The story of the antagonism between Chinese miners and Cornish, Irish and other ethnic white miners in America and South Africa and elsewhere is long and complicated and I wouldn’t claim for a minute to have any in depth knowledge of it. But just a couple of points; one bizarre and the other a tragedy.
In British Columbia the authorities hit upon a very effective expedient of stopping the Chinese working down the mines. They forbade anyone whose hair was more than 4 inches long from doing so. By coincidence this wood engraving from 1857 shows Chinese gold miners eating and attending to their hair among tents in camp.
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The tragedy was the massacre at Rock Springs. Labor disputes were often the spark for anti-Chinese riots. In 1875, the Union Pacific Railroad Company initially hired Chinese as strikebreakers in its Rock Springs mines in the Wyoming Territory. The bitterness this caused between the (largely immigrant) white miners and the Chinese festered for a decade before exploding in the fall of 1885. The attack on September 2 by 150 armed white men against the Chinese miners had calamitous results for the Chinese community: 28 deaths, 15 wounded, the expulsion of hundreds, and property damage of nearly $150,000.
http://www.rswy.net/Museum/CM01.htm Miners of the Union Pacific Railroad Company shooting at crowd of fleeing Chinese miners working for the Union Pacific.
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The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.