Chinese Jamaicans are Jamaicans of Chinese ancestry, who include descendants of migrants from China to Jamaica. Early migrants came in the 19th century; there was another wave of migration in the 1980s and 1990s. Many descendants of early migrants have moved abroad, primarily to Canada and the United States. Most Chinese Jamaicans are Hakka and many can trace their origin to the indentured Chinese laborers who came to Jamaica from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. According to one study, approximately 4% of Jamaican men have a direct Chinese paternal ancestor.
Migration history Despite an old census record stating a "Chinese Painter" named Isaak Lawson lived in Montego Bay, St. James, in the year 1774, most Chinese Jamaicans are Hakka and can trace their origin to the indentured labourers who came to Jamaica in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. The British parliament studied the prospects of Chinese migration to the West Indies in 1811, and in 1843 made an attempt to recruit Chinese workers to come to Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago, but nothing came of it. The two earliest ships of Chinese migrant workers to Jamaica arrived in 1854—the first directly from China, the second of onward migrants from Panama who were contracted for plantation work. A further 200 arrived in the years until 1870, mostly from other Caribbean islands. In 1884, a third group of 680 Chinese migrants arrived. Records from the Jamaica Archives show that some Chinese immigrants arriving in 1884 traveled from Hong Kong under labor contracts and were assigned to work on estates in Jamaica. With the exception of a few from Sze Yup, most of these migrants were Hakka people from Dongguan, Huiyang and Bao'an. This third wave of migrants later supported more of their relatives to come from China.
Early Chinese migrants, primarily male, often entered into common-law unions with the Afro-Jamaican women who worked in their businesses. However, Chinese women rarely married Afro-Jamaican men. Interracial marriage became less common as the number of women of Chinese descent in Jamaica grew. Nevertheless, in the 1943 census, the government classified the nearly 45% of Jamaicans with some Chinese ancestry as "Chinese coloured" (mixed Chinese and African descent).
When black and Indian women had children with Chinese men, the children were called 'chaina raial' in Jamaican English. The Chinese community in Jamaica was able to consolidate as men were open to marrying Indian women as there were fewer Chinese women in the community. According to Jamaican social historian Verene A. Shepherd, the sharing of women was less common among Indians in Jamaica. Indian men fought over the small number of Indian women, which contributed to an increase in the number of Indian men murdering their wives. From 1845 to 1847, Indian women made up 11 percent of the annual Indian indentured migrants in Jamaica.
The influx of Chinese indentured immigrants aimed to replace the outlawed system of black slavery. It entailed signing a five-year contract that bound the laborers physically to specific planters and their estates and subjected them to physical and financial penalties whenever any contractual conditions were broken. The contracts consisted of a $4 wage for a 12-hour work day, also including food, clothing, medical care, and housing, although these contracts were regularly violated. Chinese immigrants could also arrive independent of the indentured system. These independent immigrants could come by paying their own way as an individual free migrant, or they could come sponsored and have their passage paid for reimbursement later. In 1917, the entire indentured immigration system was outlawed, largely due to pressure from Gandhi, who was then leading the nationalist movement in India.
From 1910, Chinese immigrants were required to pay a £30 deposit and pass a written test to demonstrate that they could write 50 words in three different languages. The restrictions on Chinese migrants were tightened even further in 1931, but relaxed again by 1947 due to lobbying by the Chinese consulate. The 1943 census showed 12,394 Chinese residing in Jamaica. These were divided into three categories by the census, namely "China-born" (2,818), "local-born" (4,061) and "Chinese coloured" (5,515), the latter referring to multiracial people of mixed African and Chinese descent. This made Chinese Jamaicans the second largest Chinese population in the Caribbean, behind Chinese Cubans. By 1963, the Chinese had a virtual monopoly on retail trade in Jamaica, controlling 90% of dry goods stores and 95% of supermarkets, along with extensive holdings in other sectors such as laundries and betting parlours.
In the 1970s, thousands of Chinese Jamaicans fled a wave of inter-ethnic violence against them; at first, they went primarily to Canada, which was more open to immigration than the United States, with the U.S. becoming a major immigration destination later on. As a result, clusters of Chinese Jamaicans can be found outside Jamaica primarily in locales like Toronto, New York City and South Florida. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a new wave of Chinese migration to Jamaica, consisting of Hong Kong and Taiwanese entrepreneurs who set up textile factories on the island targeting the U.S. market and often brought in migrant workers from China to staff their ventures.
Community organizations In comparison to Overseas Chinese communities elsewhere, hometown associations related to migrants' places of origin in China were not very influential among migrants to Jamaica. Some secret societies such as the Hongmenhui were active in organizing plantation workers in the 1880s; however, the first formal Chinese organization in Jamaica was a branch of the Freemasons. Later, the Chinese Benevolent Association (中華會館) was founded in 1891. The CBA established a Chinese Sanatorium, a Chinese Public School, a Chinese Cemetery and a Chinese Almshouse. It also published its own newspaper. The CBA helped maintain a strong connection between Chinese Jamaicans and China, while simultaneously preparing Chinese Jamaican students for the Jamaican school system. The CBA continues to operate from a two-story building with guardian lion statues in the front; the ground floor is occupied by the Jamaican-Chinese Historical Museum. The building has been featured on a Jamaican postage stamp.
The first Chinese-language newspaper in Jamaica, the Zhonghua Shang Bao (中華商報), was founded in 1930 by Zheng Yongkang; five years later, it was taken over by the Chinese Benevolent Association, who renamed it Huaqiao Gongbao (華僑公報). It continued publication until 1956, and was revived in 1975. The Chinese Freemasons also published their own handwritten weekly newspaper, the Minzhi Zhoukan (民治周刊) until 1956. The Pagoda, started in 1940, was the first English-language newspaper for the Chinese community. The local branch of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) also began publishing their own paper, The Chung San News (中山報) in 1953.
Prior to Jamaican independence, there was an annual Miss Chinese Jamaica pageant, initially organized as a fundraiser for the CBA. It came to be supported by The Pagoda, which wrote editorials exhorting girls from the Chinese community to join, and in some years offered sponsorship prizes such as, in 1955, a two-week trip to Miami for the winner, in an effort to spark participation in what was sometimes a sparsely attended event. However, as the pageant grew in popularity, it drew charges from Afro-Jamaican journalists that the ethnic pride on display there was "unpatriotic" and "un-Jamaican". The pageant renamed itself to the Miss Chinese Athletic Club, in an effort to avoid controversy, but nevertheless, held its final "openly racialised beauty contest" in 1962. Over the following years, Chinese Jamaican women did not participate in the Miss Jamaica pageant for fear of racial controversy. However, this informal colour line was broken in 1973, when Patsy Yuen entered and earned the Miss Jamaica title in 1973, going on to place third in the Miss World competition in London; however, Yuen publicly portrayed herself as a completely assimilated Jamaican with little connection to her Chinese heritage, claiming in media statements that she didn't even like Chinese food, in order to avoid "disrupt[ing] the official picture of the country's identity".
There was also a Chinese Jamaican community school, the Chinese Public School. It was set up first by the Chinese Freemasons in 1920 (under the Chinese name 華僑公立學校), and operated until 1922; a Chinese drama club revived the school in 1924 (and gave it a new Chinese name 新民學校, literally "New People's School"), charging tuition fees of £6. The drama club continued to operate the school until 1928, when the CBA purchased it for £2,300 and gave it its present name, and moved it into a larger building. The CBA promulgated a new constitution for the school in 1944, which stated that it would follow the curriculum of the Republic of China's Ministry of Education and that Chinese was the primary medium of instruction while "foreign languages" were secondary. In 1945, with enrollments booming to 300 students and competitor schools being established as well, the Republic of China consulate called for donations to renovate the school, eventually raising £10,000. In the 1950s, there was heated debate in the community over the medium of instruction, with some suggesting curriculum localisation in the name of practicality, while others saw abandonment of Chinese-medium instruction as tantamount to abandonment of Chinese identity. Practical considerations won out; the curriculum was reorganised with English as the primary instructional medium in 1952 and by 1955, the school only had two teachers who could speak any Chinese. After that, the school's fortunes fluctuated and it was finally closed down in the mid-1960s.
The Chinese-Jamaican community remains prominent. In 1970, there were still 11,710 Chinese living in Jamaica. The community remains strong and they continue to celebrate traditional Chinese holidays, such as the Harvest Moon and Chinese New Year.
Interethnic relations The Chinese establishment of grocery shops throughout Jamaica had provoked concern amongst whites and blacks in Jamaica as early as 1911. It was widely believed that the Chinese were guilty of arson against their own property for insurance purposes, whereas previously they were only accused of sharp business practices.
Along with other immigrant ethnic groups to Jamaica that had made significant entrepreneurial achievements such as Lebanese, Syrians and Cubans, Chinese entrepreneurs were ready targets for the frustrations of some of the local Jamaican poor.
According to a newspaper report (31 March 1934) on "pernicious drugs" in Jamaica, the issue concerning opium became one of the early roots of xenophobic attitudes against the new Chinese immigrants of the early 1900s. The white elites became intolerable of this new wave of Chinese migrants coming in large numbers as shopkeepers. The newspaper editorial (10 June 1913) made the distinction between the earlier Chinese migrants and their present "poverty stricken, ignorant fellow countrymen", who were blamed for the 'opium scare' in Jamaica now that the "natives are succumbing to the vile and deadly habit". This first anti-Chinese thrust was rooted in the opium drug trade. The foundation was set for the first and a massive anti-Chinese riot in 1918.