Marilyn Lake: 'Yellow Peril' Racism Rears its Ugly Head
[Marilyn Lake is professor of history at La Trobe University.]
Chinese were once vilified in Australia, a travesty we'd do well not to repeat.
THE harsh sentence handed down to Stern Hu this week and radio talkback on Chinese investment in Melbourne real estate have converged in focusing attention in Australia on the consequences of the rise of Chinese power in the contemporary world.
Business leaders join would-be home owners in waxing indignant at the new turn of events. Australians are complaining about being sidelined. Suddenly it seems that Charles Pearson's remarkable prophecy of almost 120 years ago has come to pass.
In 1893, Pearson, a leading Victorian Liberal politician and journalist, predicted in what would become probably the most influential book ever written by an Australian - National Life and Character: A Forecast - that the day would surely come when the Chinese, victims of colonial persecution, would become a great power in the world. White men would be humiliated, ''elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile''....
A hundred years ago, warnings about the rise of China as a world power and the migration of thousands of Chinese people to southern Africa, Australasia and North America led to the adoption of racist policies of exclusion and discrimination, whose legacies continue to haunt us, as, for example, in Indian reaction to incidents of racial violence in Melbourne.
In responding to the housing crisis, let us be wary of reverting to type. Recent calls for tighter regulation of foreign investment in Australia, along with demands for cuts in the migration intake, deserve wide and open discussion, but we should not repeat the mistakes of the past by making race or nationality or colour the basis of our grievances and the ground on which we shape our policy.
Read entire article at The Age (AU)
Chinese were once vilified in Australia, a travesty we'd do well not to repeat.
THE harsh sentence handed down to Stern Hu this week and radio talkback on Chinese investment in Melbourne real estate have converged in focusing attention in Australia on the consequences of the rise of Chinese power in the contemporary world.
Business leaders join would-be home owners in waxing indignant at the new turn of events. Australians are complaining about being sidelined. Suddenly it seems that Charles Pearson's remarkable prophecy of almost 120 years ago has come to pass.
In 1893, Pearson, a leading Victorian Liberal politician and journalist, predicted in what would become probably the most influential book ever written by an Australian - National Life and Character: A Forecast - that the day would surely come when the Chinese, victims of colonial persecution, would become a great power in the world. White men would be humiliated, ''elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile''....
A hundred years ago, warnings about the rise of China as a world power and the migration of thousands of Chinese people to southern Africa, Australasia and North America led to the adoption of racist policies of exclusion and discrimination, whose legacies continue to haunt us, as, for example, in Indian reaction to incidents of racial violence in Melbourne.
In responding to the housing crisis, let us be wary of reverting to type. Recent calls for tighter regulation of foreign investment in Australia, along with demands for cuts in the migration intake, deserve wide and open discussion, but we should not repeat the mistakes of the past by making race or nationality or colour the basis of our grievances and the ground on which we shape our policy.