First it was about Chinese spies and plants and agents. Add to that the coronavirus pandemic. Small wonder that Australians of Chinese heritage are facing scrutiny and scapegoating. The first has to do with their affiliation, loyalty or undesirability vis-à-vis their adopted country. The second is linked to the outbreak of the infection in Wuhan, China, and which is now rampaging across the globe.
These are fraught days indeed for those looking Chinese fuelled by the unremitting headlines about the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged attempts to subvert the Australian polity and Government through leveraging the Chinese community’s perceived loyalty to the mother country. As a consequence, the general thinking could be that if you look Chinese – and preferably inscrutably so – you’re likely to harbour pro-Beijing sentiments. Period. And just because the coronavirus infection originated in China, it is widely assumed, especially in the early days, that all Chinese are potential vectors, never mind the fact that Australian Chinese hail from many other countries than China. And US President Donald Trump's reference to COVID-19 as "a Chinese virus" does not help as far as the collective image of people of Chinese heritage is concerned.
Seen in this light, anyone looking remotely East Asian could come under a cloud of suspicion possibly as agents, stooges or instruments of Beijing. And recent revelations of alleged Chinese plot to install a Chinese agent in federal parliament and fifth columnists and sympathisers beavering away silently have exacerbated the impression that they may even be lurking under our beds. This is indeed a travesty, and certainly invokes intimations of the Yellow Peril with all its attendant inchoate fears of something insidiously threatening in their midst.
In this febrile climate, Australians could hardly be blamed even if they have adopted a McCarthy-like approach to judging anyone who sports a tincture of yellow. First, when Asians are regularly lumped together as a homogeneous entity in common Australian parlance, what more when referencing people of differing Chinese backgrounds? Or in differentiating between a Chinese and a Korean or a Japanese. It is patently a nuanced exercise that can even challenge the cultural expertise of the cognoscenti. So, to talk about Chinese in broad terms (as if they are all card-carrying cadres of the CCP) is to tar and feather them indiscriminately, if not egregiously. This could have unfortunate ramifications for all those who simply look Chinese or claim Chinese lineage in this country, no thanks to the Chinese diaspora. In fact, former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans hit the nail on the head when he warned last December that Australian Chinese were feeling “collectively demonised” as a “fifth column within Australia”.
Truth be told, the Chinese diaspora in Australia is splintered; there are many shades of yellow not just on the surface but also deep down wrought by geographical and environmental influences prevailing in the adopted countries to which their ancestors have migrated. And from those countries many overseas Chinese then migrated to Australia. Therefore, migrants of Chinese heritage in Australia could have hailed from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Mauritius, and of course from mainland China.
Perhaps my own experience is instructive. Chinese sharing my Hakka Chinese background originally hailed from central China but over a millennium had migrated to different parts of China. From south China, my paternal grandparents set sail for British Malaya in the 1800s to seek their fortunes. My father, effectively bilingual in Chinese and English, was born in Malaya, but moved south to British-ruled Singapore before World War II. Both my parents became Chinese educators in Singapore, where I was born. I was promptly despatched to an English school at aged six. In year 6, my ID card stated that I was a “British subject” as the island was a British colony.
Throughout my primary school years I sang “God Save The Queen”. When Singapore attained self-government, “Majulah Singapura” (Advance Singapore), sung in Malay, took over as the island’s national anthem. In 1965, the departing British hatched a strategic political construct – Malaysia, comprising Malaya, Singapore and British North Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah – to serve as a bulwark against advancing communism from the north, so the Domino theory went. Not surprisingly, singing “Negara Ku” (Our Country in Malay), the Malayan anthem – became the order of the day as the country was the dominant partner in the new political entity.
In 1990, my family migrated to Australia and we embraced Advance Australia Fair. What does all this movement make of me? A Chinese of many hues which defies easy categorisation. Quite a mish-mash indeed. As a Singapore-born Chinese, I would be quickly picked out as an outsider by other groups of Chinese. This would similarly apply to other groups of Chinese. In all these 30 years of living in Australia, I have met Chinese from all over the world who, too, have made their home here.
A rude shock stemming from this fractured Australian Chinese community came soon after our arrival in Australia in 1990. While having lunch on a weekend in Melbourne’s Chinatown, my wife and I noticed that there were groups of decidedly Chinese looking people at various tables. To the unknowledgeable eye, everyone was a Chinese until they opened their mouths to speak. All of a sudden it dawned on me that we were far from being a homogeneous lot barring our yellow complexion and Sino features. Lunch had brought together Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore as well as from the mainland. It became quite obvious that our accents, mannerisms, speech and demeanour divided all of us. The realisation hit home: we were only Chinese in name and colour. In fact, we have all gone our separate ways with hardly any scintilla of sameness or affinity between us. This then is the price of the Chinese diaspora: 5,000 years of a shared history and culture have been blurred by 200 years of migration to different lands.
Interestingly, part of this Chinese diaspora has converged and settled in Australia. So, this is not a cohesive community by any stretch of the imagination. Throw into the mix the fair dinkum descendants of the early Chinese settlers of the gold rush days, and you have quite a spectrum of yellow identity. Such a variegated community though boasting a single hue could hardly be mobilised to do the bidding of a foreign government or even to think alike.
In Australia each group of Chinese remains within their uniquely socio-ethnic boundaries with hardly any interaction between them. If anything, these groups are analogous to the world of cheese: all yellow but with their distinct taste and flavour keeping them truly separate. So there.
For such a disparate diaspora it is highly improbable that the Chinese people in Australia will act in unison to respond to any clarion call whatever that might be, or to similarly feel the stirrings of Chinese pride or patriotism unquestioningly. Therefore, the ramifications of seeing all Chinese people in Australia as homogeneous is surely to resuscitate the Yellow Peril Mk II. Such a red alert reminiscent of the McCarthy era would be most unfortunate, and would deny Chinese people fuller engagement in the political process of Australia in their attempt to remain inconspicuous. According to Mr Evans, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Chinese Australians to crack the “bamboo ceiling” of leadership positions despite the skills they have to offer.
Indeed, a letter writer to The Age last December claimed that “we are already feeling the influence of China in our lives with a large increase in our population with economic immigration, in education, in real estate and in politics”. If this sentiment is extrapolated across the nation with some accuracy, the future does not augur very well for Australians with Chinese heritage, small as their number is – a mere 1.2 million. One can obviously sense a palpable rise in the socio-political temperature with a concomitant uptick in the distrust of these people by the wider populace.
But the letter writer fails to take into account that Chinese people are highly adaptable, and oftentimes they acculturate and assimilate quickly into mainstream society. My encounter with two Australian Chinese sisters in a Box Hill food court some years ago was an eye-opener: except for their looks, they were every inch dyed-in-the-wool fair dinkum Aussies by any measure, with a broad accent to boot. Unable to suppress my curiosity, I asked about their background and was told that they were fifth generation Chinese and spoke nary a word of Chinese. Undoubtedly, their loyalty is oriented only to Australia.
In the Second World War, Americans of Japanese heritage were interned because their loyalty was questioned for simply being Japanese never mind the fact that they were born and bred in America. The hurt still lingers after all these years. Let’s not reprise this Down Under in any form.
