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    “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967
    “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967
    “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967
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    “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967

    By Jiwu Wang

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    A history of Chinese immigrants encounter with Canadian Protestant missionaries, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967, analyzes the evangelizing activities of missionaries and the role of religion in helping Chinese immigrants affirm their ethnic identity in a climate of cultural conflict.

    Jiwu Wang argues that, by working toward a vision of Canada that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, missionaries inevitably reinforced popular cultural stereotypes about the Chinese and widened the gap between Chinese and Canadian communities. Those immigrants who did embrace the Christian faith felt isolated from their community and their old way of life, but they were still not accepted by mainstream society. Although the missionaries’ goal was to assimilate the Chinese into Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, it was Chinese religion and cultural values that helped the immigrants maintain their identity and served to protect them from the intrusion of the Protestant missions.

    Wang documents the methods used by the missionaries and the responses from the Chinese community, noting the shift in approach that took place in the 1920s, when the clergy began to preach respect for Chinese ways and sought to welcome them into Protestant-Canadian life. Although in the early days of the missions, Chinese Canadians rejected the evangelizing to take what education they could from the missionaries, as time went on and prejudice lessened, they embraced the Christian faith as a way to gain acceptance as Canadians.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateFeb 25, 2010
    ISBN9781554588152
    “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967
    Author

    Jiwu Wang

    Jiwu Wang earned his PhD in religious studies from the University of Ottawa. He has taught at universities in Canada and China and published numerous books and articles on history of religion in China and Canada and on racial relations in Canada. He is co-editor of A Dictionary of Christianity and co-author of An Introduction to Christian Culture.

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      Book preview

      “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril” - Jiwu Wang

      His Dominion and the Yellow Peril

      Editions SR /Éditions SR

      Editions SR/Éditions SR is a general series of books in the study of religion, encompassing the fields of study of the constituent societies of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/Corporation canadienne des sciences religieuses. These societies are: Canadian Society of Biblical Studies/Société canadienne des études bibliques; Canadian Society of Church Historic Studies/Association canadienne des études patristiques; Canadian Society for Study of Religion/Société canadienne pour l’étude de la religion.

      GENERAL EDITORS: Theodore de Bruyn, Mary Ann Beavis, and Joanne McWilliams

      Editions SR

      Volume 31

      His Dominion and the Yellow Peril

      Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada 1859–1967

      Jiwu Wang

      This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Wang, Jiwu, 1956-

      His Dominion and the Yellow Peril: protestant missions to Chinese immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967 / Jiwu Wang.

      (Editions SR; v. 31)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-88920-485-0

      ISBN-10: 0-88920-485-3

      1. Chinese—Missions—Canada—History. 2. Protestant churches—Missions—Canada—History. 3. Chinese—Canada—Religion—History. I. Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion II. Title. III. Series.

      BV2810.W35 2006            266’.022’089951071                C2006-901363-2

      © 2006 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/ Corporation Canadianne des Sciences Religieuses and Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Cover image: "The Heathen Chinee [sic] in British Columbia," from Canadian Illustrated News, April 26, 1879. JohnVerelst/Library and Archives Canada/C–092414.

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      Printed in Canada

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      For my parents

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      List of Tables

      Introduction

      Chapter One

      Chinese Immigrants and Their Lives in Canada

      Chapter Two

      Individual Missionary Efforts to Reach Chinese Immigrants in Canada since 1859

      Chapter Three

      Establishment of the Missions: The Organized Work among the Chinese from 1885 to 1923

      Chapter Four

      Crisis and Development: Missions from 1923 to 1967

      Chapter Five

      Response to Chinese Immigrants and the Motives and Methods of the Protestant Missions

      Chapter Six

      Chinese Response to the Protestant Missions

      Conclusion

      Notes

      References

      Index

      Acknowledgments

      I would like to take this opportunity to thank many archivists at the United Church Archives, the United Church of Canada B.C. Conference Archives, the Archives of the Anglican Provincial Synod of B.C. and Yukon, and Library and Archives Canada, whose generous assistance facilitated my research.

      Thanks are due to Theodore de Bruyn of Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion for his encouragement and invaluable suggestions throughout the manuscript’s review, to three helpful reviewers, and to the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and the Journal of Canadian Ethnic Studies for permission to include material that appears in chapters 4 and 6. I am also grateful to Evan McIntyre for his proofreading and Ian MacKenzie for his meticulous copy editing of the manuscript.

      I would like to add a special word of thanks to my dear friends Tim Fletcher, Kim Fletcher, and their three children, who are the first friends I made in Canada. Their hospitality and kindness helped through those lonely days when I first came to Canada.

      My greatest debts are to Professor Robert Choquette, who supervised this project in its first incarnation as a doctoral dissertation, and whose unequalled knowledge, sympathy, and patience have significantly improved the value of this study. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to study with him over the years of my doctoral studies in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa.

      This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

      My wife, Yahong Sui, gave me the support that is beyond measure and price, for which my simple thanks seem most inadequate recompense. This book is dedicated to my parents, who first taught me to write and instilled in me a sturdy sense of purpose that sustained me during the long and often difficult writing process.

      List of Tables

      Table 1.1 Numerical and Percentage Distribution of Chinese Population for Canada, 1871–1967

      Table 1.2 Numerical Distribution of Chinese Population by Provinces, 1881–1961

      Table 1.3 Chinese Immigrants Admitted to Canada by Intended Occupation, 1950–1959

      Table 1.4 Chinese Immigrants Admitted to Canada by Intended Occupation, 1960–1967

      Table 1.5 Percentage Distribution of Chinese Population in Canada by Religious Affiliation, 1901–1941

      Table 3.1 Chinese Membership in Major Protestant Churches

      Table 4.1 Chinese Population in Canada by Religious Denominations for Provinces, 1931

      Table 4.2 Chinese Population in Canada by Religious Denominations for Provinces, 1941

      Table 4.3 Geographical Distribution of Chinese Population by Major Cities, 1881–1961

      Table 4.4 Percentage Distribution of the Chinese Population by Major Canadian Religious Denominations, 1931–1961

      Table 6.1 Percentage Distribution of Chinese Population in Selected Provinces by Religious Denominations in 1931

      Introduction

      Chinese were among the earliest non-white immigrants to enter Canada. The first influx of Chinese immigrants occurred in British Columbia between 1858 and 1868, when they were attracted to Canada by the opening of the Cariboo goldfields. In the early 1880s, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought more immigrants from China to the province. Following this second wave of mass immigration, Chinese immigrants began to move east and settled in most provinces across the country. The Chinese population in Canada continued to grow steadily in the following years, except between 1920 and 1940 when Chinese immigration to Canada was forbidden in the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.

      Most Chinese brought their traditional religions with them when they immigrated to Canada. However, they soon became the targets of Christian missions. Protestant missionaries, mainly those from the Methodist Church of Canada, began their efforts to evangelize Chinese immigrants in the late 1850s. In 1885, the Methodist Church launched the first organized mission to Chinese immigrants in Victoria, British Columbia. A few years later, the Presbyterian Church also started its organized missionary work among the Chinese in Montreal, Toronto, and Victoria. Following these pioneering missionary activities, other Protestant denominations and organizations, such as the Anglicans, Baptists, and YMCA, entered the field of missions to Chinese immigrants. The Protestant endeavour to convert the Chinese bore considerable fruit in the following years. According to the Census of Canada in 1961, over half of the 58,197 Chinese immigrants in Canada had become affiliated with a Canadian Protestant denomination.

      The mission to Chinese immigrants was an extraordinary experience for the Canadian Protestant churches. While anti-Chinese sentiment was broadly shared among other Anglo-Canadians, the Protestant clergy—mainly those from Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches—challenged this public hostility. They not only viewed the Chinese more favourably than most other Canadians, but also began to work directly among Chinese immigrants. Yet, like many of their contemporaries, most Protestant clergy were influenced by unflattering Chinese stereotypes. They believed that the presence of the Chinese in Canada was a threat to the realization of their vision of Canada as his dominion—an evangelical zeal and earnestness to make Canada white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.¹ They saw their missionary work among Chinese as part of a campaign to defeat the Yellow Peril. Thus, contradictions were always apparent in the thought and missionary activities of the Protestant clergy. On the one hand, they shared anti-Chinese sentiment with other Anglo-Canadians; on the other, their sense of Christian humanitarianism and enthusiasm for evangelizing the world significantly influenced their response to the Chinese immigrants in Canada. Instead of excluding the Chinese from the country, the Protestant clergy attempted to convert them to Christianity and strove to bring them into Canadian society.

      Notes to Introduction begin on page 151

      Since most of the Protestant clergy were preoccupied by ethnocultural prejudices when they evangelized Chinese immigrants, some of their work isolated the Chinese from mainstream society instead of bringing them into the Protestant community. As a result, tensions sprang up between Chinese immigrants and missionaries. Some questions, therefore, can be raised: How did those missionaries transmit God’s love to the Chinese? How did they make the Chinese believe that they were equal to their white brothers and sisters before God, when all they saw around them was hostility? What was the Chinese response to the missionaries’ message when they were deeply rooted in a different cultural tradition reaching back more than four thousand years?

      It is worth noting that ethnocultural prejudice against the Chinese always undermined the evangelical concerns of the Protestant churches. As a result, Protestant mission work among Chinese immigrants in Canada was disappointing during the years when anti-Chinese sentiment was high among Anglo-Canadians. For example, in the early 1920s, almost four decades after the first Protestant organized missionary activities started, the Methodist Church, a major player in the Chinese mission field in Canada, recruited only 243 Chinese members to its mission churches across the country. The total number of Chinese Protestants in Canada was fewer than one thousand, while the Chinese population at the time was almost forty thousand.² However, when discrimination against Chinese immigrants was considerably weakened in the 1950s, Protestant missions received more favourable responses from Chinese immigrants. More churches were built in Chinese communities across the country, and their memberships also increased dramatically.³

      The impetus for the Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants in Canada was both religious and secular. On the one hand, Protestant enthusiasm to make Canada a Christian country brought its missionaries to every corner of the country to evangelize all non-Christian immigrants, regardless of their racial origin, cultural background, and language. On the other hand, the consensus that Canada’s Anglo-Saxon heritage should be maintained provided the Protestant missions with a strong impetus to instill into all other ethnic groups the ideals and standards of Canadian Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Thus, the history of Protestant missions to the Chinese in Canada was also a history of the encounter between two different cultures, and a history of a minority’s survival in a hostile society. In this sense, Chinese-Canadian history goes beyond the Chinese context and includes inter-ethnic relations with the dominant Anglo-Saxons.

      Until recently, the writing of Protestant home missions has been dominated by the theme of heroic figures who won geographical, spiritual, and cultural frontiers for the church.⁴ Regardless of the approach, the works in this tradition of Canadian Protestant historiography viewed the mission as evangelistic movements spreading the Christian gospel, bringing glory to God, extending the church of Christ, and leading patriotic crusades to Canadianize new immigrants, stimulated by the desire to keep Canada’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and the enthusiasm of making Canada his dominion.

      While the studies focused on telling stories, they were written to record the triumphs and the accomplishments of the missionaries and of the denominations and agencies that supported them. They most often took the form of missionary biographies or histories of denominational missions and other mission agencies. In one of the most important books from this historiography, The Methodist Church and Missions in Canada and Newfoundland: A Brief Account of the Methodist Church in Canada, What It Is and What It Has Done, published in 1906, Alexander Sutherland stated that the history of the Canadian Methodist Church’s missionary effort was a story of heroic endeavour inspired by a lofty purpose, with many a romantic incident and a pathos peculiarly its own, and of marvelous triumphs of divine grace in the transformation of notorious sinners into rejoicing saints.⁵

      Although these studies told the story in a wide Canadian historical context and made people aware of the country’s past and the pioneering life of the people who built the country, they were designed to serve sub-fields of theology or missiology. In other words, in this mission historiography, the history of the missions is thought of as the process of a divine evolution⁶ and therefore greatly restricted to a context of denominational identity. It focuses on the missionaries and the expansion of their denominations in specific areas and periods. It discusses the missionaries’ Christian dedication, and identifies their theological ideas and spiritual motivations, as well as their denominations. It considers the work of the missions as religious so it does not examine the reception of the missionaries or their impact on the peoples who were being evangelized, nor does it analyze the missions as encounters between cultures, relations of ethnic groups, and modes of social, political, and economic conflict.

      However, with their influx since the 1880s, new immigrants received attention in several studies of Protestant missions in the early twentieth century. These studies focus on the arrival of these newcomers and the introduction of their cultures and discussion of Protestant churches’ responses to the immigrants, as well as their strategies for converting these people.⁷ In these earlier studies of new immigrants, more attention was given to the church’s responsibilities in the assimilation of these new immigrants and seeking a best way to achieve this goal. All of these studies presented the Protestant mindset of the time: Canada should be a homogenous Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, and the new immigrants were an alien force; thus, it was not only necessary to assimilate them into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, but urgent. This attitude was particularly reflected in R.G. MacBeth’s Our Task in Canada, published in 1912:

      The foreigners that come to this country menace…the welfare of our labouring class…. A great many foreign immigrants do not consider pauperism discreditable, and this is something new on Canadian soil. Then the statistics show that foreigners of certain classes furnish the criminal list beyond all proportion to their numbers…. When these foreigners reside in blocks as they unfortunately do in some cases,…their presence is a menace of a very deadly kind to the body politic…. Our hope is to evangelize the constituent elements of the coming blend before it is too late.⁸

      Against this context, John Webster Grant contributed a new historiography to the study of Canadian mission history in 1984. His Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 presents a critical perspective on the encounter between Christianity and the Indians since the sixteenth century. It also examines the aims and activities of missionaries of all denominations and the Indians’ responses to them. Grant’s book displays the larger picture of Christian missions to the Indians of Canada and discusses the interplay between Indian missions and colonial expansion, the relation between Christianity and civilization, the pattern of Indian missions, and the response of the Indians to Christianity. In Moon of Wintertime, accounts of missionary activities are also interspersed with background information on the parties involved and discussion of issues of the time. Grant’s study exemplifies a new approach to the study of Canadian mission history, which integrates the mission history with the story of Canadian national development. More specifically, by developing a critical narrative of the Protestant mission to the Indians, Grant demonstrates how the history of the Indian mission reflects broader social and economic developments, and how church historians confronted the issue of whether change in religious beliefs was merely the result of social and economic pressures or also the product of an inner search for spiritual truth. The theme of church growth and mission progress was fading into the background of historical analysis.

      Several other studies of Protestant home missions based on these new historiographical standards appeared after the 1970s. Among the most notable are N. K. Clifford’s His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis, Rosemary R. Gagan’s A Sensitive Independence, and John S. Moir’s Enduring Witness. Although the subjects of these studies are much broader than just missionary history,⁹ the authors develop a critical and analytical approach in the study of Protestant home missions, and much of the emphasis of the scholarship shifts from elitist chronicles to a more diffuse interpretation. In A Sensitive Independence, Gagan criticizes Canadian historians’ past historiography as focusing on middle-class wives and mothers who opted for a religious vocation with the failure of a more radical variety of feminism to advance the cause of suffragism. Her studies of Canadian women missionaries concentrate on analysis of the women missionaries’ conflicting motives and their ambiguous perceptions of their work and aspirations, and their struggle for an equality built on their competence to perform the same works as men.¹⁰ Although he tries to record missionaries’ contributions to their churches in a general history of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Moir gives a profound analysis of the Presbyterian Church’s missionary work in Canada. He argues that missions to foreigners always presupposed a double objective, to Canadianize and Christianize. And this missionary strategy was based on an unquestioning faith in Anglo-Saxon superiority. He also points out that this missionary approach often engendered a type of defensive nativism.¹¹

      Much contemporary research has been done on the Chinese as they attempted to make their way in Canada,¹² but little of it focuses on the history of Protestant missions to the Chinese in Canada. This book is therefore to be the first major study on the issue. Earlier studies of the missions to Chinese Canadians were restricted to either denominational missions among Asian immigrants or regional work.¹³ Only Osterhout surveyed the mission work among the Chinese in all of Canada, but his study was restricted to the United Church of Canada and was carried out more than a half century ago. Moreover, as already mentioned, the earlier studies were written mainly to depict the work of missionaries from a missionary point of view and rarely addressed what the missionaries thought about the Chinese, how they sent their message to them, and what the Chinese response to the mission was.

      Studies of the Chinese missions that appeared after the 1970s concentrate more on the analysis of the relationship between the Chinese community and the Protestant church. Among these works, the most important is W. Peter Ward’s The Oriental Immigrant and Canada’s Protestant Clergy, 1858–1925, which analyzes Protestant missionary attitudes toward the Chinese, especially the contradiction between Protestant clergy’s cultural prejudice toward the Chinese and their Christian humanitarianism. In A White Man’s Province, Patricia E. Roy explores the role of the Canadian Protestant churches in building a white man’s province in British Columbia. By examining attitudes of the Protestant clergy toward the Chinese and missionary activities, Roy concludes that the churches reinforced racial separation by isolating Chinese Christians from the local church and encouraging prejudice against the Chinese.¹⁴

      Starting from the rich well of Canadian history, this study will present the story of Protestant missionary work among Chinese immigrants, analyzing the motivations, strategies, methods, and effects of the mission, as well as its gains and losses.

      Chinese responses to the mission will then be carefully considered. In particular, Chinese reactions to the conflict between the pull to maintain their old way of life and the push to change to new ways are explored in a broader Canadian social context. More specifically, it will:

      (1) Describe, analyze, and compare Protestant attitudes toward the Chinese with those of their contemporaries, indicating the factors that led the missionaries to work among the Chinese. For this purpose, the attitude of the general public to Chinese immigrants will be briefly explored.

      (2) Examine the missionary work of major Protestant denominations in different areas and periods. The change of Chinese religious affiliation during these times will also be described.

      (3) Trace the history of Chinese immigration to Canada, introducing their religious beliefs and examining the role these beliefs played in their lives in Canada. Based on this description and examination, the Chinese response to the Protestant mission will be analyzed.

      (4) Analyze the gains and losses of the Protestant mission to the Chinese and the characteristics of the Chinese immigrant’s religious affiliation during the time of the study.

      In short, this study both tells the story about individual missionaries and their senders, and describes the course of events and factors leading to them. It analyzes the complexity of the missions and identifies the ambiguities of the work and motivations of the people involved. This study also examines Chinese responses to the missions and the results of missionary work, which often accentuated the complexities and the ambiguities of the work.

      More specifically, this research is cast in a two-part theoretical framework oriented toward the historical interpretation of the encounter between the Protestant missionary and the Chinese, from the perspective of both sides. First, I explore the history of Protestant missions to the Chinese in Canada, based upon a general model of the development of Canadian Protestantism since the late nineteenth century, first developed by N. K. Clifford in His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis.¹⁵ According to this model, the vision of Canada after Confederation as his dominion provided an inner dynamic for the Protestant movement in Canada for nearly one hundred years. According to Clifford, this vision implied a definition of Canadian culture as a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon culture that shared a heritage of political democracy, evangelical Protestant Christianity, and of the Canadian nation as a vehicle for a moral imperialism that would spread Christian civilization around the world.¹⁶ Canadian Protestants formed their consensus and coalition based on this vision. They used this vision as a framework to determine their task within the nation, to shape their conceptions of the ideal society, and to direct their relations with other ethnic groups. Thus, the history of Canadian Protestantism from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century is the history of an attempt to produce a homogenous Anglo-Saxon Protestant country.

      The missionary work among the Chinese was, without doubt, also guided by this vision of Canada as his dominion. Evangelizing the Chinese, for Protestants, was, in fact, a means to defeat the Yellow Peril. At this point, the sense of Anglo conformity framed the mindset of Protestants, and ethnocultural prejudices preoccupied Protestants’ thought when they made their judgment on the Chinese. This study, in its historical part, follows Clifford’s model to assess Protestant missions to the Chinese and their impact on Chinese life in Canada. It is hoped that this type of approach will permit a better understanding of the history of the missions.

      Secondly, I analyze the impact of the missions on Chinese lives in Canada. Conflict theory supplies the terms needed to analyze the Chinese response to the mission: it assumes that differences in the value system among different ethnic groups leads to inter-ethnic conflict, especially when one group systematically attempts to dominate and exploit the other in a society.¹⁷ And while the dominant group mobilizes its power through force, ideology, or both to assure its dominance, minority groups will respond with counterforce, accommodation, or submission.¹⁸ Along this theoretical line, the study explains how Chinese immigrants utilized their traditional religion

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