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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT/RESUME
This article examines the surveillance of the Chinese in Canada during the Great War, focusing on the experience of the Chinese Nationalist League (CNL), one of the largest Chinese political organizations in Canada. It examines the process by which Canadian surveillance officials came to view the country's Chinese population as dangerous and potentially subversive by the end of the Great War. Though in part a manifestation of the broad xenophobia that led to the oppression of other ethnic groups in Canada during the Great War, this article contends that suspicion of the Chinese was deeply rooted in traditional Western perceptions of the Chinese as a "sly," "devious," and "mysterious" race. These perceptions nourished suspicion of the Chinese and sustained the surveillance in the absence of substantive evidence implicating the CNL in seditious activities. The surveillance resulted in the suppression of the CNL and arrest of its leaders in September 1918.
Cet article examine la surveillance des chinois au Canada pendant la Grande Guerre, se concentrant sur l'experience de la ligue nationaliste chinoise (LNC), un des plus grands organismes politiques chinois au Canada. Il examine le processus par lequel les fonctionnaires canadiens de surveillance ont commence a regarder la population chinoise du pays comme dangereuse et potentiellement subversive vers la fin de la Grande Guerre. Cependant en partie une manifestation de la large xenophobie qui a menee a l'oppression d'autres groupes ethniques au Canada pendant la Grande Guerre, cet article affirme que le soupcon des chinois a ete profondement enracine dans des perceptions occidentales traditionnelles des chinois comme une race "rusee," "detournee," et "mysterieuse." Ces perceptions ont menees au soupcon des Chinois et ont soutenues la surveillance en l'absence de l'evidence substantive impliquant le LNC dans des activites seditieux. La surveillance a eu comme consequence la suppression du LNC et l'arrestation de ses chefs en septembre 1918.
INTRODUCTION
On 1 September 1918, in Victoria, British Columbia, a local Chinese barber named Wong Chun assassinated Tang Hualong, a Chinese government minister traveling through Canada en route to China. Wong ambushed the Minister and his entourage and fatally shot Tang at close range, committing suicide at the scene after a failed attempt to shoot the Minister's secretary. (1) The assassin was a member of the Chinese Nationalist League (CNL), the North American wing of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement and a vehement critic of Chinese Premier Duan Quiri. Tang, Speaker of the Chinese House of Representatives and Minister of Education and the Interior, was returning from an official visit to the United States intended to secure war loans for Peking, and as such, Wong's political affiliation became the main focus of the coroner's inquest. (2) Investigators deemed the act to have been politically motivated, and evaluation of the assassin's motive shortly evolved into an indictment of the CNL as a whole. Exercising powers available under the War Measures Act, the federal government banned the CNL, along with twelve other political organizations, under Order in Council PC 2384 in September 1918. (3)
Local media coverage of the assassination was quick to stress the peculiarly "oriental" nature of the crime. Headlines in the Victoria Daily Colonist declared, "Local Chinatown in a Ferment: Assassination of Tang Hua Lung Creates Great Excitement and Predictions Made of Further Trouble." The reporter noted that "an Oriental impassiveness characteristic of the Chinese" could not "hide the undercurrent of excitement" in Chinatown after the murder, and that despite their effort to "solve the real inwardness of the shooting," the police were unable to permeate "a seemingly impenetrable veil of mystery and silence" surrounding the event. The same reporter commented that Wong committed the murder "with a fatalism peculiar to the Oriental," and in the aftermath, Chinatown was "seething" and "rife" with speculation of retribution and further violence (Victoria Daily Colonist, 4 September 1918).
The perception of the Chinese as mysterious, devious, and violent so clearly evident in the media coverage of the assassination also informed the Canadian government's investigation of the CNL's culpability for the crime. This paper will discuss the investigation into the assassination and the subsequent ban of the CNL in the broader context of the surveillance of the Chinese in Canada during the Great War, and consider the extent to which Canadian surveillance officials were influenced by such racist perceptions. On the recommendation of the British government, which claimed to have evidence linking the organization to the cause of Indian revolution, Canadian security officials had maintained strict surveillance of the CNL in Canada since January 1916, and many involved in the surveillance accepted the assassination as clear proof of the subversive, violent, and unpredictable nature of the CNL. This judgement was not based on conventional proof of the organization's guilt: three years of surveillance had uncovered little more than mundane organizational correspondence, and while Wong Chun was a member of the Nationalist League, evidence linking the CNL as an organization to the assassination was circumstantial at best. Rather, suspicion of the subversive nature of the CNL and its involvement in the assassination rested on the pervasive belief that the Chinese were "wily individuals to deal with" and that the operations of the "mysterious oriental mind" were opaque to white observers. Firmly convinced of the essential racial gulf between the Chinese and white Canadians, investigators were less concerned with obtaining clear evidence of the CNL's involvement in subversive activity than with attempting to come to grips with the "psychology of the ignorant Chinese." (4) This in turn absolved Canadian investigators from the need to secure hard evidence to prove the CNL's guilt: rather than proving the organization's innocence, lack of such evidence was simply accepted as proof that the "sly" Chinese had found a way to circumvent the murder investigation and surveillance measures.
In some respects, the surveillance and suppression of the CNL reflected the broad atmosphere of xenophobia prevalent throughout Canada during the Great War. A variety of ethnic groups were targeted as potential threats to Canadian national security in this period, and the federal government acted against them swiftly and decisively. For example, thousands of Ukrainian and German nationals were interned in Canada throughout the duration of the war, while the Bolshevik Revolution and rise of labor radicalism in Canada in 1917-18 raised Ottawa's concern over the activities of Russian, Finnish, and other Central and Eastern European immigrants. (5) As Jeffrey Keshen noted, surveillance of non-Anglophone populations during the Great War "reflected and derived strength from long-established nativism" in Canadian society (Keshen 1996, 101). The surveillance network that investigated the activities of the CNL monitored a wide variety of different groups, and the Chinese were hardly unique as targets of surveillance and political repression.
At the same time, however, the measures taken against the CNL represent an episode in the long history of specifically anti-Chinese discrimination in Canada. Though many ethnic groups faced significant discrimination and assimilationist pressure prior to the Great War, no group faced as much sustained racist agitation and legal marginalization as the Chinese. Discriminatory Head Tax legislation in 1885, 1900, and 1903, laws denying the Chinese voting rights and restricting their vocational opportunities, and numerous outbursts of mob violence all targeted the Chinese as an unwelcome alien population incapable of assimilating into mainstream, Anglo-Canadian society (Roy 1976, 1989; Ward 2002; Li 1998). The language used by surveillance officials during the Great War clearly reveals a significant amount of ideological continuity with anti-Chinese discrimination prior to 1914, drawing upon well-established perceptions of the Chinese as a "cunning, secretive and treacherous" "race" that "shared a universal disregard for truth" (Roy 1989, 41: Ward 2002, 9). The widespread belief in the inherently deceitful and violent nature of the Chinese race, confirmed in the minds of Canadian authorities by the assassination of Tang Hualong, sustained the surveillance for several years in the absence of corroborating evidence and contributed heavily to the eventual proscription of the organization.
THE GROWTH OF THE CHINESE NATIONALIST LEAGUE IN CANADA, 1911-16
By the time Canadian officials commenced their surveillance of the organization in January 1916, the Chinese Nationalist League had grown into a significant force in Chinese-Canadian politics. Sun Yat-sen established the first Canadian branches of the CNL in Vancouver and Victoria on his visit to Canada in 1911 after establishing branches in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco in 1909-10 (Hsueh 1961). Sun struck a crucial and lucrative alliance with the largest Chinese political faction in Canada, the Zhigongtang, and vied for the financial and political support of Canada's Chinese with diplomatic representatives of the Qing government and other political factions such as the Bao Huang Hui, or the "Chinese Empire Reform Association." (6) Sun's fundraising efforts in Canada were richly rewarded: the Chinese in Canada contributed HK$100,000 to his revolutionary cause, a total that far exceeded the contribution of Chinese elsewhere in the diaspora. (7)
The success of the 1911 Chinese Revolution ushered in an era of growth for the CNL in Canada. The CNL no longer had to compete for political influence with diplomatic representatives of the Qing government, while the Bao Huang Hui quickly reorganized as the Xianzhengdang (Constitutionalist Party), though it lost most of its supporters after 1911. The CNL was thus able to secure its position as a prominent political force in Canada, and by 1914, the organization operated forty-one branches across the country. Though twenty-eight of them were in British Columbia, the CNL could claim at least a nominal presence in every region of Canada, with five branches in Alberta, four in Ontario, two in Quebec, and one each in Manitoba and Nova Scotia (Con et al. 1982), This expansion continued throughout the Great War as well, and by 1919, the CNL operated fifty-six branches across Canada, with an estimated membership of six to eight thousand (Con et al. 1982; Victoria Times, 26 February 1919).
The CNL's expansion in this period, however, was not uncontested. The organization's alliance with the Zhigongtang, so crucial to the success of Sun's fundraising efforts in Canada, gave way to rivalry as the group claimed that it had not been adequately rewarded by Sun for its contribution to the successful revolution (Wickberg 1980). More significantly, Sun failed in his bid to retain power in China. By November 1913, Yuan Shikai had defeated pro-Guomindang military forces in China and driven the revolutionary leader into exile (Spence 1999). Sun once again turned to the Chinese diaspora for financial support, while the new Chinese president issued instructions in January...
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