July 1 marks the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act

July 1, 1923 was a dark day for Canada.

Nearly four decades after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, which saw 17,000 Chinese labourers hired to work in perilous conditions, the Government of Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act.

Commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the law severely restricted Asian immigration to Canada.

Within 12 months of the law being passed, Chinese and other Asian people had to register with the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization. They had to carry a registration card that has been likened to South Africa's apartheid pass book, and failure to show it meant they could be subject to deportation.

As a result, it is estimated that only 15 Chinese immigrants gained entry to Canada between 1923 and 1946.

A duty to remember

Professor Alice Ming Wai Jim is an art historian and curator at Concordia whose work addresses the lack of representation of racialized communities in Canadian art history. She has been educating Canadians about anti-Asian, Black, and Indigenous racism in North America and artistic responses to these darker lesser-known chapters.

"The Chinese Exclusion Act was the culmination of three decades of anti-Asian sentiment manifested through anti-Asian movements, race riots, and other laws intended to 'Keep Canada White,’" she says.

“In visual culture, you see a lot of racist caricatures in the historical records of Chinese people depicted as invading alien hordes, and this is also where the idea of the ‘Yellow peril’ begins to pick up steam. The result of the ban was an early Chinese Canadian bachelor society because it was mostly men who were recruited to work on the railroad in the 1880s, basically through a form of indentured servitude for four- to five-year periods."

Infamously, no Asian or Indigenous labourers were included in the photos of the final railroad spikes being driven into the ground.

The Chinese head tax had been applied from 1885 until the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923.

"When the railway was completed in 1885 you had a lot of labourers in need of other jobs," she continues. "The government was wondering if these people were going to stay and seek enfranchisement — so that's when these policies originated."

The rapid increase in the cost of the head tax, which went from $50 in 1885 to $500 in 1903, is an indication of how quickly legislated anti-Asian racism and yellow peril discourse progressed.

"These discriminatory policies had a profound impact on Chinese Canadian and other Asian communities. It separated families for decades and created a sense of exclusion that persisted long after the act was repealed in 1947."