The Chinese-Language Press in Australia: A Preliminary Scoping Study

Abstract

Despite clear evidence pointing to the centrality of the Chinese press in the historical formation of the Chinese community, and despite the continued importance of the Chinese-language press in the current political, cultural, social and economic life of the Chinese community, there is little understanding of its history and recent growth in mainstream English-language media scholarship. Worse still, the shift in recent scholarship to the power of cyberspace and other forms of new media in assisting the formations of diasporic subjectivities runs the risk of giving the impression that the print media are no longer relevant. Our article aims to address this blind spot by mapping out the contours of change and continuity within the Chinese-language press in Australia. In the first part, we provide a brief historical account of the Chinese migrant communities in Australia, and the role of the press in their formation. We argue that this symbiotic relationship is crucial to understanding the development of the early Chinese-language print media in Australia, which was a less than hospitable society for the Chinese migrants. We then trace the development and evolution of the Chinese-language print media in a range of areas, including the Chinese-language media's current modus operandi, business strategies, cultural practices and ideological positioning, within the context of China's rise and the widening impact of China's promotion of soft power. We conclude by identifying some future directions in the research on the Chinese-language media in Australia, thus contributing to our understanding of some of the opportunities and challenges present in the (re)shaping of Australia's multicultural policies and politics.

Diasporic Chinese media in Australia: A post-2008 overview

“…The limited access to Chinese electronic media in Australia determines that Chinese-language print media continues to play a crucial role in bridging the cultural gap. This is particularly the case since local Australian news, including local Australian news involving the Chinese communities in Australia, relies on print, rather than overseas electronic, outlets for information, leading to the formation of an intensely competitive and extremely volatile Chinese-language print media market (Sun et al 2011). …”

“…For reasons of space, we focus in this paper on the provision of electronic and digital media content which has assumed growing important in recent years, yet we do not wish to dismiss the continued relevance of Chinese-language print media, including daily and weekly papers, as well as magazines. In a separate paper focusing more or less exclusively on the print media -its history and development in Australia -we maintain that print media, due to its local and practical content, continues to serve the Chinese-reading community, especially the migrant groups from the older generations, and that the provision of electronic and digital media content should be considered in conjunction with that of print media (Sun et al 2011).…”

Chinese Activism of a Different Kind

“…Prior to the mid 1980s, they came mostly from the so-called 'Nanyang' countries of Southeast Asia (Kee, 1992(Kee, , 1995Sinclair et al, 2000) to which their ancestors had migrated generations before. Historically, the Chinese had been seen as a problem in white-dominated Australia, but their numbers were not always significant, never higher than five percent of Australia's total population (Clark, 1969;Wang, 1978;Yuan, 2001;Gao, 2011;Sun et al, 2011). The Chinese community numbered less than 10,000 in the late 1940s and around 13,000 in 1954, because of the 'White Australia' policy (Kee, 1992)4 but the introduction of the Colombo Plan in the early 1950s played a very important role in bringing in thousands of educated Chinese from various parts of Southeast Asia (Oakman, 2004).…”

“…These two Acts restricted non-white immigrants from entering Australia. The policy was progressively abandoned between 1949 and 1974 (Yuan, 2001;Fitzgerald, 2007;Gao, 2011). 5 The Colombo Plan was launched in 1950 as a post-colonial or post-war initiative to discreetly maintain British influence, especially its economic colonialism in South and Southeast Asian countries (Oakman, 2004), and 'to limit the spread of communism' in the region (Ninnes, 2005: 142).…”

“…The students were then given two similar temporary protection visas within six or so months of June 4. The purpose of introducing these bridging visas was to make some Chinese students eligible to apply for permanent residency on humanitarian grounds after 19 December 1989 when the Migration Legislation Amendment Act 1989 was introduced and the onshore humanitarian program was abandoned (DILGEA, 1990;Jupp, 1991;Cronin, 1993;Crock, 1998b;Schloenhardt, 2003;Gao, 2011).9 All of these issues resulted in a slow and complicated process in dealing with the PRC student issue.…”