Contagious Minorities: Chinese Canadians during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abstract
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada has witnessed a sharp increase in racial violence against Chinese Canadians, and, in an undifferentiated racism, other Asian Canadians have been seen as bearers of disease as well, which often made them targets of racism. The quick transformation of Asian minority groups into threats of contagion during the pandemic points to the persistence of latent fears and anxieties about Chinese Canadians across generational differences, immigration status, and national origin. This essay reflects on how knowledges about early Chinese newcomers that were generated by colonial administrators laid the foundations for modes of racial governance that continue to inform public policy and public discourse in multicultural Canada in ways at once familiar and new. It examines the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration as an important tool in reinforcing the political goal of “white Canada” by strengthening the power of European colonists. Less than a century later, in 1967, the immigration points system was introduced, preceding the adoption of multiculturalism policy in 1971, both breaking with explicitly racist national policies. Yet there is more continuity than there are differences across the 1885 Report and the 1967 immigration policy. Both participate in a historical narrative that excludes the Chinese from national imagining, laying fertile ground for contemporary anti-Chinese racisms during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary media narratives during the pandemic reproduce the same racial hierarchies, excluding Chinese Canadians from the nation. By placing the rise in anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic in the long historical trajectory of institutional racism in Canada, this essay argues for the need to learn about the historical legacies of racism to be able to intervene in structural racism so that Canada’s promise of multiculturalism can be grounded in justice and equity.
Résumé
Au cours de la pandémie de COVID-19, le Canada a été témoin d’une forte augmentation de la violence raciale envers les Canadiens d’origine chinoise et, à cause d’un racisme indifférencié, d’autres Canadiens d’origine asiatique ont eux aussi été perçus comme des porteurs de maladie, ce qui en a souvent fait des cibles du racisme. La rapide transformation des groupes minoritaires asiatiques en menaces de contagion durant la pandémie met en évidence la persistance de craintes et d’angoisses latentes à l’égard des Canadiens d’origine chinoise, par-delà les différences générationnelles, le statut d’immigrant et l’origine nationale. Le présent article révèle comment les connaissances accumulées par les administrateurs coloniaux au sujet des premiers arrivants chinois ont jeté les bases de modes de gouvernance raciale qui continuent à influer sur les politiques publiques et le discours public dans le Canada multiculturel, de manière à la fois familière et nouvelle. Le rapport de 1885 de la Commission royale sur l’immigration chinoise y est envisagé comme un outil important de renforcement d’un objectif politique, celui d’un « Canada blanc », par la consolidation du pouvoir du colonisateur européen. Moins d’un siècle plus tard, en 1967, le système de points d’immigration a été introduit, peu avant l’adoption de la politique sur le multiculturalisme en 1971, deux mesures rompant avec des politiques nationales explicitement racistes. Pourtant, il y a plus de continuité que de différences entre le rapport de 1885 et la politique d’immigration de 1967. Tous deux contribuent à une trame historique qui exclut les Chinois de l’imaginaire national, ce qui constitue un terreau fertile pour le racisme antichinois qui s’est manifesté lors de la récente pandémie de COVID-19. Le discours médiatique tenu durant la pandémie reproduit les mêmes hiérarchies raciales, excluant les Canadiens d’origine chinoise de la nation. En situant la montée du racisme anti-asiatique pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 dans la longue trajectoire historique du racisme institutionnel au Canada, cet article fait valoir la nécessité de connaître le legs du racisme pour pouvoir intervenir dans le racisme structurel afin que le multiculturalisme promis par le Canada puisse être fondé sur la justice et l’équité.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada has witnessed a sharp increase in racial violence against Chinese Canadians. As is now well known, the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) virus emerged first in the Chinese city of Wuhan and then spread globally. In Canada, the first confirmed case was reported in Toronto on 25 January 2020, and on 11 March 2020, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, made a formal announcement declaring that “COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic” (WHO 2020). In Canada, the virus was attributed to Chinese Canadians, and, in an undifferentiated racism, other Asian Canadians have been seen as bearers of disease as well, which often made them targets of racism and violence (Angus Reid Institute and University of Alberta 2020; Angus Reid Institute and University of British Columbia 2021; Bailey and Hager 2020; Yano 2020). In June 2020, a survey conducted by the Angus Reid Institute in partnership with the University of Alberta suggested a “shadow pandemic” of racism exists, as half (50 percent) of the Canadians of Chinese ethnicity surveyed reported being called names or insulted as a direct result of the COVID-19 outbreak, and a plurality (43 percent) further said they had been threatened or intimidated.
This quick transformation of Asian minority groups into threats of contagion during the pandemic points to the persistence of latent fears and anxieties about Chinese Canadians across generational differences, immigration status, and national origin. Therefore, this essay reflects on how knowledges about early Chinese newcomers that were generated by colonial administrators laid the foundations for modes of racial governance that continue to inform public policy and public discourse in multicultural Canada in ways at once familiar and new. It examines the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (the Report) as an important tool in reinforcing the political goal of “white Canada” by strengthening the power of European colonists. Less than a century later, in 1967, the immigration points system was introduced, preceding the adoption of multiculturalism policy in 1971, both breaking with explicitly racist national policies. Yet this essay argues that there is more continuity than there are differences across the 1885 Report and the 1967 immigration policy. Both participate in a historical narrative that excludes the Chinese from national imagining, laying fertile ground for contemporary anti-Chinese racisms during the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
I posit that the 1885 Royal Commission’s Report and the 1967 immigration policy equally, if somewhat differently, function as modes of narrativizing history and establishing governance practices that safeguard white entitlement. Despite the different temporal and political contexts, both the Report and the 1967 immigration points system differentiate between good and bad populations, enabling administrators and policy-makers to decide who could and should remain in the settler regime and who was and is undesirable as citizens. Contemporary media narratives during the pandemic reproduce the same racial hierarchies, excluding Chinese citizens, but now in the name of culture. In short, settler colonialism in the nineteenth century differentiated between people on the basis of (constructed) biological difference; new immigration policies in the mid-twentieth century refigured these racial categories as (assumed and reified) “national” and cultural characteristics. In exploring these shifts, but above all, the important continuities, this essay places the rise in anti-Asian racism following the COVID-19 outbreak in the long historical trajectory of institutional racism in Canada.
The first section of the essay examines historical practices of differentiation and discrimination that have effectively fomented the perception of Chinese Canadians as honest, hardworking, and necessary if fundamentally undesirable workers, foreigners who represent a menace to Canada. Chinese workers were described as good workers but undesirable citizens, and the conflation of infectious disease with the Chinese “race” by the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration and public health officials, combined with exclusionary immigration policies, transformed difference into inequality. The second section demonstrates how Canadian immigration policy, specifically the 1967 points system, produces its own form of differentiation. Echoing nineteenth-century narratives, through the points system, Chinese immigrants are selectively recruited to immigrate to Canada and positioned as highly sought-after technical workers and entrepreneurial talent, even celebrated as a “model minority.” Their successes (and those of their “overachieving” children), however, mean that they are simultaneously constructed as foreigners threatening white Canadians. The 1967 immigration points system thus emerges as a form of regulation implicated in racialized hierarchies and racisms that simultaneously masks and denies these racisms in ways that are relatively continuous if different from the explicitly racist immigration policies of the nineteenth century.
The racialized ideologies that drive these policies have been reproduced in contemporary media representation during the pandemic, which plays a significant role in generating acceptance, vigilance, or resentment of Chinese Canadians. The power of the media framing of COVID-19-related discrimination in shaping popular understanding of national well-being and threat is the focus of the third section. Drawing upon surveys and polls on anti-Chinese racism and media coverage of attacks on prominent Chinese Canadian figures, notably Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam, this section delineates the role of media representation in clarifying the nation’s terms for the integration of racialized minorities, specifically Chinese Canadians.
The conclusion makes a case for the critical need to attend to the enduring, if changing, forms of racisms in Canadian society and the importance of challenging the ideological foundations for racist scapegoating of Chinese Canadians in public discourse and in public spaces. For Chinese and other Asian Canadians, the pandemic has intensified racisms rooted in persistent constructions of these communities as highly successful workers yet undesirable, either racially or culturally ill adapted for full participation in an implicitly white nation. Therefore, learning about the historical legacies of contemporary racisms, from the 1885 Royal Commission through to the 1967 immigration policy, is necessary in the pandemic response and recovery process if we are to intervene in and challenge structural racisms that have resurged against Chinese and, more generally, Asian Canadians. If the analysis is suggestive, rather than systematic, this essay points to important continuities over more than 130 years of anti-Chinese racisms. Overall, I argue that this history belies official multicultural policies, which present Canada as a tolerant, welcoming nation. We must critically take up difficult histories to move to a more racially just Canada now and into the future.
Immigrant Labour and the Threat of Contagion: Early Chinese Settlement in British Columbia
What is now British Columbia (BC) is significant to our historical understanding of racialized labour exploitation and anti-Asian racism because the first Chinese migrants arrived there.1 Historian John Price (2019/2020) traces the Chinese arrival in Canada to ships captained by John Meares and James Colnett in 1788 and 1789, respectively (33). Relatively small in numbers, these Chinese artisans and carpenters worked with the Europeans and the Mowachaht to build “the first British fortification on coastal North America” in Yuquot, the Indigenous territory of the Mowachaht, and they also built “the first European-style schooner on the northwest coast, the North West America” (37). A more substantive Chinese presence in BC is attributed to the Fraser Valley gold rush in the 1850s, which lured Chinese prospectors (Tan and Roy 1985, 6), and from the 1860s onwards, Chinese labourers migrated to Canada in response to the demands for the labour-intensive work essential for establishing local industry and commerce (Sue and Kitano 1973, 84; Mawani 2009, Chapter 1). The Canadian government also actively recruited Chinese labour to build the railroad for the Canadian Pacific Railway, encouraging thousands of Chinese workers to move to Canada (Tan and Roy 1985, 7; Yano 2020, 126). Following the completion of the railroad, large numbers of these Chinese workers began taking up employment in logging camps, canneries, fisheries, lumber mills, and mines (Li 1998, 22; Tan and Roy 1985, 7). The increased competition between white workers (many of whose migration to BC was ironically made possible by the completion of the railroad) and Chinese workers resulted in calls for anti-Chinese legislation to restrict immigration and prevent Chinese settlements. Thus, even if the province was home to most Chinese migrants, the threat they posed to white resettlement in BC resulted in policies that legally excluded or targeted them (Mawani 2009, 8), and as Henry Yu (2021, 395) notes, “British Columbia drove much of the anti-Asian legislation” across Canada.
The Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration was established in 1884 to ascertain the impact of the Chinese presence in Canada and to procure evidence that restricting Chinese immigration to Canada was in the best interests of the country. The Commission incorporated the expertise and “commonsense” views of many witnesses in its one-year fact-finding mission. These depositions included a mix of pragmatic recognition of the importance and even necessity of Chinese labour alongside racist naturalizations of the supposed docility of Chinese labour and their ultimate undesirability in a white nation. In the statements gathered in the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 1885), the Chinese are presented as “indispensable” to the building of the transcontinental railway (xxv), and for agriculture, coal mining, leather manufacturing, and domestic service, among others. Considered valuable as labourers because of their industriousness and efficiency (xxxi), and for their willingness to do jobs undesirable to white people, such as “stooping and squatting” all day to pick berries (xxxiii) or working in hazardous conditions in coal mines (xvii), witnesses praise Chinese labourers for their “humble virtues”: “docility” (xxvii, xxi, xcv), “reliability” (xxvii), “temperance, industry, honesty, efficiency” (xxi), and for “creating no trouble whatever” (xxii). Despite what might appear to be a description of the virtues of Chinese as labourers, the general sentiment of white migrants to Canada who self-defined as Canadian is summed up by one interviewee thus: “I do not think that they are a desirable class to have amongst us, but they are very useful” (xxxviii). Marked as excess, the Chinese migrant emerges in the Report as too industrious and efficient, too willing to take up jobs that white workers were unwilling to do, and too compliant to accept work at a lower pay than white workers.
The portrayal of the Chinese as necessary, if ultimately undesirable workers, is compounded in the Report by the emphasis placed on Chinese residents as vectors of disease and sources of contamination. Many witnesses describe the “filthy” (246, 283) living conditions of the Chinese as “apt to spread fever and sickness in the neighbourhood” (lxiii-lxiv). Chinatowns are repeatedly presented as “unhealthy and likely to spread disease” (66), “injurious to the public health” (95), and as “centres from which contagion would spread all around,” adding that in such conditions, “disease not otherwise dangerous might readily become epidemic” (87). The Report ignores residential arrangements in BC’s salmon canning industry where “canners provided Chinese labourers with bunkhouses that were overcrowded and unsanitary” (Mawani 2009, 68) and racial discrimination in housing that made it nearly impossible for the Chinese to find affordable housing in established neighbourhoods (Mawani 2009, 37), forcing them to reside in ethnically segregated areas (Shah 2001, 45–76). Workplace discrimination, particularly lower pay compared with white workers, prompted Chinese workers to share living quarters or reside in cramped quarters. Yet public health officials did not recognize such structural, racist discrimination and blamed unsanitary living conditions in Chinatowns on the supposed racial difference of Chinese migrant workers (Shah 2001, 20–2). Such insalubrity then becomes the basis for the containment of the Chinese population, on the grounds of public health.
Kay Anderson (1995) describes the ways that, from the 1870s to the early twentieth century, Chinatown came to be perceived as in need of urgent intervention by civic and provincial officials. Disease rhetoric was mobilized to innovate new policies and new governmental powers to control Chinese newcomers, such as creating municipal powers for zoning and segregation of bodies on the basis of race. Homes in Chinatown were also constantly at risk of being razed because of complaints about sanitation, overcrowding, and failure to meet newly created public health guidelines (Anderson 1995, 84; Shah 2001). In addition, public health officials regularly presented the Chinese as untrustworthy or deceitful for not reporting disease, such as smallpox cases, to public health, which reinforced the “hidden menace” associated with Asians. The Chinese presence was considered harmful to the health of Indigenous peoples—“the Chinese disease is killing Indians” (Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration 1885, xxvi)—and as Shah (2001, 60) summarizes, they were perceived as “engaged in nothing short of biological warfare to destroy the lives and livelihoods of … white families.”2 Stereotypes about Chinese industriousness and honesty thus co-existed with narratives about Chinese peoples and communities as vectors of disease and as a public health menace.
Within this context, the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration worked inherently as a tool in the Canadian state-building project, providing strictly controlled spaces for civic engagement and public participation. It legitimized the voices of white immigrants, whose perspectives then formed the foundation for the creation of discriminatory and exclusionary legislations. Yet the diverse opinions and evidence collected by the Royal Commission suggest that the understanding of the Chinese in the early nineteenth century was plural, contested, and inconsistent. In their recommendations, commissioners dismissed statements in favour of continuing Chinese immigration, even when necessary for white capitalist accumulation, and selected—and thereby validated—the statements of those fearful or opposed to Chinese immigration. The Report’s recommendation to restrict Chinese immigration became instrumentalized as policy, with the Dominion government prohibiting migration from China, first through the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, which levied head taxes on all Chinese immigrants (Tan and Roy 1985, 8) and then through the federal government’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which “effectively prohibited Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1947” (Tan and Roy 1985, 8). During this period, from 1923 to 1947, the Chinese were barred from entering Canada, with very few exceptions for merchants, students, and diplomats.
Anti-Chinese legalized racism first directed at the Chinese in BC paved the way for modes of governance in other parts of the country. “Anti-Chinese racism was less intensive but equally pervasive” in eastern Canada (Chen 2004, 74). Municipal and provincial governments across the country implemented numerous laws and policies to restrict the rights of Chinese residents. Lily Cho (2021) writes, “It was a crisis of presence, in which Chinese migrants were actively recruited to come to Canada, but deeply unwelcome as potential settlers” (34). The popular discourse of the Chinese as diseased, coupled with the perceived economic (crowding out white labour) and social (public health) threat posed by the Chinese, and eventually other Asians, rendered them a menace, “the yellow peril” (Kawai 2005; Tan and Roy 1985; Wu 2002). These yellow peril anxieties that propelled early public policy innovations that discriminated against the Chinese and other Asians continued, albeit differently, following reforms in Canada’s immigration policy and the adoption of the points system.
Immigrant Capital and the Model Minority: Chinese Canadians in the 1960s and 1970s
Just over 80 years after the 1885 Report, in 1967, the points system was introduced, suggesting a shift from previous explicitly racist Canadian immigration policies. This system evaluated applicants from all countries and ethnicities based on their occupational and educational skills as opposed to their race (Li 1998, 94). The points system favoured particular professions and educational levels based upon Canada’s economic needs. Consequently, new waves of East Asian immigrants arriving in Canada were very different socioeconomically from the labourers and their families who had come to Canada a century earlier.
The new, mostly middle-class immigrants from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were mainly medical, industrial, and other professionals (Li 1998, 96–9). In addition, Canada became a popular destination for international students from China, many of whom chose to immigrate after graduation (Poy 2013, 94). Given this new migrant population, stereotypes about Asian and Chinese Canadians shifted while still reflecting earlier ambivalent nineteenth-century characterization. This new wave of immigrants bolstered an image of Chinese and Asian Canadians as highly intelligent, hardworking, enterprising, and fiscally secure, a “model minority.” Precisely because of their success, however, they were simultaneously construed as a threat, displacing naturalized white settlement.
The term model minority appeared in US newspaper articles in 1965, where the successes of Chinese and other Asian Americans were attributed to their family values (Okihiro 2014; Kawai 2005, 113–14; Yano 2020, 128).3 Although less used in Canada, the term connotes the same stereotyped assumptions about Chinese, and more generally Asian Canadian, family traditions: the focus on learning and achievement, a strong work ethic, support of family, and a regimen of discipline (Chou and Feagin 2015).4 No longer victims of Canada’s racist immigration regime like the Chinese labourers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canada, these new immigrants with financial and social capital were living proof of meritocracy. The state could now harness Chinese Canadians as a rejoinder to Black and Indigenous communities demanding equitable policies or insisting on Treaty rights: these communities could be told to follow the example set by the model minority. As Thomas Nakayama (1988, 70) writes in the context of the United States, “Asian American success affirms the workability of American social institutions. That is, since this minority group has ‘made it,’ the problems of other minority groups are a result of their own neglect.” A similar dynamic exists in Canada, where Chinese and Asian Canadians are valued for their high-achieving professionalism and financial investments in the Canadian economy; their “success” is contrasted with other, less desirable minoritized communities.
But if Chinese residents in Canada are praised as the model minority, this masks the actual diversity of the Chinese migrant community in Canada, including precarious populations of Chinese Canadian workers. Further, insofar as Chinese Canadians are construed as successful, they are perceived to be a threat, an ambivalence echoing the earlier nineteenth-century narratives of Chinese labourers as necessary and hardworking but displacing white labour and settlement. A notable example of the construction of Chinese residents as a threat is the virulent anti-Chinese media reporting of foreign investment driving up property prices in Vancouver (Todd 2016). The perceived affluence of Chinese immigrants and the high-profile investment projects funded largely with overseas capital make media headlines, masking the varied socio-economic status of Chinese immigrants living in this country. This creates resentment and backlash against Chinese Canadian businesses, often confused with Chinese entrepreneurs with foreign capital and upscale real estate purchases in major Canadian cities, like Vancouver. Blaming the Chinese for housing unaffordability or money laundering, a narrative that co-exists with the model minority stereotype, effectively stigmatizes the Chinese and broader Asian communities in Canada. The actual economic diversity of Chinese immigrants to Canada is masked (see Man 2007; Ng 1981; Poy 2013), and Chinese residents and citizens in Canada are conflated with wealthy, threatening “foreigners” who are pushing out naturalized white settlement.
This is clear in media coverage, where frequently no distinction is made between a Chinese visitor to Canada and Chinese Canadians or their generational relation to Canada. The narrative is one about the “excessive” successes of Chinese Canadians and Asians, the contagious carriers of industriousness and efficiency that are injurious to white lifestyles. The resentment at successive generations of international students from China and Chinese Canadian youth studying in Canadian universities is one example. A decade and a half after the term model minority was making its way from the United States into Canadian public discourse, a 1979 Canadian news program, W5, notoriously asserted that all Asian students were foreigners. The W5 documentary, “Campus Giveaway,” argued that Canadian universities were being inundated with foreign students, many of whom were Chinese, who were crowding out otherwise qualified Canadian applicants (Li 1998, 145). In addition to claiming that there were 10,000 foreign students studying in Canada at the time, a statistic later refuted by the Canadian Bureau for International Education, “Campus Giveaway” selected footage of Chinese students to serve as examples of foreign students (Li 1998, 145). Evidently, even when Chinese Canadians as model minorities are positioned as highly sought-after technical workers and entrepreneurial talent, their successes are construed as a constant threat to white populations who are assumed to have natural rights to Canadian institutions, including places in the university.
In 2010, with multiculturalism clearly the defining feature of Canadian national identity, we see the same anxiety about Asian students threatening the well-being and entitlements of white populations repeated in the “Too Asian” article in Maclean’s magazine (following a public backlash, the title was later changed to “Enrollment Controversy”). The article bemoans the “over-representation” of academically focused Asian students in some elite Canadian universities, producing an intellectually rigorous yet unbalanced campus social life that is an unsustainable space for white students (Findlay and Köhler 2010). No distinction is made between international students from China and Chinese Canadians. Industrious Chinese and Asian Canadians are thus applauded when they do better than other racial minority groups, helping to uphold the myth of multiculturalism and equal access to opportunity, but success triggers white Canadian fears of the overachieving foreigner-within.
Roxanne Ng (1981), Peter Li (1998), Renisa Mawani (2009), and Lily Cho (2021) have argued that while Asians, including Chinese residents, have been historically and materially crucial in the building and sustaining of Canada’s economy, they are simultaneously represented as non-citizens and undesirables. Figured alternatively as cheap labour (Royal Commission) or skilled labour (the immigration points system), Chinese Canadians have been selectively recruited to enhance Canada’s economy, even as their excessive efficiency and excessive successes become the basis for their continued exclusion within the nation. The new immigration points system, from 1967, was intended as an explicit break from racist immigration policies, like those propounded in the 1885 Report. But in practice, the new immigration system has done little to assuage racist fears and anxieties about the increased (and increasing) visibility of the Chinese in Canada (Chakraborty 2021), imagined as a model minority whose successes are admirable yet threatening to white rights to housing and education, among other national goods.
The Pandemic and the New Contagion: Chinese Canadians during the 2019–22 Pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Chinese Canadians, especially those working in low-wage precarious labour sectors bore a double burden, facing increased risk of COVID-19 infections as essential workers (manufacturing, warehouses, retail stores, sanitation, and health care) and increased risk of racisms at workplaces and in public spaces. Well-paid professionals often escaped the first risk but remained vulnerable to the second, encountering persistent anti-Chinese racisms in their everyday life. Several surveys and polls point to this exacerbation of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A June 2020 longitudinal survey by the Angus Reid Institute in partnership with the University of Alberta included 569 Canadians who identified as ethnically Chinese. Just under half of this group were born in Canada, 22 percent were born in mainland China, and 22 percent in Hong Kong. One finding was that 61 percent of Chinese Canadians adjusted their routines to avoid run-ins with racist comments or attacks.5 Similarly, a 22 June 2020 survey of Chinese Canadians by The Globe and Mail showed that six in ten respondents adjusted their routines to avoid racist attacks or unpleasant encounters. Fifty percent of the respondents said they feared their children would be bullied when they returned to their schools (Bailey 2020). Many of the interviewees surveyed by the Angus Reid Institute and University of Alberta (2020) and Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice (2020) noted a range of discriminatory actions from micro- aggressions (moving away, insults, fearful looks) to physical aggression (spitting, shoving, hitting) that they or their families experienced. One in eight respondents to the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice poll indicated that they were aware of incidents of racial bias because of COVID-19 in their neighbourhoods.
A year into the pandemic, the Angus Reid Institute conducted an additional online survey from 11 to 17 May 2021, in partnership with the University of British Columbia. The survey found that Canadians of Asian descent ages 18 to 34 and those with lower incomes were most likely to have experienced and been affected by anti-Asian racism and bigotry over the last year.6 The study found that a majority (58 percent) of Asian Canadians had experienced at least one situation related to anti-Asian discrimination in the last year, while more than one in four (28 percent) reported exposure to these situations “all the time” or “often.” The survey results also revealed a strong narrative about unassimilable Asian immigrants, perpetual foreigners within the nation: one in five non-Asian Canadians said that they felt most or all Asian Canadians do not contribute to the broader community, and one-quarter of them said that many or most Asian Canadians do not make an effort to fit into broader Canadian society.
The ongoing structural anti-Chinese racism inherent in white settler nationalism was evident not only in surveys but in the attacks on Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam. Recalling both nineteenth-century stereotypes about hard-working, docile Chinese workers and twentieth-century imageries around the Chinese as a model minority, but also constructions of Chinese Canadians as threatening foreigners, on 20 April 2020, Dr. Tam was characterized as an agent of China by Derek Sloan, an Ontario rookie MP running for the leadership of the Conservative Party.7 Sloan released a video on Facebook and Twitter posing the question “Does she work for Canada or for China?” (Gooch 2020). If Sloan’s crude attacks recall long histories of excluding Chinese and Asian Canadians from the nation, the subsequent media coverage of Dr. Tam similarly echoed earlier tropes about docile Chinese Canadians.
Media sources emphasized Dr. Tam’s ability to “graciously” bear the racisms to which she was subject (see Boutilier 2020; Gooch 2020). Press reporters approvingly noted that Dr. Tam did not display anger or annoyance, instead responding calmly to Sloan’s attack by observing that she is not distracted by “noise” and has a job to do. Journalists praised Dr. Tam for the long hours she spends working; her ability to ignore racism and focus on her job earns public praise.8 Dr. Tam as one incarnation of the model minority is not only industrious and successful, that is, an asset to the nation as Canada’s chief public health officer during a global health crisis, but also effectively handles experiences of racism by remaining silent, compliant, and modest.
Media reporting of Dr. Tam’s graceful handling of racism downplays concerns about structural racism, even though COVID-19 reignited anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese policy and sentiment in Canada. For Avvy Go, director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, anti-Asian racism during the pandemic is reflective of “the underlying racist attitudes that exists in Canadian society” (Bascaramurty 2020). Certainly, important continuities exist across the three moments of anti-Chinese racisms explored here, a community seen as a necessary, hardworking, docile labour force but also as a foreign threat whose presence should be limited. The racism faced by Chinese and Asian Canadians during the pandemic and the racist accusations against Dr. Tam, as well as the stereotypical praise for her calm forbearance despite the attacks, repeat centuries-old narratives that, at best, ambivalently tolerate Chinese Canadian presence in the nation.
Beyond Multiculturalism: Facing Racism, Preparing for the Future
Frank discussions of Canada’s long histories of racisms against Chinese Canadians are necessary, but they run counter to powerful public and international representations of Canada as a diverse, inclusive, and immigrant-friendly nation. In particular, official multiculturalism, adopted in 1971 shortly after the points system for immigration, has shaped the popular perception “of the nation having made a successful transition from a white settler colony to a multiracial, multi-ethnic, liberal-democratic society” (Thobani 2007, 144), and the consequent self-perception of Canadians as quintessentially tolerant, benevolent, and peace-loving peoples. Such imagery has persuaded many immigrants to choose Canada as their favoured destination for immigration and many refugees to look toward Canada for protection. According to the 2016 census, 37.5 percent of Canadian children are first generation or have at least one foreign-born parent. One in five Canadians are foreign born, representing 21.9 percent of Canada’s total population, and of this, half are from Asia (Statistics Canada 2017). There is therefore a significant responsibility to Chinese and Asian Canadians, given the promises of multiculturalism, to grapple with the histories of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racisms in Canada and the persistence of racisms in the present.
In particular, if multiculturalism eschews the notions of racial and biological inferiority present in the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, multicultural policy is compatible with narratives about the incommensurability of racial others with dominant (white) national culture and, thus, produces its own form of differentiated racialization. Strategically reconfiguring race as culture (Thobani 2007, 145), Canadian multiculturalism employs a group’s cultural difference (values, norms, behaviours, and practices) to define its identity. Thus, stereotypical representations exist within multiculturalism of Chinese and Asians as hard workers and later as model minorities, but at the same time as fundamentally undesirable and suspect foreigners who represent a threat to white Canadians. Indeed, multiculturalism as a mode of managing difference depicts one cultural group as good or bad immigrants/multicultural subjects in relation to other racialized groups. Perversely, the idea of Chinese Canadians as the model minority has been used to denigrate other minorities, even while Chinese and Asian Canadians’ own incorporation into the nation is precarious and always under threat.
Multicultural policy is also used to differentiate Canada from a supposedly more racist United States. The histories briefly recalled here belie that narrative. The Royal Commission of 1885 successfully advocated for formal discrimination against Chinese immigration to Canada, and the points system of 1967, although no longer formally racist, co-existed with persistent racist stereotypes about wealthy Chinese and Asians pushing out Canadians (white people) from their naturalized rights to housing, land, and education. Anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racisms during the pandemic, revealed in surveys and the targeting of high-profile Chinese Canadians like Dr. Tam, draw upon and reproduce anti-Chinese rhetoric from the United States, including former US president Donald Trump’s persistent references to the COVID-19 virus as Chinese.9 Canada has so successfully marketed official multiculturalism as an end to racisms of the past and framed racisms as an aberration in the glorious march of multiculturalism, in contradistinction to the United States, that the long litany of exclusionary and discriminatory policies that set the conditions for anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic too often remain unacknowledged. It is critical to recognize that the most recent uptick in anti-Asian racism is not exceptional or an aberrant response by anxious or fearful Canadians during a health crisis but a continuum of old hierarchies of racial difference deployed in public policies and media campaigns.
Racism becomes visible and legible to those outside the group targeted by racist acts only when it emerges as excessive or spectacular, but the recurring racial violence—both mundane and exceptional—is a constant reminder to racialized minorities of the threat of violence always lurking under the surface in multicultural Canada. As this essay has sought to show, racist violence has been historically instrumentalized to further the framing of Chinese (and other racialized) Canadians as non-citizens. Institutional racism imposed and sustained by the state combined with everyday racism has effectively fused popular racist attitudes and political policies against Chinese Canadians into routine and recurrent practices. Therefore, the violence directed at Chinese (and Asian) Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic must be traced back beyond the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in China and understood as yet another reminder to Asian Canadian communities of the precarity of their belonging in Canada.
While failures in political leadership have, indeed, exacerbated the differential impacts of COVID-19 in Canada, this cannot be divorced from Canada’s historical legacies of legalized racism and everyday racisms that structure the lives of Asian Canadians and other racialized minorities. The tenaciousness and the seeming intractability of racism requires us to publicly acknowledge our inconvenient racist pasts and work toward societal education. This will allow multiculturalism to move beyond tolerance of difference or selective inclusion of others into the nation so that our multi-racial coexistence (the promise of multiculturalism) can be grounded in justice. Dismantling structural racism necessitates attention to multicultural policy’s obscuring of the historical and ongoing legacies of race and racism in Canada. Informed by the lived experiences of affected communities, robust societal education through changes in educational curricula and public outreach can demonstrate long-term commitments to addressing existing vulnerabilities and inequities in our society. Grounding of public policies in anti-racism goals and our collective, intentional attempts to unlearn biases and educate ourselves (as well as others) about Canada’s history of racial violence and its continuing legacies is critical to responding to the present and preparing for the future.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by McMaster University’s COVID-19 Research Fund for the project “COVID-19 and Asian Canadians: Why Does Race Matter?”
Footnotes
1.
In 1891, 98 percent of all Chinese immigrants in Canada lived in BC, and by 1911, 70 percent of Canada’s Chinese population resided on the west coast (Tan and Roy 1985, 7–8; Walker 1997, 57). In 2021, Vancouver, which is home to the largest number of people with Asian heritage in Canada, was dubbed as the “anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America” (Pearson 2021).
2.
Shah (2001) notes that such accusation of malice ignored the concerns of the Chinese community in San Francisco, which included distrust of Western physicians’ ability to cure the ill, their concerns with segregation of the afflicted from family and friends, and the recognition that the afflicted would be removed to the City Pesthouse where they were just as likely to die (60). The Chinese were refused admission to the city’s hospital (69–71), even though the Board of Health condemned the Chinese hospitals in Chinatown and refused to recognize Chinese physicians (71). Approval for the Chinese to build a modern medical facility outside the city limits was also denied (71).
3.
Effectively denying the existence of institutional racism and everyday racism in North America, the term appeared, not surprisingly, in the era of civil right movements as Black Americans demanded greater rights and an end to discriminatory policies. It followed on the heels of the then assistant secretary of labour Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The so-called 1965 Moynihan Report attributed the low socio-economic condition of Blacks to their lack of family values. Thus, this new term allowed white settlers to blame racial others for their failures and suffering because minority problems seem to reside on the “good” or “bad” cultural values and traditions of minorities and not in the societal structures created by settler colonialism (Nakayama 1988, 65–73; also, see Kim 1999).
4.
Scholars argue that the continual use of Asia and Asian cultural traditions to explain success reinforces the importance of “Asia” to Asian North American identity, relegating Asian Canadians and Asian Americans to the role of permanent foreigners (Chou and Feagin 2015).
5.
Also, see Bailey and Hager’s (2020) Globe and Mail article, which gives examples of racist attacks that made East Asians change their everyday routines. In the Angus Reid and University of British Columbia (UBC) online survey from 11–17 May 2021, one in five Asian Canadians said they have consistently changed their routines or behaviours to avoid situations that may be uncomfortable or dangerous. Three in five have come across derogatory messages over the past year and two in five have made changes to avoid problematic encounters.
6.
From a representative randomized sample of 1,984 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum, the Institute derived a subsample of 107 respondents who self-identified as ethnically Chinese, East Asian, and/or Southeast Asian, which for the purposes of analysis was then boosted by an additional 524 cases to bring that group to a total of 631.
7.
In the 2021 Angus Reid and UBC online survey, one in three (32 percent) non-Asian respondents said Chinese Canadians are more likely to be “loyal to” China than to Canada on bilateral tension points between nations. Seven percent of Chinese Canadians said they are more inclined to side with China than Canada.
8.
Frank Wu (2002, 44) writes in the American context, “Asian Americans do not whine about racial discrimination: they only try harder. If they are told that they have a weakness that prevents their social acceptance, they quickly agree and earnestly attempt to cure it. If they are subjected to mistreatment by their employer, they quit and found their own company rather than protesting or suing” (also see Okihiro 2014).
9.
President Trump decided to use the terms “Chinese virus” or “China virus” publicly and repetitively in his tweets between 16 and 18 March 2020 (Fallows 2020), as well as in a White House press conference on 19 March 2020 (Chiu 2020). A widely circulated image captured at the March 19 press conference shows the president’s notes with the “corona” in “coronavirus” crossed out and replaced with “Chinese” (Smith 2020).
References
Anderson, Kay. 1995. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Angus Reid Institute and University of Alberta. 2020. “Blame, Bullying and Disrespect: Chinese Canadians Reveal their Experiences with Racism During COVID-19.” June 22, 2020. http://angusreid.org/racism-chinese-canadians-covid19/.
Angus Reid Institute and University of British Columbia. 2021. “Anti-Asian Discrimination: Younger Canadians Most Likely To Be Hardest hit By Experiences with Racism, Hate.” June 8, 2021. https://angusreid.org/anti-asian-discrimination/.
Bailey, Ian. 2020. “Six in 10 Chinese Canadians Say They Have Adjusted Routines to Avoid Racist Run-Ins during COVID-19.” The Globe and Mail, June 22, 2020. https://tgam.ca/3cuS1qL.
Bailey, Ian, and Mike Hager. 2020. “Hate-Fuelled Incidents against East Asians on the Rise, Police Say.” The Globe and Mail, May 16, 2020. https://tgam.ca/3517kTY.
Bascaramurty, Dakshana. 2020. “Fear over Coronavirus Prompts School Board in Ontario to Warn Parents about Racism against Chinese Community.” The Globe and Mail, March 11, 2020. https://tgam.ca/3gq8uOl.
Boutilier, Alex. 2020. “‘Does She Work for Canada or for China?’ Conservative MP’s Attack on Dr. Theresa Tam Draws Fire.” Toronto Star, April 23, 2020. https://bit.ly/3gl787o.
Chakraborty, Chandrima. 2021. “Racist Labour Exploitation Continues in Multicultural Canada,” Policy Options, October 6, 2021. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/october-2021/racist-labour-exploitation-continues-in-multicultural-canada/.
Chen, Zhongping. 2004. “Chinese Minority and Everyday Racism in Canadian Towns and Small Cities: An Ethnic Study of the Case of Peterborough, Ontario, 1892–1951.” Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal 36 (1): 71–91. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A123933602/AONE?u=ocul_mcmaster&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=1637219e.
Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice. 2020. “Anti-Asian Racism Rife amid COVID-19 in Canada’s Largest Cities.” April 27, 2020. https://ccncsj.ca/nationalpollbias/.
Chiu, Allyson. 2020. “Trump Has No Qualms about Calling the Coronavirus the ‘Chinese Virus.’ That’s a Dangerous Attitude, Experts Say.” The Washington Post, March 20, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/20/coronavirus-trump-chinese-virus/.
Cho, Lily. 2021. Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-citizens. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Chou, Rosalind S., and Joe R. Feagin. 2015. The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Fallows, James. 2020. “Reporter’s Notebook; A 2020 Time Capsule.” The Atlantic, March 18, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2020/03/2020-time-capsule-5-the-chinese-virus/608260/.
Findlay, Stephanie, and Nicholas Köhler. 2010. “The Enrollment Controversy.” Maclean’s, November 10, 2010. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/too-asian/.
Gooch, Tiffany. 2020. “The Gracious Tam Deserves Better.” Toronto Star, April 26, 2020. https://bit.ly/355sbFC.
Kawai, Yuko. 2005. “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril.” The Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2): 109–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170590948974.
Kim, Claire Jean. 1999. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society 27 (1): 105–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329299027001005.
Li, Peter S. 1998. The Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Man, Guida. 2007. “Racialization of Gender, Work, and Transnational Migration: The Experience of Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada.” In Race and Racism in 21st Century Canada: Continuity, Complexity, and Change, edited by Sean P. Hier and B. Singh Bolaria, 235–52. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Mawani, Renisa. 2009. Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Nakayama, Thomas K. 1988. “‘Model Minority’ and the Media: Discourse on Asian America.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12 (1): 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/019685998801200106.
Ng, Roxanne. 1981. “Constituting Ethnic phenomenon: An Account From the Perspective of Immigrant Women.” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Etudes Ethniques au Canada 13 (1): 97–108. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ251763.
Okihiro, Gary Y. 2014. Margins and Mainstreams: Asian in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Pearson, Natalie Obiko. 2021. “This is the Anti-Asian Hate Crime Capital of North America.” Bloomberg, May 7, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-vancouver-canada-asian- hate-crimes/?srnd=premium.
Poy, Vivienne. 2013. Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Price, John. 2019/2020. “Relocating Yuquot: The Indigenous Pacific and Transpacific Migrations.” BC Studies 204 (Winter): 21–44. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/bcstudies/article/view/191643/189025
Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration. 1885. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration. Ottawa: The Commissioner.
Shah, Nayan. 2001. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Smith, Allan. 2020. “Photo of Trump Remarks Shows ‘Corona’ Crossed Out and Replaced with ‘Chinese’ Virus.” NBC News, March 19, 2020. https://nbcnews.to/355jhIc.
Statistics Canada. 2017. “Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity: Key Results from the 2016 Census.” The Daily, October 25, 2017. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171025/dq171025b-eng.htm.
Sue, Stanley, and Harry H.L. Kitano. 1973. “Stereotypes as a Measure of Success.” Journal of Social Issues 29 (2): 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1973.tb00074.x.
Tan, Jin, and Patricia E. Roy. 1985. The Chinese in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association.
Thobani, Sunera. 2007. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Todd, Douglas. 2016. “Blame Politicians for Metro Vancouver’s Housing Price Crisis.” Vancouver Sun, March 22, 2016. https://vancouversun.com/news/metro/blame-politicians-for-metro- vancouvers-housing-price-crisis.
World Health Organization. 2020. “WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19.” March. 11, 2020. https://bit.ly/3w6z05T.
Walker, James W. St. G. 1997. “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada. Kingston: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Wu, Frank H. 2002. Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books.
Yano, Christine R. 2020. “Racing the Pandemic: Anti-Asian Racism amid COVID-19.” In The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi, 123–36. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies.
Yu, Henry. 2021. “Reckoning with the Realities of History: The Politics of White Supremacy and the Expansion of Settler Democracy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization, edited by Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, 390–421. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Canadian Studies
Volume 56 • Number 3 • November 2022 | novembre 2022
Pages: 393 - 409
Copyright
© University of Toronto Press 2022.
History
Submitted: 20 May 2022
Received: 20 May 2022
Accepted: 20 May 2022
Published ahead of print: 6 October 2022
Published in print: November 2022 | novembre 2022
Published online: 30 November 2022
Keywords:
Mots clés :
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Related Content
Citations
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
Download article citation data for:
Journal of Canadian Studies 2022 56:3, 393-409
Journal of Canadian Studies 2022 56:3, 393-409