Battle of the Third Reich

In the early days of the coolie trade in history, these recruitment activities are not legal activities, whether in the home of the employer or the employee.

The Manchu Qing Dynasty's "Law of the Qing Dynasty" expressly stipulates that all officials, soldiers and civilians, who go out to sea for business without permission, and those who emigrate to foreign islands should make a decision according to the Traffic Rebellion Law. Some officials from the county government who are not aware of fraud are all decisive. Only for oversight, dismissal will never be used. Kedao officials fell by three levels for oversight, and supervisors fell by two levels for oversight. The punishment must be described as cruel.

The enactment of these laws and regulations has its special historical background. It was originally intended to curb anti-Qing activities on the southeast coast, and later to stop the outflow of agricultural population. However, in the middle and late Qing Dynasty, whether from an economic or political perspective, these The regulations are clearly no longer applicable.

In fact, as early as the southeastern coastal area of ​​the middle and late Qianlong, the sea ban has almost disappeared. Even if a local official has the heart of "serving the country", in front of the power of the rural clans and the silver of the white merchants of the sea merchants, it will soon Will be open and closed or even contaminated with the same flow.

After the outbreak of the first Opium War, the British used naval guns to open the door of "I Daqing". In 1842, Qingying signed the "Nanjing Treaty", which not only ceded Hong Kong to Britain, but also agreed to open Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo and Shanghai have become trading ports, so-called "five-port trading".

Lin Zexu's end made officials in the coastal areas, especially the bureaucrats at the above-mentioned trading ports, more and more cautious, fearing that they might have offended foreigners by accident, and what kind of international disputes would arise out of nothing. You might be hacked by a stolen house if you make a big deal, and no one will complain about it for you.

The inaction of local officials has increased the arrogance of coolie traders, and the living environment of Chinese coolies has become worse, and even the lives of these people cannot be guaranteed. At that time, there were more than one mass deaths of coolies on the way. During the record, an average of 30 people per 100 Chinese coolies would be killed by various accidents on the vast ocean far away from their hometowns.

To say that this kind of trade is also scrupulous in the UK, they need to send large quantities of cheap labor to the colonies, and at the same time they need to prove the "legitimacy" of these labor sources and prove that these people are not "contract slaves" in the legal sense. .

On this issue, British businessmen must obtain the cooperation of the Manchu government, that is, obtain the endorsement of the Manchu government, prove that these transactions comply with local laws, and promote the industry to be more regulated, no longer with the kind of "slave" Traces and colors of "trade".

However, at the time, the high-level government of the Manchu Qing Dynasty would allow foreigners to point the finger at the "Ancestral Law" and happened to meet a stubborn governor Ye Mingchen with a set of "no war, no peace, no defense, no death, no decline, no The approach of "going" to deal with British people sounds almost comparable to that of a Mahatma "non-violent and non-cooperative" movement. If it is pushed back for a hundred years, it may not be possible to get an explosives award back.

The British found that there was no way to negotiate, so they decided to continue speaking with guns. The British Empire has just entered the Victorian era and is expanding her colony on a global scale. Her national strength is on the rise. She saw through the details of "I Qing" when she was a crow, so she did not hesitate to start.

Everyone knows the result of the Second Opium War, and the ruins of the Old Summer Palace are still there. Manqing and Britain, France, and Russia have successively signed the "Beijing Treaty". The specific content will not be repeated here. One of them is to agree to the British recruitment of Chinese workers to work abroad. In this regard, China's coolie turned into a "contractual immigration", and coolie recruitment is no longer regarded as a "slave trade" in disguise.

Let’s not mention those clothes whose chests are painted on B (Brisbane, Australia), P (Peru), or S (Sandwich Port in Namibia). Here I would like to talk about the hard work of C (Cuba) on the chest because of their experience. Arguably the most representative.

Before reaching their destinations, these people had been sold to major plantations by intermediary companies and became miserable contract slaves. At that time, Cuba was still a Spanish colony. The laws used by Spain to manage the Chinese coolies were actually the provisions that governed black slaves.

The Spanish farmer has almost unlimited power on his site, he can withhold the brutal wages at will, and has the right to impose various corporal punishments on the brutal.

However, China's coolies can only redeem their contracts with money after eight years of work. In fact, after many contracts are completed, Spanish employers will use various means to force them to renew their contract.

Even more hateful, the Spanish Governor also stipulated that the Chinese coolie who completed the contract would only be allowed to continue to live and work in Cuba if he was willing to be naturalized as a Cuban and believe in Catholicism and obtained a local residence permit, otherwise he would be deported.

At that time, the ferry ticket from Cuba to China was eight ounces of gold, and most of the coolies could not afford the travel expenses, so they could only be slaves for a lifetime in the plantation. Many people could only choose to commit suicide to end this suffering. Cuba has the highest suicide rate in the world, and one in two Cuban suicides is Chinese.

The tragic situation of the Chinese Cuban coolie did not improve fundamentally until the Manqing and Spain signed a labor immigration protection treaty in 1877, but many coolies failed to persist until this day.

The Americans started to participate in China's coolie business only after the Second Opium War. The coolie quotient mainly came from the West Coast.

Everyone may not believe it. In fact, half a century before the outbreak of the Opium War, the Chinese had set foot on the North American continent. At the time of Kangxi’s peak sea ban, the government banned private manufacturing of new ships, and a large number of experienced shipbuilders had to be unemployed, so in 1788, a British shipmaker took the opportunity to hire a group of Chinese shipbuilders, and then A small colony was established near Vancouver, Canada, where Canada’s abundant timber resources were used to build sailboats.

Since 1820, Chinese people have entered the United States one after another, some of them are employees and servants on commercial ships, but some are traders along the coast of Guangdong who traveled to Chongyang to find business opportunities. At that time, the gold rush in California had not yet begun. The main business of Chinese merchants was still the traditional silk and tea business. Some Chinese choose to settle down locally, and even subtract braids to join American citizenship. Before 1840, there were nearly 800 Chinese who settled in California.

After the outbreak of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, more and more coastal residents of Fujian and Guangdong chose to leave their hometowns to make a living overseas in order to survive, especially when they learned that California discovered a gold mine, a large number of Chinese workers boarded the coolie boat to California with the dream of making a fortune. .

Most of them could not afford the ticket and board and lodging expenses to the New World, so they signed a contract with the Coolie Company, and the Coolie Company made the advance payment. So the coolie companies became the creditors of these coolies, which was called "credit workers" at the time. In law, they were still free immigrants who voluntarily went to the United States at their own expense, not so-called "contract slaves."

But in fact, when they set foot on the American soil, they automatically became the "debt slaves" of coolie companies. Before paying off the debts of Kuliba, they can only work in mines or construction sites under the other party, or transfer them to other contractors who need labor through the transfer of creditor's rights.

Because during the work period, other various expenses will continue to be incurred, plus the interest of the debt itself, the coolie often needs to work for the coolie quotient for one or two years to pay off the debt.

After 1882, the situation changed again, and the coolie companies no longer insisted on holding these coolie claims. After all, it took a lot of costs to manage these Asians. They chose a once and for all method to transfer the claims to California. The Sixth Conference Hall of the People's Republic of China allows the Chinese to assume management responsibilities.

The so-called Six Conference Halls or the six largest companies in the American population are formed by the merger of the original three halls of Sanyi, Gangzhou, Renhe, Yanghe, Ningyang, and Hehe, which is also known as the United States. The prototype of the Chinese Federation.

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