"The Mysterious Oriental Mind": Ethnic Surveillance and the Chinese in Canada during the Great War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT/RESUME This article examines the surveillance of the in Canada during the Great War, focusing on the experience of the Nationalist League (CNL), one of the largest political organizations in Canada. It examines the process by which Canadian surveillance officials came to view the country's population as dangerous and potentially subversive by the end of the Great War. Though in part manifestation of the broad xenophobia that led to the oppression of other ethnic groups in Canada during the Great War, this article contends that suspicion of the was deeply rooted in traditional Western perceptions of the as sly, devious, and mysterious race. These perceptions nourished suspicion of the and sustained the surveillance in the absence of substantive evidence implicating the CNL in seditious activities. The surveillance resulted in the suppression of the CNL and arrest of its leaders in September 1918. Cet article examine la surveillance des chinois au Canada pendant la Grande Guerre, se concentrant sur l'experience de la ligue nationaliste chinoise (LNC), un des plus grands organismes politiques chinois au Canada. Il examine le processus par lequel les fonctionnaires canadiens de surveillance ont commence regarder la population chinoise du pays comme dangereuse et potentiellement subversive vers la fin de la Grande Guerre. Cependant en partie une manifestation de la large xenophobie qui menee l'oppression d'autres groupes ethniques au Canada pendant la Grande Guerre, cet article affirme que le soupcon des chinois ete profondement enracine dans des perceptions occidentales traditionnelles des chinois comme une race rusee, detournee, et mysterieuse. Ces perceptions ont menees au soupcon des Chinois et ont soutenues la surveillance en l'absence de l'evidence substantive impliquant le LNC dans des activites seditieux. La surveillance eu comme consequence la suppression du LNC et l'arrestation de ses chefs en septembre 1918. INTRODUCTION On 1 September 1918, in Victoria, British Columbia, local barber named Wong Chun assassinated Tang Hualong, government minister traveling through Canada en route to China. Wong ambushed the Minister and his entourage and fatally shot Tang at close range, committing suicide at the scene after failed attempt to shoot the Minister's secretary. (1) The assassin was member of the Nationalist League (CNL), the North American wing of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement and vehement critic of Premier Duan Quiri. Tang, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Minister of Education and the Interior, was returning from official visit to the United States intended to secure war loans for Peking, and as such, Wong's political affiliation became the main focus of the coroner's inquest. (2) Investigators deemed the act to have been politically motivated, and evaluation of the assassin's motive shortly evolved into indictment of the CNL as whole. Exercising powers available under the War Measures Act, the federal government banned the CNL, along twelve other political organizations, under Order in Council PC 2384 in September 1918. (3) media coverage of the assassination was quick to stress the peculiarly oriental nature of the crime. Headlines in the Victoria Daily Colonist declared, Local Chinatown in Ferment: Assassination of Tang Hua Lung Creates Great Excitement and Predictions Made of Further Trouble. The reporter noted that an Oriental impassiveness characteristic of the Chinese could not hide the undercurrent of excitement in Chinatown after the murder, and that despite their effort to solve the real inwardness of the shooting, the police were unable to permeate a seemingly impenetrable veil of mystery and silence surrounding the event. The same reporter commented that Wong committed the murder with fatalism peculiar to the Oriental, and in the aftermath, Chinatown was seething and rife speculation of retribution and further violence (Victoria Daily Colonist, 4 September 1918). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".