Milner as governor in 1905, that with Transvaal in a “wretched state of poverty,” the mines ought to “strengthen the position of the white population in the country, and make it a white man's country … If yellow labour were abolished plenty of whites would be found willing to work in the mines, and the mines as well as the white population would prosper.”Footnote 49
In this view poor whites and the Afrikaaner political elites purporting to represent them were joined by the South African trade union movement, which was dominated by British workmen. The trade unions had their own grievances against the Randlords. Employment of skilled whites on the mines fluctuated with the general business cycle as well as seasonal variations in the native labor supply. Skilled workers also resented efforts by the mining companies, led by their engineers, to wrest from them control over the point of production and to increase productivity. Like artisans and craftsmen everywhere, they resisted mightily these incursions against their autonomy.Footnote 50 By switching to hand drilling by Chinese labor and by imposing upon them minimum daily requirements, the mine companies aimed to control production directly. Some white drill men became supervisors of Chinese gangs while others moved to jobs above ground, but not a few were laid off, causing alarm and consternation among the unions and other critics.Footnote 51
The British-dominated unions and the Afrikaaners differed in their perceived self-interests. The former comprised well-paid skilled miners and craftsmen who did not necessarily identify with poor Afrikaaners, either as racial or class brothers. The skilled trades included many English and Australians, who looked down upon the Afrikaaners, considering them to be backward farmers, not the stuff of a labor aristocracy. It would not be until World War One that Afrikaaners would work in the mines in large numbers and become assimilated into the trade unions.Footnote 52 In 1905, however, the trade unions believed the future prosperity of the white population in South Africa lay in the immigration of skilled British workers, not in the employment of poor whites in unskilled jobs, which they imagined the province of native workers. This does not mean that the Afrikaaners were willing to work side by side with natives, doing the same work. The Afrikaaners would have sent Africans back to the farms to work under white control, indeed, under the Boer's heel.
Notwithstanding, there were many arguments against the creation of a “white proletariat.” A South African writer, I. Dobbe, expressed the general view of the white settler minority on the necessity for relegating the colored races to what South Carolina slave owners had called the “mudsill” class. Dobbe wrote that whites’ refusal to be “party to any such leveling policy is actuated by no tyrannous impulse … but by the simple instinct of self-preservation.” Whenever two races of “varying civilizations” live side by side, he explained,
the one with higher mental ability must take the lead and be overlord, or be swamped in the greater volume of the lower. The theories of the Social Democrats cannot be put into practice in a case like this without the disappearance of the highest in the lower. So long as the black preponderates and is at a lower level of mental culture, so long must South Africa be an oligarchy and not a democracy. … [F]or the white man to descend to the level of the Kaffir and to share his avocations would be suicidal from a racial point of view since it would destroy his superiority, familiarity breeding in this instance, if not contempt, at least presumption.Footnote 53
When meeting with a deputation from the White League (an organization that had formed to drive Asian merchants from the Transvaal), Milner expressed the same view: “Our welfare depends upon increasing the quantity of our white population but not at the expense of its quality. We do not want a white proletariat in this country.” The “lowest ranks” of whites in a country such as South Africa—that is, a country with a white minority and a black majority—must be “far above the poorest section of a purely white country. But, without making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, there are scores and scores of employments if we could at once succeed in multiplying our industries and in reducing the cost of living.” The key problem, said Milner, was that the economy was not sufficiently developed to bring down the cost of living and, with it, the cost of labor.
Development yet alone can make this a white man's country in the only sense in which South Africa can become one, and that is, not a country full of poor whites, but one in which a largely increased white population can live in decency and comfort. That development requires capital; we have got the capital, but it also requires a large amount of rough labour. And that labour cannot, to any great extent, be white.
This brought Milner back around to the issue at hand—that is, the need for Chinese labor to grow the mining industry and South Africa's general prosperity.Footnote 54
The most vocal champion of employing unskilled whites in the mines was Frederick H.P. Creswell, a mining engineer who had managed the Village Main Reef mining company until 1903. Creswell was an ardent and persistent critic of the mining industry's use of Chinese labor. Because he was both an insider and an outsider to the industry, the Randlords spent considerable energy trying to discredit his claim that he had profitably employed unskilled whites at Village Main. Critics said that his experiment at a medium-sized mine could not be replicated in the big mines; some charged that he had falsified his data. Creswell in turn accused the Chamber of Mines of disseminating false and misleading data. Creswell advocated for an “open and competitive labor market,” in which the white man “without a trade and only his muscle to dispose of” could contract unskilled labor at a living wage, and in which the native wage rate would “find its own level.”Footnote 55
Creswell's larger point was that the big groups and their financial investors in Britain and Europe based the industry on the indenture of very cheap, colored labor in order to make the greatest profits and to return the greatest dividends in the short term. The same interest impelled “speculative and share-market” practices by absentee financial corporations, such as holding undeveloped mining lands in order to drive up property values, rather than develop them into producing mines, which required investments of capital and time. Pecuniary interests of the financial sector now held the “very real power over the destinies of the Colony,” interests that could not be expected to have “any genuine sympathy with the real political feelings and aspirations of the people for the Colony.”Footnote 56
There was, in fact, a history of unskilled whites working in the mines, both before and after the South African war, and not just at Village Main Reef. But many mine managers considered unskilled whites an inferior class of workers, unreliable and “extremely incompetent.”Footnote 57 In the early 1890s John Merriman experimented with white unskilled mine labor on the Langlaagte Estate. He hired “first-class” Cornish men on contract for drilling and shoveling, but after a month they had not earned enough to subsist. In the late 1890s, when the mines hired indigent whites at the government's request, the workers did not last two weeks. They found the work too hard and the rate of pay (5 to 7.5 shillings a day) too low,Footnote 58 especially when compared with employment on public works.Footnote 59
Several thousand unskilled whites were working on the mines when the Chinese labor program began, but the government mining engineer acknowledged that with Chinese labor, mine managers had lost incentive to hire whites as unskilled labor. A small number of unskilled whites did work as machine helpers, but, he reported, the results were generally unsatisfactory. Many unskilled whites “take mining work as temporary employment only,” he said, “and by throwing up their work after short periods of service disorganize the steady labour supply of the mine, and cannot be relied upon for any continuous period of steady work.”Footnote 60
The white labor position had a democratic appeal insofar as it criticized the mining magnates for practices of monopoly and indenture. But it was fundamentally shaped by white racism, by the idea that was central to all of South African politics, the idea of making South Africa a “white man's country.” South African whites did not extend the idea of free labor to Africans or Chinese, much less equality of rights. This seeming contradiction was not really a contradiction, but central to the logic of protectionism for settler colonials from cheap colored labor, whose “cheapness” indexed lower civilizational and racial status.Footnote 61
The argument against Chinese labor was not just that it cost whites jobs. To their minds, an even greater danger lay in the prospect that indentured Asian labor would lead to a settled Asian population of merchants and traders. The use of indentured Indians on the Natal sugar plantations in the nineteenth century was an object lesson in the consequences of importing indentured colored labor. Indian indenture had led inexorably to a free, settled population, with wage earners, merchants, and traders. By 1905 there were more Indians than whites in Natal, and they were migrating to the Transvaal as well. Whites worried that the small population of Chinese merchants in Johannesburg would likewise grow, especially with an indentured labor force offering an ethnic market. Critics warned that the “imported Asiatic gains a grip on a country with wonderful rapidity.” Although Natal passed laws to restrict immigration of Asiatics, the colony was “a back door wide open” because indentured laborers were not required to repatriate at term: “[T]he indentured coolie of to-day is the free man of tomorrow, and the free man becomes the trader.”Footnote 62 In a sense, South Africa presented the same geographical problem as Australia, where plantations were not on isolated tropical islands but in provinces that were contiguous to more temperate zones. Dobbe articulated the common racialist argument about the Indian and Chinese that complemented the theory of “cheap Asiatic labor” with a theory of the “underselling Asiatic trader.” The Indian, he said, “Industrious, thrift, with no wants, with the acute, over-trained brain of centuries and the commercial immorality from the same cause … have overmatched the Kaffir at every turn and undersold the European.” They held the retail trade in fruits and vegetables and were “formidable competitors” with the small English trader. Dobbe considered the Chinese an even greater threat:
[T]he “hardest-headed businessmen in the world, older by several centuries than the Indians; their industry is proverbial, their plodding patience with small profits inimitable—all very good qualities in themselves but dangerous to introduce into a land occupied already by two different races, of which one is too uncivilized, and the other too impatient, to exercise them.”
Dobbe's reasoning signaled the crisis in contemporary social Darwinism, which, by the late nineteenth century, had begun to worry that the white race might have become overly civilized and hence soft. He warned that Chinese would oust natives from lowly employment and the poorer class of Europeans from all the petty trades.Footnote 63
Opposition to Chinese labor led Afrikaaner politics to directly question South Africa's ties to the British Empire. The Afrikaaner Bond Party gathered in Capetown in January 1906 to protest accusations made in the British press that Afrikaaners were disloyal to Britain; but they plainly advocated for cutting ties based on British interference in Transvaal affairs. The meeting welcomed an address by John Merriman, former manager of the Langlaagte mine and leader of the South African Party. Merriman, a long-time political figure in the Cape Colony, was of English descent but a critic of British imperialism who had opposed the South African war. His presence at the Bond Party's public meeting signaled the evolving alliance of local Afrikaaner and British politics against London. Most tellingly, Merriman predicted, “Sooner or later, English opinion would insist on the removal of the restrictions on the coolies, then good-bye to the chances of the white man.”Footnote 64 In fact, English opinion against indentured Chinese labor was already mobilizing.
The Chinese Question in Great Britain
The Chinese Question was a central issue in the general elections of 1906 that brought the Liberal Party and its Labor allies to power, ending twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule. The watershed election has received considerable attention from historians of British politics, but there has been scant analysis of the role that the Chinese Question played in the Liberal-Labor victory. If considered at all, it is described as “emotive if somewhat ephemeral”—that is, uncharacteristic of British temperament and anomalous to staple Liberal issues of free trade and education policy.Footnote 65 To be sure, controversy over Chinese labor in South Africa shot into British politics with seeming suddenness and alacrity in 1904, only to seemingly disappear from prominence after the elections. It was certainly “emotive,” which is to say that it presented an open, ugly racism that was unusual in British politics. But far from being “ephemeral,” it announced the consolidation of the politics of what Jonathan Hyslop dubbed “white laborism,” the politics of the “imperial working class.”Footnote 66 Perhaps more than any other election issue, the Chinese Question galvanized support for Labor candidates and hastened the official formation of an independent Labor Party in the wake of the 1906 elections. Moreover, by constructing a unified racial interest among British workers across the empire, the Chinese Question provided a crucial source of domestic British support for the racial logics that underlie settler-colonial home rule, federation, and dominion, processes that were already in motion but not yet fully consolidated.
The core of the Liberal opposition to Chinese labor in South Africa was the view that the Chinese had been brought to South Africa under conditions “akin to slavery.” In their view, it represented a stain on the honorable tradition of British abolitionism, a tradition held dearly by both radicals and religious nonconformists in the Liberal Party. The “slavery” trope pervaded debate as early as 1903–1904, when plans for the Chinese Labor Importation Ordinance were being laid and on through 1905–1906 during the run-up to the general elections. The opposition found it a blunt instrument to attack the Conservative government by linking the moral tradition of abolitionism to the recent sacrifices made by British soldiers (50,000 casualties) and taxpayers (£250 million spent) in the recent war against the tyrannical Boer republics—waving the bloody shirt, as it were. The trade unions readily adopted the antislavery refrain. A mass demonstration of the British Trade Union Congress gathered 80,000 people in London's Hyde Park in March of 1904 to oppose the passage of the Chinese Labor importance ordinance. The Congress declared its “emphatic protest against the importation of forced, fettered, and cheap labour into South Africa, such importation being a violation of the principles of Trade Unionism” and appealed to the “previous splendid record of our race” in “freeing the civilized world from slavery.”Footnote 67
Criticism of the program reached a crescendo of outrage in the fall of 1905 after revelations of floggings of Chinese laborers on the one hand, and of Chinese desertions and crimes committed against white farmers on the other.Footnote 68 The Liberal Party connected the two developments in a single indictment of a disastrous policy: “We brought the Chinamen into the mines and we cannot prevent them from being at once the victims and authors of lawlessness.”Footnote 69 A furious debate ensued in the press and on the floor of Parliament over the alleged abuses of Chinese mine laborers. Colonial Secretary Joseph Lyttelton claimed the charges were either lies or exaggerations—citing assurances from mine managers—but soon there were too many reports and corroborations for the government to dismiss.Footnote 70 Frederick Mackarness, an Englishman living in South Africa, wrote to the Westminster Gazette that he supported the use of Chinese mine labor but not flogging and tying them up, practices that he said were “not rare or secret, but open, if not general,” adding that he had seen photographs of coolies tied up. “If the casual visitor can see these things, why cannot a government inspector?” he asked. “If not slavery, what is it?”Footnote 71
Notwithstanding the embarrassment, Conservatives attacked the Liberals for hypocrisy and for using the Chinese Question for partisan purposes.Footnote 72 They fought back with a deluge of newspaper reports and pamphlets of their own, with photographs of clean quarters in the compounds and the like, while also invoking the protections of the contract. They warned that the withdraw of Chinese labor would ruin the colony's future prosperity. A typical Conservative leaflet succinctly iterated the reasons to support the government's policy: “to assure the solvency of the youngest British Colony, … (to) refuse to consent to the degradation of British workmen by making them work side by side with Kaffirs in the mines, … Because there will be 150 more places open to British skilled labourers for every 1,000 Chinamen who go to the Transvaal.”Footnote 73
But the charges of Liberal hypocrisy and partisan opportunism were not far off the mark. Skeptics of the Liberals’ “vapourings” pointed out that indenture had long been a feature of imperial policy; where was the Liberal critique?Footnote 74 The Liberals countered that Chinese indentured labor on the Rand bore no resemblance to Indian indentured labor in the plantation colonies. The latter had, over the course of the nineteenth century been reformed by extensive state regulation; moreover, the government administered those contracts, not private interests. (This is not to say that indentured labor rights in British Guiana, the West Indies, and Mauritius were honored other than in the breach; but the appeal to legalism and contract, long obsessions of English political culture, had satisfied public opinion.) By contrast, the Radicals averred, the Chinese Labor Ordinance contained few explicit labor protections, excluded Chinese laborers from all other employments, and required repatriation at term.Footnote 75 The Radical Liberal MP John Burns explained further:
It is no excuse to say that indentured labor has been sanctioned before. Where it has been, the labour performed has been agricultural or pastoral, and not accompanied by the loathsome compound system, with its physical restriction and its moral degradation. This differentiates all other indentured labour from what is now being imposed upon Africa, and makes that the industrial slavery it is.Footnote 76
The Chinese ordinance's “general tenour,” Burns continued, “is based on force, compulsion, penalties, restrictions. Confinement is, in a word, the negation of personal freedom and industrial liberty, and is for the benefit of one side only—the mine magnates.”Footnote 77
The Liberal opposition to “slavery” was also hypocritical insofar as it did not support Asian free labor, free immigration, or equal rights in the settler colonies. If Indian coolies settled in the Caribbean colonies after their contracts expired, they were exercising their rights as imperial subjects that the British had long been accepted by the British as an incidence of sovereignty. Moreover, Indians posed no competition for British workers or petty shopkeepers, who did not emigrate to the tropics. But, the presence of Asiatics in the settler colonies was another matter. In this case, Liberals’ moral opposition to “Chinese slavery” in the Transvaal conceded to, while also giving cover to, the argument made by the trade unions, that British working men were, by their own rights of empire, entitled to populate, work, and prosper in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Moreover, they were convinced that they could exercise that right only if Asians were altogether excluded. It was a zero-sum proposition.
The politics of white imperial laborism had been in the making since the 1880s and 1890s in Canada and Australia; in the latter, especially, trade unionism established an ideological and material structure of labor rights based on high wages and Asiatic exclusion.Footnote 78 In the last decades of the nineteenth century anti-Chinese politics in both Canada and Australia had borrowed heavily from the rhetoric of the Workingmen's Party of California to make the case against Chinese “coolieism.” In the early 1900s those ideas circulated to South Africa, where many Australians had emigrated. Australia offered a model “militantly egalitarian polity, backed by an interventionist state.”Footnote 79 But if the Australian model inspired white South African trade unionists, it was also a negative exemplar for South African elites. Percy Tarbut, a director of Consolidated Goldfields, conceded to Creswell that, among the mining magnates,
“[T]he feeling seems to be one of fear that, having a large number of white men employed on the Rand in the position of labourers, the same troubles will arise that are prevalent in the Australian colonies, viz., that the combination of the labourers will become so strong as to be able to more or less dictate not only the on the question for wages, but also on political questions by the power of their votes when a representative government is established”.Footnote 80
The conflict between white laborism and capital was, at one level, over the distribution of resources and power within the context of the white settler state. At another level, racial nationalism expressed the view that racial entitlement unified national identity and purpose across class lines. Charles Pearson had sounded this theme with the 1893 publication of National Life and Character. Pearson warned that the “temperate zones” were the last and only hope for the white race under population pressure from Africans and Asians. If not excluded by force of law, the argument went, Asiatics would inundate and overwhelm the white settler colonies with cheap labor and commerce. In global context, Australia was the central battleground between two races, the European and Chinese, for domination.Footnote 81 Pearson's analysis was rehearsed tout court in Britain during the election season. For example, M.A. Stobart wrote that at stake was the “existence of the country as a Colony of Great Britain or as a dumping ground for Asia.” The Transvaal, with its temperate climate and riches, must be preserved as a “nursery for the highest form of civilizing influence the world can boast.”Footnote 82
Another “vector” of white laborism operated through the Cornish diaspora, a far-flung network of skilled workers that circulated throughout the mining regions of the empire, from California and the North American west to Australia and New Zealand to southern Africa, and often returning to Cornwall.Footnote 83 Adding to these loops, white South Africans also traveled around the settler colonies and back to the metropole. Creswell stumped in England during the election season, speaking at trade union rallies, Liberal Party meetings, and receiving wide coverage in the press.Footnote 84 The secretary of the White League, F.R. MacDonald, also an Australian emigrant, toured Australia, New Zealand, and Britain in 1906.Footnote 85
If the Chinese Question had been thus percolating in the colonies for several decades, the Liberal Party made easy use of it during the election campaign by invoking the moral authority of British abolitionism. But the seemingly fortuitous timing of its arrival in the metropole was no accident. Labor in the colonies had not been an election issue in the past, but from 1904 to 1906 Liberals astutely sensed its importance for its alliance with Labor. Around the turn of the twentieth century, with the United States and Germany overtaking Great Britain in industrial output, the British trade unions grew more interested in emigration as a hedge against economic insecurity. They were receptive to the arguments made by the Australian and South African unions, and they became alarmed when stories circulated back to England about British emigrants living in abject poverty on the streets of Johannesburg, their unemployment supposedly the result of Chinese labor.Footnote 86 Emigration was not as central to Labor's vision as were demands for government social welfare (which many laissez-faire Liberals opposed). But racial protectionism in the colonies was another kind of statist reform, a government guarantee that the peripheries of the empire would be reserved for white settlement. In fact, emigration between 1903 and 1913 rose to unprecedented levels, with 3.15 million people leaving England for the colonies, half of them bound for Canada, the closest of the Dominions.Footnote 87
Upon the election of a Het Volk government in the Transvaal in 1907, the new legislature immediately terminated Chinese labor program save for existing contracts, which it allowed to run out by 1910. It enacted legislation excluding all new Asian immigration, as well as laws restricting the rights of Indians and Chinese already in the Transvaal. Resistance by local Chinese and Indians led to a face-saving compromise agreement in 1908, voluntary registration and no fingerprinting.Footnote 88 The greater compromise was that Botha and especially Smuts committed to the British Empire and to the interests of the Randlords. Smuts would call out armed troops to suppress miners strikes from 1913 to 1914. During this period and into the 1920s the Transvaal labor market and working classes realigned with increased dispossession of the native population and the assimilation of Afrikaaners into industrial workforce.Footnote 89
South Africa would be the most bluntly racist and violent of the British settler colonies. But it was of a piece with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which all established as Dominions of the British Empire, the concept of “dominion” signaling not a colony, but a polity akin to a country, indeed, signaling its own colonial dominion over indigenous peoples. Dominions possessed maximum autonomy within the British Empire, which they used to protect the rule of local white settlers while conveniently distancing the metropole from the openly racist modus operandi of native removal, racial segregation, and Asiatic exclusion. These tenets of white settlerism had, in fact, been forged in the United States.
The consolidation of Asiatic exclusion in the Anglo-American world perfected an ideology that cast all Chinese as a “coolie race” and as “slaves” regardless of actual status or condition. To be sure, a precise definition of slavery eluded the British election campaign; the writings and speeches of critics were studded with phrases like “general tenour,” “feeling of slavery,” “conditions akin to slavery,” “partaking of slavery.” When pressed to define “slavery,” John Burns resorted to citing the United States experience as evidence of the impossibility of free Chinese immigration, which brought the concept of Chinese comprising a “coolie race” full circle.Footnote 90
By 1905, indentured Asian labor in British colonies had dwindled to less than 100,000, almost entirely from India. The free population of Asians in the colonies was far greater—more than 120,000 Asian Indians in the Caribbean and 100,000 in Mauritius; 250,000 Chinese in Singapore and nearly a million in Hong Kong.Footnote 91 Chinese continued to work on short-term contracts in the Malay States and in Manchuria, typically for no longer than a year and under few restrictions. Yet, “slavery” remained the central organizing concept of a global discourse against Chinese immigration. Americans and British alike opposed the “slavery” of the Chinese but did not support their freedom.
