“ONE WARM SATURDAY NIGHT IN O September 1907, Vancouver witnessed a riot. A crowd that had gathered for the founding meeting of the Asiatic Exclusion League headed to Chinatown, where hooligans systematically smashed the windows of businesses. The growing mob proceeded to Powell Street, the centre of the city’s Japanese community, where forewarned residents beat them off. The rioters returned on Sunday and were again repelled. On Monday, the Chinese bought revolvers from gun shops and launched a general labour strike. Embarrassed federal authorities soon ordered the compensation of property owners but subsequently made the whiteness of Pacific Canada central to public policy by escalating restrictions on Asian immigration. Not until the turn of the twentyfirst century did the proportion of Chinese British Columbians come back up to its level at the turn of the twentieth.”
“The riot was the culmination of an ugly disagreement over Pacific Canada’s place in the global economy. The capitalists who had bankrolled construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway viewed its terminus city as an imperial gateway to burgeoning trade with Asian markets. Japan, in particular, was emerging as a strategic partner. In 1902, the British signed an alliance with the country, recognizing it as a counterweight to Russia’s ambitions in the Far East. In the first ten months of 1907, over 8,000 Japanese arrived in British Columbia. The promoters of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, aiming to join a new port in northern British Columbia with Atlantic Canada, had arranged to import up to 10,000 of them to build its line.”
“Although Europeans had journeyed to British Columbia on a CPR line that Chinese labourers had largely constructed, these newcomers viewed Asian immigrants as a threat to their way of life.”
“This hate speech reflected a broader phenomenon, as the retired professor Paul Englesberg shows in his contribution to the book. The mob had listened that Saturday night to A. E. Fowler, an activist from Seattle who gave an “impassioned speech,” in which he invoked a riot against Sikh workers in Bellingham, Washington, just days earlier.”
“For the people of Powell Street, the story turned out differently. William Lyon Mackenzie King, who investigated the events of 1907 as deputy minister of labour, was predisposed to blame the victims; in 1909, a year after he submitted his report to Ottawa, he condemned Asian immigration in his doctoral thesis at Harvard. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the internment and deportation of Vancouver’s Japanese community during the Second World War, on the pretext of avoiding similar disturb ances and against the advice of military officials. The subsequent rezoning of Powell Street for industrial uses led to further destruction and dilapidation of the built environment.”
“Anti-Asian racism has hardly vanished from Vancouver. If anything, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China further inflamed it. Yet the way in which it blends economic grievances and cultural anxieties has changed: fears of Asian wealth rather than dependent poverty now haunt xenophobes, who worry about offshore investors turning Vancouver into Singapore or Hong Kong.”
“The riot of a century ago remains relevan because it was never just an expression of primeval racism. It was a violent attempt to decide who had the “right to the city,” to use the geographer David Harvey’s phrase.”