Talk:History of Chinese immigration to Canada/Archive 2

POV edits by IP user
Sigh. Tweak here, tweak there, fudge here, twist there.....any chance the IP-only user who's been making strategic edits here care to identify themselves? And any chance you might care to justify your edits with actual citations? As it is the prejudicial language and selective-evidence content of this page continues unabated, and shamelessly so. My removal of "many Chinese were left without work" plus "as a result" has to do with the FACT that that is not the reason the Head Tax was passed at that time; this is like the silly claim, edited out a while ago, that Chinese moved east of the Rockies to escape racism in BC (as if there weren't any east of the Rockies). Everybody else was out of work in 1885, too, kiddies, and they were ALL "immigrants" not just the Chinese (who at least had been working while those they displaced could not....).Skookum1 (talk) 17:48, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey Skookum, the IP edits seem to be coming from a pretty big variety of domains. I'm not sure why you're convinced it's one person. (no, it wasn't me). Calling the Chinese immigrants isn't specifically wrong, just because everyone (well, the hwanitum anyway) was an immigrant... I don't see why you find that inflammatory or POV. And, just out of curiousity, why do you think the head tax was imposed? The reasoning behind it should probably be included in the article, no? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 20:31, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Inflammatory NO, POV YES - because it's an implication that they were "immigrant" within other immigrants, i.e. "immigrant" is now commonly used to mean "visible minority" (as apposite to "Europeans" who are not referred to as immigrants, except in FN-written histories) without any sense of its historical context; I have the new CBC book on the gold rush and it apes Barman's noxious usages, where everybody but the Europeans are "immigrants" - even though everybody was, even Canadians (she somehow makes an exception for Portuguese, as if Joe Silvey weren't somehow regarded as an equal by his neighbours, which he was). In any case "Chinese immigrants" is redundant, unless ALL other groups are referred to in the same way; and in point of fact, immigrant is the wrong word because many at the time were contract labourers, who were NOT "immigrating" but on the equivalent of a work visa; an immigrant is someone who applies for citizenship, period, despite its latter-day quasi-derisive use by academics.  And just out of curiosity, have you taken time to read Morton's book, which details out all the various attempts (before 1885) to pass a head tax, as well as all the reasons why it was argued for and against by BC politicians?  If you want an answer, get the book and friggin' read it, you'll see why I don't like the language I deleted.  In pure semantic/grammatical terms it wasn't because there were many unemployed Chinese that the Head Tax was passed (it wouldn't have affected them since they were already in the country); it was because the boatloads of "immigrants" hadn't let up despite the railway contracts being over and done with; most of these headed for the Cariboo and Fraser Canyon goldfields, where they continued to make the money the CCNC insists they didn't.  Morton's book is an eye-opener and, although written in the PC-mode of the early '70s, is one of the few books around which actually lays out the British Columbian position on things like the head tax instead of condemns it knee-jerk across the board.  AIRC Ottawa reluctantly imposed the Head Tax and reluctantly later raised it - reluctant because of trade/diplomatic sensitivities with China, as also today - but it wasn't bnrought in because Chinese were employed; rather the contrary.Skookum1 (talk) 22:27, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't have time to read Morton's book. You are saying then, that the Canadian government imposed the Head Tax because they didn't want to share the wealth/resources with Chinese immigrants? They were, at the same time, encouraging immigration from England, were they not? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 23:52, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

My wikibreak is about to (half-) end so I'll be around more, but as I'm in Halifax now and waht remains of my library is still in BC I can't source the passages in Morton's book I've been thinking of paraphrasing, or even quoting directly, about this or that; and adding detailed immigration data which is in his book and interestingly not in the PC-passive-aggressive academic writing since. Your closing questions indicate the misperceptions that these poorly written and highly biased output of writing have created and fostered. It['s one of the fallacies about talking about all white people collectively in Canadian/BC history, because there are different elements, not a single common racial agenda; rather a range of reasons, and in the case of BC's position on labour and immigration a very different one from Ottawa; and the businessw powers even within BC's white elements (Onderdonk and the CPR were carpetbagger-interlopers) the positions of the Dunsmuir clan were very and those of pre-railway settlers very different from those who came in either to work on it or after its completions; the gangs which comprised the winter riots of 1885-86 ("Chinese MacDougall incident") were Ontarians and Maritimers, not BCers, for instance; Dunsmuir liked to hire Chinese labour, though for different reasons than Ottawa had ordered it. Ordered it, and the reason was that BC's expectations that British labour, specifically Cornishmen and Welshmen and Geordies, be used to build the BC section of the railway was rejected by Ottawa was too expensive; this is one of the "Carnarvon Terms" of the original constiututional agreement that, in being rejected or ignored by Ottawa, nearly resulted in BC's leaving Confederation in the mid 1870s (hence the famous 'Carnarvon Terms or Separation" arch which Gov Dufferin refused to pass under); Ottawa's forcing railway construction ahead - MacDonald's doing so, betraying his Victoria constituency's interests and desires - caused the importation of Chinese labour to work on the railway; it was not BC's idea, nor popular among even the business class in BC; their immigration policy was primarily pro-British, and only by consequence (being on the maritime doorstep of China since the maritime fur trade first linkedd the PacNW and Canton...) was it necessarily anti-Chinese. Ottawa - or rather the magnates of Montreal and Toronto who controlled it - could hagve cared less about seeing BC settled by British immigrants; it was and is only incidental to their empire, BC only an acquisition to give the industrial cities a Pacific railhead. They may have actively promoted British migration in other parts of Canada, but BC was noty a priority; and it was Britons who mobilized to settle the Okanagan, not central Canadian interests, who only see BC as a resource region and a port ever since then, just as you have above ("sharing in the resources" etc....what about building a common society????). BC's many attempts to pass a head tax of its own were at first overturnedc by the Privy Council (in colonial days; and actually under Doughlas there was an attempt to impose a head tax on EVERYONE because of the American/European, i.e. non-British, influx) and after 1871 rejected by Ottawa. Ottawa only installed the Head Tax, and raised it, to mollify the risk of open political rebellion, even social/labour rebellion, in BC, and also to mollify China and imperial Britain's relations with it. it grates me that this complex history is boiled down to "white European policies against [insert minority] were always racist" is just BUNK and I'm tired of it. None of hte evidence indicates this; it's only the opinions of heavily-ide4ologized academic writing which has obscured the truth, all in the name of the "new history", as they like to call it, "History is being rewritten" and all other kindfs of creepy 1984-ish newspeakisms. The head Tax policy had f**k all to do with:
 * '' the Canadian government imposed the Head Tax because they didn't want to share the wealth/resources with Chinese immigrants?

....which is a gloss of the usual cant about white greediness and selfish. The Chinese had been freely partaking of the wealth/resources of BC since 1858, with (as in Morton) sevne of the ten wealthiest on Bictoria's first tax rolls being Chinese, adn by the 1870s and 1880s the goldfields as well as most of the agrictultural alienations in the Interior in Chinese hands; and remained so in some areas. The head tax was about railway labour, about uncompetitive wages and contract monopoly; resistance to Chinese labour in rfact is at the core of BC's labour movement growth from the 1880s through to the Great War, it was not about "not wanting to share wealth/resources". It was about "jobs for the boys" and wanting a British-European flavouredsociety rather than an Asian one; it's not as if there was any moral onus on British Columbian colonists to build a colony open to anyone (don't forget it had been created to keep it from being American...), no moral onus other than the one imposed by post-modern academics posthumously upon them like some kind of post-rationalists Judgement Day against evildoers. All religion, really, and like other religions based more in emotion than fact. "didn't want to share the wealth/resources" etc etc - hell, people in those days didn't think like that. They were building a global British society? Why in hell wopuld they want to be settled by as many people from a completely different culture, who unlike the Scandinavians and Germans and italians and Hawaiians and others (irrespective of colour, and inclouding Americans of all colours) readily assimilated. Bear in mind also that "immigrant", again, is highyly unsuitable for a group whose formal organizations referred to BC as "the Colonies of T'ang (China)" (i.e. of free, non-Qing China)....even held their own courts, and with Begbie's mandate and cooperation. But gold-rush era settlers all got along, famously, and BC society had accommodated the dominance of Chinese merchants, miners and also things like freighting companies and more (including the house servant, laundry and produce/grocery complex). That's all for now; what I'm tryhing to get you to understand is that modern perspectvies - terminologies such as those you have used - are prejudicial by nature, seeking to JUDGE an age gone by without adctually knowing much more about it than the easy judgements of "the head tax was imposed so white people did not have to share resources with Chinese immigrants). No, it was imposed to keep BC from becoming much as a Chinese colony as BC would have been if the numvbers of Americans in teh 1850s-1860s had remained high; the logic was that these were subjeftgs of the Celestial Emperor, not of Her Brittanic Majesty.  Simple enough; the head tax was meant to discourage immigraiton.  Obviously didn't work, even once it was raised.  yet it's portrayed as the next best thing to slavery or the death camps of the Nazis, as if it were that heinous, as well as overblown and hysterical, as well as misinformed. I'm gonna play some music now. It's late....Skookum1 (talk) 05:33, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Valuable resource on goldfields
I knew about this paper (In the colonies of Tang : historical archaeology of Chinese communities in the north Cariboo district, British Columbia (1860s-1940s) / by Ying-ying Chen, c.2001) a while ago; I thought it was here where I changed Gum Shan to Colonies of T'ang as the Chinese name for BC; Gum Shan is primarily a California ref (according to its article, which may just be a USPOV problem). "Colonies of T'ang" is used in the manifesto of the Chinese Benevloent Association on display in the Barkerville Museum; the author of said paper worked for/with the Barkervile museum/archives in the course of his thesis research. Now I have to go figure out which article that was, as this cite is needed there....Skookum1 (talk) 16:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Chinese-language interwiki
I"m increasingly curious what the Chinese-language version of this article says/claims, also its talkpage. Could someone here please translate this (and the takpage) before I run it through a mechanical translator?  I love those things, the renderings can be hilarious (had some especial fun with Brazilian Portuguese to English and vice versa...).  Anyway I'm very curious, given the wide variance between the popular mythology and the hard facts...I would image btw that the Chinese-language eequivalent of Talk:Tibet is probably even more or sa swamp than its English-language counterpart.  Maybe put the translation up as a sandbox page off this talkpage?.Skookum1 (talk) 21:55, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

History or Policy of?
I removed some more editorialization and scanned over much of the new additions in the "Immigration in the 21st Century" section, the bloated content of which is mostly about the Head Tax Redress campaign and not about the history of immigration as such. This article almost needs retitling to Policy of Chinese immigration to Canada; its history content remains half-baked and in need of great expahsion; instead additions focus on all the ways other Canadians allegedly continue to discimrinate against Chinese, and critiques government policy and media coverage from a POV standapoint; and again, about policy, not really about history. Many citations are also from POV websites or POV books/articles and are not used to maintain NPOV, rather attack it or prevent/pre-empt it. Actual historical immigration figures are out there; this article should not be a discussion of policy but of the actual history; it doesn't help that Chinese Canadian sources themslves often dont' have the history right, and are all POV-charged (the CCNC's being one of the worst, but not alone; there's a Digital Collections thing out there that's downright disinformational and full of only-negative-history. Anyone else who can see this article is more of a "whine" than a factual account is welcome to help trim the POV dross here and neutralize the language; unforutnatley most people adding to this page are more concerned with advancing a position, or backing up ethnic-agenda views of Canadian policy....again, it's policy that's being added here, not history.....The content I removed just before the remaining mention of the mayor of Markham was a POV introduction to that paragraph; if a non-POV version can be reinstated, fine; but I think the views of non-Chiense Canadians are negiatively portrayed without fair treatment of their concerns; "it was discovered that" is a POV claim made by Chinese Candian politicos/pundits, it's not an objective statement......Skookum1 (talk) 14:32, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Head tax material
As noted in the rpevious section, the 21st C. section is mostly about the Head Tax redress campaign, or part of it......not about the history of immigration. The bulk of teh Head Tax material should be moved to Head Tax (Canada) (which probably sounds a lot like this sectino already) and a condensed version left here with a main template directing to the Head Tax article.Skookum1 (talk) 14:41, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Pay rates grossly misrepresented
In the account of railway construction at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1433-9249/life_society/chinese_immigration/clip8 the pay scales are cited as $1.50/$1.75 a day for white workers (generally Irish and Cornish) and $1/day. How does this jibe with the usual claim that the Chinese were paid only 1/5-1/6 of what whites were paid? (CCNC site and many others). I know, I know, I'll get accused of racism for challenging the prevailing mythologies; the same clip is the one place I've heard in the media where it's admitted that it wasn't whites who employed the Chinese at these rates, but "contractors" in Vancouver, Victoria and Hong Kong - in other words, "snakehead" contractors, none of whom were white. It also is stated in the clip that Onderdonk claimed there were no white workers available, which isn't quite true, although it's true that (as wit the building of the North West America at Nootka Sound in 1788) it took a lot shofter time to voyage from HK to BC than it does from the UK to BC (a few months vs. 18 months); but using the rail crossing of the US, or for that matter the many Britons and Irish who'd worked on the American railroads, this is a straw man argument. And the main reason for the urgency of Onderdonk's need was that Ottawa and the CPR had fudged the earlier timetable to ge the railway built and now had a new deadline to meet; but that was of their own doing, and also had to do with their refusal to assist immigration to BC from the UK (which would have been a threat to the population dynamics of the ON/QC deadlock on the Canadian voting structure, which remains in place to this day). I'm not grinding axes here, just wishing that people would get their noses out of their own ethnic troughs and learn to see (and admit to) the larger picture.Skookum1 21:26, 12 July 2006 (UTC)


 * While I don't have any documents on hand at the moment, one thing worth considering is what else was included in railway workers pay. White workers were housed in railway bunk cars and had meals provided for them.  Asian labourers had no such bunk cars, they slept in tents which they purchased from the CPR.  To eat, they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway.  When looking at earnerings you need to look at the larger scope, beyond just the salary.  Once you take other factors into consideration, claiming asian workers earned 1/5 what his white counterpart earned is not all that far fetched.
 * You're still labouring under the misconception that it's the fault of the whites that the Chinese worked for those wages; they were contracted by Chinese businessmen and were not forced to work for those wages; rather they were hired at them, much to the chagrin of others who would not work for the same (an "other" which included others than whites, including the Hawaiians, native Indians, Mexicans and others present in early BC). And you're wrong about the rice: part of their pay was in rice "mats", which were prepped in China and shipped over, as it was their preferred diet; and again, it was a Chinese contract, not a British Columbian one, that fed/paid them according to these terms (details in J. Morton In The Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia).  As for the comparison to white workers re accommodations, given that the bulk of labourers in the Onderdonk contracts were Chinese, the whites in question would be foremen, managers, and of course Onderdonk himself; and while they have had houses in Yale and North Bend and the other canyon towns, this was commensurate with their position and their contracts, and with company policy for managers; the claim that white workers were housed in houses while the Chinese in tents is further proven to be a fallacious "we were victimized" whinge when you look at the construction pictures from Eagle Pass and the Kicking Horse, etc., where large numbers of whites worked (as well as other non-Chinese); you'll see that those construction camps were also tents, and not houses.  Yale and North Bend were meant to be company real estate showpieces, and Yale was company HQ in BC until the designation of Vancouver as the terminus, so it behooved the company to build appropriate quarters for itself and its management, not just to establish class/hierarchy (implicit in any organization) but also to sate stockholders that the company was reputable.  Also worth commenting on that, from Boston Bar upstream, the area in question is dryland and not prone to rain, unlike Yale (where what Chinese there were lived in houses, i.e. the merchants of Yale's Chinatown); and for the record up around North Bend one Chinatown along the tracks was in earth-houses of a kind very similar to those used by other pioneers; half-dug into the earth, sort of a log root-cellar.  And those who lived in caves around Spences Bridge did so because the Chinese contractors who had gotten them there didn't cough up the last pay cheque, or provide means for them to leave the area once construction was done (again see J. Morton).  The issue of Chinese working conditions in the railway period cannot be fully and honestly discussed until a reckoning is made with the actions of the Chinese companies/wealthy men who profited from and cheated their own countrymen.  Others lived in tents and suffered harsh conditions; it's the nature of the frontier.  You weren't singled out and many of the conditions complained about were, as mentioned, contracted for and expected.  Tent accommodations in frontier work in BC remains, in fact, common (tree planting, geologists/prospectors, etc etc).  What did they expect in 1880s railway construction jobs anyway?  Feather beds?Skookum1 06:30, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * they grew their own rice, the seeds which were also bought from the railway

!!The CPR wasn't in the business of importing rice seed, and as already mentioned rice mats were the form of pay and also the food supply. A few Chinese may have tried to go rice, but it mystifies me as to where they did that as I know the Fraser Canyon geography extremely well and, while its growing season is long enough, there's just no water in the quantities needed for rice. And I would have heard of rice cultivation in the Fraser Valley, where while there's water there was also not much in the of usable agricultural land cleared by the 1880s; it took the railway to bring in the settlers necessary for that. What the Chinese did grow for their own use still grows wild along the tracks in areas of the Fraser Canyon and Thompson Country, however: white opium poppy.Skookum1 06:34, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd say the sub-contracting by Chinese businessmen is relevant, but hardly erases blame. Shoe companies like Reebok continue to do the same thing today, claiming they have no control over mistreatment of overseas workers by labour subcontractors: a pretty week excuse, in my opinion. In the case of the railway, when the workers are working in Canada, it's even less excusable. -- TheMightyQuill 16:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Many people here are talking about assigning blame for the plight of whichever group. The purpose of the discipline of history is not to find blame or fault, but to uncover what happened in as unbiased a manner as possible.  The Chinese were subject to taxation and eventually faced an outright prohibition on immigration to Canada.  We can look at which groups in society pushed for these laws, the justification they gave at the time, and what other motivations they may have had that weren't publicly aired.  This is not for the purpose of assigning blame or contributing to a culture of victimization--if such a culture exists--but to contribute to the historical discourse.  Articles in tertiary sources such as encyclopedias or general textbooks should refrain from including judgments, ideological or otherwise.  If you want a historical essay about popular misconceptions of wages paid to immigrant labourers and its contribution to a contemporary culture of victimization, write an article for one of the amateur historical journals (or a scholarly journal if you are feeling ambitious).


 * Oh the simple truth, history as it really was. Thanks for your Rankean view, but I'm not really intested. The article doesn't explicitly make judgements, place blame or fault, which maintains NPOV, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be interested, and talk about it in the background. If it has no relevance for today, why should anyone care? -- TheMightyQuill 22:45, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The background reasons for the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 in Canada needs elucidation, as do the similar Acts in US, because current US immigration policy is being heatedly debated regarding illegal immigration from Mexico, Central and South America and legal H-1B, L-1, student, trade agreement and other visas during a period of high unemployment among citizens. The same abuses, mythologies, racism, finger pointing, and lies are dominating debate.Danarothrock (talk) 19:14, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Repeated deletions of gold rush section
It amazes me that this section keeps on getting deleted; the overall focus of modern Chinese Canadian politics is the railway era and the Head Tax, and apparently that's what many people think that's all this page should be about. The railway history is in fact inextricable from that of the goldfields; one reason railway workers had to continuously brought in was attrition, i.e. so many quit the crappy conditions on the railway to head for the goldfields that it was THAT, not mortality rates as the myth would like people to believe, that required new labour to be brought on. The history of dozens of small mining towns in British Columbia can NOT be told WITHOUT the story of the Chinese mining populations; some had outright majorities, like Stanley and Quesnel Forks, and many others like Grand Forks, Princeton, Granite Creek, Hazelton, Dease Lake were at least a third Chinese in composition (i.e. of non-natives). In other words, this section needs EXPANSION, NOT deletion. Similarly, the history of fish canning in British Columbia cannot be told without them, whether it's along the Lower Fraser or on the many canneries up and down the Coast. It would help if Chinese Canadians themselves, especially their historians and politicians, would start acknowledging all this instead of constantly harping on railway labour and the head tax. It's as if they don't want the success of the mining era, and the mercantile prosperity that accompanied it for many Chinese, to be told at all. I hope others who I've alerted to the ongoing problem with deleting history from this page will watchlist this; I missed noticing these deletions this time, though have caught them before; I guess I'll just come back with a raft of citations to add about where Chinese worked/lived. I added the picture of Ah Hoo, who was a famous resident of the Omineca, because it's a demonstration of the resilience of Chinese miners, and also their adoption of "backcountry ways"; some backcountry towns were very Chinatown-like in character; e.g. Lillooet and Stanley and Barkerville; in more remote locations such as Dease Lake there was no segregation, and no attempt to establish or retain Chinese lifestyles. Sometimes in published histories there are citations of the allegedly widespread violence against Chinese accounting for why there were none in the Interior/North; specific cases I know of mention Lillooet and Granite Creek and Hazelton, where claim-jumpers were driven out (no matter what ethnicity) in the 1860s/70s or in Granite Creek's case in the '90s.....but all those towns retained large Chinese afterwards; with Lillooet's non-native population from the end of the Golden Cache Rush in 1899 (when most miners went north to the Klondike after it came out that the Cache had been "salted") to the inception of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway in the 1910s, the vast majority of Lillooet's non-native population was Chinese, and the Chinese merchants in town remained right up until World War II, moving out only after the war. But for some reason there are people who simply want to delete this, over and over, as inconvenient to waht they want (their) history to be portrayed as; it's a tragedy that there are no Chinese-language translations of local town histories in all these cases, or even of major BC-wide histories; it makes me wonder what is published in Chinese.....Skookum1 (talk) 14:57, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Douglas Jung
I removed the part on Douglas Jung's "Private Member's Bill" on the Chinese Adjustment Program since this is false information. The Chinese Adjustment Statement Program was never implemented by way of government legislation (let alone a private member's legislation) in the House of Commons. During Jung's term as an MP there was no legislation on the topic. The program was announced on June 9, 1960 (not 1962) by the Hon. Ellen Fairclough, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.--RXcanadensis (talk) 14:12, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I removed the following footnote from the main page and am storing it here. It reads, "chinese or more commonly known as "chinks" have been steeling our jobs from the very beginning. Te cosmetics industry is being stolen from hard working canadian tax payers. these often illegal immigrants should be prosecuted without mercy.in 2011 it was illegal to fornicate with any chinese canadian citezen. Inorder to do this you had to pay for an asian pornography licence. "Jihadcola (talk) 19:29, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Merge discussion
I put a mergeto tag to here from Chinese in Vancouver, which other than being mis-titled in various ways (including treating Richmond as "Vancouver"), it is very thin on the ground and what little there is replicates what is already here and in Chinese Canadians (which could be the other place the "Vancouver" article could merge to). While there is a case to be made for an article specifically addressing the Chinese Canadian experience in BC, it was decided long ago that this pan-Canada article was more than enough; the merge-proposal title seems to be about Greater Vancouver rather than the City of Vancouver, also, as well as some of the content in Chinese in Vancouver being decidedly ethno-POV in orientation/sourcing (we), it has only one source, and was written by someone in the US).Skookum1 (talk) 07:10, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

What determines whether something is a suitable subject or not is WP:GNG. It says:
 * "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list."

And it's not one source:
 * Johnson, Graham E. "Hong Kong Immigration and the Chinese Community in Vancouver" (Chapter 7). In: Skeldon, Ronald. Reluctant Exiles?: Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese (Volume 5 of Hong Kong becoming China). M.E. Sharpe, January 1, 1994. ISBN 1563244314, 9781563244315. Start p. 120.
 * Ng, Wing Chung. The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power (Contemporary Chinese Studies Series). UBC Press, November 1, 2011. ISBN 0774841583, 9780774841580.
 * Yee, Paul. Saltwater City: Story of Vancouver's Chinese Community. D & M Publishers, Dec 1, 2009. ISBN 1926706250, 9781926706252.
 * Anderson, Kay. Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Volume 10 of McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History, ISSN 0846-8869). McGill-Queen's University Press (MQUP), November 4, 1991. ISBN 0773508449, 9780773508446. - See profile at Google Books (it's not yet used, but it clearly exists, doesn't it?)

And I also found:
 * Ironside, Linda L. 1985. Chinese and Indo-Canadian Elites in Greater Vancouver: Their Views on Education. M.A. thesis, Simon Fraser University.

Consider these AFDs:
 * Articles_for_deletion/History_of_the_Hmong_in_Merced,_California
 * Articles_for_deletion/History_of_the_Armenian_Americans_in_Los_Angeles
 * This was back in 2007: Articles_for_deletion/Irish_Americans_in_New_York_City

Whoever "decided long ago" must know that the decision you speak of is no longer valid. Wikipedia will not accept a merge of this subject. WhisperToMe (talk) 10:46, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment Oh, so YOU are Wikipedia? 2007 was also "long ago" also; lots was; I've seen standing conventions overturned piecemeal by those ignorant of the subject who just tout guidelines they haven't even fully read, claiming they're "policy".  Chinese Canadians exists, as an article about individuals, History of Chinese immigration to Canada exists; a parallel article on BC, where Chinese Canadian history began and where it has been a central focus of politics there ever since, was deemed by other WP:Canada folks to be unnecessary as the history of Chinese immigration to BC is implicitly that to Canada also, and the "two" subjects are so intertwined as to be difficult to separate.  Point is that you started a stub without knowing very much at all about the subject, or even without reviewing these two articles; your current title in its current form Chinese in Greater Vancouver belies an outsider's perception that Chinese history and society in BC is limited to the urban sphere; and it has the problem of inferring "citizens of (Greater) China" in its syntax; Chinese Canadians in Greater Vancouver is more correct but "Chinese Canadians in British Columbia" is more the real case, especially historically where most small towns had significant Chinese populations (many had overwhelming majorities like Richfield and Centreville and Stanley); so is your article about "anyone who is ethnically Chinese" or is it about Canadians who are Chinese?  And note that in its current titling its subject should be about individuals and not a history or social study;  which would be "Chinese Canadian history in Greater Vancouver" or "Chinese Canadian history in British Columbia".  For someone who ranted about writing lots of ethnicity articles worldwide you seem blithely unaware of these titling-conventions.  And re your list of AfD "precedents", this is not a deletion discussion but a merge discussion, and until your purpose with these two ethno-titles is more clear (why are you so ardent in pursuing them, when you know so little about the subjects or the place??), there remains no reason for a separate article on them; unless perhaps you intend to do Chinese Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area also?  It's not like there's a gap in the coverage of Chinese Canadians in Wikipedia; you say you would write e.g. German Canadian and Italian Canadian content "once sources become available" - as if they weren't.  "Ethnic Vancouver" as a title for your template is somewhat offensive when only two groups are present on it, given the city's incredibly diverse background.  Again, I'd argued for an article on Chinese Canadian history in British Columbia but got shot down and shrugged off; your BOLD creation would be more convincing if (a) you knew more about the subject matter (b) had a framework matching the title (c) weren't pursuing a political agenda (of some kind) and (d) didn't limit it to the city, as you have done. But at what point your article overlaps with the existing ones is inexorable; it's not me you have to prove the separate-existence of the article to, but where it would necessarily go would match what is already in existing articles.  What new do you have to add?  Or is pointing to AfDs about other places your only tack here?Skookum1 (talk) 01:27, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The "Hongcouver" name alone indicates that this is an encyclopedic subject. WP:GNG is satisfied through ample sources. There are many discussions about the changes in Richmond (the growth of the Chinese population), the wealthy Chinese buying things, etc. The AFDs establish precedent. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:39, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Man, did you pick a bad example as a "justification" ("Hongcouver") but it's a waste of time explaining to you why, as I already painfully know all too well; using that as justification for a separate article is just wading into deep, deep water and it was a brief one-off in the '80s; other than being trendily invoked by the occasional int'l headline, it's a dead term; and neither "side" likes it. Re Richmond there's already Golden Village, re Vancouver-as-city there's Chinatown, Vancouver, and then there's Metrotown.  Chinatowns in Canada and Category:Historical Chinatowns in British Columbia have some cursory outlines of the breadth of Chinese settlement/commerce in the 19th Century; yet no doubt you haven't even looked around at what's covered in existing articles, so hell-bent you are on writing your WP:OWN.Skookum1 (talk) 02:39, 26 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Merge withdrawn. As I've now moved the Vancouver-only title to Chinese Canadians in British Columbia, and to prevent the divisive GV/BC split re the Indo-Canadian parallel merge, and because I'd always advocated there be a separate BC article from the "Chinese immigration" one (which by its title should focus on immigration numbers and immigration politics, not on Chinese Canadian history/society as a whole), I am withdrawing this merge proposal; as it will be stalemated by stubbornness as has been the Indo-Canadian merge "discussions".Skookum1 (talk) 03:54, 26 October 2014 (UTC)