Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers & Chinese-Australian Identity During Federation

Description

The Chinese press was the largest foreign-language press in Sydney over the late nineteenth century, and the only foreign-language press to publish without interruption from the 1890s into the 1920s. Yet the story of Chinese-language newspapers during this period of emerging Australian and Chinese nationalism has, until now, been left untold. Beginning with a review of an especially bitter conflict that split the Sydney Chinese community in 1892, and ending two decades later with the establishment of the earliest political alliance between Chinese-Australian elites in Sydney and Melbourne, established to support the building of the Republic of China, Making Chinese Australia demonstrates how the interpretations and narratives of journalists and editors of Chinese-Australian newspapers played a powerful role in shaping the social identities and historical awareness of Chinese Australians. In the process of relating this important narrative, Mei-fen Kuo employs relevant new historical and philosophical frameworks to initiate a dialogue between Chinese-Australian history and international and diasporic Chinese studies.

Dr Mei-fen Kuo left her native Taiwan in 2003 to undertake a PhD thesis in Australia. In 2008, she was awarded a PhD degree by La Trobe University, and in 2009 she won an internationally competitive Australian Endeavour Award. From late 2010 to September 2013 she was an Australian Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at La Trobe University. There she worked with Professor Judith Brett and Dr James Leibold on 'Unlocking Australia's Chinese Archives: The Political and Social Experience of the Chinese Australian Community, 1909 to 1939', a three-year Linkage grant project supported by the Australian Research Council. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Swinburne University of Technology, where she is working on an ARC-funded project with Professor John Fitzgerald, entitled 'Asia-Pacific Philanthropies: Transnational Networks, Anti-colonial Nationalism, and the Emergence of Modern Chinese Philanthropy, 1850-1949'. In Making Chinese Australia, Mei-fen has made a significant contribution to research on Australian history through her pioneering study of Chinese Australians from a diasporic perspective; her bilingual research skills have allowed her to make full use of detailed but rarely consulted primary sources that are only available in Chinese. Her research adds much depth to knowledge of the Chinese-Australian urban elite in a transnational setting, and forges a dialogue between international and diasporic Chinese studies. Professor Adam McKeown wrote of her work: "I can only think of two or three other social histories of Chinese anywhere in the world that have captured this period with an equal appreciation of the social fluidity, rapid changes and shifting discourse".

The best book ever written on the history of Chinese Australia. -- Professor John Fitzgerald