Immigration

Chinese have been in New Zealand for over 130 years. Originally, they were twice invited from Victoria, Australia to the province of Otago in 1865 to rework its goldfields,(1) and their first mining party arrived at the end of that year. From the beginning it was apparent that the Chinese would be a distinctive, significant and controversial ethnic minority.

Indeed, they have always been a distinctive minority which endeavoured to keep a place in this country. As the first non-Maori and non-European people to arrive their interactions with other New Zealand groups were bound to be significant. But why controversial? After all, the preceding Chinese migration to the Australian goldfields was regarded as a �safe’ influx, having a low crime rate and other good qualities such as industriousness(2) which should have been welcomed in a developing country like young New Zealand. The basic reason for dissension was their considerable difference in race and culture from the European, whereas New Zealand was suitable for European colonisation and was governed by Europeans. These differences fostered recurring controversy on the advisability of permitting Chinese immigration, out of which the belief grew that Chinese and other Asians should be kept out of New Zealand.

The Chinese bore the brunt of this belief because they were the earliest and most numerous Asian group to come. In the nineteenth century they reached a total of 4,364 persons or about 6% of Otago’s population towards the end of 1871, and a peak population in New Zealand of 5,000 or more between 1874-81,(3) the equivalent of 1% of New Zealand’s non-Maori population in the 1881 census. Historians have long recognised that the European reaction to the Chinese presence in New Zealand tested the limits of British colonial rule in relation to this country’s immigration legislation - and thus in its progression towards independence.