"the Mysterious Oriental Mind": Ethnic Surveillance and the Chinese in Canada During the Great war‪.‬

ABSTRACT/RESUME This article examines the surveillance of the Chinese in Canada during the Great War, focusing on the experience of the Chinese Nationalist League (CNL), one of the largest Chinese political organizations in Canada. It examines the process by which Canadian surveillance officials came to view the country's Chinese population as dangerous and potentially subversive by the end of the Great War. Though in part a manifestation of the broad xenophobia that led to the oppression of other ethnic groups in Canada during the Great War, this article contends that suspicion of the Chinese was deeply rooted in traditional Western perceptions of the Chinese as a "sly," "devious," and "mysterious" race. These perceptions nourished suspicion of the Chinese and sustained the surveillance in the absence of substantive evidence implicating the CNL in seditious activities. The surveillance resulted in the suppression of the CNL and arrest of its leaders in September 1918.