| Book Review | Labour History, 94 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEW

John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007. pp. 312. $44.95 paper.

Rarely has the cover of a book so successfully concealed the treasures within. Forget the family photo and the subtitle; this is a ripping yarn of revolutionary movements, secret societies, respectable nationalism, political exclusion, Christian evangelism and community organising – all shaped by, and shaping, success and failure in business.

John Fitzgerald has mobilised this fascinating history to demolish the big white lie of White Australia: that Chinese immigrants were a threat to Australian democracy because they were effectively slaves, raised in a culture of unquestioning obedience to an absolute ruler, and could not be assimilated. Instead we discover a tradition of heroic struggles for democracy, freedom, modernisation and national renewal in which Chinese Australians played a major role.

For Fitzgerald, this is not just an argument with Henry Parkes, Arthur Calwell or the racist agitators of the 1880s. Like his right-wing contemporaries, John Howard attempted to define Australia on the basis of 'national values', and to use these as a weapon of exclusion. Rather than constituting some kind of existential threat, Fitzgerald shows that Chinese immigrants embraced precisely those 'national values' that were supposed to define 'white' Australians, and organised behind those values in the struggle for China's future.

And what a story he has to tell. He starts with the radical secret societies, which organised much of the labour migration from China to Australia on the credit-ticket system, took responsibility for the welfare of the labourers and ensured they fulfilled their obligations. These secret societies were also major political networks. The Yee Hing network (which was led by Loong Hung Pung in Bathurst until his death in 1874) created the Revolutionary and Independence Society of Australian Chinese in the late 1870s or early 1880s. One of Loong's compatriots helped create China's first revolutionary party with Sun Yatsen in 1895, and went on to help found the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The impact of this emerging radical nationalism can be seen in the identification of Loong, and others buried in Melbourne Cemetery, as people from 'China', rather than by their kin or place of origin.

With the growth of turbulence in China itself, Chinese Australians were divided between those agitating for a republic, and those for a modernised monarchy. Growing wealth and the repression of anti-Chinese immigration laws led the Yee Hing and other secret societies to come out openly as Masonic organisations, defending Chinese people in Australia and organising for change in China. Chinese nationalists visited Australia, and elements of the Australian political system and ideology, including federation, served as a model for some. Australia was shaping Chinese politics without knowing it.

The revolution of 1911 saw the growth of the nationalist party, the Kuo Min Tang (KMT), which enrolled thousands of members and raised large sums of money for the new nationalist government. When the KMT turned towards an alliance with Soviet Russia in 1923, the Australian KMT followed suit, turning towards the Australian labour movement and organising Chinese workers. By the mid-1920s, one in six Australian members was a seafarer. This reflected the broader influence of labour radicalism in Australia and was in marked contrast to the more bourgeois American KMT which rejected the labour turn.

Chiang Kai-Shek's sudden and violent attack on his communist allies in the 'White Terror' of April 1927, led to a split in Australia, and the purging of the key KMT labour activists. Membership halved, a decline the new right-wing leadership blamed on White Australia.

The pressure of White Australia discrimination and attacks on Chinese businesses in Australia, led some Chinese merchants to shift their investments to China itself, founding the four great retail empires in Shanghai. These were modelled on Sydney's Anthony Horden's, shaped by the Christian evangelism of Presbyterian Rev John Young Wai, with staff indoctrinated in liberal doctrines of equality and ethical behaviour.

At the same time, Chinese businesses invested in the British Empire in the Pacific, and organised branches of the KMT to organise protection from racist discrimination. C.F. Yong's path-breaking book, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921, covered many of these topics, but Fitzgerald has had access to more sources – most importantly the archives of the Australian KMT. And Fitzgerald is concerned to draw out of this story the energy and activism of China's radical sons and daughters in Australia, the impact of western political doctrines, and the way their organisations changed in response to Australian racism, political shifts in China, and their own success in business. The result is a truly international history.

However, there are also some important weaknesses and silences. As Andrew Markus has shown, Chinese workers demolished the White Australia myth of obedience and willingness to work for low wages by organising their own unions and striking against their Chinese employers, particularly in the furniture industry, and winning wages equal or close to those of others in the industry. This was another aspect of the modernity of Chinese immigrants.

The tensions between workers and employers or headmen are occasionally mentioned here, but Chinese labour organisation is far more often presented as democratic and cooperative, and Chinese business presented as caring. It would be unique if this were true.

Fitzgerald's apparent desire to renovate Australian nationalism to embrace the Chinese community is even more problematic. Surely the entire history of the Howard government, not to mention its predecessors, demolishes any idea that the political system in Australia is driven by values of freedom, egalitarianism or mateship that were celebrated by The Bulletin and which Fitzgerald finds so important to Chinese immigrants. These are things that ordinary Australians have had to fight for, most often through the labour movement. The most dramatic cultural divide in Australia has always been the class divide, which is one reason our rulers needed the mythology of White Australia.

This was not an academic question for Chinese people. Chinese leaders tried to understand why they were being persecuted and excluded – wrongly thinking it was just a matter of unprincipled politicians trying to win cheap popularity with 'the mob'. And it is sad to read Chinese merchants appealing to Australian governments and respectable opinion on the basis of equality and fair play. They radically misjudged the real values of 'the more fortunate, and more delicately nurtured side of society', many of whom believed

that the distinction among men in wealth, education, and social position, is of an innate and permanent character; and that what are called the working classes, constitute a distinct species of human nature, designed by Providence for the purpose of doing the rough and objectionable work of the world (Arthur Bruce Smith, Liberty and Liberalism, Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, 2005, p. 168).

Arguments aside, John Fitzgerald has given us one of the finest histories of an immigrant community, its anti-establishment origins, business and community organisation, and its intervention in the politics of the homeland. Labour historians and radicals will read this with delight – provided they look past the cover.


University of Sydney	PHIL GRIFFITHS

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