The Straits Chinese Between Empires
|2. Race, Nationality and the Straits Chinese
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1In the period I am looking at, the category of Straits Chinese took on increasingly racialised, gendered, and culturally specific connotations that gave it additional sociological meaning as a separate category in the Settlements. Being Straits Chinese, more than just Straits-born, meant to have mixed Chinese and Malay blood and to have a certain language, cuisine, ethics, education and several other features that denoted a specific culture and transformed them into something new and different. This definition of Straits Chinese and its gendered terms Baba and Nyonya has arguably persisted until today. In this chapter, I will argue that the Straits Chinese adopted Western notions of race and attempted to use these to achieve greater access to rights in the colonies. However, their incorporation into a racialised world also created a double bind whereby they were marked as non-white and Chinese and consequently barred from attaining full equality under empire. As a result, many Straits Chinese turned to a closer association with China as it too drew on racial discourses which wove the diaspora back into the fabric of national life, no matter where they were.
2.1 Becoming Straits Chinese
- 1 For an overview of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia see, Anthony Reid, “Flows and Seepages in t (...)
- 2 See, John Shepherd, “Some demographic characteristics of Chinese immigrant populations: lessons for (...)
- 3 On these mechanisms of connection see, Elizabeth Sinn, “Xin Xi Guxiang: A Study of Regional Associa (...)
- 4 George Windsor Earl, The Eastern Seas (London: W. M. Hallen, 1837), 363.
2 Since the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, Chinese traders had been regularly visiting Southeast Asia to exchange goods and foster tributary relations with the mainland.1 Over time, some Chinese began to settle in the region. Given the paucity of women who went abroad, many of these Chinese men married local women and became permanent residents in what the Chinese call the Nanyang or South Seas.2 Through this fusion of Chinese and local cultures, a new community was born which at its loosest is termed Peranakan meaning local born in Malay. The Straits Chinese were Peranakans who were born in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore (or their antecedents) and in gendered terms were split between Baba men and Nyonya women. By the mid-nineteenth century they also held British subject status through their birth in the colonies. In the Islamic parts of Southeast Asia such as the Malay peninsula, Peranakans were less readily assimilated into local society and so had further reason to remain separate, especially as the Chinese generally placed a strong emphasis on maintaining the traditions and rituals they had brought with them from China.3 Nevertheless, through the female side of the family and prolonged residence in the Nanyang, this still became an increasingly creolised community rather than merely a transplant of China. They also quickly adopted aspects of the European colonisers’ culture. As the sailor George Windsor Earl noticed in 1837, ‘from their constant communication with the Europeans, they have acquired in some measure their general habits and mode of transacting business, which renders them more agreeable to the latter than those who have not enjoyed similar advantages.’4
- 5 Mark Ravinder Frost, “Emporium in Imperio: Nanyang Networks and the Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1 (...)
- 6 It is sometimes suggested that Baba, Straits Chinese and Straits-born should not be used interchang (...)
3In the nineteenth century, as emigration picked up following the opening of treaty ports, repeated crises in the Qing economy, and rising demand for non-white labour in tropical colonies, Peranakans became important middle-men who could work with the colonial administration, the local population and the immigrant Chinese.5 It is out of this context that the Straits Chinese had to negotiate between their privileged status as British subjects and their racial difference which made them not quite British, not quite Chinese, and not quite Malay. Given the dominant monochromatic vision of race, nationality and citizenship, being ‘Straits Chinese’ became a difficult position to hold even in the cosmopolitan cities, especially as it became muddled with the broader category of ‘Straits-born’.6 In this period, therefore, we see the Straits Chinese trying to differentiate themselves from their China-born counterparts while at the same time adopting the same racial logics of the British and later China itself that would have them conflated with all Chinese.
- 7 “The Straits-born Chinese,” Straits Times, February 5, 1914.
- 8 “Chinese Emigration and Colonisation,” The Examiner, September 9, 1854.
- 9 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1977). Not all agreed however (...)
- 10 Chen Da, Chinese Migrations, with Special Reference to Labor Conditions (Washington DC: US Governme (...)
4 One way of distinguishing the Straits Chinese was in racial terms. Given their mixed heritage, the Straits Chinese could quite easily claim to be different from the more ethnically homogenous China-born Chinese emigrating to the Straits who were mostly Han but spoke a range of different languages. An article in 1914 described the Straits Chinese as a ‘mixed breed—half Chinese and half Malay’ with numerous differences from China-born Chinese appearing as a result. 7However, it was keen to point out, using the logics of social Darwinism that ‘centuries of acquired characteristics could not be abrogated in the course of a few generations.’ Thus, from the British perspective, any Malay influence was fairly inconsequential to Straits Chinese racial differentiation. And for those who believed it did make a difference, it was typically in negative terms, since in most cases the British held unfavourable views regarding the Malays relative to the Chinese. For example, The Examiner noted in 1854 that the mixed Sino-Malays were ‘less laborious and enterprising’ than native Chinese, implying Malay blood had weakened them in this regard.8 Given the ‘myth of the lazy native’ was one of the main discourses justifying Chinese coolie immigration, it follows that the Straits-born would be seen as more lethargic than the China-born Chinese given both their different climatic and racial background.9 It is also notable that immigrant Chinese agreed with the British and tended to see Peranakans negatively as a result of their mixed blood.10 Regardless, late nineteenth-century race science dictated that miscegenation and time spent in the tropics would necessarily degrade their stock over time.
- 11 “Public Health in Singapore,” Singapore Free Press, January 10, 1901.
- 12 Earl, The Eastern Seas, 363.
- 13 J.D. Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese (Singapore: Mission Press, 1879), 42.
- 14 “Locke on Sanitation,” Straits Times, September 17, 1909.
- 15 See, for example, Barbara Bush, “Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century,” in Gender and Empire, e (...)
- 16 “Sanitation and Nationality,” Straits Times, September 18, 1909, “Mens Sana in Corpora Sano,” Strai (...)
- 17 Kwa Chong Guan, et al. Great Peranakans: Fifty Remarkable Lives (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Mus (...)
- 18 Lim Boon Keng quoted in Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Lon (...)
- 19 Ibid., 399, 555-6. See also, Sebastian Conrad, “Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodyb (...)
- 20 Rev. W. Murray, “Some Reminiscences and Reflections,” Straits Chinese Annual (Singapore: 1930), 44.
5 As a result of this difference in physical fitness, numerous articles appeared discussing health and well-being addressed specifically at the Straits Chinese. Their interest in fitness appeared to clearly distinguish them from their China-born counterparts, or indeed all ‘Asiatics’ besides the Japanese as one newspaper claimed.11 In 1837, George Windsor Earl had described them as ‘probably less active and energetic’ than the actual natives of China.12 By the late nineteenth century, this view seems to have changed. J.D. Vaughan, a lawyer and former sailor in the Straits writing in 1879, still regarded the Babas as less robust than ‘the real Chinese’, perhaps due to their affluence, but he still saw them as superior to other ‘real Chinese’ because they had taken up exercise to counteract this degradation.13 Similarly, in 1909, James Aitkin, Song Ong Siang’s law partner, brought on some backlash by writing: ‘Get into the less densely populated streets occupied by Straits Chinese who keep their houses scrupulously clean as a rule, and we find men of inferior physique, mostly married and the fathers of numerous children.’14 He believed that a genteel lifestyle and marriages within the community were having a ‘degenerative’ effect on the Straits Chinese. He compared this to other creole communities such as the Malacca Portuguese, thus implicitly drawing on common racial theories that proscribed miscegenation.15 Though some Straits Chinese respondents rejected his ideas and suggested Aitkin stick to the law, many seem to have appropriated this language of degeneration and argued that the Straits Chinese specifically start exercising more to counteract the negative effects of inbreeding, which was worsening their ‘stock’.16 For example, Lim Boon Keng, perhaps the most prominent Baba at the time, wrote an article in 1909 titled ‘Race deterioration in the tropics’ which attributed to climate and miscegenation the ‘inferior’ physical condition of Straits Chinese after just a couple of generations, which had made them more susceptible to immorality, immoderation and indolence.17 Elsewhere he said, ‘though these Chinese Peranakans (or local-born men), as the Malays call them, are to all intents and purposes Chinese, from a superficial acquaintance with them and their mode of life, they have developed such distinct social qualities and have shown so many characteristic ethnic and anthropological aspects that they constitute a class by themselves.’18 Thus, Lim was careful to set the Straits Chinese apart from the inferior qualities associated with both Chinese and Malays. With this in mind, the Straits Chinese took significant interest in their personal health from around the turn of the century, coinciding with the wider cultural reform movement (discussed in more detail later) that sought to better the Straits Chinese in learning, political engagement, clothing, knowledge of Chinese, gender relations and more. Indeed, the cultural reform movement as a whole must be considered, in part, a response to an internalisation of social Darwinist views on race. For example, they created new organisations such as the Straits Athletic Physical Culturalists society which was captained by Chua Seng Chye, nicknamed the local ‘Sandow’ after a German bodybuilder who had toured the East and apparently inspired many Straits-born.19 They were congratulated for this aspect of their ‘physical development’ later in the century.20 All this points to an attempt by the Straits Chinese to demonstrate their superiority to the belittled immigrant Chinese and local Malays.
- 21 Straits Settlements: Report for 1906 (London: Darling and Sons, 1907), 29.
- 22 Census of the Straits Settlements, 3rd April 1881 (Singapore) and J.R. Innes, Report on the Census (...)
- 23 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: V (...)
6 Straits Chinese attention to their racial differentiation fits in with a more decisive shift in the same period to count Straits-born Chinese separately in the census and other government reports. For example, the 1906 Annual Report listed the ambulance force as consisting of ‘7 Europeans, 14 Eurasians, and 4 Chinese (Straits-born).’21 Likewise, the 1881 and 1901 censuses recorded ‘Straits-born’ as its own category alongside the other ‘tribes’ of Chinese such as Hokkien.22 In 1881 there were 9,526 Straits-born Chinese, rising to 14,631 Straits-born Chinese by 1901, or roughly 10 per cent of the Chinese population of the colony. In Benedict Anderson’s view, these ‘bound serialities’ form the basis of ethno-nationalist politics by attaching governmentality to imagined communities.23 While this may not have occurred straightaway, their identification as a separate community in the census did create a difficult position for the Straits Chinese as they were made a sub-set of ‘Chinese’, thus fixing them categorically to the Chinese race. By being placed in this taxonomy, they were less able to adopt the more expansive, universal registers of citizenship and cosmopolitanism.
- 24 “Chinese at Hotel Bars,” Straits Times, September 17, 1909.
- 25 “Treatment of Straits Chinese Babas in Prison,” Daily Advertiser, March 3, 1894.
- 26 “Chinese Babas,” Daily Advertiser, March 5, 1894.
7 Despite whatever differences the British may have recognised, the Straits Chinese were still lumped in with the Chinese population. While on some matters, the Straits Chinese were content with this fact and it became an important part of their cultural revival, on others, it put them at risk of the same kinds of prejudices and discriminatory practices that they felt were undeserving of a British subject of superior background. This conflation of Straits Chinese with Chinese appeared in even the most minor of incidents. For example, one Straits Chinese complained of being refused service at the Adelphi Hotel bar ‘on the ground that Chinese are not allowed to drink there.’24 The Baba was clear to sign the letter as ‘[a] Straits-born Chinese.’ Similarly, another Straits Chinese wrote to the Daily Advertiser on behalf of the community complaining that Eurasians were being given better treatment in prison than Chinese Babas who are ‘brought up in most instances in a more delicate manner than his neighbour the Eurasian.’25 The newspaper responded by following the racial logic that those of a similar fortitude to Europeans should be placed in their portion of the prison, or, in other words, that the Straits Chinese should not be dumped in the ‘native’ wing with all the other Chinese.26 While the Straits Chinese may have been descended from the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Malay ‘races’, they tried to present themselves as more evolved and therefore deserving of more equality with the Europeans in keeping with the prevailing discourses of the time.
- 27 See, for example, Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (O (...)
- 28 Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements, 4.
8 As several scholars have argued, the delimitation of rights along racialised lines in the birth of modern liberalism was linked to notions of whiteness.27 Thus, rights-bearing was made contingent on a subject’s ability to emulate or embody certain conditions of whiteness. We also see this logic appearing in regard to the Straits Chinese as they made arguments for equality with Europeans and distinguished themselves from other Chinese. This differentiation was never fully accepted nor embraced, however it did represent a conscious effort to establish a better place for themselves within the racial hierarchies that governed empire. Furthermore, the Straits Chinese appropriated ideas of whiteness and challenged its exclusive nature. J.D. Vaughan recalled speaking to a Baba who was offended at being asked if he was a ‘Chinaman’ and said, ‘I am not a Chinaman, I am a British subject, an Orang putih’, which in Malay means white man.28 Although their persistence in following Chinese rituals and wearing Chinese dress confounded English observers who were otherwise impressed by their success and loyalty to the British, for the Straits Chinese, these two things were not mutually exclusive. By claiming whiteness on the basis of their education, knowledge of the English language, success in colonial administration and subject status, as well as their racial differences, the Straits Chinese were thereby making a claim to rights within the British Empire. Nevertheless, the British were evidently not always willing to recognise them as equals, even on civic terms, and so, as we shall see in the next section, those rights were not always forthcoming.
2.2 The Colour Bar
- 29 See, for example, Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World(...)
9 Racial restrictions on British subjecthood/citizenship were made evident to the Straits Chinese on numerous occasions in this period, leaving them with the sense that the universal languages of the British Empire were not being met by the particulars of life on the ground. Although their class granted them a certain degree of access that other non-white colonial subjects were less fortunate to have, they still ran into barriers to advancement that exposed the limits of imperial cosmopolitanism. This is now a familiar story in the literature on early twentieth-century empires and their negotiations with prominent subjects who sought an equal place within empire rather than outside of it.29 The Straits Chinese were little different in this regard, however they did have the added complication of their race marking them as belonging to a country that was still nominally independent and could theoretically welcome them as equals. Combined with the nationalist movement in China, the reform movement in the Straits Settlements, and their declining influence in trade and commerce, these racial barriers in public service pushed the Straits Chinese towards closer associations with a nascent Chinese nation. I want to highlight one incident in particular that took place in this period and found its way to the House of Commons.
- 30 J. de Vere Allen, “Malayan Civil Service, 1874-1941: Colonial Bureaucracy/Malayan Elite,” Comparati (...)
- 31 “Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs and People of India,” (1858), https: (...)
- 32 Chunilal Lallubhai Parekh, ed., Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings, (on Indian Politics,) of (...)
- 33 Eighth Report of Her Majesty’s Civil Service Commissioners (London: George E. Eyre and William Spot (...)
- 34 Stanley A. Wolpert, India, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 57-8. Niraja G (...)
- 35 Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: (...)
10One of the most significant legal barriers to the Straits Chinese existed in the colonial administration. In 1904 the rules were changed to specify that persons who were not of pure European descent on both sides could not sit the cadet exams and enter the civil and police services.30 This went against the liberal language used by Queen Victoria in her Royal Proclamation of 1858 where she said that ‘it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.’31 In India, Anglophile nationalists liked to remind their government of this proclamation and its contrast with life in the colony. Dadabhai Naoroji, for example, referenced it in a paper on the ‘Admission of Educated Natives into the Indian Civil Service’, in 1868.32 Perhaps not coincidentally, he had also set it for translation into Gujarati on the examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1861.33 While many young Indians imbibed the liberal spirit of the Royal Proclamation, they increasingly had to come to terms with the limits of British universalism and the persistent discourses of civilisational differences and racial hierarchies. 34As Uday Mehta and others have argued, this racialisation of liberalism and rights-bearing was part and parcel of the imperial project, embedded in the thought of some of its most prominent theorists such as John Stuart Mill.35 What has been less remarked upon is the experience of colonial subjects in other parts of the Empire such as Southeast Asia where there was another English-educated elite class wanting to embrace those same liberal ideas. What makes the Straits Chinese more interesting and unique, however, is the fact that they were still associated with a country in which they did not reside and which was not fully colonised. Thus, the development of nationalism out of encounters with the colour bar manifested itself differently among the Straits Chinese community.
- 36 “Hong Kong and Straits Settlements,” House of Commons, Volume 35, March 13, 1912, 1082.
- 37 “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 35, March 20, 1912, 1864-1865.
- 38 “Colonial Civil and Police Services,” House of Commons, Volume 36, March 27, 1912, 421.
- 39 Ibid. and “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 36, April 3, 1912, 1161-2. Wu Lien-teh (...)
- 40 “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 36, April 3, 1912, 1163.
11In response to new statutes in 1904 which specified that cadets for the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong Civil Services must be of pure European descent on both sides, Lewis MacCallum Scott, a liberal MP, raised questions to the Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, in 1912, as to ‘the reason for the erection of this colour bar’ against colonial subjects.36 MacCallum Scott was following Tan Jiak Kim of the Straits Legislative Council who had asked to see papers from the Colonial Office regarding these regulations and was refused access. They both felt that these new regulations went against the common legal status of subject/citizen that had been expressed in documents such as the Royal Proclamation. Scott made it clear that this was a question of rights and citizenship being deprived to ‘British-born Chinese and Malays’ and went against ‘the fundamental laws of the British Empire’.37 Scott likewise pointed to the farce of ‘racial purity’ in the statute and questioned whether an Armenian would be counted as pure European or whether the Civil Service Commissioners performed genealogical investigations to see if any applicants had one non-European ancestor.38 Harcourt’s justification in Parliament was that non-Europeans would be unable to pass the examinations and so the regulation effectively made no difference to their admittance to the Civil Service. Scott pointed to Ho Kai, Lim Boon Keng, Wu Lien-teh and Song Ong Siang as exemplary British subjects of non-European descent who should have been able, if they were so inclined, to sit the cadet examinations for admittance into the Civil Service.39 The latter three were Straits-born and had won Queen’s Scholarships to study in Britain, another policy that was scrapped around the same time, much to the chagrin of the Straits Chinese community who fought hard for its continuation. Scott felt this might be related to the new cadet regulations as it removed a means for gaining the education necessary to pass the examinations.40
- 41 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 480.
- 42 Ibid.
- 43 “Education,” Straits Times, December 23, 1913.
- 44 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 548.
- 45 Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, 13.
12Naturally, the Straits Chinese community were dismayed with this exchange in Parliament which revealed the problem of the colour bar in colonial Malaya. Tan Jiak Kim, who had recently been appointed a CMG and said he hoped he would not be the last of His Majesty’s ‘Asiatic subjects’ to do so, led the Straits Chinese British Association in petitioning the government on this question.41 The SCBA said they would welcome the appointment of civil service or police ‘officials not of pure European descent on both sides’ and countered that they would be open to officers of any nationality (equated here with race) to being placed in authority over them.42 The end of the Queen’s Scholarships around the same time produced a similarly strong response. One newspaper correspondent said, ‘since the abolition of the Queen’s Scholarship, and the introduction of the colour bar many parents are not inclined to keep their children in school longer than they can help.’43 Lim Boon Keng, in advocating for their return during the war, argued ‘one of the greatest aspirations taught by the war is freedom. Surely, if Britain is fighting for the freedom of other nationalities, men brought up under the flag and taught the aspirations and ideals of Englishmen have the right to expect to become men and not mere machines always under domination.’44 Rather than being treated as raw labour, as the bulk of the Chinese and Indians of the colonies were valued for, Lim argued that Asiatic subjects should have greater representation and recognition for their contributions as fellow men of the Empire. The related issues of Civil Service admission and Queen’s Scholarship was evidently a crucial point of reckoning between the ideals of Straits Chinese British subjects and the realities of the British Empire. Lim’s response should be read as a challenge to the hierarchical nature of the British nature over its liberal language and a realignment with other Asians including China-born coolies. Like Sukanya Banerjee’s Indians who were ‘denied the “benefits” of abstraction’, the Straits Chinese, as non-white subjects of empire, found themselves fighting the particularising gaze of imperial citizenship on the ground.45
- 46 “Awakening of Chinese in Singapore,” Straits Times, November 27, 1906.
- 47 Chinese in Malacca,” Straits Times, January 2, 1913.
13The reality of the colour bar acted as a countervailing force to Straits Chinese interest in creating a place for themselves on equal terms in the British Empire in the twentieth century. As Chong Fook Loy argued in a brief retrospective on the cultural reform movement so far in 1906, the Straits Chinese became aware that ‘by their birth and their colour they were debarred from many privileges which an Englishman enjoys.’46 With new restrictions on non-European subjects entering the Civil Service, this only became more apparent and therefore pushed the Straits Chinese in the direction of China which was, by the beginning of the new century, now welcoming ethnic Chinese back into the mainland as important contributors to the country’s future. Both Lim and Wu Lien-teh would settle in China where they perhaps sensed greater opportunities for advancement. As another Baba wrote responding to the newly revealed restrictions: ‘Since the colour bar has come into existence [the Straits Chinese] can only become rich or “slaves of the desks”, for they are not allowed to share in the government of the country in which they live.’47 As a result, the Straits Chinese had more reason to identify their political future with a transforming China that could accommodate their claims to Western modernity and Chinese traditions.
2.3 The 1905 Anti-American Boycott
- 48 Chan, “The Case for Diaspora,” 107. For more on the boycott see Shih-shan H. Ts’ai, “Reaction to Ex (...)
- 49 For example, “‘Freedom’ in Hongkong,” Straits Times, September 12, 1905, and “Give the Devil his Du (...)
- 50 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
- 51 Wong Sin Kiong, “The Chinese Boycott,” 239.
14Straits Chinese identification with China was further encouraged by expansive racial exclusion laws which viewed all Chinese as alike. The boycott of American goods in 1905 was a response to this and serves as a prime example of what Shelly Chan calls ‘diaspora moments’ in which the connections that form diaspora come to life.48 The boycott is particularly significant for it brought China-born Chinese and Straits Chinese together in opposition to American racial exclusion laws specifically and overseas Chinese treatment more broadly and reshaped the contours of Chinese nationalism beyond its physical borders as a result. Western observers of the boycott noted its intimate connection to a larger transformation in Chinese society, referring to it as a sign of the ‘awakening of national life’.49 One anecdote is telling of the atmosphere in Singapore at the time: ‘There was a funny sight down the Orchard Road yesterday. A bread-seller was doing a good business, when one of the Chinese cried out that the flour was American. In a second the breadseller’s goods were upset and rolling along the road.’50 Boycotters did not shy away from referencing the ‘ill treatment meted out to us by foreigners’ in many parts of the world and that which was suffered ‘on arrival at America’ was enough to break the camel’s back.51 Due to the racialisation of the global division of labour, all ethnic Chinese came to be viewed as coolies or potential coolies by the West, thus throwing up barriers to skilled migrants who might otherwise have been seen as desirable if it were not for their race. Thus, in 1905, we see how any local differentiation of the Straits Chinese community was undermined by the prevailing racial logic by which their phenotype locked them in as Chinese no matter their place of birth, wealth, or upbringing. Although some Western figures tried to contest this logic, the racial exclusion laws still shuffled the Straits Chinese into the broader racial and national category Chinese. At the same time, the Straits Chinese actively appropriated this identification as Chinese, with prominent Babas becoming leaders in the campaign. This helped further the transnationalisation of Chinese nationalism. In this way, race, migration and its control proved central to the (re-)Sinicisation of the Straits Chinese against the hierarchies that had been frequently exposed in the British Empire and the international state system at large.
- 52 “A Singapore Dock Boycott,” Singapore Free Press, December 21, 1905.
- 53 “Strike at Tanjong Pagar,” Singapore Free Press, December 21, 1905.
- 54 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
15The boycott, which had begun in Shanghai in direct response to abuses in San Francisco and quickly spread, reached a climax in Singapore when the American ship Acme arrived at Tanjong Pagar for repairs in December 1905. A large number of Chinese labourers went on strike and refused to work because it was an American ship owned by Standard Oil.52 Placards were posted in Chinese instructing workers not to board the Acme and the press reported, possibly hyperbolically, that they were threatened with decapitation for scabbing.53 The strike was quickly stopped by a contingent of Sikhs.54 Shortly after, Chinese headmen met with the Protector who hinted that if the strike was not called off they could be deported as alien Chinese. It seems clear from their responses that this was an extension of the boycott to show their discontent with American policy and anti-Chinese sentiment more broadly.
- 55 “Boycott Originator Honoured,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 1, 1905, and, Benedict Anderson, Imagin (...)
- 56 Quoting Walter Benjamin, Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25.
- 57 Edward J.M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895-1913 (Cambridge: Har (...)
- 58 “American Boycott,” Eastern Daily Mail, November 27, 1905.
- 59 Shih-shan H. Ts’ai, “Reaction to Exclusion,” 96.
16The boycott in Malaya illustrates how the Chinese diaspora was brought together through their collective exclusion. When one of the instigators of the boycott committed suicide in Macao, Chinese temples in Singapore (on Wayang Street) made offerings that made them part of a ‘mass ceremony’ of Chinese temples across the world doing the same thing.55 Further to Anderson’s idea of the mass ceremony of newspaper reading in ‘homogenous, empty time’ as enabling modern nationhood, events such as this indicated the global and deterritorial dimensions to Chinese diasporic nationalism.56 This was also evinced in a new play that dramatised the suicide of a boycott leader in front of the American consulate in Shanghai which was sweeping China and found its way to the Cantonese theatres (also on Wayang Street) in Singapore.57 A report in late November 1905 suggested that the Chinese boycott in Singapore was still ongoing despite signs it was waning in the mainland, pointing to the autonomous agency with which different parts of the diaspora addressed the issue.58 Placed in its global context and alongside the growing revolutionary movement in China, we can better see how the overseas Chinese were not only reformulating Chinese nationalism in response to restrictions on mobility but also how these very restrictions brought them back into the imperial Chinese fold no matter their place of birth, thus limiting the potential for a more cosmopolitan idea of China embodied in the former.59
- 60 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 374-5.
- 61 Wong Sin Kiong, “The Chinese Boycott,” 236.
- 62 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
- 63 “The Basis of the Boycott,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 20, 1905.
17The Straits Chinese were active leaders in the boycott from its start earlier that year. In June of 1905, Lim Boon Keng chaired a meeting of hundreds of Chinese traders at the hospital in Wayang Street which approved the boycott.60 Lim subsequently headed the main boycott committee in Singapore and encouraged Penang to follow suit.61 Lim was keen to point out that the exclusion laws did not differentiate between different classes of Chinese, implying precisely that it was a racial exclusion which could affect the Straits Chinese like any other coolie. Consequently, many Straits Chinese joined the boycott. In Singapore, for example, it was said that ‘the better class of Straits Chinese’ had started avoiding the new tramways under the impression that it was managed by an American concern.62 Many Europeans were surprised by the scale of the boycott and its acceptance by all Chinese including Babas. As one paper reported, it was ‘to the astonishment of the world’ that ‘there was a unanimity of opinion amongst all sects and grades of Chinese that such a course was desirable.’63 The racial exclusion laws and abuse of Chinese in the US and elsewhere thus pushed the Straits-born into solidarity with their designated race despite their many attempts to differentiate themselves. In so doing, they were also making a claim towards belonging in the overseas Chinese diaspora and to a prominent position at its head that perhaps derived from their differentiation. For Lim Boon Keng in particular, this would prove important to his continued political engagement with China as both Chinese and Baba.
- 64 “To Juggernaut,” Singapore Free Press, July 6, 1905.
- 65 “The Anti-American Boycott,” Straits Times, December 21, 1905.
- 66 “The United States and China,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, April 12, 1892.
- 67 “The Possibilities of Chinese Emigration,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, October 15, 1890. See also, (...)
- 68 “Chinese Emigration to the Straits,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, May 20, 1891.
- 69 For a contemporary example of this terminology in use as a response to the Boxer Rebellion see, “No (...)
- 70 “The True “Yellow Peril,”” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, November 10, 1898.
18While so far I have presented the boycott in the Straits as essentially equivalent with other parts of the world, there were some notable differences by virtue of the unique conditions of Straits colonial society. For example, we find a great deal of sympathy in the British press for the boycott (at least until the Acme incident), as they similarly felt that the ‘Yank needs teaching’ a lesson regarding their unfair trade policy.64 It also seemed that local Chinese did not connect the British Empire to America’s exclusion laws. For example, the theatres performing the martyr play hung up Chinese flags and Union Jacks indicating their friendship with the British who, in the Straits at least, had tended to side with the boycotters so far.65 As an American writing in the Straits Times said, people in the Settlements usually opposed the American Exclusion Acts ‘based upon the general desirability of the Chinese in the Straits.’66 Similarly, in 1890 the Straits Times responded to an Australian article which asked ‘will the Chinese over-run the world?’, saying ‘we in the Straits Settlements are chiefly concerned because the Chinese stay at home too much.’67 Chinese labourers were a necessity for the colony to profit; the Times was writing at a time when Chinese immigration had slowed and tin and sugar prices were down.68 Thus, the economic exigencies of the colonies superseded any concerns about the ‘Yellow Peril’.69 Indeed, the very idea of ‘Yellow Peril’ held less water in Singapore. A letter to the editor of the Singapore Free Press entitled ‘The True “Yellow Peril”’ complained about rickshaw drivers ‘slinging along the road, head down, and don’t draw up until they bang into something’.70 Although race was undoubtedly important, Chinese emigrants were not competing to become the labour force here; they were the labour force as far as the British were concerned. Not only does this underline the social construction of racial categories relative to material conditions but also helps explain why the Chinese in the Straits were able to move much more freely in that urban society than elsewhere. As the next chapter will show, the cosmopolitan nature of Straits society allowed for the construction of ‘affective communities’ that set it apart from settler colonies where a group like the Straits Chinese would have struggled to emerge. These communities were offset by Britain and China’s use of nationality law to specify the relationship between race, nationality and citizenship, which encouraged division and mutual exclusivity.
2.4 Nationality Law and the Straits Chinese
- 71 Burbank and Cooper, “Beyond “identity,”” 15.
- 72 Ross Terrill discusses China’s claims on overseas Chinese in his book, Ross Terrill, The New Chines (...)
- 73 Brubaker, “Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State,” 64.
19 One aspect of identity that Burbank and Cooper do recognise as important is the external identification ‘that has no counterpart in the domain of self-identification: the formalized, codified, objectified systems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions.’71 The history of Chinese and British nationality law, for example, demonstrates how issues of belonging that were formerly more fluid became solidified through their connection to the state. Nationality law, however, has received very little attention in this field, especially in studies of China which only seem to mention it in wary terms of contemporary Chinese Communist Party encroachment abroad, and yet it was precisely in nationality law that subjecthood/citizenship was defined.72 The fact that British subjecthood/citizenship was established through nationality law shows how the two were conflated by the early twentieth century within the imperial framework. Belonging to a nation-state is typically defined both in formal terms such as the legal category of citizen, often materialised in identity documents, and informal terms of ethnicity and/or culture.73 However, when the legal category of citizen/subject is defined by nationality (i.e. to be a citizen is to be a national and vice versa), it immediately takes on an ethnic, cultural and territorial component. In other words, nationality as a form of identity or belonging with racial connotations also becomes bound to the state-defined legal category of citizen. Thus, nationality law is central to the definition of who is and can become a citizen.
- 74 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 1.
- 75 Eric C. Han, “The nationality law and entry restrictions of 1899: constructing Japanese identity be (...)
- 76 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cam (...)
- 77 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two Worl (...)
- 78 Quoted in, “British Citizenship,” Malaya Tribune, April 20, 1914.
- 79 Straits Chinese British Association, Duty to the British Empire, ch 16, 19.
20 In an era of rising migration, numerous states began to formalise their nationality law alongside creating new institutions and instruments such as passports to manage their populations and define their limits. As Adam McKeown writes, the passport ‘is a tangible link between the two main sources of modern identity: the individual and the state.’74 In the case of Japan, for example, the creation of nationality law and institutions to police it was expressly directed against Chinese immigration and helped place Japan on more equal terms with the West by joining a shared international legal migration regime.75 Other countries’ nationality laws had a similar negative function.76 What is of interest in our case is how British nationality law performed a conflation of citizenship with nationality despite having the category of ‘imperial citizen’. Like Wilder’s idea of the French imperial nation-state, British policy softened the boundaries between empire and nation-state and similarly had to contend with its subjects’ ideas of what imperial citizenship represented.77 This allowed for the slippage between ‘nation’ and ‘empire’ in the language used to refer to citizenship of the British Empire. At the Imperial Conference of 1911, for example, as the difference in privileges associated with naturalisation in the metropole versus the Dominions came up, it was said that ‘Imperial nationality shall be world-wide and uniform.’78 The Straits Chinese repeated this kind of language on several occasions, for example in their pamphlet on British subjects’ duties during the war which frequently referred to British empire and nation as if they were coterminous.79 However, this was always undermined by the identification of ‘Chinese’ as being a race and a nationality, therefore making it incompatible with British nationality and citizenship.
- 80 Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke (...)
- 81 Singapore Free Press, December 7, 1893.
- 82 Andrew Baker, “Divided sovereignty: Empire and nation in the making of modern Britain,” Internation (...)
21Anxieties around race and migration in the Dominions encouraged the truncation of shared imperial citizenship by coupling citizenship to increasingly territorialised states, thus, in a sense, nationalising imperial citizenship and slotting this into different territories. These states sought to make population congruent with territory and singled out indigenous peoples and non-white migrants for exclusion in various ways. This included other British imperial subjects. For example, the literary test invented in Natal was used in Australia and New Zealand to exclude Asian migrants without explicitly racialising imperial citizenship and the passport was produced in India to control the number of Indians who could go overseas.80 Inhabitants of the Straits Settlements took note of these developments. A good example of how the racialisation of citizenship trumped the letter of the law was given in the press when George Mackay, a Canadian missionary, returned to Vancouver and had to pay a $50 head tax when the immigration officials said his Chinese wife was not considered Canadian, even though they were married and she had taken his nationality under the law of both countries.81 The paper was aware of the wider imperial dimensions, saying ‘here is a wrinkle for the Australians’. The drawing of a global colour line between the white settler colonies and Britain’s tropical colonies further truncated imperial citizenship despite the continuation of metropolitan universalist discourses on Empire. The division of sovereignty within empire thereby allowed the Dominions, in conversation with other white settler colonies, to ‘decolonise’, in the sense of enforcing nation-state congruencies avant la lettre and before the metropole.82 Consequently, the idea of imperial citizenship was broken up by the marking of citizenship by race and its enforcement by self-governing territories. While this has mostly been studied in relation to South Asians, British subjects in Southeast Asia were likewise affected, especially as they were labelled Chinese and thus prey to exclusionary laws directed against them as a race more than a legal nationality.
- 83 Tsai Chutung, “Chinese Nationality Law, 1909,” American Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (1910 (...)
- 84 Ibid., 405-6.
- 85 Eric Tagliacozzo, “Kettle on a slow boil: Batavia's threat perceptions in the Indies' Outer Islands (...)
- 86 For the full text of the law see, “Law on the Acquisition and Loss of Chinese Nationality,” America (...)
22At the same time, China engaged in its own project of controlling migration and assigning belonging to its diaspora. In the late stages of the Qing Empire, as they begun to take on the trappings of a modern nation-state, the Qing formalised an expansive nationality law that recognised the principle of jus sanguinis and thus created a legal framework through which members of the diaspora could get Chinese nationality. This was carried through into the Republican period and remains little changed today. Historically, Chinese nationality had been based on the principle of perpetual allegiance and despite the ban on emigration, those who went abroad were still considered Chinese subjects no matter where they went or the nationality they acquired.83 After the Opium Wars, the principle remained (for instance, embodied in the Burlingame Treaty) but its application was loosened and so nationality cases were mostly decided by local officials if ethnic Chinese returned to China. One benefit of this vagueness was that Chinese born abroad such as the Straits Chinese could more easily slot their identity into the gap left by Chinese nationality law and British common law practices, acknowledging themselves as British subjects with Chinese cultural and racial characteristics (but not subjects of the Qing) and creating the potential to manoeuvre in China or the Straits as British or Chinese depending on the circumstances. To a Chinese state that was becoming increasingly nationalised and modernised, even before 1911, this system was increasingly intolerable. Thus, the Qing, like the British, took aim at the threat of mixed loyalties and challenged foreign governments who were granting citizenship/subjecthood (and through nationality law, also a new nationality) to ethnic Chinese living abroad.84 In particular, the 1909 Chinese nationality law was a response to a proposed change in Dutch law that would grant Chinese born in the Dutch East Indies Dutch subject status. 85The Chinese law granted Chinese nationality to children of Chinese fathers no matter where they were born. It also required any Chinese subject wishing to acquire a foreign nationality to first get permission of discharge. If their loss of nationality was not proved, they would be considered to have remained a Chinese subject. It also contained the expansive clause that ‘any Chinese subject who, prior to the operation of this law, has long resided abroad in consequences of his birth and yet is desirous of retaining Chinese nationality shall be deemed to be a Chinese.’86
- 87 See, Yen Ching-Hwang, Coolies and Mandarins: China’s Protection of Overseas Chinese During the Late (...)
- 88 Michael R. Godley, “The Late Ch’ing Courtship of the Chinese in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian S (...)
- 89 For more on Chinese newspapers in Singapore see, Chen Mong Hock, The Early Chinese Newspapers of Si (...)
- 90 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800-1911 (Singapore: Oxf (...)
- 91 Ibid., 292.
- 92 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800-1911 (Singapore: Oxf (...)
- 93 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 273.
- 94 C.F. Yong and R.B. McKenna, The Kuomintang Movement in British Malaya, 1912-1949 (Singapore: NUS Pr (...)
- 95 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 289.
23The nationality law formed part of a longer-term process of Qing courting of the overseas Chinese, including those born abroad. Hoo Ah Kay’s appointment in 1877 as the first Chinese Consul to Singapore was a noteworthy shift in policy.87 He was followed by Tso Ping Lung, a well-known employee of the Zongli Yamen who made the post more significant by his prominent reputation in China.88 Tso focused on ensuring the Chinese in Singapore kept in touch with their Chinese roots by starting a literary association for classical learning and helping found the Chinese language newspaper Lat Pau in 1881.89 He felt that locally born Chinese were just British subjects who wore Chinese clothes and was appalled at their loss of Chinese identity.90 Other Chinese likened this process to ‘becoming barbarians’, thus making them, by definition, outsiders to the Chinese nation.91 As a result of these conflicting allegiances, it was all the more important that China corral overseas Chinese back into their fold if they were to be made useful in the development of China. Consequently, the Qing began selling titles to wealthy Chinese as a way of earning both money and loyalty at a time of great uncertainty about the future of China.92 Titles were also given as rewards for overseas Chinese who had donated large sums for things like flood relief, hospitals, coastal defences and so on. For example, Gan Eng Seng, born in Malacca, was gifted a title for his philanthropic donations to Fujian.93 This prompted concerns within the British administration about the Chinese population moving towards China.94 Here, the Qing were competing with the British who did not award a knighthood to any Straits Chinese until Song Ong Siang in 1936 (although it did grant lesser titles such as Justice of the Peace which were much prized by Babas). Tso also launched a fortnightly debating society which sought to remind Straits Chinese of Confucian values and customs.95 Lim Boon Keng ended up becoming one of the most active leaders in promoting Confucianism in the Straits and later mainland China. As a result, we can see how Straits Chinese also fell under the Qing’s new transnational concerns.
- 96 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 279.
24In 1893, Chinese diplomat Xue Fucheng sent a memorial to the imperial court to end the prohibition on emigration. This was accepted by the Zongli Yamen who said emigrants were welcome to return and would be treated equally to other Chinese. It also said that all Chinese ‘who have crossed the seas’ will be acknowledged as ‘children of the Empire’, thereby retaining a claim on all ethnic Chinese living across the world.96 In this respect, China began to adopt a racialised and nationalised approach to statehood which sought out the participation of overseas Chinese even before the 1911 revolution took place. These Qing policies opened new routes for greater Straits Chinese inclusion in the Empire by giving them a political role in China by virtue of their heritage.
- 97 Shao Dan, “Chinese by Definition: Nationality Law, Jus Sanguinis, and State Succession, 1909-1980,” (...)
- 98 For further elaboration on how the Qing and Chinese elite reformers engaged with this question see, (...)
- 99 Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People, trans. Frank W. Pierce (Vancouver: (...)
- 100 For more on Chinese racial thinking see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Hong (...)
- 101 Ana Maria Candela, “Sociology in Times of Crisis: Chen Da, National Salvation and the Indigenizatio (...)
25While, as Shao Dan argues, the 1909 Qing nationality law was meant to force a perpetual legal allegiance to the Qing state, it had the unintentional side effect of promoting a racialised notion of the Chinese nation by defining subjects by blood.97 This was already evident in the Qing response to the boycott as they attempted to enter and engage with the international system as an equal player. In turn they had to accept, to some degree, the racial terms that allowed mobility to be marked in the first place.98 Both Han Chinese ethnonationalists and Manchu rulers were satisfied with the new law and its possibility to be read as the basis for a multi-ethnic empire led by the Qing or a nascent Han Chinese nation-state. For example, Sun Yat-sen argued that the ‘Chinese belong to the yellow race because they come from the blood stock of the yellow race’ and that was the basis of the Chinese nation.99 Sun was drawing on a racialised conception of Chineseness that was formed in part out of an appropriation of Western ideas about race and in part out of the West’s own insistence on Chinese racial difference.100 The 1909 law, promulgated by the Qing and carried over by the Republican state, laid the basis for a deterritorialised vision of China that encompassed those with Chinese blood all over the world, including the Straits Chinese. Through this law, the regulation of mobility, and international diplomacy, the Chinese state, especially in its more nationalised post-1911 form, sought to make the ‘messy social reality’ of the diaspora into a ‘legible and governable’ category.101 These anxieties over race and belonging as well as the ability of the state to define interiority and exteriority were symptomatic of the tightening of the hyphen between nationality and the state.
- 102 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 489. As further testimony of the difference in treatment across (...)
- 103 “China and the Dutch East Indies,” Weekly Sun, June 24, 1911.
- 104 “The Amoy Incident,” Straits Times, December 8, 1897.
- 105 “Straits Chinese Magazine,” Singapore Free Press, July 6, 1899.
- 106 “Chinese British Subjects,” Straits Telegraph and Daily Advertiser, May 6, 1899
- 107 “British or Chinese Citizens?” Straits Times, September 20, 1929.
26 The Straits Chinese were especially concerned with nationality law because it affected their ability to legally solidify their identity as British subjects with Chinese blood. But because blood meant Chinese subject, we find numerous instances of disputes over the official nationality of Straits-born Chinese with questions regarding their true allegiances and proper documentation. In the 1900s, the Straits Chinese British Association complained at length to the government of the Dutch East Indies that Straits-born Chinese travelling in the colony were being treated as Chinese nationals, not British, and that the only way they could get protection was by producing documents from the British consular authorities that would normally be unnecessary.102 While the SCBA spent years negotiating with the Dutch hoping to achieve equality with Europeans and Japanese as British subjects, they had little success, nor support from Britain. By contrast, such disputes had formed the basis of Qing nationality law and in the last months of the Empire’s existence a commission was sent to the Dutch East Indies to seek protection for the ill-treated Chinese there who it claimed as subjects, signalling the changing nature of diaspora-Chinese relations.103 A similar incident occurred in 1897 in Amoy (discussed in more detail later), when a Straits Chinese was arrested in China and denied the consular protection that was his right as a British subject.104 This prompted Song Ong Siang to write an article in the Straits Chinese Magazine clarifying the legal aspects of Straits-born nationality for Chinese who ‘intend to find a resting place for their bones in our soil.’105 He insisted, as the SCBA would continue to do, that under the 1867 Naturalisation Ordinance, the Straits government must ‘be bound to uphold our contention that every child born in this colony, irrespective of the nationality of its parents, is a natural born British subject, and entitled to enjoy all the privileges which British nationality confers.’ Babas complained that the passports given by the Straits authorities to natural-born British subjects visiting China required too much paperwork to be convenient or were rejected by China and put them at risk of being placed under Chinese jurisdiction.106 Song Ong Siang continued to push on this issue, saying as late as the 1920s that ‘the proofs of loyalty and patriotism and the service in numerous forms to the British Empire… should justify the British Imperial Government in putting an end to diplomatic uncertainty and claiming the right to protect, by the issue of unqualified British passports, every Chinese born in the Colony, because he is a naturalised British subject, whether travelling to China or elsewhere.’107 As a result, we can see how British nationality law was unevenly applied even as it became more important to international mobility.
- 108 Singapore Free Press, December 13, 1911.
- 109 “Legislative Council,” Straits Times, January 22, 1902.
- 110 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 282.
- 111 Singapore Free Press, December 13, 1911.
- 112 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 129.
- 113 See, for example, “The Duties and Privileges of a Chinese British Subject,” Eastern Daily Mail, Feb (...)
- 114 “The Straits-Born Chinese,” Malaya Tribune, February 12, 1931.
- 115 Straits Times, December 21, 1929
27Here we also see Song falling prey to the slippage between Chinese as a race and a nationality. This was a common question which the Straits Chinese had to clarify to others. The Government Gazette, when announcing the naturalisation of Chinese, would specify that ‘these Chinese, while still of Chinese race, are no longer of Chinese nationality, but have become British subjects.’108 However, Britishers and mainland Chinese still frequently forgot or equated the two. For example, before arguing in favour of reforms to English language education in the colony, Lim Boon Keng had to correct the Governor who had repeated the common misconception that children of aliens born in the colony were not British subjects.109 The British themselves usually only made this specification when it suited their claims vis-à-vis China. In 1894, for instance, a new Qing decree allowed the Chinese Consul-General in Singapore to sell a kind of passport to Chinese wanting to return to China which was allegedly also offered to Chinese British subjects. The Straits government saw this a violation of their sovereignty and told the Consul-General it must relegate itself to commercial matters and no longer interfere in matters of English law.110 As one paper later stated, ‘there can be no hybrid political condition here or anywhere else.’111 Around this time, nationality law was being crafted in many new nation-states specifically to avoid the possibility of split allegiances during wartime and other ‘hybrid political conditions’. Just before the First World War, Italy, for example, concerned with Italian emigration, stopped short of allowing dual nationality for fear of losing out on vital manpower in the event of war.112 In a similar fashion, the question ‘who would you fight for if war broke out?’ was raised on numerous occasions in the Straits Settlements papers, suggesting that military service was the ultimate test of national identity.113 Many Straits Chinese rejected this logic. For instance, one Mr. Lim Cheng Ean argued that ‘that nationality was merely a political status entirely different from the race. A Chinese could be a British subject and yet could cultivate in him the culture, custom and manners of the Chinese race’ and this was not ‘conflicting nor contradictory’.114 While they were willing to serve Britain in the First World War, they felt it was unlikely a war would break out between Britain and China and so it was a moot point.115
- 116 “Both British and Chinese,” Straits Times, February 11, 1908.
28Although Britain’s more liberal nationality law did recognise dual nationality, it was evidently a constant point of concern. British residents of the Straits had difficulty coming to terms with the idea of identifying with the Chinese race but being a British subject, believing it implied either a cunning ploy by the Chinese to get the best of both worlds or an allegiance to two imperial states that was problematic in the event of conflict between the two. The Pinang Gazette, for example, responded to this issue with an editorial entitled ‘Straits-Born Celestials Desire a Dual Nationality’, and thought it bizarre that Straits Chinese who may have been there for several generations try ‘to be at once an English Dr. Jekyll and a Chinese Mr. Hyde’.116 The British could not reconcile the notion of British imperial subjecthood as a form of nationality (a terminal identity) with the lived reality of cosmopolitan Singapore and its hybridised communities such as the Straits-born who also made claims to being Chinese. This was made more complicated by the commonplace assumption among Europeans that race, nationality, and citizenship were the same thing, and the fact that Chinese nationality law officially made this equation of blood and nationality. The belief that race defined nationality (usually also meaning citizenship) and the knowledge that Chinese nationality law also operated under this assumption meant the allegiance of the Straits Chinese was questioned from both sides during this period. Caught in the middle, the Straits Chinese were forced into trying to square a circle that had not previously existed. The cosmopolitan habitus that both empires had allowed for was being overridden by the growing affiliation of nation and state in China and Britain.
- 117 Thomas R. P. Dawson, ed. “The Sage of Malacca:” A Brief Memoir (Life Printers: Kuala Lumpur, 1966), (...)
- 118 Ibid., 14.
- 119 Ibid., 25.
- 120 The Chinese language distinguishes between people belonging to the Chinese state (or Middle Kingdom (...)
- 121 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, ch 1, Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing (...)
- 122 For a study of deportation in this context see Low Choo Chin, “The repatriation of the Chinese as a (...)
29 There is a postscript to this story which demonstrates the potential for violence inherent to the blurred lines between race and nationality. The dangers of this slippage became most visible and most significant at the moment of decolonisation, although the roots were laid decades earlier. The ascendence of a Chinese nation-state, fractured again on political lines, out of war with the Japanese, plus the anticolonial movement in Malaya and British negotiations for decolonisation, all structured the common classification of the overseas Chinese as Chinese nationals. The Straits Chinese were not immune from this classificatory project seen as a precursor to decolonisation. Tan Cheng Lock is a good example. Born in Malacca in 1883 to a Straits Chinese family dating back to the eighteenth century, Tan was educated at Raffles Institution, entered the Municipal Commission, received a CBE in 1933 and was official representative of the Straits Settlements to the Coronation of King George VI in London in 1937. Growing up around 1900, Tan was also caught up in the Straits Chinese reform movement and remained very conscious of his Chinese heritage, later being dubbed the ‘Sage of Malacca’, a term with Chinese connotations, specifically for his ‘thorough knowledge of Chinese history, culture and philosophy and coupled with his knowledge of Western culture.’117 He founded the Malayan Chinese Association and was recognised as one of the main political leaders in favour of unifying Malays and Chinese in a more racially harmonious federation. At his death in 1960, we see how his being ‘Chinese’ obscured the nature of his belonging. Tunku Abdul Rahman, for example, praised him because ‘he refused to identify himself with China’ but noted ‘he was also proud to be a Chinese and a Malayan.’118 Cheah Toon Look, president of the Malayan Chinese Association in Penang, described him as a ‘great Malayan leader and patriot whose death last night has cast a gloom over every Chinese household.’119 Being Chinese as an ethnic category was therefore not always carefully delimited from Chinese as a national category. One could be Chinese ethnically but not Chinese nationally (Chinese but not Chinese). Though being one but not the other was a source of praise in Tan’s case given the context of the Emergency and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, the lexical confusion the term ‘Chinese’ (in English at least) created with the added alignment of Malays with Malaya/Malaysia meant the Chinese were always at risk of having their identity defined for them by the various actors involved.120 The blurred lines between the two allowed for violence. One could be transformed from ethnically Chinese to nationally Chinese (and therefore a Communist threat) at the discretion of the state or simply a crowd. As a result, this ‘bound seriality’ as Anderson calls it, was ‘unbound’, and Chinese residents of the Straits became caught up in the ethnic ‘unmixing of peoples’ that accompanied decolonisation.121 Thus, the deportation of thousands of Chinese, many of whom were born in the Straits Settlements, in the post-war period, and the creation of a legal mechanism by which individuals had to ‘choose’ a nationality, represents the dark end-point to the marking of citizenship and its fixation to the state.122 Consequently, the Straits Chinese status as in-betweeners marked them out for exclusion from both mainland China and post-colonial Malaya.
Notes
1 For an overview of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia see, Anthony Reid, “Flows and Seepages in the Long-term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia”, in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast China and the Chinese, ed. Anthony Reid (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996) and Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
2 See, John Shepherd, “Some demographic characteristics of Chinese immigrant populations: lessons for the study of Taiwan’s population history,” in Maritime China in Transition 1750-1850, eds. Wang Gungwu and Ng Chin-Keong (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2004) and J.W. Cushman and A.C. Milner, “Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Chinese Accounts of the Malay Peninsula,” Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 52, no. 1 (1979): 1-56, “The Straits-born Chinese,” Straits Times, February 5, 1914.
3 On these mechanisms of connection see, Elizabeth Sinn, “Xin Xi Guxiang: A Study of Regional Associations as a Bonding Mechanism in the Chinese Diaspora. The Hong Kong Experience,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 2 (1997): 375-397, Patricia Ebrey, “Surnames and Han Chinese Identity,” in Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, ed. Melissa Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Lawrence W. Crissman, “The Segmentary Structure of Urban Overseas Chinese Communities,” Man 2, no. 2 (1967): 185-204, G. William Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia,” in Sojourners and Settlers, Lane J. Harris, “Overseas Chinese Remittance Firms, the Limits of State Sovereignty, and Transnational Capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, 1850s-1930s,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 1 (2015): 129-151.
4 George Windsor Earl, The Eastern Seas (London: W. M. Hallen, 1837), 363.
5 Mark Ravinder Frost, “Emporium in Imperio: Nanyang Networks and the Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819-1914,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 29-66.
6 It is sometimes suggested that Baba, Straits Chinese and Straits-born should not be used interchangeably as they represent differences of degree. See, Png Poh-Seng, “The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A Case of Local Identity and Socio-Cultural Accommodation,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 1 (1969): 99.
7 “The Straits-born Chinese,” Straits Times, February 5, 1914.
8 “Chinese Emigration and Colonisation,” The Examiner, September 9, 1854.
9 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1977). Not all agreed however, with John Dill Ross, a ship captain and sometime writer, feeling that those born and raised in the Straits were capable of becoming “a sleek, contended and pleasant creature, highly intelligent, and gifted with nerves as sensitive as could be wished… A little strain of Malay blood seems to vastly improve the Chinaman.” John Dill Ross, The Capital of a Little Empire: A Description Study of a British Crown Colony in the Far East (Singapore: Singapore Free Press, 1898), 69.
10 Chen Da, Chinese Migrations, with Special Reference to Labor Conditions (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1923), 62. For more on Baba, non-Baba relations see Tan Chee-Beng, “Baba Chinese, Non-Baba Chinese and Malays: A Note on Ethnic Interaction in Malacca,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 7, no. 1/2 (1979): 20-29.
11 “Public Health in Singapore,” Singapore Free Press, January 10, 1901.
12 Earl, The Eastern Seas, 363.
13 J.D. Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese (Singapore: Mission Press, 1879), 42.
14 “Locke on Sanitation,” Straits Times, September 17, 1909.
15 See, for example, Barbara Bush, “Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86-98.
16 “Sanitation and Nationality,” Straits Times, September 18, 1909, “Mens Sana in Corpora Sano,” Straits Times, November 25, 1909.
17 Kwa Chong Guan, et al. Great Peranakans: Fifty Remarkable Lives (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2015), 154. Quoted in Straits Times, February 5, 1909. Discussed further in Karen M. Teoh, Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s-1960s,” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 81.
18 Lim Boon Keng quoted in Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (London: John Murray, 1923), 4.
19 Ibid., 399, 555-6. See also, Sebastian Conrad, “Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of World History 32, no. 1 (2021): 95-125.
20 Rev. W. Murray, “Some Reminiscences and Reflections,” Straits Chinese Annual (Singapore: 1930), 44.
21 Straits Settlements: Report for 1906 (London: Darling and Sons, 1907), 29.
22 Census of the Straits Settlements, 3rd April 1881 (Singapore) and J.R. Innes, Report on the Census of the Straits Settlements taken on 1st March 1901 (Singapore: 1901).
23 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), ch 1.
24 “Chinese at Hotel Bars,” Straits Times, September 17, 1909.
25 “Treatment of Straits Chinese Babas in Prison,” Daily Advertiser, March 3, 1894.
26 “Chinese Babas,” Daily Advertiser, March 5, 1894.
27 See, for example, Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-1791, Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
28 Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements, 4.
29 See, for example, Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
30 J. de Vere Allen, “Malayan Civil Service, 1874-1941: Colonial Bureaucracy/Malayan Elite,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12, no. 2 (1970): 174-6.
31 “Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs and People of India,” (1858), https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/proclamation-by-the-queen-in-council-to-the-princes-chiefs-and-people-of-india.
32 Chunilal Lallubhai Parekh, ed., Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings, (on Indian Politics,) of the Hon’ble Dadabhai Naoroji (Bombay: Caxton, 1887).
33 Eighth Report of Her Majesty’s Civil Service Commissioners (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1863), 349.
34 Stanley A. Wolpert, India, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 57-8. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontent: An Indian History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 36-8.
35 Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
36 “Hong Kong and Straits Settlements,” House of Commons, Volume 35, March 13, 1912, 1082.
37 “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 35, March 20, 1912, 1864-1865.
38 “Colonial Civil and Police Services,” House of Commons, Volume 36, March 27, 1912, 421.
39 Ibid. and “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 36, April 3, 1912, 1161-2. Wu Lien-teh is now famous as one of the inventors the medical face mask.
40 “Colonial Civil Service,” House of Commons, Volume 36, April 3, 1912, 1163.
41 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 480.
42 Ibid.
43 “Education,” Straits Times, December 23, 1913.
44 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 548.
45 Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, 13.
46 “Awakening of Chinese in Singapore,” Straits Times, November 27, 1906.
47 Chinese in Malacca,” Straits Times, January 2, 1913.
48 Chan, “The Case for Diaspora,” 107. For more on the boycott see Shih-shan H. Ts’ai, “Reaction to Exclusion: The Boycott of 1905 and Chinese National Awakening,” The Historian 39, no. 1 (1976): 95-110, Wong Sin Kiong, “The Making of a Chinese Boycott: The Origins of the 1905 Anti-American Movement,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 6, no. 2 (1999): 123-148, and Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), especially ch 11.
49 For example, “‘Freedom’ in Hongkong,” Straits Times, September 12, 1905, and “Give the Devil his Due,” Eastern Daily Mail, September 16, 1905.
50 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
51 Wong Sin Kiong, “The Chinese Boycott,” 239.
52 “A Singapore Dock Boycott,” Singapore Free Press, December 21, 1905.
53 “Strike at Tanjong Pagar,” Singapore Free Press, December 21, 1905.
54 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
55 “Boycott Originator Honoured,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 1, 1905, and, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 35.
56 Quoting Walter Benjamin, Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25.
57 Edward J.M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895-1913 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 88, and, “The Anti-American Boycott,” Straits Times, December 21, 1905.
58 “American Boycott,” Eastern Daily Mail, November 27, 1905.
59 Shih-shan H. Ts’ai, “Reaction to Exclusion,” 96.
60 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 374-5.
61 Wong Sin Kiong, “The Chinese Boycott,” 236.
62 “Chinese Versus Americans,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 15, 1905.
63 “The Basis of the Boycott,” Eastern Daily Mail, December 20, 1905.
64 “To Juggernaut,” Singapore Free Press, July 6, 1905.
65 “The Anti-American Boycott,” Straits Times, December 21, 1905.
66 “The United States and China,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, April 12, 1892.
67 “The Possibilities of Chinese Emigration,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, October 15, 1890. See also, “The “White Australian” Fanatic,” Singapore Free Press, July 14, 1922.
68 “Chinese Emigration to the Straits,” Straits Times Weekly Issue, May 20, 1891.
69 For a contemporary example of this terminology in use as a response to the Boxer Rebellion see, “Notes on the Wars,” Daily News, July 21, 1900.
70 “The True “Yellow Peril,”” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, November 10, 1898.
71 Burbank and Cooper, “Beyond “identity,”” 15.
72 Ross Terrill discusses China’s claims on overseas Chinese in his book, Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
73 Brubaker, “Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State,” 64.
74 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 1.
75 Eric C. Han, “The nationality law and entry restrictions of 1899: constructing Japanese identity between China and the West,” Japan Forum 30, no. 4 (2018): 521-542.
76 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch 4.
77 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39.
78 Quoted in, “British Citizenship,” Malaya Tribune, April 20, 1914.
79 Straits Chinese British Association, Duty to the British Empire, ch 16, 19.
80 Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), ch 4, David Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). See also, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
81 Singapore Free Press, December 7, 1893.
82 Andrew Baker, “Divided sovereignty: Empire and nation in the making of modern Britain,” International Politics 46, no. 6 (2009): 691-711.
83 Tsai Chutung, “Chinese Nationality Law, 1909,” American Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (1910): 404-5.
84 Ibid., 405-6.
85 Eric Tagliacozzo, “Kettle on a slow boil: Batavia's threat perceptions in the Indies' Outer Islands, 1870–1910” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (2000): 81-3. Some Chinese continued to take foreign citizenship for reasons of trade. See, Man-Houng Lin, “Overseas Chinese Merchants and Multiple Nationality: A Means for Reducing Commercial Risk (1895-1935),” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2001): 985-1009.
86 For the full text of the law see, “Law on the Acquisition and Loss of Chinese Nationality,” American Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (1910): 160-166.
87 See, Yen Ching-Hwang, Coolies and Mandarins: China’s Protection of Overseas Chinese During the Late Ch’ing period (1851-1911) (Singapore: NUS Press, 1985), ch 4.
88 Michael R. Godley, “The Late Ch’ing Courtship of the Chinese in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (1975): 364.
89 For more on Chinese newspapers in Singapore see, Chen Mong Hock, The Early Chinese Newspapers of Singapore, 1881-1912 (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1967).
90 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800-1911 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986), 288.
91 Ibid., 292.
92 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800-1911 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986), 288.
93 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 273.
94 C.F. Yong and R.B. McKenna, The Kuomintang Movement in British Malaya, 1912-1949 (Singapore: NUS Press, 1990), 18.
95 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 289.
96 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 279.
97 Shao Dan, “Chinese by Definition: Nationality Law, Jus Sanguinis, and State Succession, 1909-1980,” Twentieth-Century China 35, no. 1 (2009): 12-19.
98 For further elaboration on how the Qing and Chinese elite reformers engaged with this question see, McKeown, Melancholy Order, ch 4.
99 Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People, trans. Frank W. Pierce (Vancouver: Soul Care Publishing, 2011), 5.
100 For more on Chinese racial thinking see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992).
101 Ana Maria Candela, “Sociology in Times of Crisis: Chen Da, National Salvation and the Indigenization of Knowledge,” Journal of World-Systems Research 21, no. 2 (2015): 371.
102 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 489. As further testimony of the difference in treatment across the water see, John Coming Chinaman, Bright Celestials: The Chinaman at Home and Abroad (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 158-165.
103 “China and the Dutch East Indies,” Weekly Sun, June 24, 1911.
104 “The Amoy Incident,” Straits Times, December 8, 1897.
105 “Straits Chinese Magazine,” Singapore Free Press, July 6, 1899.
106 “Chinese British Subjects,” Straits Telegraph and Daily Advertiser, May 6, 1899
107 “British or Chinese Citizens?” Straits Times, September 20, 1929.
108 Singapore Free Press, December 13, 1911.
109 “Legislative Council,” Straits Times, January 22, 1902.
110 Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years, 282.
111 Singapore Free Press, December 13, 1911.
112 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 129.
113 See, for example, “The Duties and Privileges of a Chinese British Subject,” Eastern Daily Mail, February 28, 1906, “Both British and Chinese,” Straits Times, February 11, 1908. And for a later period, Chua Ai Lin, “Nation, Race, and Language: Discussing transnational identities in colonial Singapore, circa 1930,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 283-302.
114 “The Straits-Born Chinese,” Malaya Tribune, February 12, 1931.
115 Straits Times, December 21, 1929
116 “Both British and Chinese,” Straits Times, February 11, 1908.
117 Thomas R. P. Dawson, ed. “The Sage of Malacca:” A Brief Memoir (Life Printers: Kuala Lumpur, 1966), 12.
118 Ibid., 14.
119 Ibid., 25.
120 The Chinese language distinguishes between people belonging to the Chinese state (or Middle Kingdom) and those of Han ethnicity.
121 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, ch 1, Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building, eds. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997).
122 For a study of deportation in this context see Low Choo Chin, “The repatriation of the Chinese as a counter-insurgency policy during the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 45, no. 3 (2014): 363-392, and, Karl Hack, “Detention, Deportation and Resettlement: British Counterinsurgency and Malaya’s Rural Chinese, 1948-60,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 4 (2015): 611-640. “Choice-making” is how Malayan nationality law was phrased by a British legal scholar at the time, F. G. Carnell, “Malayan Citizenship Legislation,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1952): 515.
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