John Chinaman on the Rand

by Anonymous

Quite the most frivolous of all the pledges given by Mr. Lyttelton on behalf of the Rand lords, was one in which he solemnly declared that to every Chinese labourer recruited from his native land the Ordinance would be carefully explained by the recruiting officer.

I do not recollect that the House of Commons was moved to an outburst of Olympian mirth at this most ridiculous statement. If I recollect aright, the statement was received with that solemn British expression of approval, "Hear, hear!"

"The Ordinance," said Mr. Lyttelton, "will be explained carefully to each labourer before he consents to embark for South Africa."

Now, the Ordinance is a long and complicated document. It would be impossible to explain it to the most intelligent Chinaman in under an hour. Actually, it would probably take him a whole day to completely understand the sort of life he was going to lead on the Rand. For one man to explain the Ordinance to 40,000 of them would have taken about nine years. At the recruiting offices established in China for the purpose of obtaining these yellow slaves, it would have taken at least three years to make all the forty to fifty thousand Chinamen still working on the Rand to thoroughly understand the Ordinance.

This was a reductio ad absurdum argument, which one would have thought must have occurred to the minds of the Government, but if it did occur to them they kept it in the background with due solemnity.

Seeing that the recruiting and sending over to South Africa of more than 40,000 Chinamen occupied less than a year, it is clear that this pretence of allowing the Chinaman to enter upon his engagement with the Rand lords with his eyes open was a pretence, and nothing else. But even if the simplest arithmetical calculation failed to convince the Government, their knowledge of human nature should have made them realize the absurdity of imagining that the recruiting of these men would be carried out on such principles. The recruiter, whether for the Army, or for any other purpose, is very much like a barrister with a brief. He has only to see one side of the argument; he has to close his mind firmly to all considerations other than the fact that it is his duty to get men for the particular purpose for which he is recruiting. Whoever found the recruiting-sergeant telling an embryo Tommy Atkins about the hardships of a life in the Army, of the punishments to which he renders himself liable, of the powers of a court-martial, and the like? He only tells him of the splendid chance he has of serving his King and country; of his handsome uniform; of the influence of that uniform on the female breast, and the like. I have met men who have recruited in South Africa for the Philippines, who have recruited in England for revolutionary committees for some of the South American republics, and I know that the one picture that these men do not paint to their recruits is the picture of their possible hardships. If the white recruiter acts like this to men of his own colour, how was he likely to act towards men of a different colour whom centuries of traditional prejudice led him to regard with contempt and dislike?

I am convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Chinamen at present working on the Rand neither knew then nor know now the exact terms on which they were brought from their homes. Again, it is well known that the Chinaman has a hereditary dislike to forfeiting his freedom of action. However bad his Government may be, he has the same instinct for freedom as the white man in Great Britain. All the best authorities on China agree that he would never of his own free-will have consented to bind himself to the Rand lords on the terms set forth in the Ordinance.

What happened, of course, was that the Chinese local authorities, when asked to assist in the recruiting of men for the Rand, made out a list of all the wastrels, semi-criminals and hooligans who kept their Governments in a state of anarchy and unrest, and forced these men to indenture themselves. In fact, the situation on the Rand is very much as if we had emptied our prisons and turned out all our thieves, murderers and hooligans loose on the veld.

One cannot blame the Chinese Government for so acting. It is a proof rather that that ancient empire still retains, amidst a great deal that is bad and corrupt, a spirit of elementary justice.

It would have been criminal to have sent Chinese citizens to the Transvaal. It was quite another matter to send batches of criminals.