A nineteenth-century tract makes bold claims: Australia is “vast, under-populated and ripe for response to the efforts of labouring immigrants from around the world,” as a summary goes. But its argument doesn’t come from Britons looking for recruits to colonize the continent, as one might expect. Rather, the document is a call for the rights of Chinese workers to be respected.
The Chinese Question in Australia was a pamphlet published in Melbourne in 1879 under the names of three leading figures in the local Chinese community in Victoria state, merchants Louis Ah Mouy and Lowe Kong Meng and missionary Cheong Cheok Hong.
“Contrary to the stereotype of the Chinese as a temporary sojourner in Australian colonial life,” writes historian Paul Macgregor, “these three men committed themselves to lifelong settlement in the rapidly developing post-goldrush Victoria, and set about taking active roles in contributing to the creation of what Victorian colonial life would become.”
Written in response to a push to bar Chinese seamen from key Australian shipping routes, The Chinese Question in Australia stridently condemned the racist treatment of Chinese migrants in Australia.
“Nothing…can be more unreasonable, unjust, or undeserved,” argued Kong Meng, Cheong, and Ah Mouy,” than the clamour which has been raised against the Chinese by a portion of the people of this colony… […] You do not endeavour to exclude Germans, or Frenchmen, or Italians, or Danes, or Swedes. There are men of all these nationalities here.”
Pointing out that China had been forced by Western powers to open to the world, they exposed the hypocrisy of the West and turn colonial logic on its head, writing that
if an island so small as the United Kingdom made no demur about opening its arms to all comers, and was not afraid of the competition of these exiles, but greeted them as fellow-workers, surely there is room enough in this large continent.
Macgregor hails The Chinese Question in Australia as an extraordinary document; a search of the archives unearths few records of Chinese Australian voices from the 1850s to the 1880s. The first substantial Chinese-language newspaper, the Chinese Australian Herald, appeared only in 1894, while the Tung Wah News was first published in 1898. The late development of community newspapers may have been partly due to the high costs of printing and difficulties in transportation beyond the local area.
Because other Chinese-language documents—such as private or business papers—are also rare, Macgregor relies on English-language texts by Chinese or “Europeans who are recounting the words and views of Chinese” in this period. These sources include letters to the English-language press, petitions to parliament, testimony in legal cases, and church publications from Christian evangelists ministering to Chinese Australians.
Macgregor’s historical investigation led him to the co-authored The Chinese Question in Australia. The first listed author, Kong Meng, hailed from a well-to-do family in the British colony of Penang, in what is now Malaysia. He came to Melbourne in 1853 and was a merchant with his own fleet of ships, which sailed across the Indian Ocean carrying cargoes of Chinese foodstuff and tea. Meanwhile, the Guangdong-born Ah Mouy had arrived in Melbourne as a carpenter in 1851. He made his wealth through trading and investing in gold mining. Within two decades of moving to Australia, he was able to bankroll a temple that still stands in South Melbourne.
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By 1879, the duo were prominent middle-aged businessmen “living in grand houses in Malvern and Middle Park,” Macgregor notes, while twenty-seven-year-old Cheong, who immigrated as a child, had been raised and educated in Melbourne with “a flair for English rhetoric” and a good knowledge of world affairs.
Macgregor speculates that Cheong, despite being listed third, was the primary author of The Chinese Question in Australia, as its tone and style resemble his other letters, but “Kong Meng was a prolific writer of letters to the Government regarding injustices to the Chinese, so he would also have made a contribution to the content.” On top of that, “Kong Meng and Ah Mouy would have lent their considerable renown in colonial life to increase the repute of the pamphlet,” Macgregor surmises.
He observes that The Chinese Question in Australia presents Australia as “predominantly an English country, and clearly a part of the British Empire, with all the privileges and responsibilities this implies.” Its authors appeal to “English principles of fairness” that conform to Christian and Confucian values.
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“Even without knowing the background of the authors, and allowing for the special pleading inherent in such a tract,” Macgregor explains, “there is still a sense that the authors have a great respect for many of the attributes of Western society, and especially those of Britain; and an equal respect for the characteristics of Chinese culture.” He notes that the authors lived in an era when the British were still in the process of settling Australia and building a footprint across the region, “and when Chinese émigrés were also expanding labour and trading endeavours in the Pacific and the Indies.”
Macgregor writes that Kong Meng, Ah Mouy, and Cheong “demonstrated a clear commitment to a vision of Australia which was multicultural and internationalist, with a free movement of people, a sense of hospitality and welcome, and the creation of a society combining the best of many cultures.” But, while the three make frequent individual appearances in the archives, “[n]one of these men has yet received the critical biographical examination that their roles warrant.”
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