The so-called “Chinese Australian community” is a myth. It is a much less homogeneous group than widely assumed in public debate. Recognising differences within the group would not deny their commonality but instead, serve the ultimate purposes of multiculturalism and social cohesion.
I was invited to a Yusheng lunch with a group of Asian friends during the Lunar New Year. It was great fun, mixing shredded vegetables and salmon and lifting them high up with chopsticks for blessings for the New Year. My Singaporean friend joked, “We should definitely take this to China. The Chinese love everything about good fortune”.
I told him that, in fact, Yusheng had been one of the best known local dishes in Guangdong (Canton) Province since the late Qing Dynasty, with the city of Shunde long hailed as the best place. Instead of salmon, the local freshwater fish is used and it is served, less as a westernised salad, but more in a sashimi way, with a dozen ingredients like ginger, garlic, sesame, oil, etc..
What struck me at that moment was though we would both identify ourselves as of Chinese heritage, we don’t know about each other. I don’t know about how Yusheng has been localised in Malaysia and Singapore, while my Malaysian and Singaporean friends don’t know about its Chinese origin.
Though terms like “China” and “Chinese Australian” have long been readily adopted in public debate, what “China” or “Chinese” are we really referring to?
For decades, “Chinese” has been defined in Australia’s public debate as people of the Chinese heritage, a loose term emphasising, and perhaps over-emphasising, on common cultural and traditional roots. It may work well in the earlier phases of Chinese immigration but increasingly less so when the landscape and makeup started to shift, especially after the turn of the century.
As compilation based on Australia’s most recent census (2016) indicates, migrants from Mainland China had long been dwarfed by those from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore by the 1980s (This is not, however, to assume that all those registered having been born in Malaysia and Singapore are of Chinese heritage. But this may be the closest we can get to answer that question with the census statistics currently available).
This partly explains why later immigrants from Mainland China have always been shocked and confused with the “Chinese” food they found in Australia, e.g. Mongolian beef. Many of them are localised dishes by earlier immigrants from Malaysia or Singapore and will never be found at a restaurant in Guangzhou or Shanghai.
Migrants from Mainland China to Australia is indeed a more recent story. Our compilation, again allowing for limitations, would reveal that they would only account for about half of Australia’s total intake of “Chinese” migrants between 1980 and 2000. Those Australian residents who report to have been born in Mainland China doubled during 2001-2005, again between 2006 and 2010 and again in the six years leading up to the 2016 census.
It is exactly since then that China-related topics have grown controversial: Chinese investment, Chinese students, “Chinese influence”, just to name a few. But clearly neither “China” nor “Chinese” is broadly defined here.
There is certainly limitations to the above analysis, as only first-generation immigrants are counted and not all Malaysian and Singaporean migrants are of Chinese heritage. But it does paint a vivid picture of how diverse the so-called “Chinese Australian community” is. To start with, they can be from as many as a dozen economies overseas, with starkly different experiences of education, society and government, though they may share a common language (but commonly in different dialects) and a limited number of cultural and festive practices.
It is, therefore, problematic to assume this 5% of the Australian population (as suggested by the 2016 census) are homogeneous, as many of our current studies and debates have.
https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/being-chinese-in-australia-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
The recently released “Being Chinese in Australia” poll by Lowy Institute’s Multiculturalism, Identity, and Influence Project, funded by the Australian Department of Home Affairs, for example, seems to have been designed and conducted on two conflicting assumptions.
On the one hand, it readily assumes and concludes, with evidence from the survey, that the “more than 1.2 million people of Chinese heritage [, with] experiences … as diverse as their views … were born in Australia [or] have migrated more recently from [Mainland] China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia”.
On the other, by clinging to the “catch-all” phrase of “Chinese Australians”, the poll is assuming that the cohort, though from a variety of home lands, shares the same opinion on everything.
Running a parallel survey with non-Chinese Australians (average “other” Australians) and compare their responses with those from Chinese Australians is further evidence of that.
Thus the poll seems to be a serious effort to prove something quite self-evident already, which has been repeatedly suggested by researchers but unfortunately under-publicised.
As Professor Sun Wanning remarked in a recent panel discussion at the Australia-China Relations Institute of UTS, “there is no such thing as a Chinese-Australian community”. The Chinese Studies Association of Australia, in its 2019 submission on the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, noted too that:
“By routinely referring to Chinese-Australians as a single group, Australian leaders have failed to recognise the political, linguistic, cultural, and religious differences among the people who ‘look Chinese’….Treating Chinese-Australians as one group is as ineffectual as regarding all European-Australians as one group.”
Two years ago, amid protest from the Vietnamese and other Asian communities, the City of Sydney council decided to change the official name of its annual “Chinese New Year Festival” into “Lunar New Year Festival” to “embrace all communities and cultures”. Lunar New Year has long been celebrated beyond China and there are multiple variations of customs and practices. For example, year 2023 would be the Year of Rabbit according to the Chinese zodiac, but Year of Cat, with the Vietnamese zodiac.
This incident is a perfect example of how insufficient the term “Chinese” can be. While it may be a convenient term for people of other cultural traditions to describe the cohort, it can be quite frustrating for the diverse groups of people in the so-called “Chinese Australian community”. Clarifying the term will not deny their commonality but instead serve the ultimate purposes of multiculturalism and social cohesion.
Dr Dan (Diane) Hu is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Comments
9 responses to “The “Chinese” are a very diverse group.”
I think most of these claims could be made for Australians as a whole as well, this is not a homogenous society in general. But when we discuss different groups of people in any society there are different terms that need be used according to the context and often those terms fail to describe the situation perfectly. It also gets very complex trying to describe those who have immigrated to Australia and are citizens while others here are on visas of some kind. If it becomes too politically correct then sometimes people baulk at describing any group through being concerned about making an error. Apart form Indigenous Australians we all migrated or were forced to come here originally.
When one in five people of Chinese heritage (can’t think of a better term here) in Australia suffer abusive racist attacks then we tend to talk about it aimed at the “Chinese community”, for grouping a specific ethnic identity. Here it is a useful term. But even that fails because Chinese are not all Han Chinese nor do they all originate from mainland China.
Then among Han Chinese there are many with different political proclivities as well, which you don’t mention in your article. For example the Kuomintang are representative of Taiwan and Chiang-Kai-shek’s ROC, and they have been politically active as an organisation in Australia for more than 100 years. (Clive Hamilton for example, only seems to want to accept opinions from such groups). Then there are Chinese people that live here that defend the CCP and admire mainland China and its progress. Yet some of those are born in Malaysia and Singapore etc., and support Xi Jinping.
Then there is the difference with Guangdong and Hong Kong where Cantonese is spoken, while in most of mainland China and Taiwan is where Mandarin is predominantly spoken. Yet Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and parts of Guangdong, still use traditional characters. China is a huge country, bigger than Australia, one would expect a great diversity of many things at every level.
A case in point are my neighbours across the road who are ‘Chinese’. With my limited Mandarin I can talk to the father in the household, who speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin (and possibly more dialects), but I can’t speak with his wife because she only speaks Cantonese or some other dialect I do not know. Asking his grandson one day in English where his grandparents came from in China, he said “they don’t want to talk about it”, inferring whatever reason they came to Australia is marked with some event that was possibly traumatic. So I don’t think they are pro-communist. Whatever they experienced, they want to forget. So even in one family there is great diversity.
Earlier in my life I met many Chinese people who had immigrated here from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese. These were yet another ‘ diverse cohort ‘ even from a small place that had in some cases escaped mainland China as well, either after WWII or during the previous Japanese invasions, or had just immigrated to Australia to try to make it in a new and less populated country. They opened restaurants everywhere because it always worked as a family enterprise and it provided them with income. If they did not speak English they could still work and learn the language progressively for the purposes of the restaurant. Some never learned English, especially if their work was in the kitchen. Some could not even read Chinese characters. Others were fully integrated and spoke English perfectly.
Although Australia is multicultural, which makes it hard to classify what the average Australian is these days (we don’t all think constantly about Don Bradman and cricket), it never developed in the way that China or Europe did. Drive 30kms in Europe and you’ll find great diversity in culture, whether it be the traditions, industries, food, language, or even how the houses are built.
And with the origin of food it is the same. Most people would think Cheese Fondue comes from the French speaking regions of Switzerland, but the French claim it comes from that part of France nearest the Swiss border – Franche-Comté. There are many stories like this in Europe.
Update:
May I add a little comment here about the Buddha and the concept of ’emptiness’.
As the story goes, when the Buddha attained enlightenment, he said something like ‘all is empty’. From my understanding that meant he saw everything as one thing at that moment (including himself), and not a smidgen of division between any object. There was no real name for it, but nothing could be classified.
As babies we tend to see the world like this, as an undifferentiated continuum which we are also a part of. It is only later that the concept of ‘me’ as something separated from that outer universe begins to evolve. At first we even refer to ourselves in the third person such as I would have said ‘George’ does this, and ‘George’ does that. Not ‘I’ do that which comes later. It is at that point we start to label things separate from ourselves because we have become aware of the inner and the outer, the separation. Any label is thus a convenience and a lie to some degree, and bound to be limited in its definition.
De Saussure covered much of this as a modern philosopher in that he pointed out when we say the word ‘tree’ for example, it conjures up a similar but completely different vision of a tree in everyone’s mind. I may see a gum tree, someone from Europe might see a Conifer. So we can agree that something is a tree when we often have totally different interpretations in our minds of what it looks like. Adding some Buddhism to this it becomes clear that a tree is never a single object so nicely defined either. Without the Sun, soil, water, nutrients, animals, atmosphere other plants and trees, fungi, and the original seed that it grew from it ceases to be a tree. It is all part of the one that cannot actually be separated when you see it like this.
So labelling anything is always going to fall short of the goal because it never takes into account the entirety of what something is. In China they called it long ago a rather beautiful word, the Dao 道, and all things are more like moving words like verbs, not static or clearly differentiated fixed nouns.
If only we could see ourselves as all part of the one.
And whatever kind of tree it is, it is highly unlikely it would agree with our ideas about it. BTW, I think you mean Clive Hamilton, not Clive Cameron (see third para.) cheers.
“And whatever kind of tree it is, it is highly unlikely it would agree with our ideas about it.”
Agreed, but unless you believe in some form of Pantheism with all objects having some level of consciousness then what does a tree think about anything? It’s an interesting subject. Kant looked into that with his noumenon and phenomenon. Hokusai in his many representations of Mt Fuji also plays with this concept in that which image is the mountain? Obviously all, but still do we know the mountain at all?
Thanks for the correction on Hamilton, not Cameron. I did read the former’s book though.
I dont know what a tree thinks about anything, or how much consciousness it has, if any. but it is believed by many traditions that they do communicate with each other, and even our modern science is not averse to the notion.
I agree, so do fungi where one mycelium can cover many square metres, if not much larger areas, and this is seen by scientists as a form of communication too.
Science would say that because a tree does not have a brain, then it cannot think. It certainly responds to the environment it is connected to though.
China too wants to emphasise that everyone with Chinese heritage is Chinese – and so should be sympathetic to the PRC’s interests. I wonder how many who speak of ‘Chinese Australians’ knows this.
I’m not sure that is true. But perhaps China expects that people with Chinese heritage would be less ignorant about China. And so are less susceptible to manipulation by anti-Chinese propaganda, and better able to form independent views.
In western iterations of Chinese astrology, Rabbits and Cats are interchangeable.
This is a refreshing article, Dan. In 1961, Raymond Williams coined an aphorism which I ,and others, have paraphrased as “[t]here are in fact no [Chinese] only ways of seeing people as [Chinese] “. Australian history overflows with such examples and the same applies to use of the term ‘Australians”. My sister in law is Chinese , from Wuhan. I remember with amusement a time many years ago that she visited us in Northern NSW and as a relatively new arrival had difficulty with local food. Eventually, we took her into town to the local Chinese restaurant to try and find her some palatable nourishment. Our youngest daughter, then a very young child exclaimed “Auntie, these people look like you”. My sister in law exclaimed in shock “Oh no! They are not like me!” We remember this with amusement and our daughter is now a mother of two who has one of her degrees in Asian Studies and works in the tertiary sector with overseas students. Unfortunately, despite encouragement my nephews did not have the most positive experience of Australian attitudes towards people with Chinese heritage and have not learned Mandarin, for example. This story has personal relevance for me as I developed my own post graduate interests in Asia and China in particular. I am appalled at the ignorance of our region and of China and the rampant Cold War misinformation promoted in our media and by those that should know better. This makes your article refreshing to me.