New Zealand Chinese Early History C 333

source - stephenyoung.co.nz

edmondsallan - Hello - the writings on their ancestory is excellent

Though this renewed immigration wave was still primarily one of sojourners, reflecting the long-established tradition operative in the migrants’ Cantonese home counties, it produced in effect the next Chinese generation in this country. Anti-Chinese attitudes in New Zealand did not deter them since sojourners tolerate less than ideal conditions away from home as long as they could gainfully earn, save and leave. And they could do so in New Zealand, because once arrived and admitted, the forces of law and order were extended to them. They aimed for a savings rate of one third, a visit to China about every five years and a take-home sum that was still around £100, until Chinese earnings improved after the Great Depression.(24) They continued to live circumscribed lives here within their traditional social groupings and were still separate from mainstream society. Now, though, the separatism was more European-induced than ever before, since notions of white supremacy, racial purity and the avoidence of racial ‘contamination’ or ‘pollution’ in marriage by ‘inferiors’ pervaded much of white society.

For all that, a basic level of decency was maintained towards the Chinese, and their businesses were still patronised. The decency was underlined by several churches, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and particularly the Presbyterian Church, which had a small Chinese mission in New Zealand and a big Canton Villages Mission among New Zealand-Chinese home villages in upper Panyu county, Guangdong province. This was the only Australasian church mission in China. The Chinese also acknowledged the high professional standard of the judiciary.(25) But it was exceptional for Europeans in New Zealand to hire Chinese, or for Chinese to have European employees, particularly in urban business activities. As European females were sometimes even arrested for consorting with them,(26) intermarriages remained few. Chinese market gardens which hired Maori labour sparked off a furore which went on for years about Chinese (and Indian) men and Maori women relationships, and indeed, 38 Chinese-Maori offspring were recorded in the 1936 census. The Great Depression (1930-34, although hard times actually extended from 1926-36 in New Zealand) affected Chinese businesses as well as European but new Chinese businesses were resented and opposed.(27)

Overall, the new wave of Chinese men was better educated in China (often to secondary school standard) than their predecessors, and could probably have adapted more to New Zealand life. Nevertheless, when faced with anti-Chinese prejudice, they too looked back to China as their primary home. One of their sayings was that ‘the leaves fall (return) to the roots.’ In their ancestral villages, two or three generations of overseas money earned by one or more male members per generation had enriched their families, many of whom became landlords. With this stake in China, and because their Cantonese schooling had emphasised the rebirth of China, they too were intensely patriotic towards that country. They firmly believed in the inner strength of China and the Chinese people. An added reason for their patriotism was another belief, continued from their predecessors, that only the heightened international reputation of a strengthened China could improve their lot in New Zealand. Specifically, they believed that only a resurgent China could disprove the prejudice of racial inferiority pressed against the Chinese here. The scattered Chinese communities in this country could not do it on their own, and they therefore established in New Zealand the Kuomintang party (1913) and the New Zealand Chinese Association (1937) as their two chief societies.(28) Both were strongly linked to each other and to the Chinese consulate, the staff of which was appointed by the Kuomintang government in China from 1929.

In 1937, the New Zealand Chinese Association began systematically raising funds for the Chinese war effort against Japan, and at the end of the war, was said to have raised either the highest or second-highest amount per capita in any overseas Chinese community.(29) Every Chinese earner in New Zealand contributed on a weekly basis (30) and many gave more than expected. The New Zealand government permitted the money to be sent to China. The two foremost Chinese leaders were Chiu Kwok-chun and his half-caste New Zealand-born friend Henry Yue Jackson, who worked in the Chinese consulate, and they were ably and fully supported by Consul (later Consul General) Wang Feng (1935-53). In every branch of the Chinese Association, men rose to the occasion; and many years later, the writer saw their faces light up whenever he mentioned the Association’s work in the war years.

However, due to the intense prejudice against them, the importance of the Chinese to New Zealand itself during this era was less than before. In the period up to 1945, only five Chinese had graduated from university, a number too sparse to make an impact. No commercial pioneers had followed Choie Sew Hoy and Chew Chong. In fact, the Chinese businesses, being chiefly constrained to market gardens, fruitshops and laundries, crowded in and competed with each other. For all that, one should not dismiss these three Chinese occupations lightly, since the Chinese skilfully provided a major social service in each. Labour unions finally left the Chinese alone in these three trades, probably in part because of a tacit acknowledgement of their usefulness to the general society.

The young men who had arrived postwar gradually succeeded their fathers in the Chinese businesses, many of the latter returning permanently to China in the early 1920s. Thereupon, some of the young men began developing the same wish to get their families to New Zealand. If they could do so, they believed that they were not turning their backs on China, but would get their families at least for a time out of danger; furthermore they would not need to go back to China at intervals, thereby interrupting their businesses here; they would still retire to China; and in the meantime they could send their children back for a Chinese education - as many of the small number of Chinese families already in New Zealand were doing. But of course under the immigration laws, they could not bring their families here. They were an unwanted minority under an immigration system which was enforcing sojournism by compulsion.

Then at last, positive change occurred in New Zealand’s attitude to Chinese, principally because of the international scene. In the late 1930s, Japan became regarded as a common enemy to both China and New Zealand, and the plight of the Cantonese people at war was frequently portrayed by the Canton Villages Mission of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. In 1936 New Zealand’s officialdom could still write: ‘The presence in a population of considerable groups of individuals of alien races who cannot be readily assimilated into that population… is not attended with advantage.’(31) This notwithstanding, inter-racial relationships between Chinese and Europeans had improved to the extent that in 1937, Chin Bing Foon of Dunedin was actually invited by a senior immigration officer to apply for the entry of his family.(32) Soon after, New Zealand made a landmark decision which, from 1939 until the departure port of Hong Kong was captured in 1941, permitted temporary entry to 249 Chinese wives and 244 young children of Chinese residents as war refugees.(33) My mother, brother and I came with them. This first big group of Chinese women and children were allowed to stay after World War 2 and the children became an indispensable factor in the ensuing settlement of Chinese here.

When New Zealand entered World War 2, many of the Chinese were nearing or in their 40s and not fluent enough in English to participate in the armed forces. The realistic task the New Zealand government set for them was to produce more vegetables for the rapid expansion of its troop numbers. The government designated market gardening as an essential industry and encouraged the formation of the Dominion Federation of New Zealand Chinese Commercial Growers in 1941 to increase vegetable production. Besides this, the Chinese in New Zealand earned a good reputation in World War 2 in a number of other ways.(34) As to soldiering, in both World Wars the number of full-blood New Zealand-Chinese of the right age to enlist for military service was small; in the 1916 census there were only 32 males and 8 females between 20 and 25 years and in the 1936 census, there were only 119 males and 38 females aged between 16 and 25 years. Still, at least 39 joined up in World War 2, of whom eight served overseas.(35) In China, an ex-migrant to Oamaru, Otago, named Lowe Lai-san, became a Kuomintang major general of distinction.

3. (1951-85). The era of settlement.

Generally, from 1951, an improving attitude towards the Chinese here led to the apparent disappearance of assumed racial superiorities of the past on both sides. This was therefore a happier era conducive to settlement in which the children, both Chinese and European, played the key role. The expectation of the general society was that the Chinese minority should settle, acculturate and eventually assimilate into the dominant New Zealand culture. Carried to a conclusion, this meant that the Chinese would be socially absorbed (assimilated); in practice this would have involved the learning and adoption of the dominant culture coupled with the giving up of their own, and intermarriage. Generally the youngest Chinese children were the ones most willing and able to do this, and their young European friends were most accepting of them.

As mentioned, the refugee wives and children were allowed to stay after the war as permanent residents (1947) and New Zealand further loosened its anti-Chinese regulations on immigration to allow the reunification of more families here. Three very important events happened in 1951. The census that year recorded a ratio of 40 married Chinese women to every 100 married Chinese men in New Zealand, but in that year also the new communist government in China slammed its gates on emigration, and generally kept them shut till 1976. This was the first very important event, a tragic development which meant that many Chinese men failed to get their families out of China and were destined to die as ‘bachelor husbands’ in New Zealand or Hong Kong - because very few dared to go back into China till the 1980s. However, as it turned out, New Zealand had already gained a sufficient number of reunified Chinese families with young children to create a forward movement of settlement within their ethnic minority. And, dare one say it, it was probably an advantage for these families to settle without having to assist continual inflows of new immigrant kinsfolk who would probably have slowed down that process.

For the reunified families especially, the second very important event in 1951 was that the New Zealand government granted naturalisation to Chinese again, a privilege, it will be remembered, which had been stopped in 1908. The writer recalls the excitement with which his father and uncles greeted the announcement, to them another major symbol of the fairer treatment of our ethnic minority. They noted that the liberalisation of the immigration laws for Chinese to that year had been nearly all carried out by Labour ministries and the reinstatement of naturalisation was actioned by a National Government, signifying that both Labour and National were as one in treating the Chinese more justly.

The event was all the more significant because the older New Zealand-Chinese saw that they and their families could not go back to China after the communists there began persecuting the landlord class - to which many of them belonged - as part of a land reform campaign begun in 1951. That was the third very important event. The torments inflicted on landlords caused a deep revulsion among our parents towards communist China. At the same time, very few retained faith in the Kuomintang remnant in Formosa after its failures, nor believed its vow to reconquer and reinvigorate China. For these reasons, the reinstatement of naturalisation represented in many Chinese eyes the promising start of a new era which logically pointed to settlement in New Zealand - and required that reinstatement as a necessary prerequisite.

Deep down, many others (perhaps most) of the writer’s parents’ generation still had doubts whether the Chinese could really put down roots in New Zealand. They had long memories of prejudice, and these doubts even led some of them to buy property in Hong Kong - in case New Zealand again turned its back on the Chinese. In the 1950s and even in the 1960s, New Zealand still had little real knowledge of the Chinese and some other minorities, whilst its old ethnic intolerances retained much force.(36) The older Chinese knew this and their reservations were not helped by communist China’s participation in the Korean War (1950-53) followed by persistent, strong New Zealand anti-communism particularly espoused by the Returned Services Association.(37) Both these events generated suspicion in greater or lesser degree towards all Chinese. The New Zealand-Chinese could not help but feel the suspicion, despite the reassurances of our European friends.(38) Fortunately the Kuomintang Chinese consulate was still recognised until 1972, and the New Zealand-Chinese could take some shelter under its umbrella. They could point to it and say that not all Chinese were communists and neither were they. The quid pro quo was that the Chinese in New Zealand withheld public criticism of the Kuomintang party, observed Double Ten (October 10) Day and flew the Kuomintang national flag on that occasion. By the time the Kuomintang consulate was replaced by the Chinese communist embassy, the feelings towards the Chinese in New Zealand were visibly getting better. More Chinese were mixing to a greater extent in the general society, and the embassy helped by keeping a fairly non-controversial profile and maintaining a moderate, one-nationality stance towards the local Chinese.

One can summarise the effect of China on the New Zealand-Chinese as follows: In the early years of this era when most of us were still perceived as outsiders, China’s international reputation considerably affected the Chinese here for good or bad - as our forebears had experienced. As settlement progressed, the collective image of the Chinese in this country became more and more accepted in the public mind as New Zealanders. In parallel, China’s influence upon that image has much receded - though negative media reports can still be found which have some impact upon us. Looking back, the writer feels he has only experienced two periods when China’s international reputation had been really well regarded in New Zealand - during World War 2 and just after, and in the years 1972-89 (before the Tiananmen Square incident) when America was well-disposed towards China.

The parents’ doubts on these things did not apply to their young children. The refugee and postwar Chinese children were allowed free education as were the New Zealand-born Chinese youngsters of the time, and in the schools they influenced and were influenced favourably. Through their childhood friendships with their European peers and respect for their teachers during their most impressionable and optimistic years, they were convinced that New Zealanders were basically fair and tolerant, and that being so, they could settle in New Zealand. They knew of the European expectation of their assimilation and the inevitable loss of Chineseness (as their parents warned), but they were not afraid of that. Indeed, many were eager for change and were especially attracted - in those early years of their lives - by the penchant for individuality and transformation inherent in New Zealand’s European culture. They saw the road of assimilation open to them, with its challenge and the more promising future it offered in comparison with rural based Cantonese or communist or Kuomintang alternative ways of life. Many travelled that road, intent upon achieving assimilation.

Till we meet again - Regards - edmondsallan