Event Details

In this Lancaster University China Centre seminar, Paul Kreitman of Columbia University shares his new work knitting together global and local histories Chinese migration

On 5 February 2004, twenty-one undocumented Chinese workers drowned while picking cockles on the sands of Morecambe Bay. Widely blamed on neworks of criminal human traffickers who had "enslaved" vulnerable migrants, the tragedy triggered new government legislation and had a lasting impact on British attitudes toward Chinese and extralegal immigration. But it also belongs to a much longer history in which states have sought to manage Chinese mobility by sorting migrants into categories of free and unfree, refugee and economic migrant, legitimate and illegitimate. In this talk I suggest that modern immigration controls are best understood as technologies of classification that produce the very categories of border-crosser they appear to distinguish between.

The talk develops this argument through three case studies. The first is the United States' 1862 Coolie Act, which barred American ships from carrying indentured labourers from Chinese ports like Canton, Hong Kong and Macao. Expressed in the language of abolitionist liberalism, the act institutionalised a distinction between the free (white) migrant and the oriental "coolie" that would shape Asian exclusion and imperial labour regimes across the Pacific world for decades. The second follows ethnic Chinese "boat people" who fled Vietnam via Hong Kong after 1975, many of whom eventually found asylum in the UK. Over the course of the 1980s, as global goodwill toward these refugees curdled, UN officials in Hong Kong refugee camps rolled out new screening criteria that aimed to identify and deport a new category of illegitimate asylum seeker, the "economic migrant". The third case study returns to Morecambe Bay, tracing how the disaster reshaped British labour law and immigration policy through the 2004 Gangmasters (Licensing) Act, and how regulations intended to protect undocumented workers were soon repurposed to surveil them. Together these three figures show how Chinese border crossers have repeatedly stimulated the invention of new legal immigration categories that cloak exclusion in the language of humanitarianism.

Speaker bio: Paul Kreitman is Research Scholar at the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and Director of the Columbia Summer in Itoshima program. His research interests include Japanese history, environmental history, migration history, and Pacific history. He received his PhD in History from Princeton in 2015, and since 2016 has taught and researched in various capacities at Columbia: the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of History, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is the author of Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2023).