Enough is Enough! Whites should stop apologizing to opportunistic Chinese !

Posted on June 6, 2014

Enough is Enough! Whites should stop apologizing to opportunistic Chinese ! (French Translation Below)

On May 27, Vancouver City Council voted unanimously to take steps toward yet another official apology for “historical discrimination against people of Chinese descent”. The approved motion, which was initiated by Chinese Councillor Raymond Louie, contains a sweeping mandate directing staff to investigate thoroughly, “as long as it takes,” every act of discrimination committed against the Chinese from 1886 to 1947. It also calls for staff to report back to council with recommended actions for further compensation and reconciliation efforts. (SEE THE MOTION BELOW ENGLISH TRANSLATION)

This motion comes on the heels of BC Premier Christy Clark’s apology to Chinese “Canadians” on May 15, 2014. Christy Clark expressed deep sorrow and regret “for the provincial government’s historical wrongs” from 1872-1947. With great solemnity, contrition and sense of historical rectification, this apology was fully endorsed by Clark’s Liberals, the Opposition New Democrats, the Green party, as well as Independent members of the legislature. There was no dissent. The BC government also issued a promise of one million dollars in legacy funding.

It should be noted that this provincial apology was preceded by i) an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006 backed by $34 million in financial compensation, ii) twenty-seven historical legacy projects currently in existence, iii) a formal apology in 2010 from the Municipality of New Westminster, and iv) relentless historical references in official government documents and in school textbooks about “wrongs” done to the Chinese and about White racism against Chinese throughout history.

The Chinese Canadian National Council and the Head Tax Families Society of Canada both “declined” the BC apology. Apparently, they are dissatisfied with an apology that has been tainted because a Liberal government document surfaced last February suggesting the party would attempt to gain “quick wins” at the ballot box in May by issuing formal apologies to ethnic communities for “historic wrongs”.

“A government should never be seen to be profiting from racism but this is what has happened here today,” Victor Wong, executive director of the Chinese Canadian National Council, said in a release. Sid Chow Tan, president of the Head Tax Families, added that “most of these apologies, I take with a grain of salt.”

They want, in the words of Wong, “an absolutely genuine apology,” one that includes additional “financial redress”. According to Tan, $8.5 million of the $23 million in total head-tax revenue went to B.C. coffers. The $8.5-million “tax grab” should be “symbolically returned” to families that suffered hardship.

They also want “inclusive redress”. What does this term mean? Neither Wong nor any of the Chinese leaders elaborate. The media, too, never explains. Yet this term goes to the heart of what the Chinese are asking for in the long run. It means redressing past wrongs by elevating the cultural status of those groups to whom wrong was done. It means that Whites today ­ who had nothing to do with the head tax ­ should offer both financial and cultural reparation to the Chinese (today) who did not suffer any discrimination but may well be millionaires who arrived from China a few days ago.

“Inclusive redress” can be categorized as a White-created cultural Marxist term employed by Chinese cultural nationalists to promote their ethnic interests in Canada. The Chinese want the Canadian government to make the history of White discrimination a central part of Canada’s curriculum, and beyond this some Chinese leaders are calling for the inclusion of Chinese Canadians as founders of the Canadian nation.

Henry Yu, history professor at UBC, even claimed, in an Op Ed piece in The Vancouver Sun (February 2, 2010), that the English language “stunts diversity.” Calling it a “colonial” language, he demanded that Asian languages, long “silenced” by “white Supremacists”, be given the same official status. He even equated the presence of a high number of Whites in leadership positions with “the legacy of a long history of apartheid and white supremacy.”

Vancouver Councillor Kerry Jang happily welcomed the motion for additional apologies stating that the Chinese who lived in Canada before 1947 “weren’t allowed to do very much…to live in certain areas…to go to school or do anything.” The media should have questioned this allegation, which is nothing but a historical fabrication. The fact is that the Chinese in British Columbia prospered substantially despite the head tax and despite lacking the right to vote until 1947. In a heavily documented and statistically oriented  MA Thesis written by Chinese Canadian Paul Richard Yee for the University of British Columbia, 1983, under the title “Chinese Business in Vancouver, 1886-1914,” Yee concluded that the Chinese were able to enjoy “economic opportunities arising inside and outside Chinatown.”

Yee further observed: “The Chinese conducted a wide variety of businesses, revealing that their host society was most receptive to some Chinese presence in the commercial sphere. The viability of business activities reassured immigrants that their ambitions to earn money overseas were achievable despite persistent anti-Asian hostility in the general environment.”
 
In addition to the multiple apologies and the millions of dollars the Chinese have already received in compensation, another reality that should be kept in mind, which is all too obvious but ignored by the mainstream media, is that the city of Vancouver has been literally handed over to Chinese immigrants, or, as they are known, “millionaire migrants”. Some of the individuals implicated in these continuous demands for apologies are wealthy real estate speculators who view Canada as a deracinated place where one can have double citizenship, make use of its educational opportunities, exploit advanced medical treatment, and avoid the pollution they create back home.

Daniel Hierbert, a social geographer at UBC, has thus projected that Chinese migration will result in the creation of “a social geography entirely new to Canada”. The Chinese, which currently make up about 410,000 of the 2.2 million  population in Metro Vancouver, are set to double to 800,000 by 2031. Hiebert also notes that the city will be increasingly divided into racial enclaves, with white residents becoming a minority group, or only 2 out of 5 residents by 2031.

This massive wave of Chinese colonizers who comprise a significant part of a relentless immigration inflow of up to 50,000 per year for the past 23 years has driven the price of homes way above what middle class Whites can afford, making Vancouver the second least affordable city in the world – behind only Hong Kong.

In Richmond, a city of 200,000 in Metro Vancouver, mainland Chinese migration has already helped create the first majority-Chinese city outside Asia, with White citizens cornered into small enclaves and many being forced to sell their homes and move out as “millionaire migrants” take over. It has been estimated that 74 percent of the houses sold for more than $3 million in Vancouver’s core Westside neighbourhood in 2010 were sold to Chinese buyers.

But what is perhaps even more astonishing is that these “millionaire migrants” enjoying apologies from working and middle class Whites come from a culture that, by the standards of British Columbia between 1886 and 1947, are not merely illiberal but vulgarly racist. This has been thoroughly documented in the works of Frank Dikötter. Starting with his book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992), Dikötter examines how traditional Chinese authorities commonly described as “ugly” the “ash white” skin and “indelicate hairiness” of Europeans, and the blacks as “animals, devil-like and horrifying”.

More revealing is Dikötter’s thesis on how these traditional Chinese notions about inferior “barbarians” intermingled with Nazi forms of “scientific” racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century and today. The concept of race came to be widely accepted as scientifically proven. Racial theories were disseminated through textbooks, anthropology exhibitions and travel literature, and were taught as early as the primary levels of education.

Dikötter observes that, to this day, skulls, hair, eyes, noses, ears, entire bodies and even the penises of thousands of subjects are routinely measured, weighed and assessed by anthropometrics who attempt to identify the ‘special characteristics’ (tezheng) of minority populations. The dominant Han are described as the core of a “yellow race,” which relegates to its margins all the minority populations. In another book, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (1998), Dikötter  references government publications claiming that eugenics is a vital tool in the enhancement of the “biological fitness” of the nation, heralding the twenty-first century as an era which will be dominated by “biological competition” between the “white race” and the “yellow race.” 

Another revealing exposition of the everyday racial attitudes of the Chinese toward Africans is M. Dujon Johnson’s Race and Racism in the Chinas: Chinese Racial Attitudes towards Africans and African-Americans (2007). Johnson focuses on a series of incidents during the 1980s and 1990s, including one in which thousands of Chinese students set about assaulting and destroying the dormitories of African students in Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, shouting ‘Kill the black devils!’ The authorities did not prevent the demonstrations which went on for many days.

Johnson observes: “[my experience] demonstrated to me on a daily basis how life in Chinese society is racially segregated and in many aspects similar to a system of racial apartheid.”
 
The visit by Condaleeza Rice to Beijing in 2008 led to a flurry of racist postings on China’s websites, with Rice stigmatized as “the ugliest in the world”… “I really can’t understand how mankind gave birth to a woman like Rice”… Some directly called Rice a “black ghost”, a “black pig”… “a witch”… “rubbish of Humans”… Some lamented: “Americans” IQ is low. How can they make a black bitch Secretary of State?”… Others did not forget to stigmatize Rice with animal names:  “chimpanzee”, “crocodile”, “a piece of rotten meat, mouse shit,” “[something] dogs will find hard to eat”.

Chinese elites have always been very cunning at using their quietness and cautiousness as a rhetorical device to delude Westerners with the quaint notion of Chinese innocence and purity. China is currently building an empire in Africa, based on the exploitation of cheap African labor, poor if any safety standards for workers, construction projects based on the cheapest and shoddiest Chinese materials ­ all in exchange for vital resources to feed the insatiable desires of 1.4  billion Chinese.  According to Peter Hitchens, Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and “employ African people in slave conditions.”

China’s ethnic composition is almost exclusively Han, 91.9 percent of the population. The ethnic minorities (Mongols, Zhuang, Miao, Hui, Tibetans, and Uighurs) are treated as second class citizens. Tibetans are routinely described as superstitious, lazy, ignorant, and dirty. Tibet is occupied by Chinese imperialists who destroy Tibet’s heritage, dominate the main industries and give all the best jobs to Han Chinese.

The Tibetans are disgusted that Chinese migrants eat their dogs (animals believed to be the last reincarnation before humans in Tibetan Buddhism); that the Chinese don’t walk clockwise around temples and monasteries; and that they toss away their cigarettes at wooden temples and holy trees. The New York Times described an incident in which a Tibetan man’s house was burned down for no evident reason. When he tried to seek help, the authorities said, “What race are you? Tibetan? Go ask the Dalai Lama for help.”

In 1949, Han Chinese amounted to only 5 percent of Western China’s Xinjiang province’s population. Today, the Han are up to 41 percent. Urumqi, the capital city, consists of 75 percent Han Chinese, of the 2.5 million inhabitants. The average Chinese views the natives from Xinjiang as backward and ungrateful for not appreciating the modern infrastructure bestowed upon them by the Han. In the summer of 2009, this region saw violent riots by 2,000 to 3,000 Uighur workers and Xinjiang separatists, in which approximately 150 Han Chinese were killed. The Communist reprisals were swift : up to 50,000 police and security personnel were sent to restore order, more than 2000 Uighurs were detained, and a few dozen were executed. Soon, the policy of Sinicization was intensified. In May 2010, Beijing announced a new development strategy. It would pour $1.5 billion into the region, encourage the migration of more Han Chinese businessmen, and build a beautiful homeland patriotic education campaign that aimed to indoctrinate the Uighurs to believe that “ethnic minorities are inseparable from the Han.”

Clearly, it is superbly absurd and cowardly for leaders of European ethnicity in Vancouver to have endorsed a motion introduced by Vancouver City Councillors Raymond Louie and Tang and supported by  Kerry Jang calling for more apologies to the Chinese for alleged historical wrongs.. As even naive Canadians can see, Chinese and other ethnic demands for apologies will never be satisfied.  If anything, Canadians should be demanding that the Chinese in Canada and Han China apologize to the whole world for Han China’s vulgar and oppressive acts of racism against its own population. To put some muscle into Canada’s demand, Canada should end any more Chinese immigration to Canada until Han China makes such an apology and convinces the world that it has ended its historical maltreatment of its minorities. That maltreatment far exceeds any alleged “maltreatment” the Chinese received in Canada.

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MOTION PASSED BY VANCOUVER CITY COUNCIL

Historical Discrimination Against People of Chinese Descent in Vancouver
MOVER: Councillor Louie
SECONDER: Councillor Tang

WHEREAS
1. The Prime Minister of Canada has formally apologized in the House of Commons for the Chinese Head Tax and subsequent exclusion of Chinese immigrants;

2. The British Columbia Legislature apologizes for more than a hundred laws, regulations
and policies that were imposed by past provincial governments that discriminated against people of Chinese descent since 1871 when British Columbia joined Confederation to 1947;

3. The City of New Westminster has issued a formal apology for past discriminatory practices towards the Chinese community; and

4. The City of Vancouver has proclaimed June 21, 2013 to June 20, 2014 as the Year of Reconciliation in Vancouver.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT Vancouver City Council direct staff to conduct research into the laws regulations and policies of previous Vancouver City Councils that discriminated against the people of Chinese descent in the City of Vancouver from 1886 to 1947 and consult with the Vancouver Chinese community historians and Chinese community organizations on the research findings; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT Vancouver City Council direct staff to report back to Council with recommendations on steps and actions in support of reconciliation including a public acknowledgement and formal apology.