Chinese Imagined Community

The Chinese-Canadian experience during the 19th and 20th centuries provides a classic example of history’s role in the nation-making process, the creation of an “imagined community”(Stanley 477). The anti-Asian exclusion era (1880s to 1940s) in Canada played a pivotal role in the emergence of the “Chinese” identity. Benedict Anderson describes the ‘imagined community’ as a community that is built through emotional ties with one another. Anderson states that the community "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion,” (Anderson 1991). With this said, Chinese-Canadians felt a strong connection with one another due to the strong sense of Chinese nationalism created through the covert and overt displays of racism that Canadians carried our upon Chinese immigrants. In 1885 the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway united Canada as a nation and essentially defined who was Canadian through the role of the media. The Canadian population disenfranchised Chinese immigrants even though they played a pivotal role in uniting Canada through the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Through several covert and overt displays of racism and discrimination, Chinese immigrants banded together inevitably leading to the creation of the imagined community. By creating emotional and intellectual ties with China, the Chinese community in Canada formed the “imagined community.”

Through overt displays of discrimination, Chinese immigrants were led to feel out of place and unwanted within Canada, thus leading to the imagined community. Chinese immigrants came to Canada as sojourners, hoping to ...

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...o ultimately maintain these connections, Chinese-Canadians began to educate their children in both Chinese and English. Intellectually linking them to China would provide a necessary agent of Chinese nationalism. Therefore, the “imagined community” was created through emotional and intellectual ties with China.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso. 1991.

Mar, Lisa R. "Beyond Being Others: Chinese Canadians as National History." BC Studies 156/157 (2007): 13-34.

Spencer, D. R. "Race and revolution: Canada's Victorian labour press and the Chinese immigration question." The Public 12.1 (2005): 15.

Stanley, Timothy J. "`Chinamen, wherever we go': Chinese Nationalism and Guangdong Merchants in British Columbia." Canadian Historical Review 77.4 (1996): 475.