Pigs, Pestilence, and Prejudice:

The Racialization of Early Chinese Settlers in Vancouver’s Chinatown

Edits have been made after the paper was graded

 The 15% foreign buyers tax on Vancouver homes has sparked renewed discussion of anti-

Chinese racism in the Province. Historian Henry Yu, writing in the Globe and Mail, takes the position the

foreign buyers tax is linked to Canada’s anti-Chinese legacy. Yu argues the tax parallels and builds on

historic forms of anti-Chinese legislation (2016). Canada's history of legislative measures intended to

reduce or eliminate immigration from Asia is notorious. The most widely recognised example in

Canadian cultural consciousness is the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885. Exclusionary measures such as

these raise questions of citizenship and belonging within the white-settler nation of Canada for non-white

immigrants, and what geographic spaces are considered available to them. Drawing on critical race

theory, I suggest that the historic targeting of Chinese settlers and immigrants and their subsequent

confinement to spaces of exclusion is justified through distinct technologies of racism articulated through

discourses of the natural.

Discussions of racism hinge on the dualism of culture and nature, where culture defines human

and nature defines what is not. This divide functions to position certain bodies as further from or entirely

excluded from the category human. Activist-Scholar John Paul Catungal states, “the category human

emerges not through the exclusion of certain humans, but that human was defined from the beginning as

no including certain people” (2016). Critical race and animal rights theorists such as Lisa Kemmerer

specify this human/non-human divide along lines of animalisation noting the importance of the category

animal in the creation of race (2011) Political scientist Claire Jean Kim continues to explain how

animalisation of racialized bodies renders the racialized less or non- human. This permits those seen as

human to justify refusing to extend human rights to the animalised other (2015). Racialization, however,

does not start and stop with animalization. Furthermore, what is considered less than human is not

immediately considered animal. How we come to position Other as less than human through discourses of

the natural needs to go beyond the imagery of animalization and toward a deeper reading of how nature is

taken up to position certain bodies as less worthy of human dignity and rights.
 In the context of the early Chinese community in Vancouver, the use of nature to delineate

between human and less than human is further pronounced and solidified when these constructs and

power relations map out over physical space. This confluence of discourse and physical space raises the

question of the ways, and effects to which discourses of nature have been used in the racialization of the

Vancouver Chinese community to promote anti-Chinese legislation in the space of Vancouver’s

Chinatown. I find that these powerful discourses of nature which liken Chinese to pigs, infections, and the

explicit exclusion of the Chinese from the category human, function to justify the institutional exclusion

of the early Chinese community with significant material and spatial repercussions, most notably through

the formation of Vancouver’s Chinatown.

To understand law makers’ justification in creating legally sanctioned Chinese segregation and

exclusion we need to understand the historical and spatial contexts of how the Chinese first appeared and

settled in Canadian society. Canadian immigration historically relies on race, culture, and the need for

labour (Abu-Lama, 1998). The rapidly growing economy of Canada during the mid 1800s was a draw for

immigrants (Boyd et al. 2000) The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) created a demand for

cheap labour that was largely provided by Chinese workers. The CPR was complete in 1885, terminating

in Vancouver and bringing many of the former CPR workers into the city. Not coincidently, 1885 was the

same year a federal commission on Chinese immigration was conducted, resulting in the Federal

government passing the Chinese Immigration Act which placed a $50 "head tax" on Chinese immigrants.

In 1900, the head tax increased to $100 and in 1903 the head tax was raised to an almost insurmountable

$500. This action was done to resolve racial tensions, and protect what white workers in British

Columbia viewed as an encroachment on white jobs and white space from the Chinese (Kim, 2015).

When even that did not eliminate the entry of Chinese workers into Canada the Federal government

passed the even more draconian Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented Chinese immigration to Canada

until 1946 although it was not fully repealed until 1967.

 The subsequent settlement pattern of the Chinese in Vancouver was significantly centred around

Pender St. This area, that became known as Chinatown, sat on and near the False Creek swamp. Due to its

proximity to the swamp, the land was difficult to build on and considered undesirable by the White

community. The City of Vancouver passed bylaws which actualised a social and spatial segregation of the

Chinese community within the Pender Street area. For example, laundries owned by Chinese

entrepreneurs were required by law to be confined to the Chinese quarter (Anderson, 1991). Community

members had few, if any, other living options. They were, for the most part, extremely poor. CPR wages

had been low and much of what was earned on the railroad was sent home to family in China. In

Vancouver employment opportunities were limited to low wage positions as domestic servants, manual

labourers or in the laundries. Coupled with the ongoing need to send remittances back to China to

support families or, after 1885, to save money to pay the head tax in hopes of bringing family members to

Canada, members of the community often lived in poverty. These factors understandably limited the areas

and quality of living arrangements available to them for settlement. With this history in mind it is

important to not only acknowledge the social and physical barriers inflicted on the Chinse community but

to also unpack how these barriers were constructed and justified. In this case, exclusion and segregation

was justified through discourses and imagery of nature used to position the Chinese as less than human.

The racialization and the subsequent justification of the treatment of the Chinese community

coincides with the production of racial categories and hierarchies which themselves rely on discourses of

the natural. Race was historically considered “natural” (Anderson 1991, 11). This understanding was

supported by institutions of science such as biology and pseudo-scientific investigations into the physical

similarities between non-white bodies and animals (Catungal, 2017; Anderson 1991). In this instance, the

word and idea of ‘natural’ effectively makes racial hierarchies a fact of nature itself. Racism becomes

normalised, the natural order of things, and therefore justifiable. Indeed, in his 1885 address to the House

of Commons Commissioner J.A. Chapleau, who conducted the Royal Commission into Chinese

Immigration which recommended the introduction of the head tax, described the white British Columbia
community as having a “natural repulsion” to the Chinese (Chapleau 1885, 3006). This statement

effectively positions Whiteness and White British Columbia as normal and the Chinese community as

strange, foreign and not belonging in the idealised construction of British Columbia as a White province.

From this statement, one can begin to decipher the ways in which the confinement of the Chinese through

the spatial bounds of Chinatown and the exclusionary immigration laws were constructed as a natural

process to protect the interests of the larger White nationhood of Canada.

By understanding race as a process of positioning one group as the norm and one as less desirable

than that norm, we need to analyse the ways in which these positions come into being. Kim’s theory of a

human/animal borderland, the space in between what

is recognised as fully human and what is animal; it is

within this borderland that all racialized bodies are

placed (2015). In other words, racialized bodies are

removed from culture and civilization and placed

closer to that which is savage and wild. White society

rendered the Chinese less than human and therefore

Figure 1 "evolution" of the Chinese (Thisleton's Jolly Giant,
1874) unworthy of full human rights; in this case, the rights

to equality and mobility. Animalisation and the placing of certain people as closer to nature is therefore a

tactic of social differentiation with a lengthy social history and significant repercussions for those who are

deemed proximate to nature.

The human animal border land is demonstrated in Figure 1, where the monkey evolves into a

caricature of a Chinese man who then devolves into a pig on the lower line. The use of the monkey

directly evolving into the Chinese caricature illustrates a proximity between the Chinese and nature. The

choice of the pig as the final evolutionary form functions in two ways to racialize the Chinese subject. I

will return to discuss the choice of the pig but will first address how the degeneration of the Chinese from

a human figure into a pig functions to place the Chinese as less than human and unworthy and incapable
of assimilation. The cartoon demonstrates the belief that China was a civilisation that had progressed to a

point, stopped, and degenerated (Kim, 2015). Kim asserts that a lack of cultural progress or evolution was

understood as evidence of Chineseness as “incompletely human” (2015, 53). This cultural stagnancy and

subsequent incomplete humanity is understood by Kim as a barrier to Chinese assimilation into western

society because the Chinese were deemed incapable of cultural ‘advancement’ (2015). Chapleau’s

statements in the House of Commons grounds this theory in his assertion that the Chinese were

uninterested in becoming part of Canadian society (1885). The dehumanised construction of the Chinese

as unassimilable resulted in the justification of the White community to not fully extend the spatial and

social resources needed for Chinese assimilation. This connects to both the legislation of head tax and the

spatial confinement of Chinatown. The head tax limited an unassimilable population’s influx into Canada

therefore protecting White homogeneity. The spatial confinement to Chinatown served as a physical

manifestation of this idea that the Chinese were unassimilable and coincidently through the spatial

segregation reinforced and reproduced these ideas back to the White community.

I return now to the choice of the pig as the

animal representative of the Chinese. The

representative animal of a certain group indicates

ideas about the characteristics of those people. The

choice of the pig functions to construct and visually

represent the Chinese community as dirty and greedy.

In the context of early Chinese settlers, the poverty

they were experiencing due to a lack of spatial and

social resources extended to them and their

Figure 2. Further likening of Chinese bodies to pigs
responsibilities to their families in China, the dirty (Grip, 1885)

greedy pig became a way of glossing over these factors and further dehumanizing the Chinese
community. The connotations associated with the pig contributed and solidified definitions of Chinese

space and culture within the mind set of White Vancouver.

The Thistleton cartoon is not the only depiction of the Chinese as pigs. Figure 2 shows a political

cartoon from the publication Grip that accompanied the story of a Chinese rail worker identified as Chang

being paraded around Toronto for visitors to observe his acclaimed large stature (1885). The depiction of

the Chinese race as greedy and unclean is inextricably linked to the spaces in which they inhabited. Kay

Anderson suggests the creation of Chinatown as a physical space solidified the racial ideologies and

stereotypes of White defined Chineseness (1991). For example, Chinatown was often depicted as unclean,

littered, and unsanitary with little acknowledgement of there being no city sewers servicing it (Anderson,

1991). Chinatown was also constructed as a place of vice, where unregulated gambling was a common

social activity (Anderson, 1991). One citizen of Vancouver went further than just liken the Chinese to

pigs but rather stated that they, “live(d) in places that a hog would die in” (quoted in Anderson 1991, 84).

The mapping of the racialized Chinese subject onto a place marks an important shift of racialization out

of the imaginary and into the real lived experiences and physical spaces of both White Vancouverites and

Chinese Vancouverites, solidifying, as Anderson notes, these racial ideologies into the daily lives of

Vancouverites. The racialization of the Chinese as pigs squarely places their community as less than

human.

The last comment from the Vancouver resident depicting Chinatown as place were even pigs

would perish opens a discussion of mortality surrounding the Chinese community and highlights another

way in which discourses of nature were used to exclude: the Chinese as sources of disease and pestilence.

To begin with, China itself was understood to be infected (Anderson, 1991). The Vancouver News stated

Chinatown was considered “pest producing” (quoted in Anderson, 1991, 82). These spaces occupied by

Chinese communities were understood as infected, and by extension, the people themselves were

understood as an infection or pestilence. Chinatown was essentialized to represent all of Chinese culture

(Kim, 2015). This feedback loop between place, perception, and total culture led to persistent fears among
white Vancouver residents that the Chinese community was infected with diseases such as leprosy and

cholera and were thus a danger to their healthy, clean, and civilised communities (Anderson, 1991). In his

closing statements in favour of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chapleau states quite strikingly,

As a piece of wood in the human body unless it is removed must cause disease in the places

around it and ultimately the whole body. So the civilisation of Chinese introduced into

Christian civilisation must be removed or it will be a cause of danger to the community.

(1885, 310)

This statement highlights both use of nature through the imagery of wood, and disease to exclude

the Chinese and the tangible fear of what White Canada saw as a possible danger to their nation.

Statements and sentiments like these feed back into the pattern of segregation and containment for the

Chinese community via Chinatown. The containment of the Chinese community was undoubtedly an

attempt at containing an imaginary sickness that was the Chinese community in Vancouver itself.

Let us take a step back from the specifics of animals, and disease and return to the larger

discourse at hand, the Chinese were considered less than human and not entitled to human rights. I quoted

Catungal at the beginning of this paper on the statement that some bodies were not excluded from the

category human but rather never considered human in the first place. This statement is unquestionably

true in the case of the Chinese settlers in Canada. Chapleau begins his address to the House of Commons

by repeatedly mentioning how no member of the “human family” should be barred from migration into

the British Empire or Canada (1885, 3003). After these opening statements however, Chapleau concludes

in favour of the exclusionary Head-Tax. By excluding the Chinese from Canada, Chapleau makes firm

the exclusion of the Chinese from the category human.

Discourses of the less than human significantly impacted to social ideologies and subsequently,

settlement patterns and legislation surrounding early Chinese immigration into Vancouver and Canada

more broadly. The Chinese were repeatedly positioned as further from the category human through the

use of cultural stagnancy, animalisation, infection and outright exclusion from the category in order
justify their exclusion from the nation by White law makers. We must dissect the ways in which the

Chinese have been historically racialized in order to decipher and consider the magnitude of the

regeneration of anti-Asian sentiments within Vancouver and Canada. Despite our surface level

commitments to multiculturalism, as a descendant of CPR workers myself my lived-experience and the

lived-experiences of my ancestors tell another story. One of continued unease and tension between the

white settler nation and people of colour. By failing to consult these histories and investigating the ways

in which racialization has occurred, we risk alienating an important founding Canadian community again.
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