The simple truth was that Chinese labourers in Australia, South Africa, America and Britain were quieter, harder-working, more reliable and more sober than their white counterparts. Given the practical superiority of Chinese populations, white workers therefore had little choice but to shift the grounds of attack: from a question of labour efficiency to one of a moral, racial clash between Asians and Anglo-Saxons. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a hate campaign against the Chinese flourished in Britain, the United States and settler societies such as South Africa and
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