In which Doug tries to restart his brain

Scary stuff, Amy Chua’s World On Fire. When it came out last year, it changed the possibilities in thinking about globalization, complicating the black-and-white struggle between free market globalists and the unruly lefties who oppose the current brand. I’m reading it for the second time, and it has just as much impact. This time, it’s got me thinking about the rise of China, and what the economic boom that has foreign investors salivating means in terms of its political power. I’ve also been wondering what it means for Australia in the future, once the euphoria of the resource boom dwindles.

The Chinese democracy movement is dead or dormant after Tiananmen Square and a nasty strain of popular ethnonationalism has taken its place. The Chinese government permits and tacitly encourages Chinese anger against Japanese atrocities in World War II, while openly feeding Chinese pride in their new creation, a surging economy which is both admired and feared by developing and developed countries alike. Poorer countries watch the country shrug off the economic shackles of communism with mixed feelings of awe and concern; America and Japan need China to kick their own flatlining economies into gear, just as they cautiously watch as a dictatorship feeds its billion people on a diet of increasingly palatable rhetoric about Chinese historical greatness and inevitable superiority. The ancient civilization, insular for 600 years, has burst forth for the first time since the decline of the Ming Dynasty. Chua notes that overseas Chinese communities already dominate economies throughout South-East Asia, ranging from Indonesia to Myanmar to the Philippines. In every case, they are a tiny minority of the population – 1% in the Philippines, 3% in Indonesia. Yet they have influence far beyond their numbers, controlling an estimated 70% of the economy in Indonesia. In Thailand, Chua reports that of the top 70-odd business groups, all but three are Chinese-dominated. Chua dubs the phenomenon “market-dominant minorities” and notes that such minorities are found around the world, from Lebanese traders in West Africa to Jews in Russia.

While overseas Chinese communities often have strained relationships with their homeland in the ongoing Communist era, the powers that be in Beijing are starting to flex their muscles outside their national borders, intensifying the stand-off over Taiwan in recent years and conspicuously failing to censure a national uproar about the version of WWII presented in certain Japanese history books. The channels of state power are spreading far beyond China’s physical borders into the overseas communities, attempting to instill patriotism in their far-flung economic colonizers. In 2002, I wrote an article on the conflict between the Falun Gong and the Mainland Chinese state establishment which touched briefly on this issue. I found that the Chinese consulate was exerting pressure on the Chinese language newspapers in Melbourne, pressing them not to give the banned religious group coverage in their pages. One newspaper editor I talked to resisted this attempt to apply mainland Chinese policies to ethnic Chinese in another country, saying that “this is Australia, not China, they have no power here.” Brave words, but isolated. Other editors refused to comment on the issue, along with the Consulate itself. This year, there was the famed case of Chen Yonglin, a Chinese diplomat who successfully gained a political protection visa, fleeing from what he called the “evil” government in his country. Chen claimed that up to 1000 Chinese spies were at work in Australia, keeping close watch on Tibetan, Taiwanese and East Turkestani independence activists, along with the Falun Gong. The incident was politically difficult for the Australian government, currently enjoying the spin-off financial benefits coming from the prolonged Chinese boom, primarily the huge surge in resource exports to China. Let’s not forget the possibility of a bilateral free-trade agreement.

Australia’s multicultural experiment has succeeded while other countries, notably England and France, are bogged down in suspicion and the formation of ethnic ghettoes which increasingly supplement the class system in England. Australia, however has seen little visible ethnic tension; in recent times, the only notable ethnic conflict has been between Aboriginal Australians and the white establishment in riots in Palm Island and Redfern. But as China rises to power, challenging Japan for Asia-Pacific supremacy, our privileged existence as a rich country on the outer orbit of the developed, largely English speaking world seems increasingly tentative. Chua points out that in many countries around the world, market-dominant minorities are violently challenged by a rebellious populace incited by ethnic firebrands; the killings of ethnic Chinese by poor Filipinos in Manila is so common as to be almost unremarkable; the staggering massacre of Tutsis by the poorer, more numerous Hutus in Rwanda, 1994; the anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia, 1998.

In Australia, Anglo-Saxons are a market-dominant majority, and the steady disintegration of the white Australia project has helped acclimatize fearful whites to pluralism slowly; first with Catholic Irish after the Potato Famine, then with the Chinese for the gold rush (one of our less proud moments), before Greek and Italian immigration, post-WWII widened into the Middle-Eastern, Asian, Indian and African polyglot mix who now buy houses in suburbs like the longer-established Anglos. But as the balance of power shifts in the region, there is no guarantee that ‘white’ economic dominance will remain that way, given the astounding success of overseas Chinese in our neighbouring countries. Chua argues that conflict is not inevitable, but that such ethnic issues are amongst the most intractable in the world. I wonder if Australian tolerance can survive the test that countries like the Netherlands are currently undergoing, where resentment between white majorities and new migrants put the values of the country under strain. We’ve already had Hanson, but she was suppressed by the media and the politicians, not by a wave of tolerance and acceptance.