Abstract
The World War I period witnessed several important shifts in the legal treatment of Chinese residents and in their portrayals in British culture. Reflecting anxieties prompted by the war, negative Chinese stereotypes in newspapers and popular fiction focused on Chinese gambling and opium smoking, on the supposed threat of long-term Chinese residents and their control of wealth and property, and on the hazards that their alleged immorality posed to white men rather than to white women. The Chinese population of the East End also became, for the first time, a subject of serious concern at the highest levels of the government and the judicial system.
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Notes
The act, which applied to all aliens (not merely those of enemy nations), gave the Home Secretary almost unrestricted power to refuse entry or to deport any alien whose presence in the nation he deemed to be contrary to the public interest. Ann Dummet and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990), 107.
The most serious and widespread of these incidents were the riots following the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915. Nicoletta Gullace, “Friends, Aliens, and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 2 (2005): 345–67.
The British-supported Japanese invasion of Shangdong in late 1914 represented a new nadir in the in the history of Anglo-Chinese diplomatic relations. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China. 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 281.
In other instances of domestic homicide in England, where passion was often seen as the root cause of violence, a conviction for manslaughter, which carried a lesser sentence, was common. David Taylor, Crime, Policing, and Punishment in England, 1750–1914 (New York: Palgrave, 1998), 29.
Lee’s employment of a mediator conformed closely to the patterns by which conflicts concerning loss of “face” (tiou lien) were typically resolved in Chinese communities. Martin C. Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shangtung Province (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 168.
Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239.
Gail Savage, “‘The Magistrates Are Men’: Working-Class Marital Conflict and Appeals from the Magistrates’ Court to the Divorce Court after 1895,” in Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century, ed. George Robb and Nancy Erber (New York: NYU Press 1999), 240–41.
Derek Walker-Smith, The Life of Lord Darling (London: Cassell, 1938), 178.
Albert Lieck, Bow Street World (London: Robert Hale, 1938), 97.
For a broader discussion of the relationship between masculinity and national power in wartime, see Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Nicoletta Gullace, Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 73–74, 101.
The rising official concern over the transmission of venereal disease, the impetus to control working-class women’s and black colonial soldiers’ sexuality, and the alleged moral threats posed by the Indian and black soldiers in the Western Theater are examined in Philippa Levine, “Battle Colours: Race, Sex, and Colonial Soldiery in World War I,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 104–30.
Virginia Berridge, “East End Opium Dens and Narcotic Use in Britain,” The London Journal 4, no. 1: 16; Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: the Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Granta, 1992), 44. The parent legislation—the Defense of the Realm Act—was passed on August 8, 1914.
One notable exception was the Russian immigrants who fell under the stipulations of the Military Service (Conventions with Allied States) Act of 1917. Sascha Auerbach, “Negotiating Nationalism: Jewish Conscription and Russian Repatriation in London’s East End,” Journal of British Studies 44 (July 2007): 609–18.
Thomas Burke, Out and About: A Note-Book of London in War-Time (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919), 86.
Jonathan Seed, “Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–40,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 75.
In contrast to “Asiatic” seamen, “coloured” British seamen, who were generally drawn from various parts of the empire, were paid at the same rates as white seamen, though the jobs they were assigned aboard ship were usually of a lower paying category. Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 42–44.
Ibid. Sexton had also been a key figure in the organization of working-class demonstrations against “Chinese labour” in South Africa. James Sexton, Sir James Sexton, Agitator: The Life of the Docker’s M.P. (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 34.
Brian Fawcett, “The Chinese Labour Corps in France 1917–1922,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch 40 (2000): 33–111. France would bring over a similar number, bringing the full total of Chinese laborers employed on the front to nearly 200,000.
Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 26.
Sax Rohmer, The Yellow Claw (London: Methuen, 1915; New York: McBride, Nast, 1915), 278.
Rohmer, Yellow Claw, 172. The theme of aristocratic decay and its association with drug addiction had been prevalent in the works Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde as well. Andrew Blake, “Foreign Devils and Moral Panics: Britain, Asia, and the Opium Trade,” in The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural History, ed. Bill Schwarz (London, 1996), 254.
In Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the moral degradation of white Britons, both male and female, had been similarly described as facilitating their domination by Oriental villains. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 94–95.
Just as one protagonist in the first Fu Manchu novel asserted, “East and West may not intermingle.” Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (London: Methuen, 1913), 136.
Burke, Limehouse Nights (London: Grant Richards, 1917; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 19, 45, 56, 51, 104, 26–27, 309–10 (citations are from the 1969 edition).
Thomas Burke, Son of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1946), 219; Seed, “Limehouse Blues,” 77.
Anne Witchard, “Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the ‘Glamorous Shame of Chinatown,’” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2 (2004), 2.
For recent scholarship on how literature and journalism helped shape the experience of Victorian Londoners with regard to gender, class, and morality, see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000);
Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2003).
Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 44.
For a broader discussion of “respectability” in working-class culture, see Ellen Ross, “‘Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep’: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods,” International Labor and Working Class History 27 (Spring 1985): 39–59;
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996);
Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30–46.
Jill Pellew, “The Home Office and the Aliens Act, 1905,” The Historical Journal 32, no. 2 (June, 1989): 374.
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© 2009 Sascha Auerbach
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Auerbach, S. (2009). “Most Insidious Is the Oriental in the West”. In: Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620926_4
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