Chinese Australians in White Australia (review)

One of the most common arguments used by conservative governments to justify their discriminatory immigration policy of excluding a certain ethnic group from entering their countries is the incompatibility of the group’s culture, values, habits and behaviors. A notable example is the White Australia Policy legislated by the Australian parliament in 1901 to restrict non-White immigration as a response to the government’s growing anxieties over the visible presence of Chinese and Pacific Islanders in the colonies. Although the policy officially ended in 1973, an attempt has been made to defend the White Australia Policy in recent years, as Robert Mane, one of Australia’s foremost public intellectuals and academics indicates in the introduction of the book. Without being explicit, this is perhaps with reference to the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The White Australia Policy in 2004 in which the author contended that the discrimination practiced in White Australia was not racist because it was not based on racial criteria but rather on “reasoned judgments” about the principles and values that distinguished the Chinese from others. More specifically, the argument put forward by Windschutte was that given the irreconcilability of the two opposing immigrant cultures hosted by Australia in the 19th century — one characterized by individualism, egalitarianism and mateship and embraced by white settlers freed from the tyrannies and privileges of Old Europe, and the other held by the Chinese with values deeply entrenched in servility and oriental despotism that remained unchanged for centuries — there was a case to be made.

It is in this context that Fitzgerald’s publication is most commendable. It unambiguously sets out to tackle such arguments and show how flawed and untrue they are by re-examining in detail the history of Chinese communities in Australia in the 19th century. In particular, he notes that the majority of Chinese arrivals at the time were not slaves but free men from villages in southern China in search of good fortunes on the goldfields. He spells out how the Yee Hing (Yixing) brotherhood, the fraternal network through which Chinese laborers were recruited to work in Australia, evolved from an underground secret society into a significant Chinese Masonic movement. As such, Fitzgerald demonstrates that democracy was not an ideal exclusive to white settlers in Australia but was strongly supported by the Chinese in Australia who strove to transform their mother country into a modern democracy endorsing freedom and egalitarianism. Moreover, he finds that the Chinese, in fact, were enthusiastic supporters of a federation in Australia. This is supported by the fact that not only did Tung Wah News, the newspaper for the Chinese community at the time, report on a daily basis on the issues surrounding federation out of a conviction that local Chinese had a part to play in the new Australia under a system of government based on liberty and fairness, but the Chinese community which participated in the great parade of the first Commonwealth parliament was no less jubilant than white Australians.

For Fitzgerald, the “Big White Lie” that denigrated the Chinese in Australia’s past has to be exposed. To debunk the myth that the Chinese in Australia were a servile people, he delves into historical records documenting the development of the Kuomintang (KMT) in Australia. He shows how the Chinese struggled to survive in a racially discriminatory society by redirecting the orientation and role of the political organization in representing Chinese Australians to the Chinese government authorities. They believed that they were treated with derision by white Australians because the Chinese government was weak. To demonstrate Chinese resilience in the face of social adversity, Fitzgerald looks further at the ways in which the Chinese, especially business entrepreneurs and those with Christian networks and Christian ethics, developed their business and investment strategies beyond their fraternal networks while offering comfort and support to one another.

Ultimately what Fitzgerald offers in the book is an account of the Chinese in Australia as an ethnic minority that was strong...