Abstract
This chapter focuses attention on integration-inspired community activism as another reason behind Australia’s current Sinophobia. This perspective is considered in four sections. The first section considers behavioural characteristics of the first large group of new Chinese migrants in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The second section looks at Chinese migrants’ enthusiastic responses to Australia’s ideas and practices of multiculturalism and integration. The third section discusses the needs for migrants in business to have local networks, the demands of which have then been elevated to an idealist level, at which political participation is promoted with the aim of pushing the bamboo ceiling. The fourth section looks at the extent to which the role of ethnic Chinese in bridging Australia and China has been misinterpreted.
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Notes
- 1.
A number of Chinese Australians have used this ancient Chinese saying to express their frustrations about being demonised in Australia’s mainstream English-language media as Chinese agents after living in Australia for many years and helping the country establish links with China’s economic activities and market. This ancient Chinese saying has different translations. Andrea Breard’s translation is ‘Once the smart hare is caught, the hunting dog is fried’, which is translated according to a long version of this saying: jiaotusi, zougoupeng (Breard 2002, p. 59). As noted by Breard, this saying has another longer version: niaojin gongcang, tusi goupeng ‘When the bird is beaten, the arms are put aside. When the hare is killed, the dog is fried’ (Breard 2002, p. 59). Gyula Paczolay’s translation is ‘The hound is cooked when the hare (caught) is dead’ (Paczolay 2009, p. 129). This is a very old saying dated back to China’s Spring–Autumn period from 770–476 BCE, condemning those who ignore the contributors after achieving their immediate goal, and advising that this is not only immoral, but also very shortsighted. This ancient saying has a few modern colloquial versions, including xiemo shalü (killing the donkey right after it finishes work and leaves the millstone). For more information about this everyday version of the saying, see Yang (2007, p. 101; 2014, p. 55) and Zhu (2018, p. 240).
- 2.
The crisis of faith or belief was called xinyang weiji in Chinese, and it took place in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It has been predominantly defined from two perspectives. In the eyes of orthodox Chinese communists, after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, many young Chinese no longer believed in Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, as well as socialism, the prospect of communism, and even the leadership of the CCP. From the reformist perspective, Maoism and their radical practices had lost public support since the September 13 [1971] incident, when the CCP’s Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, Mao’s appointed successor, went to his death on his flight to Mongolia. After 1978, because more Chinese people were influenced by Deng Xiaoping’s ideas, such as ‘seeking the truth from the facts’, the ‘liberation of thoughts’ (sixiang jiefang), and the abolition of ‘forbidden zones’ (dapo jinqü), young people in China started embracing various new ideas. A pessimistic theory believes that this crisis created something of an ideological vacuum in China, but moderately speaking, this was a widespread reaction of young Chinese to the early stage of China’s reform. This process helped people clear up various ideological confusions and be ready for new ideas and views. Interested readers can read more in Fewsmith (1994), Goodman (1994), Li (1997), Chen (1999) and Solinger (2015).
- 3.
This Federal Court case is recorded under the title of Chau v Fairfax Media Publications PL [2019] FCA 185, which is available at the websites of the Federal Court of Australia and the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLii). According the court summary, Chau Chak Wing alleged that the Fairfax Media and John Garnaut defamed him in the article titled ‘Are Chau Chak Wing’s circles of influence in Australia-China ties built on hot air?’, which appeared in the then Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The article described Chau’s supposed connection with what was said to be an unfolding international bribery scandal. Chau claimed that as a result of the defamatory article, his business, and personal and professional reputation had been brought into public disrepute. He won the case and the Federal Court awarded him $280,000 in compensatory damages. In addition to the above-mentioned original court ruling document, interested readers can read more about it in Griffiths (2018), Han (2018) and Whitbourn (2019a).
- 4.
It has to be admitted that the so-called runaway mentality is not in popular use, and instead, it has often been expressed in a few alternative expressions, such as Chuguochao or Chuguo chao (the tide of going abroad), and even Aozhoure or Aozhou Re (the Australia fever) in the context of Australia. As I introduced in my 2013 book, ‘The tide of going abroad’ was originally the name of a long feature report published in 1987, which vividly described the attempts of young Chinese people to leave China (Gao 2013, p. 5). This social phenomenon emerged as a negative response to the first major setback to China’s reforms in 1984 and 1985. This expression is also translated as ‘emigration fever’ (Nyiri 2010). The so-called Australia fever (Aozhoure) was part of the emigration fever that emerged in China a few months after the introduction of the ELICOS scheme in Australia in 1986 (Gao 2013, p. 6). The runaway mentality was widely shared by Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s, including some senior leaders of China’s ruling CCP. In addition to my 2013 book (Gao 2013), interested readers are referred to Cherrington (1997), Nyiri (2010) and Bregnbaek (2016).
- 5.
The Han nationality or ethnicity, Hanzu in Chinese, is the largest ethnic group in modern-day China, and accounts for about 91 per cent of China’s total population. This percentage has been slowly declining from about 93 per cent in the early 1980s as a direct result of the birth-control policy that started in 1979 and the ethnic identity shift. China has 56 ethnic groups in total, and the other 55 are defined as ethnic minorities, the population of which accounts for just over 8 per cent of the total population. The dominance of Han people in China is not simply due to numbers, but also its long history. Although some have argued that the Han nationality is an entirely modern phenomenon, many Chinese scholars insist that the Han nationality is a historical result of mergers of numerous ethnic groups or tribes, and the people of Han as a nationality have been named in association with the Han dynasty, the second imperial dynasty of China (206 BC–220 AD). This was a very powerful dynasty, and paralleled the Roman Empire in the West. For more information about the Han nationality and its historical and cultural formation, see Hardy and Kinney (2005), Lewis (2007) and Schneider (2017).
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Gao, J. (2020). Integration-Inspired Community Activism and Pushing the Bamboo Ceiling in Australia. In: Chinese Immigration and Australian Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5909-9_6
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