Revenge of the Diaspora: How Chinese Migrant Networks Disrupted South African Indenture, 1903–10

This paper explores a transnational campaign initiated by the aggrieved South African Chinese community to disrupt efforts to bring indentured Chinese workers to the country. Following British annexation in 1902, between 1904-1910 more than 60,000 Chinese workers were transported to South Africa’s Transvaal colony on contracts of indenture to labour in the country’s gold mines. This was an enormously complex and costly endeavour, and a significant episode in the histories of South Africa, China, and the British Empire. But recruiting those workers did not initially prove so easy as South African mine magnates and their agents expected. In fact, upon the arrival of their first investigatory mission in China in 1903, recruiters found themselves already the target of a popular campaign against the scheme. As recruiting began in earnest the following year, posters denouncing the scheme sprung up in coastal cities, accounts of mistreatment appeared in Chinese newspapers, and mysterious letters of warning reached senior officials. Though recruiters ultimately managed to fill their quotas in troubled North China, the campaign contributed to the complete failure of their efforts in Guangdong and Fujian. While British officials blamed Japanese or German interference, the real origins lay within their own empire. In the Transvaal itself, the community of primarily Cantonese traders had been pleading with the local and imperial governments for reprieve from a battery of discriminatory legislation. This community took the opportunity provided by the mining scheme to publicize their grievances, protect their kin from exploitation, and throw a wrench into the works of empire. In doing so they mobilized networks stretching across Southeast Asia and South China, intersecting with simultaneous campaigns demanding dignity for Chinese migrants across the Pacific. This paper brings together disparate traces from across Africa, Southeast Asia, and China to reconstruct the history of this subversive movement.