Zhang Deyi, Qing Ambassador to U.K.

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 204-206:

DESPITE ANOTHER ROUND of protest—including a trade union rally of eighty thousand in London’s Hyde Park—the Chamber of Mines and the Transvaal government moved with dispatch to set up a program. Transvaal agents, who had already laid the groundwork for recruiting in China, went into high gear. In fact, recruitment in Yantai (Chefoo) in Shandong province had started in January, before the ordinance was finally approved.

But there was just one problem: China had not approved the program. The lapse violated long-standing diplomatic protocols, established in 1860, regarding the recruitment of Chinese labor to territories within the British Empire. The Foreign Office did not show Ordinance no. 17 to the Chinese ambassador in London, Zhang Deyi, until mid-February. Zhang promptly intervened via the Foreign Affairs Department in Beijing (Waiwubu, the successor to the Zongli Yamen). Everything ground to a halt while Zhang Deyi and the Foreign Office commenced negotiations in London in March. The Transvaal Chamber of Mines called the delay “quite unexpected” and “much to be regretted.”

When Harry Ross Skinner had recommended importing Chinese indentured labor for the gold mines, he had predicted that China would respond “passively” to such a project. The Foreign Office should have known better. Zhang Deyi was no naïf—he was a seasoned diplomat with forty years of experience in the Qing foreign service. His appointment as Qing ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1902 was his eighth assignment abroad. He had begun his career as a young translator on the Qing’s first overseas mission in 1866 and in the Burlingame delegation in 1868; he had then served in various capacities in Chinese embassies, mostly in Europe. Zhang was also one of China’s most prolific diplomat-diarists, who wrote and published eight books chronicling his trips (Figure 20).

Nor was Zhang a stranger to South African affairs. From 1896 to 1900, he had served as councilor in the Qing legation in London, and from there he closely followed the South African War. As ambassador, Zhang was well aware of the debates taking place in South Africa over proposals to import Chinese labor. He worried that the mining companies would abuse Chinese workers in the manner that had made Peru and Cuba the most notorious destinations of the nineteenth-century coolie trade. He further worried that ill treatment of indentured Chinese in South Africa would have negative effects on overseas Chinese communities throughout Africa, from Mauritius to Tanganyika to the Cape Colony. He knew indentured Chinese labor emigrants were vulnerable to the “three harms”—low wages, tight controls, and poor benefits. As early as February 1903—nearly a year before the Transvaal passed Ordinance no. 17—Zhang reported to Beijing that South Africa was likely to recruit Chinese labor. He wrote repeatedly throughout the year that China should forbid labor from going to South Africa without a convention with Great Britain. He was furious when he learned that recruitment was already taking place in Yantai before China had agreed to the program.

On May 13, after three months of negotiation in London, Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne and Ambassador Zhang Deyi signed the Emigration Convention of Great Britain and China of 1904. The convention underscored the distance traveled from the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the coolie trade. It stipulated a minimum age of twenty for emigrants and inspection to ensure that laborers were of sound body and mind. Contracts were to be written in Chinese and English and specify wages, hours, and rations; free passage and return; and the right to free medical care and medicine. It required witness from both Chinese and British officials. It gave China the right to station a consul or vice-consul in the colony and gave Chinese workers “free access to the Courts of Justice to obtain the redress for injuries to his person and property” as well as access to postal facilities for sending letters and remittances to their families.

Zhang pressed hard for a prohibition on corporal punishment, but he was unable to insert an outright ban into the agreement because, the Foreign Office informed him, Transvaal law provided for corporal punishment for certain offenses for “everybody, including whites.” The British assured Zhang that floggings would be administered only by order of a magistrate or judge after trial and conviction, and only with government-approved instruments, and that it would not exceed twenty-four lashes. Although the agreement showed improvement in China’s ability to negotiate protections for its emigrant workers, enforcement of the terms of the ordinance would be determined on the ground.

Brief articles about Zhang Deyi (張德彜) can be found in Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia, but not in English Wikipedia.

Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

Australia's Afghan Crisis, 1888

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 178-181:

THE CONFLICT IN AUSTRALIA reached a climax in 1888 when officials in Melbourne and then Sydney, backed by public agitation, refused to allow 268 Chinese passengers arriving from Hong Kong on the Afghan to disembark, including some sixty Chinese who held British naturalization papers. The crisis paralyzed British officials in London, while hysteria that the Afghan represented the leading edge of a new “invasion” swept Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Cheok Hong Cheong led a committee of Chinese merchants to protest the agitation surrounding the Afghan affair, which tried to meet with Victorian premier Duncan Gillies but was continually rebuffed.

Cheong went on to deliver a public address and publish it. He rebuked Australia for waging a shameless campaign rooted in “the selfishness, the prejudices, and the shams, which form the warp and woof of the present agitation.” He asked, “Is it possible that common human rights, accorded to other civilized peoples, are to be denied to us? That it is to be a crime, punishable by imprisonment with hard labor, if man or woman of the Chinese race travels over the line separating any of the colonies without a permit?”

Cheong and his colleagues were constructing a rhetoric about China and Chinese rights on the world stage that mirrored the perspective articulated by Qing diplomats. Cheong echoed Marquis Tseng’s assertion of China’s awakening: “That such a time may come, nay, probably will come sooner than is supposed, when the presence and power of China as a great nation will be felt in these seas, and it lies with you to say, as wise men or otherwise, if this is to be for good or evil.”

Victoria placed the Afghan in quarantine and declared the passengers’ travel documents to be fraudulent, barring their entry. The ship then ventured to Sydney, where authorities also refused to land the Chinese, goaded by a crowd of five thousand demonstrators shouting “Out with the Chinamen” in front of the New South Wales Parliament. South Australia pledged that it would also refuse the ship. With three colonies vowing to refuse admission of the Chinese aboard the Afghan, the Chinese Question took center stage in intercolonial politics.

Taking advantage of the crisis, Premier Parkes rushed legislation through the NSW assembly that exponentially increased poll taxes and residence fees on Chinese and declared that NSW would no longer recognize naturalization papers, including those previously issued by NSW. He backdated the law so it applied to the passengers on the Afghan. It was not a full victory, however, because the courts heard the habeas cases of naturalized Chinese and ordered their disembarkment. The Afghan then returned to Hong Kong with the remaining passengers.

The Afghan affair raised disturbing questions. When the Chinese passengers aboard the ship obstructed the unloading of cargo, they threw open the idea that Australia could refuse people while welcoming goods. From a simple business calculus, Hong Kong shippers considered the Australian trade finished, as passenger fees had kept cargo rates down. In London, officials struggled over how to sever migration from trade, that is, how it might possibly accommodate Australians’ demands for immigration restriction while protecting its broader commercial interests in Asia.

The Afghan crisis also accelerated the movement to federation. Parkes had long been a proponent of federation, a strategy to strengthen Australia’s position in Asia and within the British Empire. The Chinese Question provided a racial urgency that rallied the masses and brought divergent colonial interests into closer alignment. In June 1888 an intercolonial conference in Sydney discussed the need for the uniform restrictions on Chinese immigration. Much was riding on the outcome. The southern colonies hoped to bring the tropical colonies firmly to the side of restriction and to present a united front to London. The Colonial Office hoped that the conference would produce an agenda reasonable enough—or at least not as obnoxious as standing colonial policies—to take to the Qing as the basis for a new treaty. London asked the colonies to behave as responsible imperial partners, expressing to them the hope that the “Conference will endeavour to conciliate the susceptibilities of [the] Chinese Government as far as practicable.”

The conference agreed that immigration restriction should be secured simultaneously through imperial diplomacy and by uniform colonial legislation. But it could not get unanimous support for all its resolutions. Tasmania and Western Australia abstained on a general statement in support of exclusion and on specific legislative models, which included the continued criminalization of unauthorized intercolonial travel and stricter shipping regulations. Tasmania balked at the blatant disregard for the home (British) government’s authority and discrimination against Chinese who were British subjects. Western Australia’s reticence lay in the territory’s use of Asian labor in the northern maritime industries, although in 1886 it had banned Chinese from work on the huge goldfields discovered at Kalgoorie. South Australia agreed to all points in the interests of intercolonial unity, but it insisted that restrictions should apply only to Chinese and not to Indians or Pacific Islanders, who continued to work in the Northern Territory, which South Australia administered. Although unanimity eluded the conference, the basis was laid for further negotiations toward a full White Australia policy.

In 1891 the Privy Council, the official advisory body to Queen Victoria, conceded broader discretion to the colonies over Asiatic restrictions, ruling that foreign aliens had no legal right to enter British territories. Although the rule did not cover Chinese in Hong Kong or Singapore, who were British subjects, it confirmed the colonies’ use of local legislation to restrict Chinese immigration.