COVID-19 and Political Polarization: Notes on Australia’s Chinese Communities
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Chinese Australians are from a variety of backgrounds, Southeast Asian countries, Hong Kong and Taiwan for instance. Most Chinese Australians of Southeast Asian migrant backgrounds are politically inactive regarding the PRC, but do take the opportunity of China’s economic take off to expand their business. Migrants from Guangdong and Hong Kong used to be the most numerous in Australia since the middle 19th century and they were also the ones that kept the Chinese cultural tradition going in Australia (Petty 2009), symbolized by the iconic China towns built by them in most capital cities. More of contemporary migrants of Chinese ethnicity are from mainland China, such as a large number of students of English from the PRC who were able to stay and then to obtain residents status subsequent to the 1989Tiananmen events during which the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke appeared tearfully on TV announcing the extension of visas (Fang and Weedon 2020). This source of migration continued, including immediate families of the students of English before the Tiananmen events (Liu Xi’an and Gao 1998), business and investment migrants and skilled migrants from the PRC.
Author: Mobo Gao
Institution: The University of Adelaide
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3122953971