CHINESE COMPETITION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13286, 19 September 1906, Page 6

CHINESE COMPETITION.

That Asiatics should be allowed to evade industrial and commercial regulations imposed upon all Europeans in the colony is. simply to give a bonus for the extermination of any European industry which the Asiatic chooses to enter. The Wellington shopkeepers are up in arms against Chinese evasion of the Early ClosingAct ; and the article on the effect of Chinese competition in the Auckland laundry business, which appears in to-day's Herald, will bring home to our readers the local reality of this unfair competition and the necessity of effectively blocking it by compelling Chinese to come under the same regulations as those which apply to our own workers. Under the guise of ownership or partnership, which is a mere cloak for a form of slavery unknown > to Europeans, the Chinese notoriously work all sorts of hours for the meanest pay, competing in business against European employers whom the law compels to pay decent wages for short hours. For our laws are based upon our own social conditions, and are not adapted to cover the social conditions of China. Nominally every Chinaman in the colony is free, but although our laws would quash the agreement, he may be bound hand and foot by agreement made in China, where his parents or children are responsible for him, and may be sold into slavery if he repudiates. Add to this the superstitious craving of the Chinaman to return to China,' either dead or alive, and we have a chain upon the Chinese immigrant stronger than any so-called "right" which British law may give to him. The European cannot compete against the Chinaman as long as the existing unfair competition is allowed. But if all Chinamen were compelled by law to be housed as Europeans are housed, to work European hours, and to keep to all other European industrial and commercial conditions we should hear no more of Chinese competition, and should speedily see the cessation of Chinese immigration. This is a fair thing for our European employers and shopkeepers to ask, and we are astonished that our colonial workmen have been so blind to their own interests that they have not insisted upon it. If the Chinese can only be

prevented from ruining the European laundry business and other industries by special legislation, then special legislation we ought to have. For while we are so i drastically regulating the employment of Europeans it is industrially criminal to allow the Asiatic to advantage by regulations vrhich do not affect him at all because they are based solely upon European customs and consequently only apply to Europeans.