Yun Jiang doesn’t mince her words when reflecting on how the recent decline in Australia’s relationship with China has affected Chinese Australians.
“It’s almost as if we’re already at war,” the scholar and former government policy adviser says. “During times of war, we are kind of forced to choose.”
Australian government rhetoric on China may have cooled since Labor came to office, but Chinese Australian communities are still dealing with the consequences of “drums of war” fears stoked over the past few years.
Some say the media’s negative portrayal of China, and of the two countries’ relationship as a zero-sum game, has made them feel forced to choose between their Chinese and Australian identities and fuelled suspicious attitudes towards them.
“Chinese Australians are often seen by some in the national security community as just collateral damage,” says Jiang, the China Matters fellow at the Australian Institute of International Affairs. “And the racism and the suspicion that’s targeted at them? Well, they’re just unintended consequences.”
Jiang says the rise in hostility can be traced back to 2018, when the Coalition government passed foreign interference and espionage laws that then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said were partly driven by media reports that “the Chinese Communist party has been working to covertly interfere with our media, our universities and even the decisions of elected representatives right here in this building”.
Jiang, who was then working as a public servant, says it became harder after that for Chinese Australians to obtain security clearance for sensitive roles.
The Australian and Chinese governments increasingly clashed over Beijing’s expansive claims across the contested South China Sea, human rights concerns such as the repression of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province, and the clampdown on dissent in Hong Kong. Tensions also flared over Australian national security-related decisions, including banning Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network in 2018.
Things turned uglier when the pandemic began in 2020, and especially after Scott Morrison’s government called for an independent international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. An editorial in the state-controlled Global Times said that could damage the bilateral relationship “beyond repair”.
Haiqing Yu, a professor of media and communications at RMIT, says Australian and other Western media outlets stopped portraying China as a strategic competitive partner to focus on these issues.
“The moment you are not vocally anti-China, you are then portrayed as pro-China.”
Chinese-Australians particularly felt the repercussions of this during the pandemic.
“When I was wearing a mask during the Covid restrictions, I was told to ‘keep your Chinese virus home’.
“That kind of racism doesn’t happen overnight,” Yu says. “Australia has had racism for a long time, but it has resurged in the toxic, hostile environment between China and the US-led west.”
In October 2020, Jiang was among three witnesses of Chinese heritage invited to appear before a Senate inquiry to discuss “issues facing the diaspora”, in her capacity as director of the ANU’s China Policy Centre.
After she gave her opening statement, then Liberal senator Eric Abetz asked the witnesses to “unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist party dictatorship”.
Jiang says: “I was very shocked at the time and later on I just felt, you know, how long do I need to be in this country? What do I need to do to prove that I am Australian enough?”
‘Bordering on outright paranoia’
The diplomatic feud with Australia escalated in 2020 when the Chinese government said it felt unfairly targeted by the Australian government’s early public calls for an independent international inquiry into the origins and handling of the pandemic.
The tensions were inflamed by hawkish public commentary from Coalition backbenchers and the Australian government vowing to persist in raising human rights concerns about China.
Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at Per Capita, says there is evidence the way Australians view China has dramatically changed in recent years, which has influenced broader perceptions of the Chinese diaspora.
In 2018 the Lowy Institute’s poll found only 12% of Australians saw China as more of a security threat than an economic partner. By 2020 that number had jumped to 41%, and a year later it was at 64%.
In 2022, the Australia-China Relations Institute at UTS found that 42% of Australians believed Chinese Australians could be mobilised by the Chinese government to undermine Australia’s interests.
“That’s really concerning for me as it almost borders on outright paranoia that Chinese Australians are a potential fifth column in Australia,” Chiu says.
Jiang says many Chinese Australians are afraid to speak publicly on China and Australia’s relationship with it.
“So when we have this public debate there is a group of people’s voices that’s also missing.”
At the lowest point in the diplomatic rift, China imposed restrictions on a range of Australian exports, including hefty tariffs on wine and barley, and Chinese ministers refused to speak with their direct Australian counterparts for more than two years, sparking claims of “economic coercion”.
Peter Dutton, then defence minister, raised the stakes by saying Australia needed to “prepare for war” and it was “inconceivable” that Australia would not come to Taiwan’s defence.
Yu has observed conversations between largely older Chinese Australians on WeChat since 2019. She says the relationship between China and Australia was the issue most discussed in the lead-up to the 2022 election.
The Mandarin speakers, particularly those who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, often discussed the impact a possible war with China could have on their personal safety and livelihoods.
Yu says some were worried that Chinese Australians would be interned, as Japanese-Australians were during the second world war.
“[They said things like] ‘What if there was a war between China and Australia? The Chinese Australians would all be put in detention camps’,” she says.
Yu says a wide range of views on the Chinese government can be found even just among first-generation migrants from China.
“We have people who are strongly pro-China, even though they have lived in Australia for decades,” Yu says.
“We also have people who are strongly against the CCP, particularly the generation who came to Australia in 1989.”
The 2022 election
Yu says this fear among Chinese Australians played a part in changing their votes at last year’s federal election.
In seats with the greatest proportion of voters with Chinese heritage, there was a 6.6% swing away from the Liberals, compared with a 3.7% swing in other seats.
Yu does not believe Chinese voters withdrew their support for the Liberal party to “punish” it for its aggressive stance against China, but as a warning of their discontent: “I think it’s a sign to tell the Liberal party, ‘You better listen to us’.”
Chiu, a Labor party member, points to a Lowy Institute survey of Chinese Australians, which found that identification with the Coalition fell from 42% to 28% between 2020 and 2021.
“In their attempt to wedge Labor on China to bolster their national security credentials, they forgot that the only constituency for whom Australia-China relations were a swing issue was Chinese Australian communities, particularly those who have family or economic ties with China,” Chiu says.
“And for them, it wasn’t an abstract issue. It has immediate real life consequences for them. And as a result, it backfired for the Coalition spectacularly.”
The Liberal party review of the election suggested Chinese voters had mistaken the Morrison government’s criticisms of the government of China for an indictment of the wider Chinese community.
“This was obviously incorrect but the [Liberal] party’s political opponents pushed this perception among voters of Chinese heritage in key seats in 2022,” the review said.
The party’s representatives needed to be more sensitive to the Chinese community’s genuine concerns “and to ensure language used cannot be misinterpreted as insensitive”, the review said.
It noted that the proportion of Australia’s population with Chinese ancestry had grown from 3% in 2001 to 5.5% (1.4 million people) at the 2021 census: “Rebuilding the party’s relationship with the Chinese community must therefore be a priority during this term of parliament.”
Victorian Liberals observed similar trends when they lost November’s state election.
The former Liberal candidate for Box Hill, Nicole Werner, wrote in a News Corp column that the main reason the party was unsuccessful in seats across the eastern Melbourne suburbs was that “the Chinese vote has abandoned the Liberal party”.
She wrote that she felt hung “out to dry” by the party’s lack of long-term engagement with multicultural communities.
Almost a year later, Werner won a byelection in Warrandyte on Melbourne’s north-east fringe and became the first Victorian Liberal MP of Asian-Australian heritage, which she says shows the party wants to choose “people that are representative of the communities that they seek to represent”.
She says the Victorian Liberals started using WeChat last year, and since then had been “a lot more careful in our rhetoric”, including more clearly distinguishing the CCP from Chinese Australians.
Werner says the party has begun to prioritise engaging multicultural communities
Dutton also appears to be recasting his message in line with the review.
Campaigning in March in the byelection for the Victorian seat of Aston – where 14% of voters have Chinese ancestry – Dutton said China was an “incredibly important trading partner for our country” and praised the “incredible diaspora community here of Australians of Chinese heritage”.
“They are people who have worked hard, they’ve educated their kids, they’re entrepreneurial, they are working hard for their families, for their community, for their country and they’re wonderful Australians,” he said.
The Liberals now hold only two metropolitan Melbourne seats, Deakin and Menzies, both of which are home to a high proportion of Chinese Australian voters.
Chiu says: “There is no pathway for them to get back into government without winning those seats that have a high proportion of Chinese Australian voters.”
Yu says it is “very dangerous” to suggest that Chinese Australians are rusted-on Liberal or Labor supporters and underestimates their agency to suggest they have misunderstood or been misled on the Coalition’s anti-China stance. Just because some chose not to vote Liberal last year “doesn’t mean that Chinese Australians can’t … engage in critical thinking”.
“Just like when people say, ‘Oh, by using WeChat we are all brainwashed [or] we are under [the influence of] CCP propaganda’.
“We know there’s propaganda on WeChat [and] in mainstream media because we have brains. We think. We read … news everywhere because we have been constantly told that Chinese language media is censored and therefore we actively sought after alternative news so we can have better balanced news sources.”
Chiu says: “We shouldn’t deny or downplay the reality of foreign interference and the nature of the Chinese Communist party.
“But we have this unhelpful perception that anything with a possible link to China is a potential threat that can be weaponised, including people of Chinese heritage. And I think that’s been extremely corrosive, leading to this use of reverse onus of proof and guilt by association.”
Yu says journalists, politicians and other public figures need to be responsible for the language they use to discuss China.
“Language matters. So if everyone is careful about the words they use, [don’t] confuse China with Chinese, like ‘Chinese influence’. I always say, ‘Do you mean China’s influence?’
“I am Chinese, so I’m Chinese influence. So small things like this matter.”
With Daniel Hurst
