Colonialism
Date Published
Role of Colonialism: HK, diaspora, Dictation test, whiteness, within the Empire, Aboriginal expropriation,
Much of the early history of the Chinese in Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can only be understood within the broader framework of colonialism. Colonialism defined Australia as a white settler project of British imperialism, one built upon the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the displacement of their peoples. Within that context, land was granted to white settlers who increasingly regarded any external influence — whether imperial, Asian, or otherwise — with suspicion and fear.
This fear of China in particular was both paradoxical and revealing: it expressed an anxiety that the colonisers themselves might one day experience what they had inflicted upon others. The treatment of Chinese Australians, therefore, can be understood against this background of imperial conquest, racial hierarchy, and the fragile legitimacy of the settler nation.
The weakness of the Qing dynasty in the nineteenth century compounded this situation. It meant that the Chinese diaspora expanded into regions where Chinese people lacked political protection and were subject to discrimination, violence, and exclusionary laws. The creation of Hong Kong as a British colony further facilitated large-scale migration across the Pacific to settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas — but always within an unequal imperial system.
In Australia, colonialism created a persistent tension between economic demand and racial exclusion. The colony’s expansion relied on cheap labour, yet white workers — seeking higher wages and secure employment — perceived Chinese labourers as a threat. This conflict between the economic logic of empire and the racial ideology of a “white man’s country” reached its culmination at Federation in 1901, with the White Australia Policy and the infamous Dictation Test.
As the global structures of colonialism weakened during the mid-twentieth century, Australia was compelled to redefine itself — no longer as a dependent outpost of empire but as a nation within a decolonising, increasingly Asian region. To maintain migration and settlement without the racial hierarchies of empire, it gradually adopted a policy of multiculturalism.
Overall, the history of the Chinese in Australia must be seen through the lens of colonialism — not as a separate or incidental story, but as one fundamentally shaped by the same imperial forces, economic contradictions, and racial ideologies that defined Australia’s emergence as a nation.
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