| Popis: |
This chapter draws attention to the efforts of Chinese residents and subjects in Australia seeking equality of treatment with Australians of British descent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to a short-lived student visa program introduced for students from China to study in Australia in the 1920s. The question of who was to be permitted to enter Australia, and how they were to be treated on arrival and settlement, was one that reached beyond powers of local self-determination to issues of imperial and colonial administration. On the part of Chinese settlers, the struggle for equality within Britain’s Australian territories was catalysed by an assumption embedded in China’s nineteenth-century treaties with Britain that Chinese subjects enjoyed equal rights of mobility and equality before the law with other subjects of the Crown. In addition, British colonial and maritime infrastructure of the day provided clearly marked avenues for travel and settlement as well as channels for Chinese community leaders to present their cases for equality of treatment. In the face of state-endorsed discrimination, they sought to maintain business and community networks stretching from North Queensland to Zhongshan County and from Melbourne to the See Yap districts in Guangdong Province. The operation of the student visa program illustrates how such a case could be mounted and how inter-government links operated to maintain and foreclose hometown ties between communities in Australia and China at a high point of the White Australia era. |
