for prof washington only

ECON 321 SPRING 2017:
INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 6

Honor Code: I guarantee that all the answers in this assignment, except those for the question specifically marked as a group discussion question, are entirely my own work. I have cited any outside sources that I used to create these answers in such a way that the TA or instructor can look them up.

Name or Signature for Honor Code: ______________________________________________

The table below is for TA use only.

Question 1 and 2 cannot use references. Both of them need your own word.

1. [Reading] Read The Economic Cost of Racism to Chinese-Canadians.

1. 1. Write a 3-2-1 report on one of the two papers above. Remember that you CAN’T just copy-and-paste text from the paper. use your own words. (12 marks)

1. 1. The author of the article, Peter S. Li, is a sociologist, not an economist, and uses the phrase ‘economic cost’ differently than an economist would. Use your economic training and what you have learned in the article to briefly describe what the economic cost of racism is to Chinese-Canadians. (2 marks)

Hint: Remember that economics studies the allocation of limited resources among unlimited needs and wants. How does racism influence the allocation of resources by Chinese-Canadians? What cost does this changed allocation imposed, compared to a world with no racism?

1. [‘Raphing] Chinese immigrants came to Victoria looking for, among other things, a better income than the one they could earn in China. However, on arriving in Canada they would have faced a number of fees and taxes in their first year.

In this question, you will use available historical sources to answer the question, ‘How many years of working in China would it take to pay the fees faced by Chinese immigrants in their first year in Victoria?”

You will be given a large amount of data. If performing the calculations by hand, please use only the first ten years (1878 – 1888, inclusive). If you are using Excel, please use the whole data set.

1. 1. The first step is to calculate the total fees and taxes a new immigrant could expect to pay each year. Use the data in the appendix (on page 7~9) to calculate the total yearly fee by adding up all the individual fees and taxes present in a given year. (This list is NOT comprehensive, so we’re under-estimating the actual burden on immigrants.) (4 marks)

1. 1. Now it’s time to find out how much an average worker in China earned at that time. The good news is that in 2011, Robert C. Allen et al. published a series of wages for rural workers near Beijing from 1807 to 1902. The bad news is that it’s not in dollars per year, and we need to convert it into dollars per year in order to perform our calculations.

Allen et al. have daily wage data, in copper ‘cash’ (or wen, 文). At the time, China was on a silver standard – its currency was backed by silver. Allen et al. also provide information on how may copper wen are in a silver tael (两). A tael weighs about 4/3 (1.33) ounces.

Use this information, and the assumption that a year has 365 days, to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in ounces of silver. (4 marks)

1. 1. Next, we need to turn the yearly wage in silver ounces to a yearly wage in dollars. For the time period we’re looking at, British Columbia was essentially using the U.S. dollar1, so we can use U.S. data.

We don’t have the price in dollars of an ounce of silver, but we can build it from two other pieces of information we DO have: the official US price of an ounce of gold, in dollars, and gold/silver price ratio: that is, how many ounces of silver were equal in value to one ounce of gold.

Since the US was on a stable gold standard, one ounce of gold was worth exactly $20.67 throughout our entire period. The gold/silver price ratio (ounces of silver/ounces of gold) was obtained from MeasuringWorth and is provided in the Data Appendix.

Use the information above to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in dollars. (2 marks)

1. 1. It’s finally time to put it all together and create our graph. Divide the Total Yearly Fee from part a. by the Yearly Agricultural Dollar Wage in part b. to find how many years of working in China it would take to pay the first year of fees faced by Chinese immigrants to Victoria. Plot this series as a line graph with well-labeled axes. The vertical axis should be ‘Years to Pay Fees’ and the horizontal axis should be ‘Year’. (Remember: if you’re doing this by hand, you only need the years 1878 – 1888. Otherwise, your graph should cover 1878 to 1902.) (4 marks)

1. [Research] UVic hosts an important collection of Chinese-Canadian documents, mostly donated by the Chinese Collective Benevolent Association (CCBA, founded 1884). This question asks you to perform some independent research into changing conditions between the founding of the CCBA and the start of the Chinese Exclusion period, in 1923.

Most of the documents in the archive are written in Chinese, but an English translation is provided as part of their description. If you can read Chinese, feel free to read the original and write your own translation for any required quotes, etc.

1. 1. Go to UVic’s Chinese Canadian digital archive search page, and enter ‘economic conditions’ in the search bar. This should yield 7 results. Read through at least three of these sources, most of which are extremely short.

Based on what you have read, explain how economic conditions changed for Chinese immigrants in Victoria between 1884 and 1922. (e.g. Did they move away from agriculture and into manufacturing jobs? Did they own less land than before? Did any jobs appear/disappear, or become more/less important over time?) Use properly-cited quotes from your 3 (or more) sources, including a URL that leads directly to the source, as part of your argument.

(8 marks for your argument, 6 marks for appropriate use and citation of at least 3 sources.)

Note: If a document has more than one page, you can click on the individual pages in the right-hand pane to see that page’s transcript or translation.

References

Question 1

Peter S. Li, “The Economic Cost of Racism to Chinese-Canadians,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1987, pp. 102 – 113.

Available via UVic at http://search.proquest.com/docview/1293156009?pq-origsite=gscholar

Question 2

Anonymous, “Municipal Police Court,” Daily Colonist, May 1, 1880, p. 3. Available at http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist18800501uvic/18800501#page/n2/mode/1up/

Dominion of Canada, “Copy of Imperial Order in Council, The Court at Windsor Castle, the 3rd Day of April, 1886”, Sessional Papers, Volume 16, Second Session of the Sixth Parliament of the Dominion of Canada, 1888, p. 51.

Available online at https://books.google.ca/books?id=mAIxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268

David Chuenyan Lai, Chinese Community Leadership: Case Study of Victoria in Canada, World Scientific Publishing, 2010.

Availability at UVic: http://voyager.library.uvic.ca/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=2022121

Peter S. Li, “A historical approach to ethnic stratification: the case of the Chinese in Canada, 1858 – 1930,” Canadian Review of Sociology, Vol. 16, Issue 3, August 1979, pp. 320 – 332.

Available via UVic at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-618X.1979.tb01034.x/abstract

Robert C. Allen et al., “Wages, prices and living standards in China, 1738 – 1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 64, 2011, pp. 8 – 38.

Available via UVic at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27919531

James Powell, A History of the Canadian Dollar, Bank of Canada, 2005.

Available at http://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/dollar_book.pdf

Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Price of Gold, 1257 – Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2017.

Available at http://www.measuringworth.com/gold/

Question 3

Uvic Chinese Canadian Collection: http://contentdm.library.uvic.ca/cdm/search/collection/collection2

Sometimes, randomly, the above link won’t work. If that happens, go to

http://www.uvic.ca/library/featured/collections/asian/Chinese-Canadian.php

and click on ‘Browse This Collection’.

Data Appendix

This data is also available as an Excel file.

Question 2.a. Details of Fees

Question 2.b. Daily Rural Wages near Beijing and copper wen per silver tael

Notes:

1 Tael weights 4/3 (~1.33) Ounces.

1 Year has 365 Days (for the purpose of this question)

Question 2.c. Gold/Silver Price Ratio

Note:

You may assume that during this entire period, 1 ounce of gold was worth $20.67.

1 “Canadian bank notes, denominated in dollars, were … widely accepted and circulated freely in the United States.” (Powell, p. 19)

2 Victoria Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (域多利中华会馆)

3 Figures in bold were missing in the original, and have been estimated via linear interpolation.