The Chinese Immigration [Exclusion] Act, 1923 and the Structure of Anti-Chinese Racism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 , also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, banned the entry of Chinese people to Canada and required all Chinese in Canada, including the Canadian born, to register with the government. The act devastated Chinese Canadian lives and communities. This paper applies two of Hannah Arendt's insights into the social organization of totalitarianism to understand how anti-Chinese racism has been structured. Focusing on the discourse of Asian/Chinese exclusion in the Canadian House of Commons and Senate in 1922 and 1923, the paper shows that the idea of Chinese exclusion was closely linked to the white supremacist vision of Canada that its land and resources were and should be the monopoly of people of European origins. As such, anti-Chinese racism was not just an ideology, or individual prejudices or ignorance, but it was a social structure that was integral to the making of the country, and whose invention can be traced historically. The historical activity of the Chinese in trying to stop the passing of the act brings the functioning of this social structure into sharp relief. The consequences of this structure continue today. Résumé: La loi sur l'immigration chinoise, 1923 , également connue sous le nom de Loi sur l'exclusion des Chinois, a interdit l'entrée des Chinois au Canada et a exigé que tous les Chinois au Canada, y compris les personnes nées au Canada, s'inscrivent auprès du gouvernement. Cette loi a dévasté les vies et les communautés des Canadiens d'origine chinoise. Cet article applique deux des idées d'Hannah Arendt sur l'organisation sociale du totalitarisme pour comprendre comment le racisme antichinois a été structuré. En se concentrant sur le discours de l'exclusion des Asiatiques et des Chinois à la Chambre des communes et au Sénat canadiens en 1922 et 1923, l'article montre que l'idée de l'exclusion des Chinois était étroitement liée à la vision suprémaciste blanche du Canada, selon laquelle ses terres et ses ressources étaient et devaient être le monopole des personnes d'origine européenne. Ainsi, le racisme antichinois n'était pas seulement une idéologie, des préjugés individuels ou de l'ignorance, c'était une structure sociale qui faisait partie intégrante de la construction du pays et dont l'invention peut être retracée historiquement. L'activité historique des Chinois qui ont tenté d'empêcher l'adoption de la loi met en évidence le fonctionnement de cette structure sociale. Les conséquences de cette structure se font encore sentir aujourd'hui.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".