Writer / Li Xiaofei Knife
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, there are 15 naturalized players in the men's ice hockey team that has participated in the Chinese men's ice hockey project and scored zero goals, most of whom are of Chinese descent.
In addition to fighting hard in the face of strong enemies on the field, on social media, their telling of family experiences and their true confessions to the motherland have also touched many netizens.
Among them, one of the oldest participants in the Chinese delegation, ye Jinguang, the 37-year-old ice hockey team captain, is the representative.
Born in Canada, Ye Jinguang is the most accomplished Chinese athlete in the history of professional ice hockey. He introduced himself on Weibo that his ancestors were exiled to North America 150 years ago, "but China has always been in the tradition of the Ye family", and the club where Ye Jinguang first played, the Kunlun Hongxing Ice Hockey Club, further explained that Ye's ancestors were Chinese laborers who were trafficked from Guangdong to North America to participate in the construction of railways a hundred years ago, and his parents were still looking for relatives in Guangdong.
Ye Jinguang's narration leads to a history of weeping blood more than a hundred years ago.
01
November 21, 1852, Xiamen.
Shen Mou, a scoundrel who gave the British businessman Hutchison Foreign Firm to do things, because he usually supported foreigners and did all the lack of virtue to lure and abduct people, on this day he was finally caught by the angry masses, beaten up, and twisted to the general Yamen for justice.
After seme and secretary Konabe heard the news, the foreign firm openly rushed into the yamen to intimidate and forcibly took Shen out of the yamen and hid himself in his home.
That night, Sam went to the yamen again and clashed with the officers and soldiers. After the news came out, the angry people of Xiamen decided to strike the whole city the next day, demanding that the foreign bank hand over Shen Mou, and ordered "Yiren to act only for profit, rampant lawlessness, and extreme harm ... Whoever dares to associate with both Tokuji and Hutchison in the future will certainly put it to death and will not forgive the loan."
On November 24, thousands of Xiamen people demonstrated at the gates of the foreign bank, and the soldiers of the British warship Vulcan opened fire on the crowd with their bare hands, killing 12 people and wounding 16 people.
The trigger of this incident was the "piglet" trade that had lost its conscience, and Xiamen at that time was the main port for kidnapping Chinese and transporting them abroad.
According to Kong Feili's research in the book "Chinese in the Eyes of Others". After the Opium War of 1840, various recruitment scams existed in China's treaty ports, forcing thousands of Chinese to become indentured Chinese workers under quasi-slavery. They have either been kidnapped and forcibly dragged, deceived, and physically threatened to sign unequal contracts.
Due to the massive expansion of imperialism on a global scale, from the 1850s onwards, voluntary labor could no longer meet the demand. In the decades following the Opium War, traffickers who kidnapped Chinese workers roamed China's coastal areas.
Some local hooligan gangs specializing in this kind of work are called "curly hair" by the British. They are either employed by foreigners' recruitment offices, or some scattered soldiers, usually wandering around in the coastal villages, once they find those who are poor and helpless, or deceive them on the pretext of introducing jobs, or tempt them to gamble, and sometimes simply kidnap them and sell them to the recruitment offices for a few oceans per person.
Due to the gradual collapse of the Qing government's rule at the grassroots level after the Opium War, captives who fell into the hands of the other side in the civil clan armed struggle, or poor and helpless ordinary people, may also be forced to take the road to the recruitment office, locked up in a prison-like "pavilion", waiting to be sent to the foreign ocean ships.
Through various unequal treaties, large and small, the Western colonists enjoyed extraterritorial jurisdiction in China, and those "curly" minions relied on the privileges of their masters to run amok.
Those victims of kidnapping and abduction were called "piglets" by the Chinese at that time, which was an image portrayal of the inhuman treatment they received.
In 1859, various commercial groups in Guangzhou jointly submitted a prayer to the British consul, which said that in recent years, the Portuguese have set up many "piglet" restaurants in Macao, renting steamships under the pretext of your country's reputation... Trick the children of good families into ignorance and foolishness. Once the deceived and abducted person is caught in the net, he becomes a so-called "piglet", is escorted into a giant boat out to sea, tied up in a cabin, and then forwarded to the "piglets" in Macao for acceptance numbers. The abducted were persecuted in the museum... But there are those who dare to speak out and are unwilling to be destroyed immediately, or even put to death.
The Portuguese complained that the Portuguese had transported the "piglets" of this generation out of the country, sold them into slavery, and were bullied, and those who were barely able to save their lives were only one in ten thousand, while in China, their parents were dependent, their children were weeping, and they could not get it day and night when they looked forward to their return. Even the only son of several generations of single transmissions, the orphans of the virtuous mother Juyu, have also been sold to the outside world... Flesh and bones are separated, and families are broken.
The British consul pleaded that the British consul "understands things well, is impartial, and has a kind heart... Remember the heart of the people of The Heavenly People who love things, strictly determine the methods, and prohibit abduction and deception."
However, for the colonists at that time, the coolie trade was a lucrative business similar to the opium trade, and in the face of this piece of fat, the colonists of various countries were simply one, and there was no reason to talk to them.
02
Boarding the ship was the beginning of the misery of these coolies, who continued to be subjected to all kinds of abuses on board, all protected by unequal treaties.
Peruvian President Castilla wrote in 1861 that the coolie trade reproduced all the evils of the already condemned "African" slave trade. The abducted, fraudulent migrants were "confined to extremely crowded ships, without any ventilation, without even the most basic food, and subjected to barbaric jurisdiction throughout the voyage."
Because of the harsh conditions, the death rate of coolies on board is very high. In 1852, Lord Elgin, departing from Xiamen, arrived in Singapore after a 62-day voyage, then a port in the Sunda Strait after 23 days, then another 46 days to the Cape of Good Hope and another 39 days to de Mérara, British Guiana, for a total of 177 days.
During this long voyage, a total of 154 Chinese who were originally on board the ship died 69 people during the trip, with a mortality rate of 45%. The findings revealed that the causes of death included overloading, food shortages and the infiltration of seawater, which caused the rice in the cabins to emit harmful gases due to the soaking and fermentation of seawater.
In 1859, a British ship bound for Havana encountered a strong typhoon in the South China Sea, the ship hit the reef and sank, the captain and crew ignored the 850 Chinese on board, just jumped on the lifeboat to escape, and all the Chinese on board were buried in the sea.
In 1848, the discovery of gold in California, the United States, required a large number of labor, coupled with the restrictions of British law, American ships gradually replaced British ships as the main force of trafficking Chinese coolies.
According to Hu Hengkun's research in the book "The Chinese in Early American Comics", these Chinese who came to North America became the vanguard of the development of the American West. They were involved in reclamation efforts in various industries, and in addition to miners, they were also the main laborers in the construction of the Pacific Railroad and the western section of the telegraph line across North America.
According to Kong Feili's research, about 11,000 Chinese workers were employed during the critical phase of the construction of the Pacific Railway, and Ye Jinguang's ancestors were one of them. The Chinese endure hardships and stand hard work, from hammering, drilling to blasting, the hardest work in the project falls on the Chinese workers.
Hu Hengkun introduced in the book that by the 1870s, the Chinese had joined the ranks of urban light industry and became the backbone of California's handicraft industries such as boots, shoes, cigars and clothing. The white laborers on the West Coast, in the economic depression after the American Civil War, angered the Chinese workers and insisted that the Chinese workers would take their jobs.
Under the influence of white xenophobia and media "yellow peril" propaganda, the Chinese in the United States became the scapegoats of the labor movement in the economic downturn.
It is an undeniable fact that capitalists exploit labor and monopolize markets and resources, and Chinese workers are also deeply affected. However, in the social form of racial segregation in the United States at that time, the White Labor Party did not accept Chinese workers, and the capitalists took the opportunity to hire Chinese workers to crack down on the strike action of the White Labor Party. Therefore, instead of confronting the chinese workers, the White Labor Party accused the Chinese workers of being a stumbling block to the unity of the American labor organization, advocating the exclusion of them and the expulsion of them. The slogan resounded all over the West Coast.
The fact is that the Chinese have no suffrage and political influence in the United States, and in the labor dispute, the Chinese bear the brunt of the problem and become the target of being targeted and attacked. The resentment between labor and management was vented on the Chinese. A series of atrocities against and exclusion of the Chinese have occurred in various places.
In September 1885, a massacre of Chinese broke out in Shiquan, Wyoming, killing 28 Chinese, injuring 15 others, and expelling hundreds of Chinese. Zheng Zao, the Qing government's special envoy to the United States, strongly protested to the then US secretary of state, who replied that the federal government could not interfere in local affairs, and at the same time proposed to Congress to allocate compensation, and finally passed the compensation case in 1887.
A month after the Stone Spring massacre, riots broke out in the city of Seattle, killing 3 Chinese and burning Chinese shops. Successive atrocities forced the Chinese to gather in San Francisco, which is also one of the reasons why there are more Chinese in San Francisco today.
The Qing government was weak and incompetent, and after being forced by the US government to sign the "Tianjin Treaty" in 1880, promising to automatically stop the Chinese from coming to the United States, the politicians of the two parties of the Us Republican Democratic Party saw that the Qing government was weak and could be bullied, and proposed a federal bill in Congress to exclude and prohibit Chinese from entering. In 1882, President Arthur passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in Congress, which formally banned Chinese workers from entering the United States.
Subsequently, from 1884 to 1904, the U.S. government promulgated a series of laws amending the Chinese Exclusion Act, and all Chinese technicians and laborers were completely denied entry and exclusion. By 1924, new immigration laws were in place, prohibiting all Asian races from immigrating to the United States.
In the "Chinese exclusion" political circles of the United States at that time, any official who negotiated with China, as long as he said a good word for the Chinese side, would be regarded as betraying national interests, being besieged by his colleagues and politicians, and being scolded by newspapers. President Arthur vetoed the Congressional Chinese Exclusion Act and was immediately ridiculed by the media for "kowtowing" to China in pigtails.
And the image of "squinting eyes" was also born in that wave of "Chinese exclusion". Through a large number of words and cartoons, the US media instilled in readers that the United States is an advanced and civilized society, and it is necessary to eliminate the old tradition of corruption and incompetence in China. Whites were given the right to enjoy only the rich resources of the New World, and the "Yellow Peril" was coming, and the people of American land would be occupied by "inferior nations."
This situation was not gradually changed until the 1940s, when China and the United States became allies in the battlefield of World War II, and Japan became the main source of the "Yellow Peril".
03
The sentence "150 years ago my ancestors wandered to North America" implicates the history of Chinese people's blood, tears and struggle for a hundred years. The inability of a weak, semi-colonial, semi-feudal country to protect her children from bullying and oppression is the lesson learned by our ancestors in history.
Today, some people on the other side of the ocean are in a state of anxiety trying to make yesterday a repeat.
However, China has changed the world, the world has changed, and history can never repeat itself.
A strong motherland is a safe haven for the world's outstanding sons and daughters of China, and it is also the best stage for displaying their personal talents.
As Ye Jinguang's teammate Yuan Junjie said before the Sino-US men's ice hockey match, "The words and deeds of the previous two generations have made me very proud of myself as a Chinese... To have the opportunity to represent China is my greatest wish in life... The world needs China's multi-ethnic integration tradition, and the Olympics need China's spirit of dissent and tolerance... I sincerely invite the elites of all fields in the world to return to China together and continue the spirit of the Chinese nation from generation to generation. Together to the future! ”
(The comic strip in this article is selected from Hu Hengkun's book "Chinese in Early American Comics", which was collected by Professor Hu for many years, and is hereby explained)
Image from the web