费晟: Environment, Chinese Immigrants and Racist Discourse in Colonial Australia

发布日期：2018-01-28

2017年，在Routledge Press出版的Environmental History of Modern Migrations一书中，我中心费晟副教授的文章 “Creating the Threatening “Others”: Environment, Chinese Immigrants and Racist Discourse in Colonial Australia” 被收录其中。文章主要内容如下：

The migration of Chinese to Australia stimulated by the discovery of gold triggered a white racist discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. The anti-Chinese propaganda was not only rooted in economic and cultural rationalities, but also used ecological factors to justify the view that Chinese immigrants constituted a harmful species for Australia. In the 1850s, 'water grievances' of European miners towards Chinese caused violent racial conflicts and led to the earliest discriminatory legislation. The anti-Chinese discourse diminished over the next two decades because the growth of the Chinese population slowed and Chinese immigrants proved useful in the development of agricultural industries and making the Australian natural environment profitable. When a feeling of nationalism and imperialism quickly grew in the 1880s, Chinese bodies were again condemned as dirty, corrupted and disease-causing. The middle class, especially the politicians and media elites, preached the danger of Chinese emigration to Australia. By looking at the development of the white racist discourse from an environmental perspective, this chapter illustrates how environmental arguments were successfully used to support European domination in the developing Australian economy and society.

It has been widely proved that Chinese immigrants had a significant influence on modern Australian history. However, as late as the mid-1970s the Australian Chinese were still a group of “aliens”in the public mind. In this chapter, I will briefly discuss how this anti-Chinese discourse was developed by exploiting environmental and ecological anxieties, rather than simply an economic or cultural bias, against the specific activities of Chinese immigrants. The dispute in allocating natural resources and the image of Chinese bodies as dirty, strengthened a racist ideology rooted in the view of Australia as a remote European colony surrounded by an Asian population.