1 00:00:06,300 --> 00:00:15,000 Thank you so much. I have no slides, so you just have to look at me or something else. 2 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:24,120 First, thanks so much to the organisers for inviting me. It's lovely to be here and I too am not an economic historian. 3 00:00:24,120 --> 00:00:32,400 I guess all of us are here at the tail end to give you a different angle of vision on some of these questions. 4 00:00:32,400 --> 00:00:36,900 My paper is drawn from my forthcoming book called The Chinese Question, 5 00:00:36,900 --> 00:00:41,910 which is about the Chinese who participated in the great gold rushes of the 19th century 6 00:00:41,910 --> 00:00:48,390 and the racial politics of exclusion that arose in the Anglo-American settler societies. 7 00:00:48,390 --> 00:00:54,270 In this paper, I think about Chinese gold seekers as ironic historical actors in that period. 8 00:00:54,270 --> 00:00:57,360 It's global economic development, 9 00:00:57,360 --> 00:01:05,970 although we cannot hold them responsible as causal agents in the trajectory of British and then U.S. global economic and financial hegemony. 10 00:01:05,970 --> 00:01:11,790 I propose that we think about them as vectors of both convergence and divergence in the rise of British and 11 00:01:11,790 --> 00:01:20,600 American power and the weakening and isolation of China in the global economy in the 19th and early 20th century. 12 00:01:20,600 --> 00:01:28,640 The gold rushes of the last half of the 19th century were unprecedented in scale and consequence from the California gold rush of 13 00:01:28,640 --> 00:01:37,370 1848 to the discovery of gold in the Yukon in nineteen oh one gold miners and gold mining companies extracted from the Earth. 14 00:01:37,370 --> 00:01:46,040 So four hundred and thirty five million ounces of gold, more than the total amount that had been mined in the previous three thousand years, 15 00:01:46,040 --> 00:01:50,960 perhaps 150000 Chinese participated in the gold rushes around the world. 16 00:01:50,960 --> 00:01:54,830 To be sure, they were a minority of the Goldfield populations, 17 00:01:54,830 --> 00:02:05,120 although they comprise upwards of 20 to 25 percent of the people in the gold districts in California and Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and 60s. 18 00:02:05,120 --> 00:02:10,280 The 60000 Chinese who went to the Transvaal between 1984 and 1910, 19 00:02:10,280 --> 00:02:17,120 were instrumental in the revival and expansion of industrial gold mining after the South African war. 20 00:02:17,120 --> 00:02:23,120 The economic historian Jean-Jacques van Houlton considered the increase in the global supply of gold. 21 00:02:23,120 --> 00:02:29,390 A fortuitous meeting of the monetary demands posed by expanding world trade. 22 00:02:29,390 --> 00:02:36,230 But we might think of it more as a stimulus. A new stage of capital accumulation gold increased the money supply, 23 00:02:36,230 --> 00:02:46,010 promoted investment and trade enabled more countries to go to a gold monetary standard eventuated in it, becoming the international monetary standard. 24 00:02:46,010 --> 00:02:53,270 Gold alone does not explain the rise of Great Britain and then the United States as the world's leading investor and creditor nations. 25 00:02:53,270 --> 00:02:58,700 But gold was definitely a brick in the road of their ascent. 26 00:02:58,700 --> 00:03:05,660 The participation of Chinese in the gold rushes was ironic in several respects at the scale of broad historical sweep. 27 00:03:05,660 --> 00:03:09,440 They contributed to one of the great historical divergences of the period. 28 00:03:09,440 --> 00:03:14,450 The shift from China's commanding position in the early modern global silver 29 00:03:14,450 --> 00:03:20,090 trade to becoming semi colonised by Euro-American powers in the 19th century. 30 00:03:20,090 --> 00:03:26,570 My point here is not to revisit the arguments for the Great Divergence circa 18:00 or 7500, 31 00:03:26,570 --> 00:03:34,880 but to appreciate some of the consequences of this shift from the primacy, primacy of silver or bi metal ism to gold in global trade. 32 00:03:34,880 --> 00:03:42,770 Take, for example, the war indemnities that the imperialist powers imposed on China during a century of humiliation. 33 00:03:42,770 --> 00:03:50,810 The settlements of the two opium wars amounted to 30 million silver dollars, or seven point five million pounds. 34 00:03:50,810 --> 00:04:01,190 These penalties seriously hobbled the ching. But consider those against the indemnities imposed by Japan after the Sino-Japanese War in 1896. 35 00:04:01,190 --> 00:04:11,030 Fifty million pounds and by the boxer protocols of nineteen oh one, sixty seven and a half million pounds payable to the eight foreign powers. 36 00:04:11,030 --> 00:04:21,500 Moreover, indemnities payable in gold, which required China to sell silver on the world market at a time when its price relative to gold was falling. 37 00:04:21,500 --> 00:04:28,430 Notwithstanding, I want to focus mostly on this paper closer to the ground on the Chinese emigrants whose myriad activities 38 00:04:28,430 --> 00:04:34,880 during the gold rush is more directly influenced the changing nature of relations between China and the West. 39 00:04:34,880 --> 00:04:40,010 I will consider gold miners, as well as merchants who were always just a half step behind them, 40 00:04:40,010 --> 00:04:45,800 as was the general case on the Gold Fields or who were former gold miners themselves. 41 00:04:45,800 --> 00:04:51,170 So first, there was a matter of how much Chinese earn directly from gold mining and where those profits went. 42 00:04:51,170 --> 00:04:56,810 Now this is very hard to determine with any precision because Chinese miners tended to underreport earnings, 43 00:04:56,810 --> 00:05:03,920 and much of the data we have are anecdotal. But, for example, in Sacramento County, California, in 1860, 44 00:05:03,920 --> 00:05:13,550 small cooperatives of four to five members own claims assessed on average of $2500, with each partner earning 40 to $50 a month. 45 00:05:13,550 --> 00:05:18,710 And this is actually comparable to the earnings of white miners at the time. 46 00:05:18,710 --> 00:05:25,460 After expenses, one might save three dollars a month or $30 a year to send to one's family in China. 47 00:05:25,460 --> 00:05:31,310 If we try to scale up, we can use other data to get a sense of Chinese economic activity in mining. 48 00:05:31,310 --> 00:05:39,230 For example, in 1861 in California, Chinese paid one hundred eighty seven thousand dollars in foreign miners taxes, 49 00:05:39,230 --> 00:05:44,570 over two million dollars in water charges and one point thirty five million to purchase. 50 00:05:44,570 --> 00:05:50,390 Mining claims some who are lucky a gold mining simply return home with their pile, 51 00:05:50,390 --> 00:05:55,580 as contemporaries would say, returning Chinese often carry gold and gold dust for others. 52 00:05:55,580 --> 00:06:03,740 So there are also remittance carriers. For example, 18 men returning to China from New South Wales in 1857. 53 00:06:03,740 --> 00:06:10,010 On this ship, aethereal carried the gold of three hundred and seventy others worth over 9000 pounds. 54 00:06:10,010 --> 00:06:19,710 One of them carried gold, divided into 72 packets wrapped in long strips of linen, one for himself and the rest for others in. 55 00:06:19,710 --> 00:06:27,660 And near his home village in Guangdong province, and I will say more about remittances later his second, there is a matter of trade. 56 00:06:27,660 --> 00:06:29,760 The gold rush is utterly transformed. 57 00:06:29,760 --> 00:06:37,320 Transpacific commerce, the canton trade of the 18th and early 19th century had travelled through the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, 58 00:06:37,320 --> 00:06:41,220 to Europe and to New York, and Hong Kong was still a struggling port. 59 00:06:41,220 --> 00:06:48,930 Just seven years after a session to Britain, the California gold rush prompted Hong Kong to pivot to the Pacific. 60 00:06:48,930 --> 00:06:57,300 It quickly became the premier Asian Entrepot for both goods and emigrants headed for the Gold Mountains for the year 1849 alone. 61 00:06:57,300 --> 00:06:59,820 23 vessels exported from Hong Kong. 62 00:06:59,820 --> 00:07:09,510 Nearly 5000 tons of goods to San Francisco, including rice, sugar and tea, beer, coffee, cigars and chocolate hats and clothing, 63 00:07:09,510 --> 00:07:20,160 furniture and canvas tools and implements timber logs and planks, window frames, bricks, marble slabs and prefabricated wooden houses. 64 00:07:20,160 --> 00:07:25,560 The Chinese population of Hong Kong itself grew as nearly 8000 people arrived in 1850, 65 00:07:25,560 --> 00:07:33,210 with many intending to produce goods for the California market engaged in the shipping trade or other otherwise work in the booming port. 66 00:07:33,210 --> 00:07:40,890 Chinese commercial firms in Hong Kong, although not as large or powerful as the venerable British and American houses like Jardine, 67 00:07:40,890 --> 00:07:49,230 Matheson nevertheless became important players in the California trade and in the economy of the expanding Chinese diaspora. 68 00:07:49,230 --> 00:07:55,350 Many Chinese merchants on the Goldfields were former miners, hiring others to work their claims while they ran a store, 69 00:07:55,350 --> 00:08:00,420 invested in larger mining operations or branched out into other lines of business. 70 00:08:00,420 --> 00:08:04,050 But the most powerful Chinese merchants were located in the big cities. 71 00:08:04,050 --> 00:08:11,610 For example, Chen Locke that his Cantonese name, an early arrival, was known by the name of his firm Chee lung, 72 00:08:11,610 --> 00:08:16,230 which in time became the largest and most famous Chinese business in San Francisco. 73 00:08:16,230 --> 00:08:22,080 In 1852, Chee long imported as much as ten thousand dollars in Chinese goods at a time, 74 00:08:22,080 --> 00:08:26,340 sold it all in a few days and returned to China for another shipment. 75 00:08:26,340 --> 00:08:34,980 He established branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yokohama. Over time, he and other big merchants owned their own lots, erected their own buildings. 76 00:08:34,980 --> 00:08:40,110 Some merchants purchased their own ships or became shipping agents. 77 00:08:40,110 --> 00:08:46,230 China remained one of San Francisco's three largest trading partners, at least to 1880. 78 00:08:46,230 --> 00:08:49,950 Chinese merchants and shippers carried passengers in both directions. 79 00:08:49,950 --> 00:08:54,480 They imported so-called fancy goods for white customers like silk and porcelain and 80 00:08:54,480 --> 00:08:59,160 rice tea and opium from the growing for the growing population of Chinese immigrants. 81 00:08:59,160 --> 00:09:05,640 They exported wheat, flour, ginseng and mercury, as well as Chinese miners gold dust. 82 00:09:05,640 --> 00:09:10,410 By 1880, there were 25 Chinese import export firms in San Francisco. 83 00:09:10,410 --> 00:09:20,850 The most prosperous were each worth a half million dollars, and many had seats on the city's merchant exchange, including seven who were stockholders. 84 00:09:20,850 --> 00:09:28,380 So let me turn briefly to Australia, where gold was discovered in 1851, touching off the second major gold rush of the 19th century. 85 00:09:28,380 --> 00:09:35,520 Trade with the Metropole increased exponentially, as well as sailing traffic from Hong Kong and Shomon to Victoria. 86 00:09:35,520 --> 00:09:40,350 During the 1850s, Australia became the fourth largest importer of Chinese tea, 87 00:09:40,350 --> 00:09:44,910 consumed not just by Chinese emigrants, but by British colonials as well. 88 00:09:44,910 --> 00:09:49,800 Locating Meng was arguably the most powerful Chinese man in Victoria. 89 00:09:49,800 --> 00:09:56,370 Unlike the Chinese merchants of California, whose trade ran bilaterally between San Francisco and Hong Kong, 90 00:09:56,370 --> 00:10:02,580 loess interests nested in broader, overlapping networks of Chinese and British commerce in Asia. 91 00:10:02,580 --> 00:10:07,920 He was born to a Cantonese merchant on Penang Island in the British Straits settlements. 92 00:10:07,920 --> 00:10:15,420 His family had been settled there for over 100 years, long before the arrival of the British in the late 18th century. 93 00:10:15,420 --> 00:10:21,540 In 1853, Lowe travelled from Mauritius, where he was tending to his family's business to Victoria. 94 00:10:21,540 --> 00:10:28,440 After a few months of unsuccessful gold prospecting, he went to Calcutta and brought back to Melbourne a shipment of goods. 95 00:10:28,440 --> 00:10:35,460 He founded Tang Ming and Co., an import firm. Soon, he would own a half dozen ships. 96 00:10:35,460 --> 00:10:42,150 He imported mainly from Calcutta and Penang and Singapore, raised opium, sugar and other foodstuffs. 97 00:10:42,150 --> 00:10:47,820 He was a major agent of credit tickets, the main way by which Chinese financed their passage to Australia. 98 00:10:47,820 --> 00:10:55,320 He was an investor and founding director of at least a half dozen companies, including a distillery and several gold and silver mining companies. 99 00:10:55,320 --> 00:11:03,890 He held shares in insurance companies and banks and was a founding shareholder and board member of the Commercial Bank of Australia, founded in 1850. 100 00:11:03,890 --> 00:11:05,340 66. 101 00:11:05,340 --> 00:11:13,830 Eventually, his business network extended to mining and Mercantile Ventures in New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and New Zealand. 102 00:11:13,830 --> 00:11:19,340 His business dealings reveal a sport an important distinction in the opportunities Chinese faced in colourful. 103 00:11:19,340 --> 00:11:25,990 You and Victoria, although California banks also did business with Chinese, notably the Wells Fargo and Co. 104 00:11:25,990 --> 00:11:30,820 No American corporation welcomed Chinese capital. Moreover, 105 00:11:30,820 --> 00:11:35,620 locating Meng was part of a Southeast Asian Chinese elite who were confident in 106 00:11:35,620 --> 00:11:39,460 their identity of belonging within both the British Empire and the Chinese. 107 00:11:39,460 --> 00:11:48,160 Diaspora merchant leaders held positions of authority in Chinese native place and clan associations, and as such, 108 00:11:48,160 --> 00:11:56,320 they were spokesmen for Chinese to euro Americans, especially in response to racial discrimination and animus in Australia. 109 00:11:56,320 --> 00:11:59,050 Lo Kang Meng was a leader in both the Senate who IgG1, 110 00:11:59,050 --> 00:12:05,710 the native place association for people from the three counties around Gwangju and the Yi Yi Xing, 111 00:12:05,710 --> 00:12:07,270 which was part of the drug Hong Kong, 112 00:12:07,270 --> 00:12:15,610 the anti Manchu Secret Brotherhood Society that spread across the Chinese diaspora in the middle and late 19th century in both the U.S. and Australia. 113 00:12:15,610 --> 00:12:19,480 Chinese merchant leaders sent delegations to meet with white officials, 114 00:12:19,480 --> 00:12:25,810 wrote letters to the newspapers and published pamphlets that refuted Chinese racial stereotypes, 115 00:12:25,810 --> 00:12:33,280 emphasise their positive contributions to society and appealed to Euro Americans for justice and equal treatment. 116 00:12:33,280 --> 00:12:37,330 They also consistently raised the argument that restricting immigration would damage 117 00:12:37,330 --> 00:12:43,720 trade as early as 1850 to Chinese merchants wrote to the governor of California. 118 00:12:43,720 --> 00:12:50,860 Knowing that your country wishes to trade with China, they argued that trade quote cannot all be in one side. 119 00:12:50,860 --> 00:12:56,710 The gold we have been allowed to dig in your minds is what has made the China trade grow up so fast. 120 00:12:56,710 --> 00:13:05,830 Like everything else in this country, if you want to check immigration from Asia, you will have to do it by checking Asiatic commerce unquote. 121 00:13:05,830 --> 00:13:12,610 Nearly 50 years later, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Wu Tang Fong, wrote in the North American Review. 122 00:13:12,610 --> 00:13:21,520 The immigration and trade were matters of mutual helpfulness and called for true reciprocity in US-China relations. 123 00:13:21,520 --> 00:13:27,250 But if the notion that exclusion harm trade was a fixture in the debates over the Chinese question, 124 00:13:27,250 --> 00:13:33,040 there has actually been little examination of the actual effects of exclusion laws on commerce and trade. 125 00:13:33,040 --> 00:13:38,500 So in the rest of my talk, I want to address that question. And this is complex and multidimensional, 126 00:13:38,500 --> 00:13:42,700 as exclusion had both direct and indirect effects on global trade and commercial 127 00:13:42,700 --> 00:13:47,800 relations in different realms of economic activity and a different scales. 128 00:13:47,800 --> 00:13:52,210 So let's take first the Chinese immigrant merchants and small capitalists whose activities 129 00:13:52,210 --> 00:13:57,850 I have just described the exclusion laws adversely affected them in myriad ways. 130 00:13:57,850 --> 00:14:03,250 Exclusion meant a shrinking population, which meant a shrinking ethnic market. 131 00:14:03,250 --> 00:14:10,720 There were discriminations and harassments, such as San Francisco's ban against walking on a sidewalk with a pole on one shoulder. 132 00:14:10,720 --> 00:14:11,920 In 1897, 133 00:14:11,920 --> 00:14:21,160 the U.S. Immigration Bureau expanded the definition of labourer who would be excluded and narrowed the definition of merchant and exempt class. 134 00:14:21,160 --> 00:14:29,890 After Chinese exclusion became permanent in 1942, a merchant named Leech who wrote quote, How can I call this my home? 135 00:14:29,890 --> 00:14:36,040 And how can anyone blame me if I take my money and go back to my village in China, unquote? 136 00:14:36,040 --> 00:14:41,860 The San Francisco newspaper editor Will Panjab claimed that quote Because of the injustice, 137 00:14:41,860 --> 00:14:46,870 all of the great Chinese merchants who formerly paid one third of the customs duties at 138 00:14:46,870 --> 00:14:53,620 the Port of San Francisco have gone back to China or do business in other countries. 139 00:14:53,620 --> 00:15:00,580 In Australia, Chinese capitalists had invested in mining and plantation agriculture in the far north in the 1870s. 140 00:15:00,580 --> 00:15:01,840 But by the turn of the century, 141 00:15:01,840 --> 00:15:09,490 these opportunities narrowed as immigration restrictions constrain the availability of Chinese labour upon which they depended. 142 00:15:09,490 --> 00:15:14,830 The Australian historian Paul Griffith argues that the elite Anglo-American Anglo-Australian 143 00:15:14,830 --> 00:15:21,100 interests chose to destroy the economy of the Northern Territory rather than let Chinese develop it. 144 00:15:21,100 --> 00:15:26,230 Queensland, with substantial capital already invested in agricultural development, 145 00:15:26,230 --> 00:15:36,310 hired whites to replace Chinese and Pacific Islander labourers on plantations with higher wages subsidised by the government. 146 00:15:36,310 --> 00:15:43,330 Cooktown, which had thrived as a port connecting northern Queensland to Singapore and Hong Kong, declined after 1890. 147 00:15:43,330 --> 00:15:47,770 And in Melbourne and other southern cities, Chinese remain confined to the ethnic market, 148 00:15:47,770 --> 00:15:52,390 with just a few niches that serve no non-Chinese consumers like gardening, 149 00:15:52,390 --> 00:16:00,400 farming and furniture making with your economic activities in the United States and in the British settler colonies. 150 00:16:00,400 --> 00:16:05,530 Chinese labour and merchant immigrant energies directed elsewhere. 151 00:16:05,530 --> 00:16:14,620 Migration from southern China to Southeast Asia dramatically increased after 1870 16 million between 1891 and nineteen thirty eight. 152 00:16:14,620 --> 00:16:20,320 I get this figure from six and a half and forty million from India. 153 00:16:20,320 --> 00:16:27,070 Although Chinese has settled in the Nanyang for hundreds of years as locating Meng's family exemplified the late 19th and early 154 00:16:27,070 --> 00:16:35,140 20th century booms in tin mining and rubber production for European industrial markets required ever larger numbers of workers, 155 00:16:35,140 --> 00:16:40,570 and they were recruited from long established trade and labour networks. 156 00:16:40,570 --> 00:16:46,210 We also see migration from northern China to Manchuria from 1890s to World War Two at comparable 157 00:16:46,210 --> 00:16:52,210 scale in response to Russian and Japanese industrial and mining development in the region. 158 00:16:52,210 --> 00:16:58,960 So exclusion resulted first in greatly diminished economic activities for Chinese merchants and capitalists in the West, 159 00:16:58,960 --> 00:17:06,640 and second in the concentration of Chinese labour and mercantile emigration to Southeast Asia and North Asia. 160 00:17:06,640 --> 00:17:12,730 The first did not directly cause the second, but neither are the two trends merely coincidental. 161 00:17:12,730 --> 00:17:18,460 Both were integral to a broad reorganisation of global migration in the early 20th century. 162 00:17:18,460 --> 00:17:24,640 British settler my emigration to the White Dominions East and southern European emigration to the INDUSTRIALISE, 163 00:17:24,640 --> 00:17:32,890 the industrialising centres of the Americas and Asian migrations to the colonial economies of Southeast and North Asia. 164 00:17:32,890 --> 00:17:41,530 This new ethno racial pattern of migration was not simply a spontaneous response to labour and capital market demands. 165 00:17:41,530 --> 00:17:46,300 Rather, they resulted from a confluence of political and economic measures that directed 166 00:17:46,300 --> 00:17:50,890 labour and commercial energies in certain directions and not in others. 167 00:17:50,890 --> 00:17:54,310 These included negative policies like Chinese exclusion, 168 00:17:54,310 --> 00:18:02,260 as well as positive policies such as deliberate British efforts to divert immigration from the United States to Canada and the other dominions, 169 00:18:02,260 --> 00:18:10,420 and the tireless work of industrialists, agriculturalists, labour agents and shipping companies to recruit labour from Europe to the Americas, 170 00:18:10,420 --> 00:18:17,090 from India and China to Southeast Asia and Chinese to North Asia. 171 00:18:17,090 --> 00:18:21,830 OK, I'm going to skip the part about tea and conclude with some additional comments. 172 00:18:21,830 --> 00:18:23,510 Well, let me just say this about tea. 173 00:18:23,510 --> 00:18:31,520 I mean, China's exports of tea plummet in the late 19th century, and we talked about that a little bit yesterday. 174 00:18:31,520 --> 00:18:40,640 But I just want to point out that Australia is amazing in how far it would go in its racial the racial basis of its policies. 175 00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:51,020 The value of Chinese tea exports to Australia plummeted after 1886, when at the height of anti-Chinese agitation, 176 00:18:51,020 --> 00:18:57,950 and a contemporary noted that hostility towards China outweighed all other considerations, including those of a commercial nature. 177 00:18:57,950 --> 00:19:05,090 The Australian colonies also similarly refused to participate in the Anglo Japan Treaty of 1896, 178 00:19:05,090 --> 00:19:13,760 which would have opened a lucrative Japanese market to Australian wood wool on account of that treaty's provision for free Japanese immigration. 179 00:19:13,760 --> 00:19:19,280 OK, so let me conclude with some comments on immigrant remittances. Contemporary observers, 180 00:19:19,280 --> 00:19:27,260 chain customs officials and Western economists in the early 20th century and remark on the scale of overseas Chinese remittance. 181 00:19:27,260 --> 00:19:36,380 The ching diplomat Huang Tention, believed remittances from California in the 1880s to be about 1.2 million a year, 182 00:19:36,380 --> 00:19:43,910 a credible estimate if just a quarter of the population in California sent $30 home in a year. 183 00:19:43,910 --> 00:19:50,480 In 1983, Hosam Morris of the Chinese Maritime Customs House considered quote China's most important invisible 184 00:19:50,480 --> 00:19:57,320 asset to be her export of brawn and brains in the emigration of a portion of her redundant population, 185 00:19:57,320 --> 00:20:06,230 whether as traders or labourers, unquote. He quoted Fujian Customs Commissioners who called attention to the cash assets derived from remittance, 186 00:20:06,230 --> 00:20:12,470 including those made by 2.5 million men who were earning money in Manilla, 187 00:20:12,470 --> 00:20:20,270 Java and the Straits, amounting to over 10 million silver dollars a year, or one point ninety five million pounds. 188 00:20:20,270 --> 00:20:24,950 Morris calculated Chinese remittances to be at least 73 million tails a year, 189 00:20:24,950 --> 00:20:30,740 or about 11 million pounds, including that figure in China's assets for 1983. 190 00:20:30,740 --> 00:20:37,310 Morris calculated that China's assets exceeded his liabilities, a modest net surplus in its balance of trade. 191 00:20:37,310 --> 00:20:42,500 Now I won't go into this here, but these accounting structures are somewhat arbitrary, 192 00:20:42,500 --> 00:20:47,840 and they also omit omit all Hong Kong trade because there are no customs data for that. 193 00:20:47,840 --> 00:20:53,060 But the point is that he's trying to he's trying to make a point about the importance of remittance. 194 00:20:53,060 --> 00:21:00,140 And more was not the only analyst who credit overseas Chinese remittance for balancing China's trade accounts. 195 00:21:00,140 --> 00:21:07,910 The economists see of Riemer of the University of Michigan, writing in 1933, believed some four to five million overseas Chinese, 196 00:21:07,910 --> 00:21:14,270 perhaps 60 percent of the total immigrant population, regularly sent remittances home to China. 197 00:21:14,270 --> 00:21:19,850 He revised Morsi's figures upward based on his own investigation of bank records to arrive at an 198 00:21:19,850 --> 00:21:27,980 estimated average annual remittance of 50 million U.S. dollars per year for the period 1982 to 1913. 199 00:21:27,980 --> 00:21:32,990 He acknowledged that the small remittances of individual labourers from laundry men in 200 00:21:32,990 --> 00:21:39,560 America to rubber workers in Malaysia constituted a considerable amount in the aggregate. 201 00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:48,230 But the great sums, he said, are remittances of business profits and of income from property holdings, especially in Southeast Asia. 202 00:21:48,230 --> 00:21:54,560 Remittance supported a transnational culture that sustain immigrant family ties and subsistence. 203 00:21:54,560 --> 00:22:01,250 Sending money home, fulfilled familial obligations and raised the standard of living and social status of immigrants, 204 00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:05,060 families in towns and villages in the late 19th century. 205 00:22:05,060 --> 00:22:10,880 Thirty dollars but enough rice and small necessities for a small family for a year. 206 00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:18,020 In addition to household maintenance, remittances, built houses, schools, libraries, roads, hospitals and railroads. 207 00:22:18,020 --> 00:22:23,030 The people of keeping county in Guangdong lined the roads leading into their county with 208 00:22:23,030 --> 00:22:28,520 fortified watchtowers to repulse bandits attracted by the wealth of remittance families. 209 00:22:28,520 --> 00:22:30,980 And this is now in UNESCO's sight. 210 00:22:30,980 --> 00:22:39,320 The prosperity of immigrants sending regions in Guangdong and Fujian provinces testified to the power of overseas remittance, Rima noted. 211 00:22:39,320 --> 00:22:45,350 Quote The Chinese have built up business investments abroad with practically no out payments from China. 212 00:22:45,350 --> 00:22:53,750 These investments bring into China payments from outside, which are of the greatest importance in her balance of payments, unquote. 213 00:22:53,750 --> 00:22:59,870 Thus, even as exclusion policies shut Chinese out of the social and economic mainstream in the West, 214 00:22:59,870 --> 00:23:06,620 the emigrants carried Goldust home in the linings of their jackets and sent foreign exchange through remittances. 215 00:23:06,620 --> 00:23:12,050 One of the greatest ironies, perhaps of the Chinese question is that overseas Chinese in the United States, 216 00:23:12,050 --> 00:23:19,920 Australia and Southeast Asia held onto their savings. And remitted large amounts to China when the price of silver dropped. 217 00:23:19,920 --> 00:23:24,520 Thank you.