Empire, orphans, and honourable Aussies

In June last year, China's Vice-President Xi Jinping, the man in line to become the next president of the world's most populous emerging superpower, came to Canberra with a 200-strong delegation of Chinese business and government leaders. On his way back to Beijing, he stopped in Darwin and took his entourage to visit Kakadu to see Aboriginal art.

Thus began Graham Bradley in The Australian last December. The Vice-President of China, when asked, told Bradley that he wanted to see the place where the Indigenous art came from, those beautiful works that our Governor General Quentin Bryce had presented to the Chinese government in Beijing recently. Could it be that he also wanted to see how the Aboriginal people live today?

Given that we have from time to time raised our concerns about human rights in China it is not unlikely that visiting Chinese dignitaries would be interested in aspects of our cultural practice which linger from the days when the first narco state in history, as Niall Ferguson put it in the TV series The Ascent of Money, smuggled opium into China to extract the silver dollars it desperately needed to pay for tea and silk.

The Qing government had insisted on silver for its tea and silk, outlawed opium, and rejected trade overtures from the Empire that ruled the waves. It was a terminal mistake. Great Britain invaded in 1939 and executed an unnecessarily prolonged military expedition until 1842. Opium spread like wildfire in China soon afterwards, and that opprobrium would last for the next 100 years until Mao’s triumph in 1949.

By that time the British Empire was all but a bag of bad dreams. Australia, the New Britannia, became an orphan cast adrift in an alien sea. Half a century on, we are now talking big about securing our place in the Asian Century, particularly the Chinese Century. We will be more China-literate in our business dealings, more China-sensitive in certain political matters, and perhaps even China-empathetic in some cultural aspects, as indicated in the presenting of Indigenous art works by our Governor General at the Gates of Heaven in Beijing.

And we are a tolerant people, with the success story of a multicultural society that is the envy of many in the West. But will all these best-foot-forward antics really wash with the well-educated and well-travelled ruling class of that one-Party capitalist behemoth on a path to reclaim the glory days of the unrivalled Middle Kingdom during the Ming Dynasty?

Trust is the basis of business dealings, and foreign relations. The leaked plans in which Australia becomes part of the American war machine against some nation looking rather like China are unfortunate to say the least. Is the orphan still yearning for the pampered days of the far away mother empire?

The British Empire gave us unbridled faith in our virility. Our dauntless endeavours in the New Britannia had regrown the Anglo-Saxon race, as our well-fed, better-built, and indomitable soldiers demonstrated amply in the Great War just ended. Bursting with pride, Billy Hughes refused point blank to entertain the Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919. The result was the transfer of German concessions in Shandung Province to the Japanese as compensation for loss of face.

China, an ally of the West in that Great War, bitterly disappointed, refused to sign the Treaty. In hindsight, we can see that the West had afforded Japan a bridgehead on Chinese soil from which to launch in 1931 its pan-Asia empire of the rising sun. Will the Chinese forget that? Do we have to say anything about that in our cultural engagement with the Chinese? Funding Australian Studies Centres at their universities and staging Australian productions in their cultural venues is no doubt helpful. But what are we to make of the sins from our Imperial past?

The Chinese are a serious people. Despite Mao’s Cultural Revolution they are still infused with the Confucian belief in intellectual rigour and perseverance. They have not forgiven the Japanese for the Nanking Massacres in 1937, and they find the continuing Japanese failure to admit in their school curriculum the atrocities they inflicted upon China particularly repugnant.

Is there a vein there we should mine? We never did anything anywhere near what the Japanese did. But we were an integral part of the Empire that gave China a hundred years of abject humiliation and turmoil. We sent a contingent to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, too late to do the real fighting, but soon enough to do the “cleaning up” of the remnants of boxers, hunted down and slaughtered.

The Chinese are unlikely to care too much about that episode. But the Yellow Peril, the Versailles Peace Treaty, the Red Menace, may well be in their calculus of how our overtures should be regarded, particularly with the recent posting of American troops in Darwin, reminiscent of a time when we were overwhelmed by the fear of Asian invasion.

Are the Chinese still that swamping peril we once imagined them to be in our current fathoming of China as the emerging superpower? Are Chinese Australians still just dutiful minions, somewhat exotic, neither expected nor encouraged to take on an unbridled place in the public life of Australia?

Apart from Penny Wong, few Chinese are seen in our public life. What does the Chinese government think of that? And if their emissaries should visit our National Museum or examine our history curriculum, they might conclude that the Chinese are at best presented as useful minions, albeit with warm intentions.

The evil connotations of the Yellow Peril are gone and in their place are signs of the humanising and rehabilitation of John Chinaman, once the pest to the White Man’s progress towards his New Britannia.

In the ‘Landmarks’ Exhibition at our National Museum in Canberra, ten ‘Landmarks’ tell the story of the white settlement of Australia. One of these is themed ‘pastoralism and gold’, featuring the iconic windmill of Elsey Station. In its online version the Chinese appear twice:

Some of Gunn's possessions, including small tokens of remembrance given to her by the Elsey station cook, Ah Cheong…

and

No history of Australia would be complete without an account of the gold rushes and their impact on Australia. Landmarks traces how gold shaped ideas about representation and government on the Victorian goldfields, and challenged law and order in the Lachlan valley of New South Wales.

A lavishly decorated Chinese costume, used for many years in Bendigo's Easter parade, evokes that community's efforts for recognition as equal citizens.

Ah Cheong was a grateful servant, eh! And what about the lavishly decorated Chinese costume? At best a case of positive Orientalism, and at worst a case of glossing over the tyranny visited upon the Chinese during and after the gold rushes. A replica of the‘Roll Up, Roll Up, No Chinese’ banner used in one of the infamous Lambing Flat Riots of 1861 would have been a more fitting artefact than the lavishly decorated Chinese costume.

At any rate a closer look at the Chinese participation in the Bendigo Easter Parade in the 1890s would suggest that it was more an opportunistic display of exotic colour to win acceptance from a generally disdainful and hostile populace. On at least two occasions the Chinese were treated with such indignity in planning committee meetings that they chose to withdraw from the parades. These incidents are germane to the fate of the C19 Chinese, marooned in Australia, too poor to return to their ancestral hearth.

Historically the Chinese were at best seen as a useful and exotic people. Perhaps even now they ought to be grateful for their place in Australia. Charlie Teo, the intrepid folk hero brain surgeon, did not escape censure for his dignified critique of our society in his recent Australia Day address. Likewise Chinese Australians were told in popular media that they should not have complained about the TV casting of white actors to play Billy Sing, our Gallipoli hero, and his Shanghainese father.

Perhaps Charlie Teo should have known better. There has been a Lambing Flat Chinese Tribute Gardens in Young since around 2000: ‘In recognition of the contribution of the Chinese community to the settlement of Young in the 1860s and to the ongoing contributions of the Chinese people to Australia as a Nation.’ Not a single word, though, alludes to the Lambing Flat Riots, a persistent series of attacks upon the Chinese.

In truth these expeditions to rid the diggings of the Chinese, with banners, bands, and guns held aloft on horseback, marked a historic milestone on our path to White Australia in 1901. So how can we tell the story of gold or the white settlement of terra nullius without any reference to the calamitous role cast upon the hapless Chinese? Fomenting for and clinging to White Australia occupied our national psyche for a good hundred years!

When it comes to building trust with China nothing will speak more loudly to official Chinese visitors than the way we present Chinese Australian history. Last October I heard a Chinese guide (university trained) in Nanjing telling our Australian group that the locals still hated the Japanese for the atrocities they committed in 1937. We found out later that he never allowed the presence of Japanese tourists to stop him from telling that part of Nanking’s past.

Surely the Chinese emissaries would not be focused on the past treatment of the Chinese in Australia. Yet if we follow the Japanese and keep dragging our feet on telling the unexpurgated version of our history with China and its subjects sojourned in our land, we only invite questions about the sincerity of our overtures to win an equable place in the Chinese Century. Bradley’s account about the Vice-President of China taking his 200-strong delegation to Kakadu to see Aboriginal art, at the end of top level business roundtables and official engagements in Canberra, should beckon us to think deeply about how the Chinese might be seeing us through our cultural practices and productions, no matter how we otherwise present ourselves as honourable Aussies at official levels.

The British Empire is long gone. But we, the orphan of that Empire, will do well to search our soul to establish an outlook towards Asia that is neither nostalgic nor too optimistic or overconfident. If we want to be accepted as an honourable member in the Sinosphere of the 21^st century, it might be a good start to have more Chinese Australians tell the unexpurgated story of the Chinese in Australia, away from the froth and bubble of multiculturalism and purged of the remains of the White Australia dream.