100th Anniversary of Anti-Asian Riots
2007 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver, B.C. The riots began in Bellingham as a movement to drive Punjabi Sikhs out of the lumber industry. On September 7, a white supremacist crowd marched to Vancouver city hall to demand a White Canada. Many proceeded to attack Chinatown and then the Japanese community around Powell Street. Rioters were challenged by Japanese Canadians, who had armed while windows in Chinatown were being broken. The riots were not only a landmark in the rise of racism in Canada, they signaled the beginning of systematic federal intervention to prohibit Asian immigration to Canada through the imposition of quotas on Japanese emigration, continuous voyage regulations and a $200 landing fee to exclude those from India, and the enforcement of head-tax laws against the Chinese and, when that proved ineffective, passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923. Despite Asian Canadian efforts to fight these measures, the period was marked by escalating injustices, including the infamous Komagata Maru case of 1914 and the uprooting, dispossession and dispersal of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II.