Month: October 2017

History background of White Australia Policy —the history of Chinese immigration in 1800s

The large-scale movement of Chinese population from China to overseas countries appeared with the beginning of Chinese modern history. Before the First Opium War with Britain, only a little amount of Chinese could go aboard because of the Isolationism policy of Chinese government. Guangzhou in Canton province of China was the only port which was officially connected with Western world.

The beginning:

From the First Opium War between China and Britain (1840-1842) in 1840, China was forced to open the market and offer raw and processed material to Britain and other western countries. With the trend that Chinese society generally get in touch with the western world, Chinese began to migrate to western countries and colonies which include Australia (one of Britain colonies in 1800s)

Development:

Following the First Opium War, powerful western countries participated in the aggression by signing unequal treaties with China after wars. After the sign of the treaty of Nanjing, Chinese government opened five ports in south of China to western countries and admitted Hong Kong as a colony of Britain. In the treaty of Peking with Britain in 1861, Chinese government permitted Chinese labors to work aboard. Poverty and new business chances let many poor people and businessmen leave their hometown to overseas. People from provinces near the South China Sea, especially in Canton (near Hong Kong) tend to move to Southeastern Asia and Australia. This phenomenon is called “Xia Nan Yang” in Chinese history. The southern gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s attracted a lot of Chinese to move to Australia, and then Chinese became the most numerous and obvious non-European migrants in Australia. However, with the desire for the new Australian nation to be white, white colonists started to introduce anti-Chinese legislation in each colony after gold rushes (Bagnall,2009).

In 1901, the federation of Australia was established. Because too many non-European migrants moved in and occupied Australian resources, Australian government introduced White Australia Policy to limit the migration from China and other non-European Countries.

summary:

Two unequal treaties between Chinese and Britain government allowed Chinses to move overseas

Chinese labors and businessmen from Canton and Fujian preferred to go to Australia

The gold rushes in 1850s and 1860s attracted a lot of Chinese to enter Australia, which made white colonists unhappy.

The federation introduced White Australian Policy finally.

Map of Canton today overlaid with an old map of Canton.

This map shows the growth of the area and the changes of the river.

References

http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E6%BE%B3%E6%94%BF%E7%AD%96

http://www.360doc.com/content/10/1217/21/805131_79098856.shtml

https://wenku.baidu.com/view/e66cdd4769eae009581bec64.html

 Bagnall, K. (2009). Immigration – National Archives of Australia, Australian Government. [online] Naa.gov.au. Available at: http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/publications/papers-and-podcasts/immigration/white-australia.aspx [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].

by Jinrui Liu and Jie Yan

Map by Michelle Djakic.

These boots are made for measuring!

When marking up the data of the transcriptions files I came across something that I found quite fascinating. This was that heights for the individuals included how tall they were in boots. This little bit of information just kept sitting in my head this unusual fact that measurements were taken when somebody was wearing boots.

So I tried to find out how much height a boot would add. I started looking through trove and online and I couldn’t find anything that was absolute. Most of the things I came across suggested it would add an inch. But then this research got me thinking about how the data is collected for height; were people measured by using measuring tape or was the wall a ruler and people had to stand next to it. Were people told to stand up straight or just told to stand. Just all these variables about this one little bit of data of height just kept on making me try and work out how it was generated. So, I decided to conduct a little experiment using other people in the class as guinea pigs.

My experiment was that I asked the class to stand against the wall and have their height measured both in boots and not in boots with no other instructions. Some interesting things observed is that some people move their heads in various ways giving themselves extra height or losing height. People took measurements from different points making the measurements inconsistent. I for one intentionally slouched for my height without boots but stood as tall as I could with boots to try and give myself the biggest variation. Below is the table of our results showing that on average most people would gain an inch when in boots with some outliers caused by intentionally trying to manipulate the data.

In conclusion I feel that this is an interesting way of looking at how data is collected on a small-scale as it shows that without knowing how the data was collected it’s hard to know how you can use it.

By Steven Doyle

The ages of travelers recorded in the data, falls largely between the ages of thirty and fifty, with a small number of outliers on either side. We can see from the numbers that most of those travelling in and out of Australia at the time were adults, mostly of middle age. We know from the records that many had families ‘back home’ in their countries of origin. The predominantly male travelers were returning to wives and children across the seas, either to visit, or see to the livelihood of their relatives.

From the 284 data sets obtained, it was found that the most represented nationality, requiring an exemption document was Chinese, at 88% of all the travelers. The remainder was 9.8% Indian and 1.1%  Syrian. The other, at 0.7% comprised of one Japanese person and one identified as Assyrian. Despite the data set reportedly recording nationality of the travelers, Assyria (an ethnic minority who have lived mostly in what is now known as Iraq for thousands of years) was not seen as a nationality or country at the beginning of the twentieth century.  During the early twentieth century, this land was under control of the Ottoman Empire, and later under the control of the British after World War I.  The fact that ‘Assyrian’ has been recorded as a nationality is probably an example of human error. Whoever recorded the information would not likely have known any better. It is possible that the traveler referred to themselves as ‘Assyrian’, (as they likely felt more ties to their ethnic group than to the country/nationality) the way that, for instance, an Iraqi Kurd may describe themselves as coming from Kurdistan.

References

Mantilla, Y. 2016, “ISIS’ crimes against humanity and the Assyrian people: religious totalitarianism and the protection of fundamental human rights”, ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 77.