Extracts from an essay on Early Chinese Experience in the UK

Having written a ten thousand word dissertation on the topic 'Early Chinese Immigration to the United Kingdom and its formation through the 'yellow peril' and British racism', I became aware of the effects that these descriptions of nationalities can have on other groups. With hindsight, I would rephrase 'racism' to 'prejudice' to capture assumptions, animosities and micro-aggressions that would not fall foul of being daubed a "racist" act. 

I am intending to revisit the essay and update it to include more modern discourses. Here are extracts from my conclusion.

At the start of early Chinese immigration, the seamen were grouped and housed according to ethnicity by law. As I have argued above, Chinatowns were formed as both a comfort for the isolated and as a reaction to protect against external hostility. Their insular nature bred fears of suspicious activities, and gave Sax Rohmer’s Fu Machu stories plausibility. Even British attempts to stamp out opium affected changes in the Chinese communities, producing underground opium dens perpetuating the image of a vast syndicate.  

British xenophobia forced the Chinese community into opportunistic occupational niches, like laundering clothes, and in time, takeaways. This engendered the impression of Chinese uniformity and conformed to the Yellow Peril’s notion of homogenous racial invasion. One way in which the Chinese settlers of the 19th Century had freedom was their potential to cohabit and marry local women, although this embittered local English men who already had grievances over jobs and pay. Often these mixed race relationships resulted in boycotts, or even erupted into physical attacks. 

The activities of the NSFU continually demonised the Chinese seamen, despite making up only 5000 of the total 45,000 Asiatic mariners. The prevailing discriminatory milieu during and after the Great War provided the backdrop with which to further smear the Chinese immigrants, on the basis of opium addiction and "corruption" of white females. It was feared that Chinese amoral habits would spread, and as a result, repatriation and deportation decimated an already small minority.  

Britain is now a country where nationality is no longer an arbitrary matter of appearance, or the spot of earth where one has the destiny to plop out onto, as the censuses of the nineteenth century assumed. Let the lessons of the early Chinese immigrants show how destructive xenophobia and racial stereotypes can be to society.