China's Pride Burns Bright

The Age

Thursday April 24, 2008

Farah Farouque

A RESURGENT China has exported its sense of national pride to mainland Australia: the torch relay has not only galvanised human rights and Tibetan-Buddhist protesters, it has sparked unprecedented outpourings of Chinese nationalism in Melbourne.

Last night a massive convoy of buses departed the Telstra Dome for Canberra on a mission. The passengers are out to bolster China's pride which, they argue, is being slurred by the ongoing relay controversy.

"We heard about the different (protesting) voices, and we wanted to show our positive voice," said organiser Bin Hua. Like most of these journeymen, Mr Hua is an overseas student. He says interest in the Canberra trip had gathered momentum through discussions on online forums and, contrary to "rumours", no Chinese embassy officials were involved in the muscular display of support. "We are paying for this ourselves."

Former deputy lord mayor Wellington Lee was among a sprinkling of older people who joined the convoy. He said he joined the group to show solidarity. "The press hasn't been kind to China. More than that, it has been pretty anti-China," he said.

There are close to 670,000 Australians who claim a Chinese ancestry - nearly 200,000 in Victoria. And the sense of pride in the history and accomplishment of China and Chinese culture is at a peak, commentators note.

"Traditionally, the community has not been politically active, but with recent economic success they have started to behave like the Americans and British when they were on top of the heap," said James Jupp, a migration expert at the Australian National University.

Deakin academic Damien Kingsbury suggests the counter-campaign to the torch protest has the fingerprints of some degree of "manipulation". "It's almost impossible that the Chinese embassy is not involved in some way," he said. "The confluence (of events) can't be purely coincidental."

Dr Kingsbury suggested the influence would have been subtle, perhaps with the embassy making contact with some key locally based Chinese and tapping into existing - and genuine - disquiet among the diaspora.

"There is a genuine sense of patriotic pride on the part of the ethnic Han Chinese here," Dr Kingsbury said. "They see the attacks (on the torch) as much about being anti-Chinese as about human rights."

Over the past fortnight, there have been a number of talkback callers of Chinese origin protesting about how the torch issue is being presented.

Molly Liu, an Australian resident for 20 years and office manager at the Australian Chinese News, said: "The whole thing makes the Chinese community here feel isolated and a lot of news reports about what is going on in China are not truthful."

© 2008 The Age

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