Exploiting Chinese Migrants in the 19th Century

Theme: Migration & Displacement

Published: 6 March 2025

Summary
This SCAS Talks episode features Mònica Gínes Blasi, discussing her research on 19th-century Chinese migration, particularly indentured migration. Blasi reveals how Spanish and British colonial policies, alongside human trafficking networks, fueled this system. Her work highlights the interconnectedness of different migration systems, exploring the entanglement of indentured labor with other forms of migration and the complexities of agency among Chinese migrants. The discussion touches on the role of language, translation, and the creation of harmful stereotypes in shaping migration patterns. Blasi's research uses a global perspective, connecting the Chinese experience to broader colonial practices, and offers insights applicable to contemporary discussions on human exploitation and migration policies.

Keywords
Chinese migration, indentured labor migration, labor intermediaries, global history, migration patterns

Suggested Link/s
SCAS page: Mònica Ginés Blasi

The research for this podcast was funded by the EU's research and innovation programme 'Horizon Europe' under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101065464.

Transcript of the Episode

Mònica Gínes Blasi 00:05
In 1855 the consular staff in the southeast China coast found a ship carrying 44 little girls, less than eight years of age. And it turns out that these shipments was a consequence of regulation that had been passed just the year before in Spain, a royal decree which stipulated that one fifth of migrants to Cuba had to be women. And because it was so difficult to find women to emigrate, immigration agents just resorted to trafficking little girls.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:47
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to Mònica Gínes Blasi, postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d’Asie Orientale, ENS de Lyon and a Barbro Klein Fellow at Scotts during this academic year, 2024/2025. She is a labor historian specialized in Chinese global labor migration and debt bondage in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research focuses on the international networks that operated Chinese indentured labor migration and child and woman trafficking in treaty-port China and beyond. We're going to talk about some of her work today. And this is the third episode in our theme "Migration and Displacement". Very welcome to the studio, Mònica.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 01:36
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:38
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 01:41
Sure, I am now working on Chinese migration, and this has been my topic since I finished my doctorate. But I come from a background, a double background, in Chinese Studies and in Art History, and that was really thetopic up to my PhD dissertation, and then after that, I drifted on the topic of Chinese migration in history.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:07
Well, that sounds like a really interesting background. Can you tell us more about how you got into your research topic?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 02:13
My dissertation was on the formation of Chinese art collections in 19th century Catalonia. I was originally interested in Chinese art, but then it turns out that one of the first museums that opened in Catalonia was not in Barcelona. It was in Vilanova i la Geltrú, which is a town near Barcelona, and it was created by the Minister of Overseas Affairs at the time, that was politician and intellectual and writer called Victor Balaguer i Cirera. And turns out that the collection had to do with his relations in China. So part of the collection was donated to the museum by a friend of his that had been Vice Consul of Spain in various cities in the south China coast in Macao, Hong Kong, and it turns out he had been involved in a way, in Chinese migration to Cuba. But part of the collection, precisely not the most interesting objects of the collection, were donated by Spanish immigration agents working also in the South China coast, in charge of a significant portion of the migration to Cuba as well, but to other places all over the world. So he was responsible for Chinese migration to California, Australia, to Peru, to various sites. So basically, he was a human trafficker. But they were behind the formation of this early collection, and I found it so intriguing that a young Vice Consul received petition from this other immigration agent called Francisco Abellá to help him unlock the obstacles that he was finding in organizing migration to Cuba in the 1870s. And you can really see this interconnection between the politicians in Spain, the planters and authorities in Cuba, and also the Vice Consul in Spain and the traffickers, right. But not only that, but studying that, I realized that some of the consuls and vice consuls in the South China coast were directly involved in this human trafficking, and they were getting paid by certifying every Chinese migrant. So their certifications were, moreover, added to the debt that every Chinese migrant would accumulate and that would be taken off their salary once they got to Cuba. But of course, they had conflict of interests, so it was very important for these vice consuls that as many Chinese migrants would be sent to Cuba as possible, because they would get paid an extra salary from it. So they were really in between the role of an authority and of a labor intermediary.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:31
So very briefly, then what is your research about?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 05:34
So I work on Chinese migration in the 19th century, and I'm interested in looking at how different systems of migration interact. So I have mostly focused on what is called indentured migration to Latin America. And in previous work, I have compared Chinese migration to mostly Cuba, also Peru, with Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. So I compare and look at the entanglements between indentured labor with other systems of migration and labor migration.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:13
So just to clarify, what is indentured migration?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 06:16
So indentured migration is a system that was based on contract labor that became widely in use as a consequence of the British abolitionist campaign in the 1830s. From the 1830s abolitionism brought about a need to find alternatives to enslaved people, and these alternatives were sought in the way of either this indentured system or contract labor system, but also other forms, for instance, apprenticeships. Indenture contracts is a type of contracts that existed from the Middle Ages in Europe, and this tied people to a system of debt bondage, from which it was difficult to break out from. Particularly because Chinese people would come already from backgrounds of poverty, and therefore to emigrate, they would need an advance for the ticket. So when they became recruited, the ticket would be advanced to them, so they would have the ticket paid for and other necessities, for example, clothing, the legalization of documents as well, and all of these will have to be paid from their salary afterwards. But the reality was that after the eight year contract, as it was in the case of Cuba, they would not have created enough salary, enough revenue to be able to pay for the debt. Actually they will have become more indebted, and therefore that would tie them to a system of permanent servitude, where they would often have to sign another contract for, perhaps, in the case of Cuba, for another eight years. And this was something that was common across the colonial world.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:18
That's very interesting, this kind of system that you just have to keep on going in the same loop.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 08:24
Yes, exactly. So it was a form that was not a replacement to slavery, because these laborers often worked alongside enslaved people, still, in certain places, for example in Cuba. But it, of course, had a lot to do with the abolition of slavery.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:43
So this sounds like a very complicated and entangled system all in all.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 08:48
Yes, the global perspective, this has been done already by historians before me. So connecting Chinese migration, for example, to Cuba with Chinese migration to colonies of the British and the French empires, for example. But I'm trying to give it a more comprehensive and integrative perspective by seeing the connection with other systems of migration that perhaps happens later in time. So for example, Chinese migration to sites in Southeast Asia, to Dutch colonies, and also entangling these Chinese migrations to internal systems oftrafficking, and, for instance, the trafficking of little girls, women, the selling of wives. And also the trafficking of young boys within China, but also overseas, and especially to Southeast Asia. So I'm trying to give this comprehensive perspective. And by giving this comprehensive perspective, including also the trafficking of girls and women, it allows us to properly portray a gender perspective of Chinese migration, which has been portrayed in the historiography as mostly male until now.

Natalie von der Lehr 10:10
I just wonder this Chinese then who were emigrating. Did they want to emigrate? Did they have to emigrate? What was the background there? What was happening in the world and China right then, or in the world in general, with all these connections?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 10:25
Exactly, that's a very good question, and that is not only what was happening in China, but also what was happening in the world. So first of all, the situation in China was of a crumbling Qing dynasty that had for a long time been losing support, and there was a situation of famine that was terrible, especially in the southeast China coast. So we were coming from an increasingly overpopulated China, and we are talking about 430 million people in China at the time, and also a period of floodings that worsened the famine, especially in the South China coast, but also across China. Moreover, this is a period in the 19th century whereChina sees revolt after revolt. So we have the Taiping Rebellion. We have a series of internal armed conflicts. For example, at the time, there was the Hakka and Punti ethnic wars. And moreover, this is known as the century of humiliation in China, between the 1830s with the Opium Wars until 1945, this is really how this period is known. So we have to understand first of all how the situation of the peasantry in the South China Coast might have been, so really poor people in a situation of famine, who often did not have another way ofescaping the famine than emigrating. And moreover, there is the Western incursion in China, which, from the 1830s with the Opium Wars, really worsened the situation of the population and the financial situation of the Qing government, right. That is not to say that Chinese migrants did not have a say. Did not always have a say. We don't have to see them either as victims of the Western incursion in China, for example, or or of this migration, or the labor recruiters. They often signed up voluntarily, although given the situation that they had,and also labor recruiters and Chinese brokers and also Western immigration agents, created a system of migrating that allowed for a lot of abuses, and that was very common. So we have many instances of deceit, of even kidnapping, of even torture to force people to agree to emigrate. So it was a complex situation that really tells us about the agency of the migrants when it comes to migrating in these hyper exploited systems of migration.

Natalie von der Lehr 13:24
What you have talked about so far really reminds me of a novel I read recently called Babel, written by Rebecca F Kuang. And this story plays out mostly in Oxford during the 19th century, the period that you were talking about. And Babel is an institute for translation in Oxford, a fictional institute, and in this book, one of the main characters who gives himself the English name, Robin Swift, a Chinese boy is taken away from China in early childhood, raised in England and put to work at this institute as a scholar in translation. As the story unfolds, then, Robin Swift shifts from his hope that translation is a way to bring people together to the realization that his translations are used to strengthen the colonial framework of the Empire, and opium also plays a role here, and so on. So I was really thinking about that now, when you when you talked about your research,

Mònica Gínes Blasi 14:23
Yeah, indeed, even though it's fictional, it speaks to me of so many aspects of my research. First of all because it highlights the importance of language and translation, which is also such an important part of my work and the work of historians in general. But if you work with global history, translation is absolutely crucial,and not only that, but the role of translators at the time and how knowledge production was created across cultures, and also the impact that that knowledge production had in even shaping these migrations, right. So it makes me think of many aspects. So to begin with, the way that a culture looked upon another, and the way that stereotypes would be created so as to affect the actual migration of people. Stereotypes shape migrations via the circulation of pseudo scientific ideas about racial categorization, especially in relation to plantation labor, but other types of labor, for example, mines, contract labor, construction labor in the colonies, and what races would be best for every type of labor and for every geography in the colonial world. This is, of course, part of imperial knowledge formations that, in a way, would leak into the projects for labor recruitment. So for example, capitalist or an immigration agent or a plantation owner would write projects and present it to a government administration or a ministry, for example, the Ministry of Overseas Affairs or the Ministry of the States. And if that project was approved for the recruitment of particular people from a specific place because it was believed that they were better for Caribbean plantation labor, then that would actually materialize in the actual recruitment of those people. Most of the western consulates in South China at the time, which is something that I have really looked upon in in my research, because I've really focused on middlemen and the intermediaries, many of them began as what was called in Spanish "joven de lenguas",so somebody who was literally a "youngster of languages", a young person who would become a translator and who traveled to China and started working in a consulate to be able to become a translator. But it's so interesting what you mentioned, because with this, along with these translators, they worked with Chinese translators, but of them, we know very little. So it's so interesting how the Chinese translators become invisible, while the Western young translators later become this consular, sometimes important and impactful figures.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:48
Interesting. But then going back to your research, maybe we can dive into some more specifics there.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 17:54
Yes.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:55
So do you have any example there that you would like to share with our listeners?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 17:59
Absolutely, in 1855 the consular staff in the southeast China Coast found a ship carrying 44 little girls less than eight years of age. And the British consular staff, particularly consul Winchester, investigated the case because the ship called the Inglewood was a British ship, and the captain and the crew were also British, or mostly British. And turns out that these shipments was a consequence of regulation that had been passed justa year before in Spain, a royal decree, which stipulated that one fifth of migrants to Cuba had to be women. And because it was so difficult to find women to emigrate, immigration agents just resorted to trafficking littlegirls. That way an existing, pre-existing trafficking of children that was going on in the area of Ningpo and organized both by Chinese and also Portuguese men in that area, was reused as a way of obtaining the number of girls or women or female passengers in the ships to Cuba. All this investigation uncovered this Portuguese-Chinese network of human trafficking, and it was also clear that Spanish and British consuls and immigration agents, also the Portuguese consul, were involved in one way or another. And it was also clear that this system was also interconnected to the trafficking of girls and boys to different parts of Southeast Asia, for example, the trafficking of girls to the Philippines, and also the enslavement of little boys to places such as Siam and Timor.

Natalie von der Lehr 20:04
So what happened to the little girls in the end?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 20:06
The little girls were originally cared for by the British consular system, and afterwards they are transferred to the local Chinese authorities, who in the end, put them under the care of some Chinese women, and afterwards, I lose the track of what happens to them. But the last information that I have is that they are going to be put at the service, domestic service, of Chinese wealthier families. And that's interesting as well, because it connects to a system of servitude of little girls that has existed until quite recently. I'm talking about the 20th century, and that's called Mui tsai, and that implied the selling of little girls to wealthy families to be put under service, domestic service, in these families.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:04
I mean, you study migration historically, but migration is also a hot topic nowadays, of course. What can we learn from your research and your research field in regard to migration patterns and systems today?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 21:20
One of my objectives is to find the ways in which laws and regulations in the past either hindered or fostered migration, really in a structural sense, to see what is behind bondage and therefore create understandings that can be applied nowadays and from which we can create policies that might be truly effective to hinder human exploitation. And this is really my final, my final objective to create understandings that can be applied, actually applied, nowadays. So that's one thing, but then also we can see as well how the Western incursion in China really unlocked this system of migration, because it was also coequal to the 1840s anti-slavery convention, which means that by hindering the slave trades, this had consequences in triggering the significant migration of Chinese people. And we are not talking about small numbers. We are talking about an unprecedented movement of Chinese people from the 1830s onwards. So it is estimated that about 23 million Chinese people migrated in the 19th century to the early 20th century. And that shaped global roots, and of course, it had a clear impact in the way global migration was shaped and has been shaped until nowadays, right. So we can see some continuities, but we can see transformations that take us back to that earlier period, in the 1830s.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:23
You mentioned that you started off with art history and combined this with East-Asian studies. So nowadays, when you visit an art museum, what are you thinking about?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 23:34
Yes, this is a very good question, very interesting question. So now, when I go to a museum, and I see whether there are or there are not Asian artworks in their collections, it makes me think of, first of all, the history of that museum, but the history of that country, whether it had some connections to Asia. And what were the, toput it, in a way, the tentacles of that empire in, for instance, of the British Empire, right? So if they have Chinese art in a collection, it means that in the past, they had some sort of connection to that country. But also, if there are no artworks, and then I find out that they do have artworks in the museum, but they are not being displayed - it also means that providing knowledge about other cultures is not in the agenda, neither ofthe museum, the curator or of the nation itself, of the country itself. It really tells you about what the interest in that country is, and whether it is sensitive to providing knowledge about other cultures or not.

Natalie von der Lehr 24:54
Interesting. So you can see things also in your everyday life, and that tell you about history.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 25:01
Yes, absolutely,

Natalie von der Lehr 25:12
You are in residence at SCAS during this academic year. What are you studying while you are here?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 25:17
So here I'm studying intermediaries, labor intermediaries, and how they are agents, what I call concealing agents, how sometimes they conceal not only migrants and information about the migrants, but also self conceal their own activities. So I'm studying labor intermediaries. I'm building a typology of the labor intermediary. And also I think this is a topic that has emerged recently in scholarship, and I would like to contribute to the discussion at the minute in academia by bringing in the Chinese migration subject.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:03
Then talking about SCAS in more general terms, since you are a fellow here right now, you are in residence, what is your experience of this multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium?

Mònica Gínes Blasi 26:15
This is being such an amazing, enriching experience. I'm very, very grateful, and I am so happy I submitted that application. I think it's so interesting, the fact that we have such an interdisciplinary environment, and it'sreally amazing how it creates very, very interesting synergies, something that I will have not expected, because many of us come from the social sciences and the humanities, and the synergies that are being created and the dynamics have made me do my work differently. So there is a before and after my time in SCAS. Also the way I contribute, I think it makes me learn how to contribute to other fields in a way that I thought it would not be possible, right? So, listening to my colleagues in the social sciences, I can really see how we have topics in common, and it's very interesting. I think the one element that connects us all is an interest in social justice, even if it's social justice of the past. So perhaps this is the one element that brings us all together, and I feel very fortunate to be here because of that. And then, of course, the setting is absolutely amazing, the fact that we can really, really focus on our work here, and it's made me so productive. I recommend it to anyone. And of course, the place is beautiful. The food is amazing, and the staff, they treat us so so well. So, yeah, I'm absolutely happy to be here, and I'm very grateful that they've given me this opportunity.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:17
Thank you very much for talking to me and to our listeners, of course.

Mònica Gínes Blasi 28:21
Thank you.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:25
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I've talked to Mònica Ginés Blasi, postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d’Asie Orientale, ENS de Lyon, and a Barbro Klein fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. We have talked about her research on Chinese global labor migration and depth bondage in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this was the third episode in our theme "Migration and Displacement". In the previous episodes within this theme, we have heard Ayse Caglar talk about city making through the lens of displacement, and Sari Nauman about what Early Modern History can offer refugee studies. These are episodes 62 and 61 respectively. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium. We are sure that there's something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Mònica Ginés Blasi once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai