History, Memory and Identity: Rediscovering the Sino-Australian Relationship through Wartime Propaganda, 1931–1945

Abstract

This thesis investigates the Chinese-Australian relations throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, drawing on archival materials in Australia and China (including Taiwan), it primarily examines the complicated relationship between the Chinese government and overseas Chinese in Australia, the connection between China and Australia, and white Australian responses and perceptions of China through the window of the wartime pro-Chinese propaganda campaigns carried out in Australia. White historians have conventionally considered the Sino-Australian relations in the exigency of the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War as a peripheral link between two distant allies. This dominant narrative, however, underacknowledged other aspects that entwined both nations beyond their loose official relationship. This thesis enters the landscape of pro-Chinese propaganda campaigns in Australia, where local, national and transnational networks interweaved China and Australia closely. The analysis of the three major themes mentioned previously forges new historical connections across the two nations that are hard to uncover and understand in accounts of the wartime Sino-Australian bond at the level of an official relationship. Navigating through the propaganda campaigns directed at the resident Chinese in Australia, this thesis argues for a heterogeneous relationship between the Chinese government and the Chinese overseas. Their fragmented but networked connection was expressed through wartime cooperations and conflicts where the independent and interdependent agency of the politically vigorous Chinese diaspora in Australia was articulated, challenging the traditional ‘impact-response’ model in evaluating the relationship between China and Chinese abroad and disputing the stereotype of a dying Chinese community in Australia in the 1930s. Operating with the regional and global networks, the Chinese propaganda targeted white Australians was unprecedented but less successful. Bridging Chinese and Australian national histories, their close collaboration tells a different story other than the narrative of distant allies. Although many of the ambitious goals of pro-Chinese propagandists and supporters were resisted by most Australians holding their deeply-rooted racist ideologies, the thesis also suggests diversity and fluidity in Australians’ ostensibly sound doctrines.