HKU Bulletin December 2013 (Vol. 15 No. 1)

Some of the magnificent houses in Kaiping county built with money remitted from overseas Dr Elizabeth Sinn is an Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, with research interests covering Chinese social organisation, philanthropy, business, migration, women’s history, just to name a few. The In-Betweeners Dr Elizabeth Sinn’s new book Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong challenges traditional thought on a crucial turning point in Hong Kong’s development. Much has been written about the migration of tens of thousands of Chinese to America during the California Gold Rush of the mid-19 th century and after, yet little has focussed on the migration process itself. Perhaps even more surprising, even though Chinese migration as an economic and social phenomenon has been closely connected to Hong Kong since that time, no previous scholar has focussed on it. Dr Elizabeth Sinn’s book fills those gaps. It takes a unique approach to migration studies – putting emphasis on the mobility of people, goods, money, information, ideas, practices and values – while at the same time bringing together two very important historical developments: Chinese migration and its impact on Hong Kong and in turn, Hong Kong’s impact on Chinese migration. “Most previous work has been on political history,” says Dr Sinn, “but there is very little on shipping, finance or international business. It’s interesting considering shipping and import/export are so synonymous with Hong Kong.” External view One of the points she emphasises is that because Hong Kong has so many external dimensions you really have to look at it from the outside. By doing so, she was able to look at movement out and in, the trading and personal networks, the same-native-place networks, the financial and shipping aspects, and band all these together to see what made the place tick. The Gold Rush of the 1850s was a turning point for Hong Kong, which until then had relied largely on a single trade, opium. Now, it was able to compete with the new treaty ports of Shanghai and Xiamen, and since it was a duty free port, ships and merchants from anywhere could come and go without restriction, and without having to pay too many kinds of dues. Further, the cost of doing business in Hong Kong was low, and it was safe – especially after 1855 and the first Chinese Passengers Act, when the government undertook to check that emigrants leaving Hong Kong were not enslaved, coerced, or tricked into going. The book challenges stereotypes about the ’coolie trade’ and the restriction on Chinese women migrating to California. The coolie (from the Indian word ’kuli’ meaning a hireling) trade grew after the African slave trade was abolished in Britain, but they still wanted cheap labour. They found it in India at first and later China. These manual labourers were sent by the British to places like the Caribbean, Peru and Cuba as cheap – and often forced – workers. But this is totally distinct from the Chinese going to America at this time, who went because they wanted to go. “They were after California gold,” Dr Sinn says. “They wanted to go so badly they would even borrow money for their passage and pay very high interest. However, because there was this trade, people looking at it from the outside often assumed that all Chinese were coolies. “My argument is that there were different kinds of Chinese migrants: those that went involuntarily and those that went voluntarily. But in America in the 1860s–1870s they didn’t like the Chinese and so they called them all Chinese coolies and accused them of being slave-like. As a historian, it is important to draw the line between what is slavery and what is not.” The in-between place The book applies new methodology to the study of migration, in that it looks at the phenomenon of the ’in-between place’. Most migration studies concentrate on the sending place and the receiving place. These are perceived as the two ends of the passage, but often it is not that simple. “Hong Kong was usually neither the sending nor the receiving place, but had a hugely important role in determining where people went and how they got there and also how and where they returned to,” says Dr Sinn. “I argue that Hong Kong was an in-between place. So was San Francisco, because when they arrived people would often stay and work awhile before heading for their intended destination of, say, Sacramento or Los Angeles.” At the same time, migrants in California used Hong Kong as the base to supply their needs – the biggest exports being food and prepared opium. It was also where the Chinese immigrants in the US would remit money to their families. As trade grew, Hong Kong and San Francisco became distribution centres and vitally important in the whole migration process. Officially, Dr Sinn says, the book took 12 years to write, commencing in 1999 when she got a grant from the Research Grants Council to write about Hong Kong’s development as an emigrant port. “But really the book is the cumulative effort of 30 years’ research – including that which I used for my first book on the Tung Wah Hospital,” she says. “A lot of the ideas about charitable work, global networks and the Chinese merchants in Hong Kong reappear in this book. It is a culmination of new ideas, old ideas taking new directions, and associations being made that I didn’t see before.” Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong is published by HKU Press. After 1875, Chinese women wishing to go to the US had to declare that they had not been kidnapped, decoyed or forced to emigrate, and were not going for immoral purposes or to become prostitutes. My argument is that there were different kinds of Chinese migrants: those that went involuntarily and those that went voluntarily… As a historian, it is important to draw the line between what is slavery and what is not. Dr Elizabeth Sinn 32 | 33 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin | December 2013 Books