Making Chinese Australia is a landmark study, not only in Chinese-Australian history, but in Australian history more generally. It also makes a substantial contribution to the transnational history of the Chinese diaspora across the Pacific. It marks a break with approaches to the past framed by the sociological framework of race relations, which often had the ironic effect of rendering and reducing Chinese to a “race,” defined in terms of their vulnerability and victimhood. Australian Chinese are still best known historically—and in progressive school texts—as the feared and ridiculed objects of the racist cartoons in the popular press. New historical scholarship during the last two decades has challenged and revised this traditional representation, offering more interesting accounts of Chinese historical agency in Australian settler colonies and the diverse encounters between British and Chinese imperial subjects across the continent.
Making Chinese Australia is a key work in this new wave of historical studies. Mei-fen Kuo provides a detailed account of the activities of Chinese elites in Sydney and Melbourne in shaping and reshaping modern national communities, both the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia and the building of an independent republican China. In this context, Kuo insists that identity formation be seen as a complex historical process, involving urbanization, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and international networking, rather than an essentialist expression of Chinese community character or a simple reaction to the experience of racism.
Making Chinese Australia is also an important study of a transformative urban press, taking a cue, at one level, from Benedict Anderson's work on the formation of modern imagined communities in print culture. Kuo's focus is the role of Chinese-language newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, predominantly in Sydney, a key international trading center for the Pacific, where some 65 percent of the Chinese population could read and write Chinese. (A much smaller percentage could read English.) She sees the newspapers not just as the source of a considerable amount of information, but as dynamic agents in the process of, and tensions arising from, political and social change and community formation. The proprietors and journalists are key historical subjects in her innovative account of modernization, urbanization, and nationalism.
The Chinese Australian Herald was founded in 1894 in Sydney, the Tung Wah News in Sydney in 1898, and the Chinese Times in Melbourne in 1902. Although there was also an important German-language press in the Australian colonies, Kuo points out that the Chinese press was the only foreign-language press to continue publication over some three decades. The Chinese Australian Herald had European proprietors, including the bohemian author James Alexander Philp, while the editors were Chinese bilingual intellectuals, including Sun Johnson, educated in Hong Kong and London. As its name suggests, it was more Australian and assimilationist in orientation, though its readership extended across the Pacific to the Philippines, Tahiti, and China. The editors commended political democracy and progressive working conditions, including the adoption of “clock time” to regulate working hours. The newspaper urged its readers to follow the eight-hour day and observe the Sunday Sabbath.
The Tung Wah News, by contrast, was more internationalist in orientation, founded by Chinese merchant elites and closely involved in establishing the Chinese Empire Reform Association in 1899. The editor between 1898 and 1900 was Wu Yuping, a Honolulu-based Chinese, while the paper's concerns were heavily influenced by the Hundred Days Reform movement. With the exile of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Tung Wah Times became part of a network of reformers linking Yokohama and Sydney.
Liang Qichao visited Australia between October 1900 and April 1901, with a view to fundraising, but with his visit coinciding with the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia, he also wrote a 20,000-word essay on the need for China to build a strong, democratic nation-state: “Tracing the Source of China's Weakness.” He extended information networks around the Pacific Rim and arranged for Tung Wah News to become the Australian agent for two revolutionary periodicals published by Chinese students in Japan: Guominbao and Kaizhilu.
More generally at this time, developments in the Chinese-language press reflected changes in the leadership of the Chinese Australian community: “The new Sydney Chinese elite exercised social leadership through newspapers, through non-particularistic social networks that crossed native-place boundaries, and through new forms of political participation that involved political parties” (p. 101). In 1902, Thomas Chang Luke, a former editor of the Tung Wah News, became the first editor and proprietor of the Chinese Times in Melbourne, at first supported by leaders of native-place associations, but increasingly transnational in orientation and revolutionary in its sympathies. Kuo argues that in the years before the Chinese revolution of 1911, Chinese-language newspapers in Australia played a vital role in enhancing their readers’ political consciousness and ethnic nationalism. Stories of discrimination and suffering under White Australia featured in the Chinese-language press fueled an emotional commitment to the Chinese revolution of 1911 and became central to twentieth-century Chinese Australian identity.
Making Chinese Australia is a stirring read as well as a deeply researched and innovative contribution to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian and international history. It is path-breaking scholarship and sure to become a classic in its field.
