Address of CG Lu Xu
on the 2nd “Canada-China Friendship”
Online Forum
(17:00 Mar 19th, MST)
Friends, Comrades, Good evening.
It’s my great pleasure to be invited by the host to kick off the forum today.
It is a courageous and encouraging move to choose “anti-racial discrimination” as the theme of today’s Canada-China Friendship Forum. By focusing on discussions and proposed solutions around this topic, the forum is designed to increase the public awareness of human rights violation among the certain communities, as well as illustrate that the human conscience will not be wiped out despite thousands of years of ups and downs.
Looking back into the history, the racial discrimination has never ever gone away. Since the 19th century when the Chinese immigrants came to this country to build the Pacific Railway, “unequal treatment” has fallen onto them without at least being questioned. Although burdened with the toughest jobs and made huge sacrifices in building the railway, the Chinese immigrants were treated as slaves and their contributions were completely ignored and forgotten for a long time afterwards. In 1885, Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which was obviously discriminatory against the Chinese immigrants. Since then, more than 80,000 Chinese immigrants had been levied about 23 million Canadian dollars in head tax, an amount comparable to the whole cost of constructing the Pacific Railway. In 1923, Canada replaced the head tax with the Chinese Exclusion Act, separating the Chinese immigrants from their families on the two sides of the Pacific Ocean. In 1985, the Canadian government built a monument to commemorate the centennial completion of the Pacific Railway, but the contributions of the Chinese immigrants were not at all mentioned in the inscription.
The systematic racial discrimination has hardly been a secret in Canada, however, history has always repeated different but essentially the same stories at different stages. In June last year, the Angus Reid Institute released a polling survey over a certain number of Canadians Chinese, 58% of respondents said they had experienced discrimination within the past year, while 28% said discrimination occurred “always” or “often”.
The systemic racial discrimination against the Chinese community in Canada has been stirred up again in recent years, which is the result of the interaction of multiple factors. The discrimination in the early days caused by disdain is evolving towards hostility and hatred. The disputes between China and Canada over Meng Wanzhou Case and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic have become an excuse and an outlet to carry the discrimination against the Chinese community. Furthermore, some Canadian politicians insisted on the “political correctness” of “striking at anything Chinese” out of their own political interests, leading the Canadian public opinion on China to the wrong direction. The mainstream media in the United States and most of the Western countries played the role of fanning the flames and adding fuel to the fire, by fabricating and spreading fake news related to China, leading to intensified discrimination and hatred against the local Chinese community. What deserves vigilance is that while the US and Western politicians and media are attacking China in an all-round way, they keep on repeating “only targeting the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people in China or abroad”, in an attempt to induce the Chinese community in the US, Canada and other western countries into a false illusion of safety and surrender of all claims to fairness and justice.
In the face of discrimination, there is only one way out for the Chinese community here. That is to get united, motivated, organized with concerted efforts to fight for their own civil rights by firmly opposing and strongly condemning all hypocrisy, slander and racial discriminatory words or actions. Only then, can the attention of the Canadians be aroused to the issue of discrimination against the Canadian Chinese, can governments at all levels in Canada no longer “turn a blind eye” to the issue of discrimination against the Canadian Chinese, and can the rights of survival and development of the Chinese community be finally and truly secured.
Once again, thank you very much for having me here. I wish the forum a great success and the discussions fruitful.