Henry Yu is a professor in the History Department at UBC, where he researches and lectures on the history of migration, racism, and early colonial relations on the West Coast. The following is a version of a speech delivered by Henry at The Mainlander’s Myth of Foreign Investment panel in 2013.
—Editors
The main thing I would like to do today is to concentrate on the question of where the history of racial scapegoating in Vancouver originated. To do that it’s important to begin from the beginning.
One thing that I find helpful in these conversations is to think about the question, “Who belongs here?” – “here” meaning where we are in Vancouver, but also in Canada in general. Many of you have probably heard that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are settler colonies that were built around white supremacy as a way determining who does and does not belong.
When I say white supremacy a lot of people think I’m calling people Nazis, but white supremacy is a lot more complicated than that. In its most basic form, it is an overt structuring of society that gives privileged access to resources to those who could be considered white, starting with European migrants. In reality the process was very uneven, so for a long time if you were from Italy, you weren’t actually white. If you were Catholic, you weren’t white; if you were Jewish, you weren’t white; and, if you were Armenian, you weren’t white.
This phenomenon touched all aspects of society, including the labour movement. If you go back to 1907, the people who were forming unions used white supremacy as one of their key rallying cries. One of the most popular bar songs in 1907 for example – the year of a big anti-Asian riot in Vancouver, organized around anti-Chinese, anti-Punjabi, and anti-Japanese agitation – was called “White Canada Forever.”
Apologists for the past
Today there are a lot of people attempting to apologize for the past, and there are also apologists for the past – but those are two different things. It’s one thing to say we had a racist past and to ask how we can work through the legacies of the history of white supremacy. It’s another thing to say that racism didn’t really exist.
As a historian I have no time for the apologists, because the people who were organizing white supremacy didn’t try to hide it. There was a Ku Klux Klan in Shaughnessy, they didn’t try to hide it. There were also anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese groups and groups against people who were “Oriental or Asiatic.” There were a lot of things they didn’t like: they didn’t like Native or Aboriginal peoples, and they didn’t like Blacks. It’s very hard today to swallow the position that white supremacist racism didn’t exist then.
We have to always remember that this land is unceded. While violent tactics were certainly used, there was no Battle of Vancouver, Battle of Burnaby or Battle of Chilliwack where the British definitively defeated the Coast Salish peoples and then took their land. And secondly, there were no treaties (except for a few signed on Vancouver Island by the first Governor James Douglas – about 2% of BC), which is the other approach that was bypassed. There was no process where a deal was made: “You give us this and we’ll give you something in return.” So neither of those things happened. By our own laws, by anyone else’s laws, by any moral or legal accountability, this land remains unceded. This land is indigenous land. That’s why 98% of BC is unceded territory and there’s no way around that.
One of the things I think is crucial to consider is, in light of this history, what is the norm here in Vancouver today? One of my friends from university grew up in the Interior of BC and then moved to the Lower Mainland. He looked around at different communities in the region and picked North Vancouver. I said “Why North Vancouver? It’s a heck of a commute downtown over the bridge and all that,” and he said, “Oh, because it’s like how British Columbia used to be.” We’ve been friends for a long time, so I didn’t say, “What the fuck do you mean by that?” But the little guy in the back of my head was going, “What the fuck do you mean by that?” I didn’t press him, but if I had the question would be, “Do you mean it’s overwhelmingly white?”
Building the colonial myth
I’ll throw in another anecdote that I think is important. My kids went to Carnarvon School, it’s an elementary school on 16th and Blenheim. One of the things that they taught my third grader, my eight year old, was about how Canada initially had “free land.” All the kids made posters with, “Canada, free land, free axes, free horses, come to Canada!” This exercise was supposed to be their history lesson about who populated Canada.
I tried to explain to my 8 year old, “Well, it’s free for some people, because at the same time you’re taking it away from the people already here, so it’s kind of stolen land given away as a free gift. I’m not sure I would celebrate this ‘free land’ in this way since it was someone else’s, and especially given that so many other people weren’t allowed to come because of anti-Asian exclusion. So it was only free for some people.” Even though she was 8 at the time, my kid understood the concept of why it was easy to give something away for free if it has been dispossessed from someone else. The idea we still have of Canadian land as “free land” – that’s an example of the legacy of white supremacy.
Remember that 98% of British Columbia has neither been ceded by treaty by the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for over 10,000 years. The unilateral declaration that all of British Columbia is “Crown Land,” as if it was all owned by the King of Britain just because he said so, is a myth which recent Supreme Court cases have fortunately no longer been able to fully uphold. We are beginning to see the legal system consider the legal flimsiness of the colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and that all of this land was taken from someone else. Yet myths about “free” land still remain dominant.
The reason I bring these stories up is to point to the ways in which white supremacy has become so normalized in the mythic history of Canada. It is this process of myth-making that has made it so hard for people to even think about what white supremacy is and what it means.
Anti-Asian racism and the rewriting of history
For another example, why did the Chinese build the railroad? The answer that is usually given is because they were “cheap.” But what does that mean? On the one hand, Chinese workers were cheaper because of racism – because they were seen as more expendable. But there is another factor that often gets overlooked. Chinese labour was cheaper because they were already here, and because it cost less to get to the West coast by water by crossing the Pacific Ocean.
The irony is that from California, to Oregon, to Washington State, to British Columbia, the Chinese built the railroads. In both Canada and the US, the western ends of the railroads were built with Chinese labour. It was only after the railroads were finished that it became cheaper and easier to get to the West coast by land, by riding the same railroads that the Chinese helped build. It’s ironic because as soon as settlers started to come en masse along the cheap transportation that the Chinese had just built, people getting off the trains looked around and said, “What are all these Chinese and Natives doing here? Let’s get rid of them.” And they did, or at least they tried to.
Every time you think of the railroad, remember that the Chinese built it because they were already here to build it. Why that’s important is because it takes a massive amount of narrative violence to change the whole story of British Columbia and Canada. Right from the early years the narrative was changed to, “the Chinese are latecomers who are trying to undercut us and take our jobs away.”
The truth is the exact opposite. Unionization in San Francisco and Vancouver was based on taking jobs away from Chinese and Japanese workers who had arrived from across the Pacific. That’s crucial to understand because it’s one of the ways that we still accept the normalcy of the world that white supremacy built.
What’s wrong with Kitsilano?
I wrote an op-ed piece once asking what’s wrong with Kitsilano? What’s wrong with North Vancouver? What’s wrong with any neighbourhood that is “overwhelmingly white” in a census? People attacked me, asking “What do you have against Kits?” I said, “Nothing, my kids go to school in Kits, my best friends are from Kits.” What’s wrong with Kits is that there is nothing wrong with Kits. If you have a century and a half of white supremacy, you get Kits.
And then when the neighborhood shifts residents go, “Oh shit, there’s non-white people coming in.” When you’ve built a place around white supremacy, anything that destabilizes the status quo becomes abnormal and threatening. What’s wrong with Kitsilano? Nothing, it’s normal. That’s what is wrong. That’s the work that white supremacy did, and continues to do.
In the 1990s, after a wave of immigration from Hong Kong anticipating the transfer of its sovereignty from the UK to China, Vancouver was called “Hongcouver.” People in East Van weren’t saying “Hongcouver,” because East Van was already a diverse place with lots of Chinese. The places that were really resistant to this new diversity were West side communities such as Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy – areas that you could say had been living on the fumes of white supremacy for decades.
Yes, people were coming from Hong Kong. In making the decision between a one-bedroom condo in Hong Kong or a six bedroom mock Tudor mansion in Shaughnessy, many decided to go for the latter (the price at the time was about the same). The discovery that Vancouver’s real estate was relatively inexpensive in comparison to places such as Hong Kong may have been a shock. That some of the discoverers had Chinese faces was probably more shocking. I will talk more about the economic aspect later, but it is important to understand that one of the mainstays of displaying shock throughout Vancouver’s history has been racialized scapegoating.
We should look closely at dynamics that unfold when non-whites move into neighbourhoods that were built around white supremacy, like Shaughnessy or the British Properties. Properties in these areas historically had legal covenants stating, “Do not sell to a non-white person.” As in California and throughout the West Coast, property came with covenants stating, “don’t sell to Jews, don’t sell to Blacks, don’t sell to Natives, don’t sell to Chinese.” Of course, we don’t enforce these covenants legally anymore, but they were there. Particularly in those neighbourhoods that reacted the most emotionally to immigration in the 1990s.
A couple years ago, there was a controversy about whether places like UBC and U of T were “too Asian.” Maclean’s Magazine put “Too Asian?” on the front cover of one of their issues. The question only makes sense in the context of a society built around white supremacy. Questions like this can only go unquestioned if the assumption is that white society is the norm against which everything else is measured. They can only come unquestioned in a settler colonial province, like British Columbia, settled on 98% unceded territory.
Speculative real estate market is the problem
I put these ideas together about who and where we are as a way to understanding our past, but also our present, and to argue that if we want to move forward in solving any of these issues we have to think through the complexities of what it means to live in a settler colonial society. Racialized immigrants have since the beginning been scapegoats, but we also have to understand settlers as experiencing different degrees of class and privilege.
Today a lot of people are undeniably coming to Vancouver with a lot of money, and they are investing in speculative housing, because there is a speculative housing market here. They’re not the problem, speculative capital in real estate is a problem. It is the structure of our city right now. Indeed, from the moment of colonial dispossession of Indigenous land this has been a speculative real estate market. New immigrants didn’t cause this. If we don’t like it, then we need to change it. We have to ask what kind of structure we want to create in its place.
One of the last ironies in this history is the Downtown Eastside. It’s not the Downtown Eastside that people from mainland China want to move into. That’s not where the capital from the People’s Republic of China is flowing into right now. Yet the housing crisis there continues to worsen.
If we’re looking neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Chinatown is incredibly low rent too, and also facing a threat from development. We have so many Chinese seniors that need affordable housing, and yet we continue to build luxury homes for the private market. While wealthy immigrants are often blamed for lack of affordable housing, it is the speculative real estate market that those wealthy enough – Chinese or not – are capitalizing on.
One of the great ironies of the freeway fight in Strathcona and Chinatown was the way that it saved a number of areas. Those areas that were bulldozed, and where public housing was built like at Maclean Park, are still there and still low-income housing. But other places like houses in Strathcona that were saved by a broad-based, multi-racial progressive coalition are now a million-and-a-half dollars each.
This question of private versus public housing is an important one, and I’d throw it in as a last kind of caution as we think about real-estate economics and housing markets. The city that we most often associate with hyper-capitalism and neoliberalism is Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a colonial city, like Vancouver, built upon real estate speculation. And yet compared to Vancouver it is night and day.
Hong Kong has the highest percentage of its residents of any city in the world living in public housing. As much as money has been made in real estate speculation and development in Hong Kong, they managed to also house ¾ of the city’s residents in publicly subsidized housing using profits from that speculation and development. Why can’t we even house 5% of our population in public housing? I just want to throw that out going forward.
I’m a historian, and what I’ve said here builds on the past, because we need to learn from the past as we move into the future. If we’re going to live together here, we have to face our past, including the foundations of white supremacy, and how common it has been to blame Asians for all our ills; but we also need to imagine a future together where we can live together in a just peace, not the wary watchfulness between those who have and those who have not. Blaming Mainland Chinese for the affordability problems of an unaffordable speculative housing market is a red herring that misses the point. History shows, whether through out labour movements or the building of our neighborhoods, that this is a point that has been missed before.

daphne Harwood
December 12, 2015 at 6:50 am
Terrific article. Important truth-telling.
hsiangwayyy
December 13, 2015 at 2:00 am
Hong Kong doesn’t have the highest percentage of its residents living in public housing in the world, Singapore does.
antuerius
December 13, 2015 at 4:57 am
I don’t think “white supremacy” is a legitimate historical or academic term. Informally, it usually indicates a corrupted investment in the granting and grist mill of identity politics in the ethno-political theatre. Asia is a bad example of tolerance, even among themselves. The worst that the Europid racial nation has delivered them is minor in comparison to the ethnic hatred and demographic violence within their own group, now of some billions. Asian leadership would not tolerate this sort of incitement, why should the West & Europe be expected to?
Sarah Keller
December 13, 2015 at 8:01 am
Although, I agree that this is a terrific article – there might be one problem. I don’t think that it gives the Chinese people very much agency. I learned in a third year Canadian History course this last semester that there is a third reason why Chinese workers built the rail-roads: It’s because they felt that they could afford to do so, and that they were willing to work for less money because they knew how to live on less money. Hopefully that’s a true statement since we wouldn’t want the current curriculum of any UBC history course to be at fault.
D.J. McCormack
December 13, 2015 at 8:53 am
Thank you — this is a really useful article. I have always thought the problem we have in Vancouver is not ethnicity but an immigration policy that favours the “investor class” (i.e. rich people) over refugees and others. If working class Chinese were moving here they would settle, work and stay. But often people are buying up and tearing down and rebuilding, leaving their kids here to go to school and returning to their country of origin to work and avoid Canadian taxes. It is a class problem, not a race problem.
X
December 13, 2015 at 6:15 pm
It’s a conversation that’s hard to avoid, especially among me and my fellow working class/lower-middle class friends, but I always try to hit home that it’s not “chinese people” that we need to be upset about it’s rich people, it’s capitalism. The issue of race is simply a smokescreen, Chinese people are a scapegoat.
joe_kits
December 14, 2015 at 1:10 pm
As a kits resident I’m particularly offended by your generalization about the neighbourhood. As a person of colour, I’d like to thank you for perpetuating the myth that Kits is a white dominated neighbourhood. What’s wrong with Kits is you, your opinion, and consistent erasure of people of colour from the narrative because it suits your research trajectory, a trajectory that guarantees continued federal funding. I do love it when a Princeton graduate likes to tow the line of intellectual eugenics. We’ve been here a long fucking time. Please, lead the way.
thomas rocco
December 15, 2015 at 8:19 am
having lived in Seattle and visited Vancouver and surrounding areas, I find this to be a very enlightening article. The explanation of factors in most recent immigration from Hong Kong is really stimulating. Who would know, for example, about the per cent of HK population living in subsidised housing? and by the way, how come we have not figured out how to make more out of real estate speculation, which is still dominating economies in many North American cities, so that less well off people who want to continue living in those cities can do so? Including NYC. Thanks to Henry Yu for this article and thanks for those who have passed it on thru Facebook.
John Rawlins
May 13, 2016 at 8:44 am
I vividly remember a geography lesson when I was ten years old and living in Burnaby in 1970. Our teacher told us that black people in South Africa were not treated like white people and that was wrong. I raised my hand and asked if that was the same as the way we treated native people in Canada. The teacher’s words then rang around the class and left my face stinging: ‘Shut-up John’.
Bonnie Foley-Wong (@BonnieOWong)
May 13, 2016 at 8:55 am
That may very well be the narrative you’ve been taught to believe, but it is not necessarily true. It is written from the biased perspective of the authors of the curriculum.
It is echoed in the idea that manufacturing can be outsourced overseas, where labour is cheaper, to convince you that unethical supply chains and human rights infringements are okay because it’s better than no job or that people choose to work in such conditions or it’s just how things are done elsewhere.
Choice is the fine line between empowerment and exploitation. Generalizations certainly do not capture who is empowered in certain economic situations and who is not.
Dale Fuller
May 14, 2016 at 10:52 am
Thank you for this history lesson. Not that I was completely unaware. I personally believe that racism, anywhere, anytime is horrible. I no longer live in the Lower Mainland, but many of my friends and family still do. If they were to begin spouting any kind of racism, I would call them on it. (They don’t, by the way) I do have a small bone to pick with you, however. I know that the labour movement has not been innocent of racism by any stretch of the imagination — and that includes today’s working class. But to introduce the subject of unions being racist and then to immediately jump to the lyrics of a popular bar song to illustrate your point I think reveals a bit of prejudice of your own. But again, thank you for the article. I learned that Vancouverites can take some lessons from Hong Kong which I think surprised many of your readers. Dale Fuller
Douglas E Stever-Akesson
May 14, 2016 at 6:39 pm
I live in Burnaby, BC CANADA and I put a heavy capitalization on CANADA. WE have two official languages here. English and French! I can’t read the menu’s of a number of food establishments on Kingsway. Everything is in Chinese. I’m going to start a business and put everything in Swedish. I can just hear the screaming that this would cause.
K Scott
May 15, 2016 at 6:55 pm
I agree, it doesn’t matter where the money is coming from, whether it’s China or the U.K., it’s our real estate market and laws governing it that are the problem.
I don’t like how the author states that Canada is “well, it’s free for some people, because at the same time you’re taking it away from the people already here, so it’s kind of stolen land given away as a free gift.” This land belongs to no one. Earth will be here long after we’re gone, we’re here for like a second of it’s existence. We also share this planet with millions of other organisms and yet act like it’s our right to own it over any other species… ugh arrogant humans… rant over. Lol.
Mike Cleven
May 16, 2016 at 1:34 am
Henry Yu’s babble about being a “historian” falls flat when you know a lot more about BC history than he does…..sure, he has a degree in history and what amounts to a political appointment to a politicized institute at UBC, but like so many sino-flavoured versions of BC history he just glosses over important stuff in terms he wants to use to slag “White Supremacy” with
“For another example, why did the Chinese build the railroad? The answer that is usually given is because they were “cheap.” But what does that mean? On the one hand, Chinese workers were cheaper because of racism – because they were seen as more expendable. But there is another factor that often gets overlooked. Chinese labour was cheaper because they were already here, and because it cost less to get to the West coast by water by crossing the Pacific Ocean.”
The reason was actually that Ottawa didn’t want to do what BC wanted – import workers from the British Isles to build the railway and settle and stay in what was a BRITISH (not Chinese) colony….and John A MacDonald said “no Chinese workers, no railway” and the reason they were cheaper is that Chinese labour contractors were the one paying them lower wages (in rice mats, not money); a British Columbian wouldn’t engage them, no, Ottawa hired an American, Onderdonk, to bring his Chinese crews up from California. And an infamous incident that has been blamed on whites but was actually the intentional fault of the labour contractor who left 2000 Chinese in Spences Bridge to starve over the winter without paying them, it took the “White Supremacists” in Vancouver to raise the money to rescue them…
another gross historical gaffe for an “historian”:
“While violent tactics were certainly used, there was no Battle of Vancouver, Battle of Burnaby or Battle of Chilliwack where the British definitively defeated the Coast Salish peoples and then took their land.”
No indeed no… but the notion that colonialism only operates by violence and conquest is an imposition on the historical reality. The Coast Salish peoples were already under repeated attack by Euclataws (Southern Kwakiutl, the Cape Mudge Band) and the Kwantlen welcomed the arrival of the HBC at Fort Langley, moving to the shelter of the fort’s guns; the “Battle of Vancouver” had been the Euclataws and Haida raids on Burrard Inlet that led the Tsleil-waututh to invite the Skwxwu7mesh to move to the inlet…which pissed off the Musqueam (and they’re still pissed off about it).
The Oregon Treaty of 1846 is what kept the Americans from the genocidal wars which wracked Washington and Oregon and Idaho for the following decades…….the HBC was more interested in natives as customers and business partners.
I’m particularly rankled by Yu’s comments about Lillooet supporting the speculative crap espoused as “history” by that politician-turned-preacher who does tours up the Fraser Canyon making up history as he goes to suit himself. Not a word about Lillooet history’s many prominent and respected Chinese, not a word about rich merchants and farmers…. just complaints about a Chinese graveyard gone derelict being ‘racist’ because they were not buried in the Christian cemetery right next to it….. but the issue is really “why did Lillooet’s Chinese not bury these guys according to Chinese tradition” (box their bones and send them home to China)….. seems to me they were outcasts given a decent burial (with a very nice view as it happens, with good feng shui no less) as the tongs wouldn’t……but oh no, it’s white racism as to why it’s not a cemetery anymore…… and why they’re not buried in the Christian graveyard.
We are being subjected to the same colonialist behaviour China and Chinese complain as “humiliations” – an economic sphere of influence, segregated and elitist housing, and racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and cultural spending and more…
Henry Yu you sicken me.
Kevin
May 16, 2016 at 6:24 am
Vancouver demographics are unlike the rest of Canada. Impacted the most by cross-Pacific immigration Asians account for 13% of the national population but around 50% in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, and 70% in Richmond (NHS 2011). Caucasians are becoming once again a minority on the west coast. The economy has shifted, communities have transformed, and urban spaces have grown and gentrified. It is a jarring experience for all who have lived here for decades. Having grown up in a white enclave in Metro Vancouver, I only wish our education system had had more foresight to offer Chinese language in our schools. Since Expo86 the Asia-Pacific region has been Vancouver’s future in terms of foreign investment.
Can't afford my hometown, took my brains elsewhere.
May 16, 2016 at 4:07 pm
Under Chinese law, foreigners can’t buy land in China. Period. How’s that for racism?
Christine
May 16, 2016 at 5:29 pm
Racism is the decoy to greed and a divide and conquer tactic. The 1% live everywhere.
Can't afford my hometown, took my brains elsewhere.
May 16, 2016 at 6:49 pm
Nor can a foreigner become a citizen of China.
Mike Cleven
May 18, 2016 at 6:52 pm
Bonnie Foley-Wong you said
“That may very well be the narrative you’ve been taught to believe, but it is not necessarily true. It is written from the biased perspective of the authors of the curriculum.”
I really have NO IDEA what curriculum you’re talking about. High school histories have dwelt on the head tax and more for decades, and very little else about BC history other than the Komagata Maru and Japanese internment. Same at universities – I took SFU’s HIST-436 course and 50% plus of the curriculum was about the maltreatment of Chinese. Scholarly publishing focuses on racism in BC. Yet despite campus being overwhelmingly Chinese in flavour there was not one single person who was Chinese in the class – complete disinterest, in other words. This was also noted by Indo-Canadians in the class.
Henry Yu’s revision of history is calling for MANDARIN as an official language, on the premise that there were Chinese in the colony and early province. But they were CANTONESE speakers. …. so where’s this Mandarin bullshit comes from?? PRC sponsorship of Henry Yu is my bet. (btw of the two dialects I prefer the sound of Mandarin over Cantonese so long as it’s not the arch-Maoist announcer voice like that woman during the Olympics).
Such hypocrisy for an obvious Han Supremacist to yak about White Supremacy when Chinese billionaires are currently holding a financial gun to the head of the BC economy and overwhelming the non-Chinese community (we’re not all “white” y’know) is just completely absurd. Han are well-known in the Orient for treating other races and nations as vassals or outright dirt, so give me a break with the pretentious moralizing about how whites can’t understand anything until someone who’s Han explains it for them.
yeah, right…… I’ve read tons of BC histories, including many local ones, and this narrative that you claim exists and which Yu wants to rewrite and eradicate the old…. it’s just not in them. It’s in scholarly and academic papers alleging that it is, but when a REAL historian reads them it’s obvious that sourcing is selective and biased, often out of context, and the premise of each article is biased against whites and obfuscatory about bits about Chinese that don’t fit the narrative of oppression and discrimination. Especially the local histories and period travelogues, which are invariably sympathetic to the Chinese – and to those Chinese ostracized by others for being “unlucky”, like the guy who got beaten to death and set on fire by his countrymen in early Victoria…..and no mention of the opium trade controlled by Chinese/HK companies, none at all, other than to pontificate about how racist it was for MPs touring Vancouver’s opium dens to remark on the white girl they found there.
Twisted logic prevails, and false or out of context evidence ‘facts’, which is the case for your babble about the mythical ” curriculum you think still exists and the revisionist narrative and agenda being pushed by Henry Yu. It doesn’t – course outlines and readings are now focussed on the Chinese – more than any other group than the natives – as is media coverage and journalistic articles about BC’s past.
I remember what David Lam said when he became Lieutenant-Governor; apparently lost on Henry Yu, and on you – he called on the province’s new Chinese and old to not inflame tensions and divisions of the past and seek to integrate and become Canadians in mind and soul. Multiculturalism wasn’t about building segregated racial communities – or segregated history, either.
Prof. Yu reminds me of the first Qin Emperor – who ordered that all histories before his own time should be destroyed so that history would begin with him. What else happened in China and who else lived there before him is largely unknown except by archaeological analysis
How many peoples and languages have Han supremacy eradicated? Hundreds…. just ask the Manchu whose language was completely wiped out since the Qing Empire was overthrown – Han-ification went on there, it’s going on in Tibet, going on in Eastern Turkestan (which Han Supremacy has rebranded Xinjang), and in Lower Mongolia….if Mongol is even still spoken in China….
Wiping out history and replacing it with your own version is the act of a conquering people or ruler. It is not the act of an immigrant in a country that has, out of the goodness of its gullible hheart, made it easy to get in…especially if you had money to buy your way in.
Other British Columbians, whether white or native or other kinds of Asian of all the other colours that there are in BC, will not react kingly to a campaign to Mandarin-ize BC or make it an official language. The response will be anti-Chinese sentiment and the refrain “Go Back to China if you prefer to speak Mandarin” will make eminent sense to nearly everybody – including BC’s historical Cantonese-descent population.
If you want to divide BC and inflame anti-Chinese tensions raised to the boiling point by Mainlander billionaires and their games on the Vancouver realty market, that’s what the result of Mr Yu’s pretentiousness will be.
I suggest you look up David Lam’s comments and go have a long walk in the park and think about all I’ve said.
the rhetoric appearing at the bottom of the screen nauseates me; invoking the local native peoples as if that validates Han colonization is poppycock. “Strategic dispossession” is what has happened to the non-Chinese populations of Vancouver and Richmond and is the essence of the blockbusting – city-busting – inundation of BC by Chinese money that can’t be reported in China….. in other words, by money laundering.
the “settler colony of British Columbia” included a huge number who were settlers FROM CHINA; well, they were supposed to be temporary workers and go back to China afterwards but many didn’t. They helped build a railway that divested native lands to industry, their mining activities destroyed and poisoned streambeds (by 1860 Chinese owned 90% of the claims on the Fraser from Hope to Quesnel) far worse than miners of other ‘races’ did, and bought up ranches left and right WITHOUT any thought of the native peoples whose land it really was…..
no accident btw that the Benevolent Assn. building in Barkerville includes a document describing BC as the “Colonies of T’ang” (T’ang alluding to pre-Qing China) – indicating that they didn’t respect Britain’s claim to the territory and considered it a Colony of China…….apparently types like you and Prof Yu do, too.
English is a lingua franca in BC, which does not have an official language; refusing to learn it as many Chinese do is an insult to the broader community. Pushing Mandarin as an official language too – it was the liberalism or our nasty civilization that let you in, money or no money.
I’m familiar with Taiwanese writer Bo Yang, are you? His critiques of modern Chinese culture resonate with me, I’ve experienced so much of how BC has changed because of Chinese imperialism and the “never admit you’re wrong, blame your victims” mentality that pervades Han culture.
It’s time you learned the real narrative, not the cartoon-drawn one being pushed by Prof Yu and yourself. Seeing the world only through the eyes of your own race is something you are accusing me and other British Columbians of – but it’s blatantly what you are doing yourself.
Carson
June 22, 2016 at 1:36 pm
What a fantastic read!
Mike Cleven
June 28, 2016 at 9:45 am
and all completely fabricated bullshit laid out to serve the interests of those who want to colonize Canada “the Chinese way”. Lie after lie after lie after distortion after blame-blame-blame and making a fake show of sidling up to native peoples whose lands and resources Chinese colonialism is after on a much larger scale than has yet happened so far.
There is no excuse for imperialism and colonialism – OF ANY COLOUR.
someone
July 23, 2016 at 8:25 pm
Then you go back home.
Mike Cleven
July 27, 2016 at 12:33 pm
I AM home you jerk. I was born here.
Advancing the cause of Mandarin in order to make newcomers from China “feel welcome” by making it an official language is horrifically bogus. Especially when those advancing it sidle up to native peoples and pretend to share in their suffering but make no sign of learning THEIR languages -which DO deserve official status. Mandarin doesn’t, and is being overtly touted as an instrument of Han colonization.
I know the Chinook Jargon and smatterings of Halkomelem and St’at’imcets and know a lot of native history and am “on their side” – not for political advancement and posturing like Prof Yu and Bill Chu and others. And yourself?
The racism of the “new” Chinese towards historical Chinese British Columbians as being “bananas” and “not Chinese enough” is on fully display in this article and too many others. Racism towards people who aren’t Han at all is even more pronounced in BC – and sadly it gets official funding from both our government’s and China’s.
Using 19th C colonialism as an excuse to validate 21st C. Han colonialism is so bogus, so hypocritical, it’s NAUSEATING.
As are racist comments like your “go home then”
I AM HOME.