In the late 1880s, agents of both the Qing and British Empires embarked on unprecedented missions to investigate Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia and Australia.Footnote 1 The first was undertaken by the specially appointed Qing Imperial Commissioners Wang Ronghe 王荣和 and Yu Qiong 余瓗, and the second by the British translator, diplomat, and orientalist Edward Harper Parker. Traveling at virtually the same time, and visiting largely the same places, these two missions carried out what were likely the most comprehensive studies of Chinese populations abroad up to that point in world history. Both parties used their work to argue for bold new approaches to engagement with Chinese diaspora. Consequently, both parties also faced significant resistance. What can these exceptional parallel expeditions tell us about the empires from which they originated and the places and peoples they encountered? Firstly, these two journeys help reveal unexpected commonalities between two very different imperial systems, demonstrating the emergence of a more global vision in the late-Qing state than has been assumed. They also provide materials for in-depth portraits of Chinese communities and the struggles they faced, highlighting the appearance of new forms of transnational activism. Finally, they revealed the crucial situation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “Chinese Question” of migration to white settler colonies in its broader diasporic context.
The roots of the nineteenth century Chinese diaspora lie in China’s late-Ming and early-Qing eras. Both dynasties had initially attempted to restrict private maritime activity, but especially after 1727 when the last Qing haijin maritime ban was lifted, migration to Southeast Asia boomed. Across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Chinese migrants from places like Fujian’s hub of Xiamen (Amoy) thrived as traders, craftspeople, cultivators, and miners, though the Qing state itself made no efforts to govern or support their activities abroad. After the forced restructuring of China’s coastal trade in the First Opium War (1839–42), established migrant networks began taking advantage of the new (semi-)colonial regimes in China and Southeast Asia to expand their endeavours and escape increasing war and poverty at home.Footnote 2 Following the exploits of diasporic pioneers and business magnates, Melissa Macaulay has provocatively suggested that Chaozhou (Teochew) migrants from northern Guangdong may have been greater beneficiaries of this colonial system than colonialists themselves, reaping colonialism’s benefits without responsibility for its costs.Footnote 3 While this framework struggles to account for some working class migrants the three investigators encountered, the colonial era unquestionably marked, as Adam McKeown shows, China’s entry into a global age of mass migration.Footnote 4
This period also saw the opening of brand-new migration pathways. Beginning in 1849, Cantonese migrants from the counties around Guangzhou appropriated the new British Colony of Hong Kong as a hub for migration, joining the gold rushes in California and Victoria. By the 1880s, these rushes had long since subsided, but migrant communities had established themselves in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around what Henry Yu terms the “Cantonese Pacific.”Footnote 5 In British colonies, these migrations were protected by treaty. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, new waves of anti-Chinese fervor spread across British and American settler societies primarily driven, as Mae Ngai argues, not by economic competition but by white supremacist populism.Footnote 6 As scholars like Benjamin Mountford and Rachel Bright have shown, the mounting demands of white settler colonies for Chinese exclusion presented a conundrum for London. Largely self-governing but beholden to the metropole in international affairs, colonial governments demanded London abrogate its treaty obligations.Footnote 7 This was E. H. Parker’s “Chinese Question”: was it truly justified for London to support Chinese exclusion, and what would the consequences of doing so be for the British empire?
Europeans and Americans had also taken advantage of the post-Opium War border regime in China to begin indenturing cheap Chinese labor for the Americas. Though some workers were recruited with informed consent after Britain and France forced the legalization of indenture during the Second Opium War (1856–1860), many more were unwitting victims of human trafficking, especially to Cuba and Peru. In 1874, the brutality of the workers’ treatment there forced the dynasty to abandon its longstanding non-involvement in emigrants’ lives and collaborate on investigatory commissions. The inhumanities they revealed contributed not only to the closing of the traffic and to the establishment of a Qing consular system, but, as Shelly Chan argues, to the beginning of a new relationship between state and diaspora.Footnote 8 Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong’s voyage represented part of this new and significant trend—the unprecedented globalization of the Chinese state driven by the exigencies of diaspora. Their commission then was born from a very different “Chinese Question”: What further hardships were migrant communities facing abroad, and how could Qing intervention serve to cultivate a new kind of state power?
From across the Atlantic to the Pacific these Chinese questions intersected: What role would the two great imperial metropoles of Beijing and London take in shaping the pathways of Chinese migration? In the late 1880s, the answers were profoundly uncertain and yet urgently needed. In this paper, I explore the ways E. H. Parker and Wang and Yu’s journeys into diaspora sought to provide them. I do so through case studies of two sites visited: Deli in the Dutch East Indies, and Britain’s Australian colonies. While any of their stops could make for fascinating studies, I have chosen these two because they represent some of the investigators’ best documented visits, to places where the stakes were particularly high, and which serve to illustrate two very different Chinese communities facing two very different struggles. Indeed, in Deli, brutal labor conditions led the visitors to favor restricting migration, while in Australia mounting anti-Chinese fervor led both parties to support easing migration. Exploring these two contrasting examples, I show how the parallel missions promoted local and global interventions in Chinese mobilities that they saw as simultaneously empowering their own imperial states. At the same time, I uncover the intertwined reasons why ultimately both London and Beijing rejected these interventions in favor of alternative visions of empire. For all its differences, the Qing state was, just as much as Britain, engaged in the very modern process of responding to the unexpected outcomes of globalized industrial mass migration.
Preparations
Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong’s journey was the culmination of decades of transformation in Qing policy and philosophy on migration and diplomacy. The Cuba Commission of 1874 and the opening of the first Qing Consulate in Singapore in 1877 had ushered in a new era of consular expansion.Footnote 9 By the late 1880s, the dynasty had put consuls in San Francisco, New York, Lima, Havana, and Matanzas in the Americas; and Nagasaki, Yokohama, Kobe, and Hakodate in Japan. But in Southeast Asia, where the majority of Chinese migrants resided, Singapore remained its only outpost.Footnote 10
Still, Qing consuls now defended the rights of workers in Cuba, advocated for merchants in the United States, and even exercised extraterritorial jurisdiction in Japan.Footnote 11 Such things would have been inconceivable just a decade or two prior. For centuries, Qing officials had rarely left their own state, and certainly never did so in order to assist migrant communities. Consequently, it was an uphill battle for advocates to convince Beijing of the value of expensive, unprecedented new appointments abroad, whose benefit to the empire was not always clear. During the 1884–85 Sino-French War, however, the movement for state involvement in diaspora gained a powerful new ally: the Governor-General of Guangdong Zhang Zhidong 张之洞. From seemingly having little prior knowledge of the topic, Zhang’s attention was captured by unexpected wartime expressions of diasporic support.Footnote 12 Shortly after the conflict’s end, in October 1885, Zhang Zhidong memorialized the throne with a new proposal to dispatch a special commission to visit overseas communities.
Zhang’s initial plan, however, was focused on mobilizing migrants’ financial resources, canvassing donations for a Guangdong-controlled global fleet of gunboats. Dedicated to the protection of diasporic merchants suffering “bullying and humiliation” at the hands of foreigners, these warships would “spread the imperial might far and wide”—a very different vision of the “Cantonese Pacific.”Footnote 13 Soon, however, a rapidly unfolding crisis on one side of that Pacific transformed Zhang’s program. Beginning with the brutal Rock Springs Massacre in September 1885, a wave of anti-Chinese pogroms swept the American west.Footnote 14 Squeezed between Chinese exclusion and extralegal violence, Cantonese Americans appealed to the Governor-General for additional aid.Footnote 15
Zhang became increasingly concerned that threats to migrant livelihoods represented an economic danger to China—especially, as he later warned, if America’s anti-Chinese pathology were to spread to other countries.Footnote 16 By the time it came for the mission to be launched, Zhang and his collaborator, the new minister to Washington Zhang Yinhuan 张荫桓, had sidelined warships. Instead, they now promised a close inquiry into migrant communities’ grievances and how they could be addressed. With Zhang Yinhuan accounting for Japan, Hawaii, and the Americas, and the new envoys covering Southeast Asia and Australia, this was envisioned as the first-ever comprehensive global exploration of diaspora. The two men chosen to lead the commission were Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong.Footnote 17
Wang Ronghe was a general in the Qing military, with roots near Fujian’s migration hub of Xiamen. Wang himself, however, had been born in the British colony of Penang in the 1830s, where he mastered English at the Anglo-Chinese school. Wang joined the Qing army during the Taiping Rebellion around 1861, and his expertise in foreign languages and technologies seems to have made him an asset. Prior to the Commission he had been primarily deployed in the construction and operation of military telegraph lines.Footnote 18 His colleague Yu Qiong was born in another locus of migration, Taishan, outside Guangzhou, in 1834. Yu passed the provincial exams to become an official (juren) in 1861 and held several domestic administrative positions before becoming the dynasty’s first consul at Nagasaki between 1878 and1884. There, Yu had distinguished himself as an expert on foreign affairs.Footnote 19
Together they would visit the Philippines, Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Burma, Sumatra, Java, and most of the Australian colonies before returning to China in 1887, only to depart again to tour Borneo, Siam, and Vietnam in late 1887 and early 1888.Footnote 20 During their journey they would submit reports to Guangzhou and to Beijing, as well as to the new Qing diplomats in Europe responsible for each nation’s colonial empire. At the end of their primary mission, they submitted a comprehensive report on their observations, intended to demonstrate the need for increased state involvement in diasporic communities. Moreover, they themselves represented an unprecedented overture from the state, however transitory, being the first Qing officials most migrants would have encountered abroad.
Edward Harper Parker’s journey was self-consciously conducted in dialogue with Wang and Yu’s, or as Parker later put it, he “followed the footsteps of [their] mission.”Footnote 21 E. H. Parker, as he preferred to style himself, was born in Liverpool in 1849. Parker came to China as an interpreter for the British consular service in 1869 and worked as a translator at a series of posts along the China coast and in Korea. In between postings, he also managed to become a barrister in England and to establish himself as a reputable Orientalist.Footnote 22 It seems Parker conducted his tour primarily to bolster his standing as an Orientalist, which he did entirely of his own accord. Taking a year’s leave from his post in China around 1 March 1888, he visited French Indo-China, Siam, Burma, the Straits Settlements, Sumatra, Java, Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand before submitting his final report.Footnote 23
During his leave, Parker voluntarily submitted a variety of research reports circulated among the Foreign, Colonial, and India Offices, not solely on Chinese abroad. But Parker had a particular interest in Chinese migration dating back to at least 1875.Footnote 24 With the “Chinese Question” in Australia rapidly becoming one of the most pressing issues in London, Parker chose to synthesize his findings into a comprehensive report on Chinese diaspora for circulation around the empire.Footnote 25 Parker was certainly not the first Briton to report on Chinese migration into white settler colonies or crown colonies in Asia. But what Parker sought to accomplish for the first time, like Wang and Yu, was to use first-hand observations to weave these disparate threads together, revealing a totality greater than the sum of its parts.
Finding Deli
For Wang Ronghe, Yu Qiong, and E. H. Parker alike, the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) was an obvious destination. The archipelago hosted one of the region’s oldest and largest Chinese communities. In fact, the colonial capital at Batavia had been built in part by Chinese migrants in 1619. Since that time, Dutch officials had habitually appointed local Chinese elites as “Captains” (甲必丹) or other officers responsible for administering Chinese populations. Despite many traumas and interruptions, generation after generation had settled in the islands, sometimes intermarrying with local Malay families.Footnote 26 In 1888, Parker estimated there were 350,000 people of Chinese descent there, mostly concentrated in Batavia (today’s Jakarta) and Semarang on Java, with more continuing to arrive every day.Footnote 27 Despite the size and prominence of this community, the colony proved to be one of the most difficult for Qing officials to gain access to.
There were “no subjects of the Emperor of China in the Netherlands Indies,” The Hague initially responded, refusing the diasporic commission. Since all resident Chinese were considered Dutch subjects, they contended, Wang and Yu’s visit would constitute “meddling in the internal affairs” of the territory.Footnote 28 This was, as even some Dutch colonial observers pointed out, an indefensible claim.Footnote 29 As China’s Ambassador to the Netherlands Xu Jingcheng 许景澄 later protested, it was impossible to unilaterally declare all resident Chinese naturalized, especially recent arrivals. The Dutch foreign ministry rejoined that terms like “naturalization” and “citizenship” were entirely inapplicable to the Dutch East Indies. Of myriad races of the colony, they claimed, none were citizens, yet all were colonial subjects.Footnote 30 The foreign ministry opted not to mention that this did not apply to European “races,” who could naturally be recognized as foreign nationals. Nevertheless, in order to gain access, Xu was forced to reframe the visit as one of Sino-Dutch friendship and commerce, ostensibly unrelated to the diaspora question.Footnote 31
Within the Dutch East Indies, Deli, the hub of the Sumatran plantation belt, had not been on the planned itinerary for either journey. Situated at the northeastern edge of Sumatra, Deli was actually much closer to British Penang across the Malacca Strait than it was to the centers of Dutch authority and Chinese community on distant Java. Though Deli ultimately became a focal point for both expeditions, it was literally only discovered en route. As Wang and Yu explained, despite not having received prior imperial approval to investigate it, they had been left with “no choice but to go” after receiving multiple entreaties from British and Chinese elites at Penang. There, sources told them that not only were more than sixty thousand Chinese indentured at the port, but Dutch planters were treating workers in ways that were “exceptionally tyrannical.”Footnote 32
Similarly, E. H. Parker essentially stumbled across the settlement, after his attention was drawn to it while on board a steamer from Singapore to Penang filled with Chinese migrants. Learning of their destination, Parker resolved to visit Deli on his way back from Burma. Immediately ingratiating himself with several planters on board, he began collecting information on the site. According to his sources, Dutch planters had begun tobacco farming at Deli around 1863 but mass production there was only a decade old. Despite the venture being “closely kept” and “little known” outside the immediate region, he reported, it was already highly productive and immensely profitable.Footnote 33
The largest planting conglomerate, the Deli Maatschappij (company), alone employed fifty thousand Chinese workers, and according to Parker was delivering an astronomical one hundred percent return on shares. In 1887, he claimed, Deli had produced 140,000 bales of tobacco, or nearly 14,000 tonnes, most of which went to Amsterdam. There, the planters held a near monopoly on supply, and operating as a cartel cleared approximately £2,000,000 profit (roughly $9,700,000 USD) that year. As Deli’s environmental conditions had remained stable, essentially the only variable factor was labor cost.Footnote 34 In other words, maintaining such high margins was entirely dependent on keeping wages low by ensuring that Chinese migrants constantly flowed into the colony—and remained there.
With the permission of the Dutch colonial government, Wang and Yu arrived on the Deli coast (Labuhan Deli) on 17 December 1886 from Penang and reached the main settlement at Medan on the 19th. They were publicly received by Dutch officials and planters, as well as their Chinese lieutenants Lim Tek Swie (林得水) and Oen Ghan The (温颜郑). The lieutenants would serve as the commissioners’ primary informants, though Wang and Yu would also interview numerous European officials and planters, as well as Chinese foremen (gongtou 工头) and laborers. While official assistance facilitated elements of their investigation, it was also intended to “stage manage” their experience. This did not prevent them, however, from obtaining ample evidence of abuse before their departure on 28 December.Footnote 35
E. H. Parker, for his part, traveled from Penang to Deli and back just over a year and a half later, in early June 1888.Footnote 36 Parker visited in an entirely private capacity and so received no official reception. Nevertheless, he obtained what was in some ways even more damning evidence than Wang and Yu. While the movements of Chinese persons were highly controlled, Parker was able to move freely among the plantation workers and question them at will. In total, he claimed to have interviewed fifty or sixty laborers this way, mostly Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese men. Perhaps Parker’s greatest advantage was his seemingly automatic treatment as a fellow member of the white ruling class. Planters of different European origins did not simply let slip their tactics for brutally exploiting Chinese workers; they actively boasted about them to Parker.Footnote 37
Revelations
With access secured, both missions interrogated the experience of Chinese migrants in Deli. They were particularly concerned with tracing the flows of migration and uncovering precisely what made their experiences so difficult. As their investigations revealed, migrants were widely deceived, overworked, and structurally exploited, while planters actively conspired to trap them in the settlement. These revelations not only shaped the investigators’ broader understandings of Chinese mobilities, but they also help refine modern frameworks for Chinese migration in the colonial era.
Both missions were naturally interested in how migrants were first recruited. Their findings detailed the complex collaborations between Dutch planters, Chinese brokers, and British colonial infrastructure that made Deli’s economy possible. The process began on the colonial side, where Deli planters would request workers from their agent in Penang, the most prominent of whom, Parker reported, was Theodoor Cornelis Bogaardt. Bogaardt and others in turn would make orders to Straits-based Chinese labor brokers, many of whom were Anglo-Chinese British subjects.Footnote 38 In China, brokers’ local agents then recruited men—Wang and Yu estimated about eighty percent from Chaozhou’s port of Shantou and twenty percent from Xiamen—and sent them to Singapore, often via Hong Kong. From licensed depots (baracoons) in Singapore they signed contracts in the presence of the British “Protector of Chinese” before then being shipped to Deli via Penang.Footnote 39
Both missions reported widespread complaints from workers that they had been misled as to their destination and/or terms of employment. Wang and Yu claimed half of all those in Singapore depots had been “kidnapped,” and Parker reported that “every single coolie…I spoke to” reported having been deceived in some way.Footnote 40 Workers also appear to have universally failed to receive the full thirty-dollar advance paid in their names, which seems largely or wholly to have gone into the pockets of brokers. Consequently, migrants arrived not just penniless, but actually in debt to their employers.Footnote 41
Wages were also the subject of careful scrutiny by the investigators. Working ten-hour days planting, picking, or packing tobacco, migrants were paid piecework for each 1000 units processed. The rates varied dramatically from as high as eight dollars to as low as three dollars or even one dollar per thousand.Footnote 42 As Wang and Yu emphasized, three to six dollars per month of this went straight back to the planters to pay for workers’ basic provisions. According to them, some could still manage to earn between fifty and two hundred dollars a year, while others could not even meet the high cost of provisions from the company store. Wang and Yu were also particularly concerned with the impact of gambling, apparently run by foremen, which further drained workers’ income. In order to meet their expenses or cover their losses, migrants were often forced to take on even more debt from planters.Footnote 43 The “Coolie Ordinance” defining migrants’ legal rights as well as the accounts of their debts, and earnings were kept locked away by planters, ensuring workers never quite knew “why or to what extent they were in debt.”Footnote 44 Wang and Yu made the inaccessibility of the Coolie Ordinance one of their central critiques, delivered to the Dutch and to the metropole.Footnote 45 Not surprisingly, few migrants put much stock in their copies of contracts, such as Li Zheng 李正 who gave his original contract to Parker to send back to London as it was not of “the slightest use” to him.Footnote 46
The question of women in workers’ lives, however, was addressed by E. H Parker alone. According to the planters, no wives or women of any kind were allowed on plantations, explicitly as a part of wage suppression—as larger households required higher incomes to survive. Consequently, any man seeking female intimacy was obliged to spend some of his meager income in Deli, where Parker claimed there were about one thousand Chinese sex workers, primarily Hakka and Tanka (Dan) women.Footnote 47 Whether Wang and Yu were unaware of this or simply chose to omit it for propriety is impossible to know.
There were also many structural features in Deli’s legal system intended to disempower Chinese migrants that both parties noted. For one, Chinese migrants were “rigidly excluded by Dutch law” from owning land, which Wang and Yu took particular objection to. Even more egregious was that workers seeking to lodge complaints with authorities were first required to obtain written permission from their employers to leave their plantations. Moreover, they were forbidden from doing so in more than small groups, and anyone giving shelter to workers outside their workplaces was criminalized.Footnote 48 Overall, punishment was one of the most integral features of the exploitative labor system, what Gregor Benton terms the “penal sanction.”Footnote 49 Essentially, this meant that legal punishment for things like refusing tasks or leaving plantations without a pass consisted of either pay deductions or hard labor (twenty-five guilders or three months, according to Parker).Footnote 50 In other words, the punishment for not working was more work—the potential for abuse here was enormous.
As if this were not sufficient, the investigations also found migrants were subject to a host of cruel and arbitrary abuses. Workers reported to Wang and Yu that they had been forced to work when ill or were driven off their plantations to “die on the roadside.”Footnote 51 They complained of planters holding them financially liable for crop problems outside their control, such as extreme weather. Planters “boxed their ears,” lashed them, had them beaten by foremen, and handcuffed them if they tried to escape or complain.Footnote 52
At the same time, Deli was not a prison. Both parties reported that it was possible for some workers to accumulate savings and return home, though exactly what proportion remained in question. Some workers told Parker it was up to thirty percent, while others said as few as seven people had made it home in the past two years (roughly 0.014%).Footnote 53 What both groups established with certainty was that the contract stipulations capping workers’ total terms at three years—regardless of debts—were being widely violated. Wang and Yu also made this one of their central criticisms. Parker reported seeing “at least 50 men” who had been stuck there for more than a decade, and who “looked forward philosophically if not cheerfully to an early grave.”Footnote 54
E. H. Parker’s easy fraternization with the white elite was particularly useful in exposing the foundations of planter exploitation. One Dutchman proudly told Parker that “all the planters had come to an agreement” to never pay out more than two dollars and fifty cents cash to any individual per fortnight—that is to say, deliberately conspiring to withhold earned wages and prevent workers from saving. Surpluses, at best, would go toward renting land to cultivate extra tobacco for sale back to its owner. This planter “said plainly the great object was to keep the coolie from going, and that the more he was in debt the better.”Footnote 55 It was a damning admission, delivered without a hint of shame, that the foundation of the entire plantation system was a calculated trap of debt bondage.
For Wang and Yu and for Parker, despite differences in the evidence each gathered, it was abundantly clear that all aspects of Deli were structured to disempower, exploit, and ensnare Chinese migrants. As Parker’s reporting made especially clear, this was deliberately done to maximize profit at the cost of human misery. Wang and Yu’s reporting, on the other hand, highlighted that Chaozhou was the primary locus of recruitment for this misery. While the Chaozhou brokers and merchants—in China and the Straits—who sold hundreds of thousands of their countrymen into borderline slavery may have been beneficiaries of new colonial systems in Asia, highlighted by Melissa Macauley, it is very difficult to see those being sold as such. Centering working-class Chaozhou migrants victimized in the production of wealth for those beneficiaries makes the totality seem rather less salutary, even for those populations best situated to exploit the contours of colonialism.
Interventions
Given the evidence of both structural and arbitrary abuses in Deli, it was up to the investigating parties to determine what form their interventions would take. Comparatively, Parker’s intervention was very modest, while Wang and Yu attempted to intervene at multiple levels and proposed radical solutions. Unfortunately for migrants, neither attempt made a significant impact on the lives of Chinese workers there, at least in the short term. Ultimately, the investigators’ experiences in Deli would be most impactful in shaping their answers to the broader “Chinese Questions” of what role their respective empires should take in governing Chinese mobilities.
Given Parker’s unofficial position, he seems to have considered his role primarily to be alerting metropolitan elites to the situation in Deli. He did, however, take pains to highlight discrepancies in the Chinese and English texts of indenture contracts.Footnote 56 In fairness, this was a clear point of intervention that Wang and Yu also highlighted—these contracts were, after all, being signed in Singapore in front of a British official. But given the fact that many brokers were apparently British subjects and all traffic was flowing through British colonies and on British- flagged ships, there were multiple potential avenues for intervention. Despite pleas from workers that “they and all the coolies they knew would run away” if they could access a ship, this was apparently insufficiently compelling for authorities. Even Parker himself was not fully convinced.Footnote 57 Unlike the 1874 Cuba Commission, which Britain had pushed for heavily, there appears to have been little perceived political or economic advantage in interfering with the Dutch operations. By the turn of the twentieth century, significant British and American capital had been invested in the plantations.Footnote 58
Wang and Yu, on the other hand, attempted interventions at multiple levels—beginning on the individual scale. An unsanctioned delegation of laborers from the “Taboeran” (Duanmalan 缎马蓝) plantation appealed to the commissioners, in what the local paper complained was “the only dissonance” during their visit. Led by Zhu Yawu 朱亚伍, the workers begged the commissioners to help obtain justice for the murder of their friend and colleague Wen Yalong 文亚隆 several months prior. According to them, Wen had been savagely beaten to death by the ill-tempered planter Piepers (Duanpipa 缎琵琶) on the night of 15 September 1886, following a week of abuse for picking tobacco “unevenly.” By the time his colleagues discovered his brutalized body the next day and brought it to Oen Ghan The for inspection, Piepers had already absconded.Footnote 59
Wang and Yu pressed the Dutch authorities for action and learned that Piepers had fled to Penang. In what seems unlikely to have been a coincidence, several days later, the Dutch consul in Penang finally had British authorities arrest Piepers. By the time Wang and Yu wrote their report, however, Piepers had already been released, apparently due to the Dutch authorities’ mismanagement of the extradition request. “Yet this concerns a human life!” lamented Wang and Yu. “How could the matter end in perfunctory dismissal this way?” But alas, they added pointedly, the pair were “not consuls” and thus had “no authority to dispute the case.”Footnote 60
Not surprisingly, then, a demand for consular representation was one of the key outcomes of their visit. The Dutch-employed lieutenants were ineffective, they concluded, and a Qing official based only in Batavia would be insufficient. They asked that a sub-consul be put in Deli directly to support migrants. Moreover, their visit contributed to the conclusion that it was imperative for the Qing consulate in Singapore to be upgraded to a Consul-General responsible for the region and supported by a Vice-Consulate in Penang. With increased authority, consuls might finally be able to help confront the “criminal deception” taking place at Chinese labor depots—a contribution hitherto refused by the British Protector of Chinese. Throughout Southeast Asia’s ports, their report concluded, “commerce and labour are equally dependent on the Chinese as their backbone” but it was Singapore and Penang that represented “the major crossroads” through which migrants flowed to Deli and many other places.Footnote 61 The latter is a conclusion contemporary scholarship has very much affirmed.Footnote 62
In the commissioners’ view, however, the situation in Deli necessitated more. Dutch elites had assured the commissioners that, while there had been problems, these were on their way to being rectified. Wang and Yu (correctly) surmised that significant voluntary change was unlikely.Footnote 63 As one European casually expressed to Parker, the Chinese in Deli were already “overprotected.”Footnote 64 Publicly, but diplomatically, the commissioners presented four easily addressable concerns to Batavia: the violation of three-year contract limits, planters’ concealment of migrants’ rights, pernicious gambling, and pass requirements for plaintiffs.Footnote 65
Privately, however, in their report to Ambassador Xu Jingcheng in Europe, the pair urged radical action. Alluding to the successful termination of Chinese labor trafficking to Cuba and Peru following investigations, they recommended that migration to Deli be stopped altogether. Reopening, they advised, should only be considered if the planters paid one hundred thousand dollars into poverty relief for Chinese workers—essentially, reparations.Footnote 66 Banning migration to Deli was quickly dismissed by Xu, however. Unlike for the Americas, he emphasized, there had not yet been any diplomatic agreements on labor recruitment made with the Dutch, let alone violated.Footnote 67 The Qing state was in no position to simply dictate terms to a European power. For the migrants of Deli, such efforts sadly meant little. Questioned by Parker about their visit, workers told him they assumed the Qing commissioners had simply been bought off.Footnote 68
In some ways, the settlement’s only newspaper, the Deli Courant, was positive about the visit—at least initially. The paper had, in fact, advocated for admitting the commissioners, to demonstrate that the Dutch had nothing to hide, and perhaps to lobby for a cheaper direct route to China.Footnote 69 The paper remained relatively favorable toward the commission during its tour, even welcoming some of the commission’s recommendations. In the abstract, it celebrated the Qing government’s increased interest in “the fate of the Chinese abroad.”Footnote 70 But the paper’s tone shifted when the commission’s formal recommendation to put a consul in Deli came to light. Citing bad press on Qing diplomats in Singapore, the Courant warned readers not to be tempted by the “siren song” of direct immigration into allowing a Chinese consulate—a “remedy…worse than the disease it cures.” “We cannot warn strongly enough against this,” the paper declared—not just for Deli, but for Australia as well.Footnote 71
While it was true that officials like Wang, Yu, and Zhang Zhidong were actively trying to expand the power of the state in diasporic communities, they sought only to do so using precisely the same tools European powers employed beyond their borders—namely, extend diplomatic and consular infrastructure abroad, perhaps underwritten with a handful of gunboats. The Qing state did not possess even a fraction of the capacity to contest European colonial rule. In my view, what proved particularly intolerable was the implication that European mistreatment of Chinese migrants—by ostensibly more civilized powers—necessitated even a limited degree of Chinese oversight. Scholars of imperialism and colonialism have long emphasized the binary distinctions European powers drew between so-called civilized and uncivilized societies, and the challenge to this order was almost certainly unwelcome.Footnote 72
In the end, the Qing empire would never put a consul in Batavia, let alone Deli. Dutch officials succeeded in blocking Chinese attempts until shortly before the Xinhai Revolution, and the first Chinese Consul-General to actually take office represented the new Republic in 1912.Footnote 73 This did not mean an absence of state interest in local Chinese labor conditions, however. In 1906–1907 and again in 1920, Chinese officials would return to scrutinize the exploitation of indentured workers in the region.Footnote 74 The nationality of Chinese in the Dutch East Indies also remained a key point of contention. Indeed, it was a new Dutch statute on the subject that served as the impetus for the Qing dynasty’s first formal nationality law in 1909, which enshrined the principle of jus sanguinis—transmission by blood. Going forward, this legal framework would undergird all Qing and Republican efforts to engage with the Chinese of Southeast Asia.Footnote 75
In the meantime, the Dutch labor regime in Deli also underwent significant transformation. Despite the establishment of a direct route from China, even more cheaply recruited Javanese workers began making up an increasing percentage of Deli’s plantation labor. By the early twentieth century, Javanese laborers had become the majority of the workforce, and by the 1930s, the overwhelming majority.Footnote 76 Yet as Benton shows, working conditions did not improve dramatically. Despite reforms, Deli remained one of the most brutally exploitative and highly profitable sites in Southeast Asia until the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese in 1942.Footnote 77
In the 1880s, however, exposure to the realities of migrant life in Deli had a significant impact on Wang, Yu, and Parker, and their respective answers to the question of what role their imperial metropoles should take in influencing Chinese mobilities abroad. In the short term, all three, but especially Wang and Yu, advocated for interventions to improve the conditions of Chinese workers there. In the wider scheme, however, Deli had demonstrated to the investigators both the shocking degree to which Chinese laborers could be exploited, and the complex ways in which these exploitative systems were embedded within the broader currents of Chinese migration. Interventions made in one place, in other words, could profoundly impact what was taking place in another. Meaningful transformation thus required an understanding of the totality, and how its many pieces fit together. As both missions turned their attention to the Chinese in Australia, so too did many others around the world. For Wang, Yu, and Parker alike, it was increasingly clear that imperial interventions in Australia would resonate across the entire Chinese diasporic world.
Coming to Australia
After completing their tour of Java, Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong returned to Singapore to write their reports and from there set out for Australia, in what would be China’s first-ever official visit to the continent.Footnote 78 China had been connected to Australia indirectly through the Makassan-Aboriginal trade even before the establishment of Britain’s first Australian colony in 1788. From the early nineteenth century, smaller numbers of Chinese began arriving in Australian colonies as indentured laborers facing abysmal working conditions, but the majority of migrants came as fortune-seekers beginning in the gold rush of the early 1850s.Footnote 79 By the 1880s, the continent was divided between six largely self-governing British colonies (and one subordinate territory). Since the heyday of the gold rush, their total Chinese population had actually shrunk considerably. As E. H. Parker correctly noted, there had been as many Chinese in Victoria alone as there were in the entire continent. By his reckoning, in the 1880s the total Chinese population of all the Australian colonies (plus New Zealand) was fifty to sixty thousand, roughly the same as Deli.Footnote 80 Their class position within colonial society, however, was quite different. In the 1880s, most Chinese Australians worked autonomously as market gardeners, furniture makers, and petty traders.Footnote 81 As Sophie Loy-Wilson shows, in rural areas Chinese shops were especially important sites for encounters between the European, Asian, and Indigenous populations.Footnote 82
Despite the overall shrinking of the Chinese population, beginning in the late 1870s, the relative growth of Chinese communities in Australia’s tropical northern fringes was used to justify a new wave of anti-Chinese sentiment across the continent. Stoking fears of mass Chinese immigration undercutting white workers and replacing white settlers, anti-Chinese politicians succeeded in re-instituting “poll taxes” in most colonies. These were punitive head taxes paid by Chinese persons upon entering each territory, which had first been used during the gold rush. But even this was not sufficient, as anti-Chinese fervor continued to grow over the 1880s alongside demands for even more dramatic action to curb Chinese migration. As Mae Ngai argues, this was largely the result of a white supremacist populist politics, as Chinese migrants posed limited economic competition to white settlers in most industries.Footnote 83 Yet as David Walker has shown, Asian “invasion” narratives proliferated so dramatically from the 1880s that they became central to the self-constitution of an Australian white settler identity.Footnote 84 This was the tense environment into which Wang, Yu, and Parker journeyed.
The Qing Commissioners spent more than three months on the continent. The pair arrived at Port Darwin on 25 April 1887, and left Cooktown for China on 3 August.Footnote 85 In between, they visited Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat, Adelaide, Brisbane, and a few smaller settlements. Though they were often received by local politicians and colonial officials, their primary informants were the Chinese community leaders who welcomed them at every stop, accompanied them throughout their visits, and often attended their official meetings. These included Dr. George On Lee 叶七秀/安利 and (Mei) Quong Tart 梅光达 of Sydney,Footnote 86 Lowe Kong Meng 刘光明 and Louis Ah Mouy 雷亚妹 of Melbourne,Footnote 87 Way Lee 维利 (also known as Yet Soo War 叶绣华) of Adelaide,Footnote 88 Sum Chick Tong of Brisbane,Footnote 89 Dr. Ng Wing Fat of Ballarat,Footnote 90 Dr. James Lamsey of Bendigo,Footnote 91 and many more. The commissioners even recruited staff in Australia, bringing Alexander A. Seng Chai (Yuen Lin Seng), born in the small New South Wales village of Sofala, back to China as an aide-de-camp.Footnote 92 Many of these community leaders were, before and after the commissioners’ visit, among the most prominent voices opposing the anti-Chinese movement.Footnote 93 The commission’s appearance, then, did not represent deliverance sent from the mainland, but rather a new and potentially powerful tool in the community’s efforts to fight discrimination.
During their visit, the commissioners attended banquets, ceremonies, and the Adelaide International Jubilee Exhibition. They even took the time, as Nadia Rhook highlights, to award Charles Hodges, Melbourne’s Chief Chinese Interpreter and defender of Chinese legal rights, an imperial rank and its accoutrements.Footnote 94 Their primary objective, however, was investigating and addressing Chinese communities’ grievances.Footnote 95 As might be expected, their greatest complaint was the anti-Chinese movement, especially the hated poll taxes. In Melbourne, for example, a petition submitted by Lowe Kong Meng and forty-six others requested assistance in repealing the discriminatory taxes and curbing extralegal violence against their community.Footnote 96 The commissioners’ report ultimately detailed a litany of related grievances: the repeat taxation of traders moving between colonies, the triple-rate poll tax in Queensland, Sydney’s “especially unreasonable” severity toward market gardeners in its hinterlands, the “extreme hardship” faced by workers in Ballarat when the head tax was piled atop downturns in the mines, punitive taxes on rice imports in Port Darwin, and more.Footnote 97
E. H. Parker, for his part, arrived almost exactly a year after the duo left, reaching Adelaide at the beginning of August 1888 and departing from Sydney at the end of the month.Footnote 98 During that time, he also visited Melbourne, Newcastle, and likely other settlements. Again, Parker did his research in an entirely private capacity. Beyond scouring the presses, he claimed to have consulted with a diverse range of white settler society, including police officers, “stray members of the Legislative houses, labourers, larrikins, seamen, &c.”Footnote 99 Parker made no mention of having consulted with Chinese residents as he did in Deli, though this may have been a strategic omission. In any case, he seems to have been primarily interested in interrogating settlers’ arguments against Chinese migrants.
Parker’s conclusion on this topic was unambiguous: there was “absolutely no fair complaint to be made against the Chinese” in Australia. In the Australian colonies, Parker argued, Chinese migrants made valuable economic contributions and rationally charged as much as they could for their labor, like everyone else. He doubted that “more than a small minority” of white Australians were ever negatively impacted by the Chinese and was extremely critical of the working and political classes that had drummed up the latest panic. As in Deli, he noted that “statements freely made to me in several Colonies” confirmed the worst.Footnote 100 Both investigative parties, in other words, once again came to similar conclusions.
Interventions, Continued
Australia was a very different beast from Deli. For one, the situation facing migrants there seems to have been better understood before Wang and Yu arrived, and the two were almost immediately called upon to appeal to Australian authorities. The colonies were also electoral democracies for white male settlers and boasted vibrant English language presses. For the commissioners, this meant that there were other avenues for intervention. Throughout their journey it seems the pair also attempted to actively influence white public opinion.
The commissioners, especially the native English speaker Wang, gave extended interviews to newspapers throughout Australia. Receiving reporters with “ease and affability,” they attempted to correct misunderstandings, dispel rumors, and answer questions about China and the Chinese.Footnote 101 At the same time, they were not afraid to reject accusations by anti-Chinese campaigners as being without “a modicum of truth.”Footnote 102 More than anything, they sought to convince readers that exclusionary legislation represented an injustice.
Wang and Yu were also savvy enough to address the topic of Chinese women in the Australian press, despite once again being silent on the question in their final reports to China. The preponderance of men among Chinese immigrants was a regular complaint in many white settler colonies. Certainly, in Australia, this demographic imbalance alone was frequently cited as proof of rampant so-called immoral behavior.Footnote 103 The commissioners attempted to reframe the discussion and engender sympathy for migrants instead. They repeatedly addressed the “mistaken impression abroad” that Chinese women were forbidden by law to leave the country, explaining that they were “perfectly free to go anywhere.”Footnote 104 Solo male migrants, they insisted, had no desire to remain separated from their spouses in China. They merely lacked the resources to bring them over or return home with something to show for their efforts.Footnote 105
E. H. Parker, too, had much to say about the topic of gender and sexuality. In his report, he chose to focus largely on the contentious issue of unions between Chinese men and white women.
Especially at the height of the immigration panic, such relationships were depicted as sensational cases of seduction or moral failure. But as Kate Bagnall shows, these unions were not uncommon and often resulted in caring and supportive partnerships.Footnote 106 Surprisingly, Parker too generally viewed such relationships favorably, praising Chinese men as dutiful partners, and seemed critical of the fact that white women would nevertheless “lose caste.” Uncharacteristically for the time, Parker was also positive about the “race prospects” of resulting “half-breeds.”Footnote 107 It is probably not coincidental that Parker himself had married a Chinese woman, with whom he had one daughter.Footnote 108
Despite prejudices, the Commissioners seem to have been cordially or even well received in most settler communities. Wang and Yu even spoke directly to a senior delegation from the “Anti-Chinese League” in Sydney. The Commissioners attempted to assure them that there was no “great influx” of Chinese being held back by the poll tax, as making a living in Australia was not significantly easier than in China. Chinese migrants did not wish to undercut white settlers, they insisted, but were forced to work for less as “strangers, not understanding the language.”Footnote 109 Nevertheless, anti-Chinese rallies increasingly simmered behind the scenes, especially on the last leg of their tour, in Queensland. There, the Commissioners complained that even Premier Samuel Griffith “was biased.”Footnote 110 These dark clouds overshadowed their departure from the continent.
The Commission’s Final Report and Its Reception
With their work in Australia complete, it was time for Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong’s most significant interventions, not only on behalf of the Chinese in Australia, but on behalf of migrants across the vast swath of the Asia-Pacific they had covered. This meant not just enumerating the complaints received in Australia, Deli, and many other communities, but drawing conclusions based on the totality that would make a compelling case for Beijing to intercede. Unfortunately for the commissioners, their project would almost immediately face enormous challenges from all directions.
To begin with, Wang and Yu appealed to the Chinese minister in London, Liu Ruifen 刘瑞芬. Liu, in turn, protested firmly but diplomatically to the British Foreign Office about Australia’s discriminatory poll taxes. Situating the issue alongside injustices in Canada, Liu condemned the poll taxes as “incompatible” with international law and treaty obligations—something British officials had long been anxious about. Article 5 of the 1860 Convention of Peking, written to compel China to legalize indentured labor recruitment, stipulated that migrants were at “perfect liberty” to travel to British colonies, and would be accorded protection.Footnote 111 Chinese Australians themselves had raised this argument locally as early as the 1850s, and put it in print no later than 1879, but now through the commissioners it reached London directly.Footnote 112
For Qing officialdom, Wang and Yu’s final travel report placed the Australian colonies within the larger puzzle of regional Chinese mobilities, outlining the geographies, economies, and grievances of the region’s Chinese communities.Footnote 113 Even more important, however, was their submission to their sponsor Zhang Zhidong, which formed the backbone of his memorial to the throne regarding their mission’s findings. This report detailed novel colonial strategies of discrimination, such as the Australian use of poll taxes as an instrument of Chinese exclusion, but it was also imbued with traditionalist rhetoric intended to stir the imperial state. It described, for example, how Chinese migrants everywhere “welcomed with acclaim” the “awe-inspiring presence of Han officials” and “gratefully praised the imperial benevolence.”Footnote 114
Weaving together accounts of migrants’ successes, reverence, and mistreatment, Wang and Yu argued for an expansive extension of the state into diasporic communities. For Australia, they urged the establishment of a Qing Consulate-General in Sydney responsible for the continent plus New Zealand, while also empowering community leaders to become regional Vice-Consuls. These formed part of the larger constellation of posts they envisioned for almost every community they had visited—including Deli—beginning with a self-funding establishment in nearby Manila. Zhang emphasized, drawing on their work, that these were not long-term goals but urgent necessities to stem the tide of anti-Chinese “oppression and expulsion” that threatened to spread across the world. Not only could millions abroad lose their livelihoods, he warned, but they would be forced to flee back to a south China already struggling to support its population. Confronting this, Zhang insisted, demanded a broad, multi-sited, and immediate extension of state activities. Collectively, consuls would not only help solve local issues but bind these communities to each other and to China itself, promoting Confucian education, raising funds for the state, and helping “the will of the people to naturally consolidate” across the region. With their powerful, well-researched plea dispatched and backed by Zhang, Wang and Yu set out on their supplementary journey to Borneo, Siam, and Vietnam.Footnote 115 By the time they returned, however, things had already come crashing down.
In Australia, Wang and Yu’s efforts were exploited to fan the flames of anti-Chinese sentiment. By the time word of their consular requests and complaints to Liu reached the Australian presses, the Chinese exclusion movement had reached a fever pitch. In early 1888, Henry Parkes and other anti-Chinese politicians ramped up the rhetoric of Chinese invasion, demanding action from London and threatening to take matters into their own hands. Beginning on 27 April with the ill-fated SS Afghan, first Melbourne and then Sydney refused to allow Chinese passengers to disembark.Footnote 116 Initially, many Australian newspapers had praised the commissioners’ gravitas and erudition, and celebrated China’s effort to reach out to its emigrants. But as in Deli, and with even more vitriol, following the suggestion that European mistreatment necessitated Chinese oversight, the very same publications turned to condemn the commissioners.
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, which had hailed their commission as “a great step,” now claimed the purpose of consuls was “to keep these colonies open to the surplus population of China,” and “Loyalty to our race demand[ed]” their opposition.Footnote 117 In Melbourne, The Age had initially described the mission as “highly creditable,” but later insisted that it had “meant mischief.” The Chinese were “not welcome,” let alone their “ornaments” of consuls.Footnote 118 As Adelaide’s Express and Telegraph put it (despite having found the commissioners “highly intelligent” and “distinguished”), if China were to “extend its protection over” migrants in “places where they are subject to special hardships,” the Chinese “will spread over the land in ever-increasing swarms.”Footnote 119 In other words, having an unfettered ability to subject Chinese migrants to suffering was essential to upholding the project of white supremacist colonialism in Australia.
If this was not sufficient, other powers like the Dutch and Spanish proved even more fiercely opposed to the establishment of Chinese consulates in their Asia-Pacific colonies, essentially refusing to even entertain the possibility. However, it was the early 1888 response from the Qing Foreign Affairs Bureau in Beijing (总理衙门), now under the administration of Prince Qing 庆郡王, that put the greatest nail in the coffin of Wang and Yu’s program. Rejecting much of Zhang Zhidong’s memorial for consular expansion, the Bureau emphasized the very real challenges of substantial costs and strong foreign opposition. At the same time, its response also demonstrated a profound disconnect with the realities of migration and geopolitics in the age of colonial capitalism.Footnote 120
Using an antiquated framing, the Bureau claimed that while the peoples of dense Fujian and Guangdong “often relied on the outer seas to make a living” and so found themselves “scattered about” foreign ports, the existing consulates had already been painstakingly selected for their protection. Since foreign powers already dominated Southeast Asia’s “core territories” (腹内之地), like Burma, Siam and Vietnam, if China were to attempt to “exercise control over the lesser islands scattered around them,” let alone “remote” places in Australia, it would only generate antagonism.Footnote 121 While they were not wrong about the antagonism, it was also clear that the Bureau’s latest administrators interpreted the world in terms inherited from past generations of empire-builders. This was a profoundly territorial orientation—one which understood the relative importance of places as diminishing the further they were from the state itself. It saw populous landmasses, not mobile populations, as the primary sources of wealth and objects of governance.Footnote 122 Much had changed in Beijing over the past decades, but not enough to grasp the scale, the interconnectivity, and the urgency of diasporic life illustrated by the commission. Despite the thousands of miles traveled, the countless encounters, and the myriad reports, ultimately the work of Wang and Yu was insufficient to stir the empire to greater action. For Chinese Australians, this meant that London remained the only imperial metropole left to intervene on their behalf.
Parker’s Report
By the time E. H. Parker sent his final report home to the Foreign Office around October 1888, the Chinese exclusion campaign in Australia had reached the level of an imperial crisis.Footnote 123 Following the Afghan incident, Australian leaders resolved at an intercolonial conference in June 1888 to standardize harsh new exclusion measures and to demand Britain extract China’s cooperation. Despite hand-wringing in London about allowing settler colonies to drive foreign policy and the potential impact on Anglo-Chinese relations, they began negotiations with Beijing.Footnote 124 In response, Parker’s final product synthesized the data he had collected and directed it toward the Australian situation. Beyond critiquing Australia’s anti-Chinese movement, Parker sought to present a comprehensive sketch of Chinese migration flows that would move power holders in London to intervene. His strategy was twofold: first, demonstrating that the realities of global Chinese migration did not correspond to the specter painted by white nationalists, and second, arguing that intervention promised unrecognized benefits across British colonial Asia.Footnote 125
Parker was unambiguous that the “sources, causes, extent, and danger of Chinese immigration…have been greatly exaggerated.”Footnote 126 To demonstrate this, he comprehensively dismantled the frequent claim that there were “five hundred million Mongolians” in China waiting to storm Australia’s shores. Instead, Parker examined the specific and limited coastal populations (“races”) in Guangdong and Fujian that actually practiced migration as a livelihood: namely, the Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Tanka (Dan), Hokkien, Chaozhou (Teochew), and Fuzhounese. Detailing the specific destinations and economic niches that each group had carved out for themselves, his work presaged that of recent scholars like Philip Kuhn.Footnote 127 Parker demonstrated not only that there were at most four or five million potential migrants in all of China, but that among them only Cantonese people came to white settler colonies in any significant numbers. They were, in his words, “one of the best races in every way.” Parker estimated that Chinese migrants and their descendants numbered about six million globally, but only about one million of them had emigrated since 1837. This added up to less than half the number of “Anglo-Germans” who had settled in Australia and New Zealand alone during this time.Footnote 128 Thus, the entire premise of the white replacement panic in Australia was false.
With the racial hysteria in Australia thoroughly debunked, Parker proceeded to make his case for imperial intervention on behalf of Australia’s Chinese community. This was not grounded in migrants’ shared humanity or rights. In fact, he thought their “quite local and modern appetite for equality with Europeans” ought to “be checked” lest it “become troublesome.” Rather, Parker sought to situate the Australian crisis in the context of Chinese mass migration to Britain’s wider colonial empire. With nearly three-quarters of a million Chinese migrants and their descendants now spread across Britain’s colonies in the Asia-Pacific, especially on the Malay peninsula, Parker argued that Britain had become the world’s “second great Chinese power.” Granting reprieve to the Chinese in Australia was not merely for their benefit, but a gesture that would resonate for hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants across the empire and beyond. This was particularly urgent, he warned, as Britain was not alone in trying to win their loyalties.Footnote 129
Wang and Yu’s commission, Parker argued, represented an epochal new movement: China’s embrace of “the latent power possessed by China in having subjects abroad.” After years of metropolitan disconnect, Chinese society and state were turning their attention toward the diaspora as never before. European abuses at home and abroad were driving Chinese ever closer to the once-alien Manchu dynasty, while a booming Chinese-language press now kept readers “continuously informed as to the treatment of their countrymen abroad.” Finally reaching out into these communities, the Qing state now “gathers them into the fold,” hoping to transform migrants from “grist to the foreign mill” into “stones in the foreign querns.” By not antagonizing its colonial Chinese populations, and broadly governing them with respect for core principles of xiao 孝, Confucian filiality, London could make it impossible for China to “raise them in jehad [jihad]” against Britain. Perhaps someday, Parker fantasized, were Britain to occupy the Chinese mainland, these loyal populations could become the kernel of a new “Ying or Flourishing Dynasty”—a reference to the Chinese name for England, Yingguo 英国.Footnote 130 Chinese Australians would likely not have been pleased to learn that this was the best-researched case made to London in their defence.
Parker’s report seems to have intrigued at least some senior officials at the Foreign Office, but was not well received in the colonial sphere. Australian political elites appear to have been particularly displeased with it—not surprising given that it accused them of manufacturing the Chinese crisis. Ultimately, they were allowed to give the final word, with the “official” response shared by the Colonial Office being that of staunchly anti-Chinese Queensland Premier Boyd Morehead. Morehead unreservedly condemned Parker’s work for what he called its “defective knowledge” about the Chinese in Australia, cast aspersions on the broader research, and warned that it would be “injudicious” to follow it.Footnote 131 In the end, Morehead’s interpretation seems to have been accepted in London.
This is not to say that there were no anxieties in the metropole about the consequences for Britain’s relations with China or with its diaspora. London officials expressed consternation when Liu Ruifen protested over Australian demands for exclusion as an “act of illiberality and invidiousness…without a parallel in any country.”Footnote 132 But concerns were mitigated upon receipt of a secret copy of the Qing Foreign Affairs Bureau’s dismissal of Zhang Zhidong’s memorial.Footnote 133 They knew that, in the short term, the chances of the kind of Qing interventions that Parker warned of were slim. Despite Beijing’s ultimate refusal to consent, the Australian states forged ahead with Chinese exclusion, with London agreeing to approve whatever “severely restrictive legislation” they desired regardless.Footnote 134
Like Wang and Yu, Parker saw that imperial interventions in one part of the vast and interconnected web of Chinese migrant communities could have transformative effects on the whole. Also like Wang and Yu, Parker’s vision was quashed by an alternative imaginary of empire. In this case, it was an empire in which the wishes of white settlers would always trump the potential, the freedoms, or the rights of colonial populations of color. The former had a democratic mandate, after all, while the latter did not and could not. As in the Dutch empire, peoples of color would always be foremost subjects of colonial authority. Over the coming years, Chinese exclusion legislation would proliferate across white-settled parts of the British empire. In Australia, these acts were just the beginning of what became the “White Australia” policy after federation in 1901, extending exclusions to all non-white immigrants. These policies were not fully dismantled until 1973.Footnote 135
In Australia then, as in Deli, the response to the “Chinese Questions” of the late 1880s would reverberate for many decades to come. At this crucial juncture, both imperial metropoles had ultimately rejected more meaningful intervention in diasporic flows. Moreover, these decisions had been interrelated. If Beijing had enthusiastically embraced the kind of engagement with migrants that Wang and Yu supported, perhaps London might have been more inclined to overrule the Australian exclusionists, as E. H. Parker advocated. Certainly, Beijing’s unwillingness to do so contributed to London’s easy dismissal of potential consequences for its relationship with China and its diaspora. A window of opportunity had closed. Nevertheless, this was just one chapter in a much longer story of the relationship between migrants and metropoles. Though Wang, Yu, and Parker would not again be major players, their influence would continue to be felt.
Epilogue and Conclusion
Wang Ronghe, sadly, did not live much beyond the completion of the commission’s second tour in Southeast Asia. According to his official obituary, Wang contracted malaria while in Southeast Asia and was forced to go on leave in Shanghai. He died there in late 1890 as a consequence of his illness and the “cumulative effect of his labours”.Footnote 136 Yu Qiong’s career continued, albeit exclusively domestically. He held several mid-level posts in Zhejiang and elsewhere before retiring to his hometown to manage railways. He died in 1914.Footnote 137 One wonders if Beijing’s weak reception of the commission cut his diplomatic career short.
Wang and Yu’s work, however, would be vindicated in China. Though not involved with the commission or Zhang Zhidong’s program, Xue Fucheng 薛福成, Liu Ruifen’s successor as Qing minister to London, would soon take up their cause. Beyond again advocating for consular expansion, in 1893 Xue would famously memorialize a call for the dynasty to formally abolish its long-defunct haijin maritime ban. This was explicitly an overture to migrants and has widely been interpreted as ushering in a new era in the relationship between state and diaspora that lasted until the end of the dynasty and beyond.Footnote 138
One of the first to alert London to the significance of Xue’s memorial was none other than E. H. Parker, then serving as consul on Hainan. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also tried very hard to get its original proponent, Singapore Consul-General Huang Zunxian 黄遵宪, fired for what Parker claimed was tax evasion.Footnote 139 Despite the weak reception of his own report, Parker had a respectable career after returning to China. He held several more Foreign Office posts and was even temporarily appointed advisor on Chinese affairs in Burma. At the same time, he does not seem to have commanded great respect at the Colonial or Foreign Offices.Footnote 140 In 1895, he retired to lecture on Chinese in Liverpool and Manchester, where he maintained an interest in diaspora and published extensively up until his death in 1926.Footnote 141
With Chinese increasingly excluded from white settler colonies, migrants would be driven in greater numbers toward Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies—something Parker himself anticipated.Footnote 142 London would never embrace the kind of global competition for Chinese hearts and minds that Parker advocated for, and colonial Chinese would never be accorded the same status as white settlers. Nevertheless, British subjecthood remained a powerful tool and an important identity for many of Chinese descent. Indeed, in China itself, laying claim to British subjecthood (and other colonial nationalities) was becoming an increasingly popular legal and commercial strategy for re-migrants, much to the chagrin of Qing officials.Footnote 143 Back in the Straits, starting around the turn of the twentieth century, a growing movement of Chinese Singaporeans began cutting off their queues to demonstrate their rejection of the Qing and embrace of British subjecthood.Footnote 144 Just a few years later, however, a large and exuberant group of Chinese Singaporeans nevertheless amassed to swear loyalty to the Qing before Yang Shiqi 杨士琦, head of the dynasty’s next and final tour of Southeast Asian communities.Footnote 145 Still other Chinese Singaporeans, by this time, had already pledged themselves to an as-yet-unrealized reformist or republican Chinese state.Footnote 146 Both despite and because of the many metropolitan disappointments, this was only the beginning of contests for the allegiances of Chinese migrants.
The 1880s, however, had marked a turning point. In the midst of a transformative age of mass migration, “Chinese Questions” loomed large: What parts would Beijing and London play in the management of Chinese mobilities? The two journeys into diaspora undertaken by Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, and E. H. Parker, sought to provide answers through investigations of unprecedented breadth. From the daily cruelties of debt bondage on Deli’s tobacco plantations to the vicissitudes of life under rising racism in Australia, and myriad experiences in between, the two parties captured unique snapshots of Chinese life across the region. Independently, both parties attempted to weave these threads together to demonstrate how interventions in these connected communities could have a transformative impact on the whole. Driven by the exigencies of modern migration, the late Qing state was developing a new global reach. Such parallel efforts to address the challenges raised by diasporic flows show it had more in common with powers like Britain than has generally been assumed. Ultimately, however, both missions’ programs were quashed by alternative visions of empire: one which privileged the territorial over the mobile, and one which privileged the white over the non-white. While these interventions were paths not taken, this did not mark the end of metropolitan relationships with Chinese diaspora. These were just the first instances of complex contests over loyalties that would continue through China’s Republican period, across the Cold War, and into the present.Footnote 147 Those seeking to win support from migrants abroad today would do well to remember Wang and Yu, and even Parker, and proceed first not from a demand for loyalty but from genuine inquiry into what can be done to improve people’s lives.
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