Chinese Australians


Chinese Australians are Australians of Chinese origin. Chinese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Chinese diaspora, and are the largest Asian Australian community. Per capita, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.5% of Australia's population at the 2021 census.
The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in South China, with most such immigrants speaking dialects within the Yue dialect group. The Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies in the 19th century. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established several Chinatowns in major cities, such as Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney. In the Australian external territory of Christmas Island, Australians of full or partial Chinese origin form the plurality of the population.

History

Chinese peoples have a long and continuing role in Australian history. There were early links between China and Australia when Macau and Canton were used as an important trading ports with the fledgling colony. Mak Sai Ying was the first officially recorded Chinese migrant in 1818. After his arrival he spent some time farming before, in 1829, he became prominent as the publican of The Lion in Parramatta. Early-19th-century migration was in limited numbers and sporadic, primarily those who came in this period were free merchants or adventurers and, the more common, indentured labourers.
File:Bendigo Chinese Museum gate.jpg|thumb|Gate to Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum, dedicated to the history of the Chinese on the Victorian goldfields
The Australian Gold Rushes are what first lured thousands of Chinese to the country. In 1855 in Melbourne there were 11,493 Chinese arrivals. This was startling considering that barely five years previous, Melbourne's entire population had only been around 25,000 people. By 1858, 42,000 Chinese immigrants had arrived in Victoria, with many of them living in boarding houses in Little Bourke Street. Due to the widespread racist sentiments in parliament and on the goldfields, the first of many immigration restrictions and Chinese targeting laws was passed in late 1855. However, due to the long, poorly regulated borders between the colonies of Australia the numbers of Chinese on the goldfields continued to swell. Upon the goldfields Chinese peoples faced many hardships. There were violent anti-Chinese riots; the Buckland Riot, the Lambing Flats Riots, as well as general discrimination and prejudice. However, there were many establishments in this period that would have a lasting effect on the history of Australia and the history of Chinese in Australia. One of these establishments were the Chinese camps, which most often, later, became Chinatowns in Australia. There was also the establishment and the consolidation of power for Chinese societies, many of these are still active in Australia today. These societies provided support and community for the Chinese in the colonies.
After the gold rushes the numbers of Chinese living in the cities swelled and their businesses and industries contributed much to growth of Melbourne and Sydney in the late 19th century. Mei Quong Tart and Lowe Kong Meng were prominent business figures in Sydney and Melbourne respectively. However, there were very few Chinese women migrating to Australia. At one point in the 1860s the numbers of Chinese in Australia was around 40,000. Of these, it is believed only 12, were women. This gender imbalance meant that Chinese men married women of European descent but many had it in their hearts to return to China.
File:Melbourne-Punch-federation-Victoria-pest-Australian-Chinese-May-1888.jpg|thumb|This 1888 political cartoon by the Melbourne Punch depicts the anti-Chinese racism in Australia which was one of the driving forces behind the push for federation.
File:A Chinese woman wearing traditional qipao standing in the bushland with two borzoi dogs in the bushland of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, 1930.png|thumb|A Chinese Australian woman wearing traditional qipao standing in the bushland with two borzoi dogs in the bushland of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, 1930s
Anti-Chinese racism among white Australians also strongly contributed to the push for the federation of Australia. Some of the first Acts of the new federation would establish the White Australia Policy. This policy made it almost impossible for anyone new to migrate from China to Australia. After federation the population of Chinese in Australia steadily declined. Despite the declining numbers people with Chinese heritage still played their part in Australian history. There were over 200 people with Chinese heritage who fought for Australia in World War I, including the decorated sniper Billy Sing. A similar number fought for Australia in World War II.
The final end of the White Australia Policy from the 1960s saw new arrivals from the Chinese diaspora and for the first time significant numbers from non-Cantonese speaking parts of China. The first wave of arrivals were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s. This was followed by economic immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, whose families often settled in the capital cities. New institutions were established for these arrivals and old ones such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce revived, while numerous Chinese language newspapers were once again published in the capital cities. Ethnic Chinese settlers from Peru immigrated to Australia following the Peruvian dictatorship of Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru in 1968.
File:Chinese New Year celebration at Box Hill, Melbourne.jpg|thumb|Chinese New Year celebrations at Box Hill, Victoria, home to one of the largest Chinese Australian communities in the country
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, then-Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, allowed students from China to settle in Australia permanently. The aftermath of May 1998 riots of Indonesia saw sizeable influx of Chinese Indonesians fleeing persecution in their home country for Australia. Since the 2000s, with the rapid development of China's economy, there has been an explosion in the number of immigrants from China, which have frequently been Australia's largest source of new immigrants since 2000. In 2015–16, China was the second largest source of immigrants to Australia behind India. China is now the third largest foreign birthplace for Australian residents, after England and New Zealand.

Demographics

At the 2021 census, 1,390,637 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, accounting for 5.5% of the total population.
In 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 677,240 Australian residents born in mainland China, 101,290 born in Hong Kong, 59,250 born in Taiwan and 3,130 born in Macau. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Before the end of the 20th century, Chinese Australians were predominately of Cantonese and Hakka descent from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, and Cantonese was the dominant language. Due to more recent immigration from other regions of China, Mandarin has surpassed Cantonese by number of speakers.
In a 2004 study on the intermarriage pattern in Australia, the proportion of second-generation Chinese Australians with spouses of Anglo-Celtic ancestry was approximately 21% and for third generation it was 68%.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2012 Chinese immigrant mothers had a total fertility of 1.59 children per woman, lower compared to the Australian average of 1.94. This declined to 1.19 and 1.73 respectively in 2019.
Capital cityPopulation with Chinese ancestry Proportion of total population
Sydney552,68010.6%
Melbourne409,2858.3%
Brisbane117,4964.7%
Perth112,2935.3%
Adelaide56,7884.1%
Canberra26,0315.7%

Language

At the 2021 census, 685,274 persons declared that they spoke Mandarin at home, followed by Cantonese at 295,281. Many Chinese Australians speak other varieties of Chinese such as Shanghainese, Hokkien and Hakka at home. Many Chinese Australians from other areas speak Tagalog, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, and Portuguese as additional languages. Second or higher generation Chinese Australians are often either monolingual in English or bilingual to varying degrees with their heritage language, with their relationship to language often being a key component in the maintenance of a bicultural identity.
Chinese Australians have adopted many slang terms in Chinese. An example is the term 土澳, which is a slang term for Australia.

Religion

According to the census data collected in the last twenty years, among Australians with full or partial Chinese ancestry there has been a general decline of institutional religions. In 2016, 55.4% of the Chinese Australians fit within the census category of "not religious, secular beliefs or other spiritual beliefs", rising significantly from 37.8% in 2006. These shiftings in religious demography may be due to the incoming of new immigrants from China who generally do not have a formal religious affiliation, and many of whom are involved in the native Chinese religion which has been experiencing a revival in China over the last decades.
There are also several notable Chinese temples that exist and still active in Australia, like Sarm Sung Goon Temple, Albion, Sze Yup Temple, Yiu Ming Temple and Heavenly Queen Temple. Nan Tien Temple in New South Wales and Chung Tian Temple in Queensland are the oversea branch temples of Fo Guang Shan.