Floating in a hot air balloon over Melbourne’s CBD early one morning, balloonist Kiff Saunders described how a five-month backpacking trip across China in his 20s changed his life.
“It gave me an understanding that there’s more than one way to live a life,” he said.
“These people, they’re really enthusiastic, energetic. I find them in our business to be really great customers. They’re very easy. They work hard.”
His positivity towards the Chinese was genuine, and it was - to my Chinese Australian ears - a welcome change.
When you grow up looking or being different from the mainstream, you develop a sense of how welcome you are, and how that wavers over time. At some point, you also learn that it’s completely out of your control.
The origins of the COVID-19 outbreak have fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia. Source: AAP
Take the situation now. The political relationship between Australia and China has never been more tense, with Australia losing $20 billion in exports to China because of last year’s trade sanctions.
That, combined with COVID-19’s origin in China, has created an atmosphere reminiscent of the ‘90s, when politician Pauline Hanson said in her maiden parliamentary speech: “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.”
Her speech back then empowered people to be openly anti-Asian. These days it’s about being anti-Chinese.
For example, found that between April 2019 and April 2020, 55 per cent of opinion pieces had negative depictions of Chinese and Chinese-Australian people.
That meant you had more than a one-in-two chance of consuming anti-Chinese sentiment for every op-ed you decided to read in that year.
ANU China academic Yun Jiang says loyalties are being questions as tensions with China increase. Source: SBS Dateline
“It was quite blatantly racial profiling,” said Yun Jiang.
“It definitely felt to me like a loyalty test. That I have to choose between China and Australia, and I have to condemn China in order for my views to be accepted.
“People are saying ‘Show your loyalties, pick a side. Publicly announce whose side you’re on'.”
In Australia, 1.2 million people identify as Chinese. The diversity within this 5.6 per cent of the population is huge; it includes descendants of Chinese workers who first arrived in the 1800s, right through to people who arrived more recently.
I asked Yun Jiang what’s actually at stake when we talk about China and Australia not getting along.
“As well as the economic dimensions of the trade war affecting certain industries, there’s people-to-people links, especially with Chinese Australians and Chinese international students getting stuck in the middle,” she said.
“There’s also the geo-political question of the future, and that that international structure is going to be.”
While all of this happens at a country-to-country level, it’s easy to forget about the people actually caught in the middle.
The political relationship between China and Australia has never been more tense. Source: Kydpl Kyodo
Someone who feels strongly about this is Kiff Saunders, whose business is now running at 40 per cent capacity because of closed borders.
He’s worried that Chinese tourists might not come back, even when borders do re-open, because of poor China Australia relations. But still, he’s sure of one thing.
“The politics are not the people,” said Kiff.
“It’s a political problem, not a national problem. Don’t make it about the national; don’t turn it into suspicion or that these people are not good."
He was talking about how we think about the Chinese in China. I can’t help but think how relevant it is for thinking about Australians, too.
