The book deals with “The China-Australia Migration Corridor,” the largest and longest established of China-Australia flows. It provides valuable information for both students of migration from China, and specifically to Australia, as well as those studying migration studies more generally.

This book originates from a research project at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, and funded by the Australian Research Council. As such, the introduction and nine chapters combine to give an internal consistency unusual for many edited collections. The approach of the various authors is historical and anthropological; unashamedly qualitative with a primary focus on individuals, families, and small village groups. As such, it might be seen as providing an unrepresentative sample of migration from China to Australia, but the field research is supported by such a broad range of supporting secondary, mostly recent, sources, that the reader can have confidence in the findings of the researchers. The approach is longitudinal, covering over a century of change in the migration corridor between China and Australia.

The focus is on migration from a relatively small part of China, Zhongshan in the Pearl River Delta, to Australia from the second half of the nineteenth through to the Twentieth Century. Proximity to both Hong Kong and Macao made this area a principal source of migration to Australia, parts of North and Central America, and the Pacific. The researchers focus on the material manifestation of this migration present in houses, shops, and temples. These artefacts exist in both the origin and destination areas of what they call the “heritage” of the migration corridor from China to Australia. The book is divided into two parts. The first section focusses on the process of migration through its flows and identities, and the second explores the physical forms created by and interaction between places of origin and destination, most notably Sydney.

The findings of the research are indeed interesting. The localisation of national origins in international migration is well known, but the researchers of this study convincingly demonstrate that these origins can be drilled down to specific local areas; some villages in Zhongshan were important contributors to migration to Australia, while other villages within that same region sent few. These migrants also saw themselves to be from specific family, kin, or village groups rather than as Chinese in a generic sense, despite government programs in both origins and destinations to categorise them as such. The government of China at varying points in the past saw the “overseas Chinese” (the huaqiao) either as a category of Chinese to be leveraged as a source of finance, or as a group to be discriminated against because they were leavers. The Australian government saw them all as Chinese, who were so often persecuted both officially and within the dominant white society. Yet their personal identities were highly heterogeneous.

Up until the late 1930s, the migrants from Zhongshan villages saw themselves as transnational actors, circulating within spatial corridors of migration and incorporating not just their village of origin in China and specific destinations in Australia, but also Hong Kong and other destinations such as Fiji in the Pacific. They traded within this space, with several becoming wealthy who generated employment for yet other migrants from their villages. The architectural styles at the various nodes within this space reflected this evolution, as groups adopted and modified colonial designs in destinations, and “remittance houses” in origin villages, which showed progressive shifts from extended traditional houses to ever larger and more modern buildings to culminate in porticoed mansions.

One of the real strengths of the book is the detailed discussion of the impact of the hiatus in this migration from the onset of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, through to the victory of the Communist Party of China in 1949, and to the end of Maoist era in 1976. For some 40 years, contact between places of origin and destinations was severely curtailed. In the early Maoist period, diaspora families in Zhongshan were discriminated and prejudiced against when their properties were confiscated and lands redistributed. The Chinese population within Australia was essentially in exile and a new generation grew up with a very different, and more Australian, identity, to the extent that one family was not even aware of Chinese New Year. Many did not learn to speak Cantonese or even to read characters.

The opening up of China from the late 1970s brought a new era in the migration corridor. Properties and lands were returned to diaspora families who were encouraged to reinvest in their homeland, to re-establish a tradition of building and supporting schools, or to conserve ancestral halls. Many did so. But many, too, without linguistic skills, engaged primarily only in diaspora tourism to trace their roots to specific villages and houses. Because they did not wish to return permanently, large numbers of migrants’ houses and ancestral halls remained as ruins within an ever-expanding landscape of a modernising high-rise China.

The book deals with “The China-Australia Migration Corridor” from Zhongshan, which is certainly the largest and longest established of China-Australia flows, but it is no longer the only one. At several points in the book, tantalising references are made to the “new” Chinese migrations, although nowhere are these systematically discussed with reference to the flow from Zhongshan. The new migrations are clearly distinct in terms of education and gender, but also in terms of wider origins within China. While the book has a useful concluding chapter that attempts to draw together the major lines of argument, it could also have looked forward to bringing in the new migrations into the context of the old.

Continuing in this vein, one could perhaps have hoped that the complex circular migrations at the heart of this book had been set against such patterns elsewhere. Much research in Australia going back almost 50 years has emphasised the changing nature of non-permanent migrations. Regrettably, history, like so many other disciplines, also has its silos. This cavil aside, the book deserves to be widely read. It provides fascinating insight into how both migration and the diaspora change over a long period of time. The historical perspective belies any easy assumptions about the nature of diaspora to show that it is highly heterogeneous and can change markedly as it evolves, impacted in this case by ideological shifts in the origin.

Thus, the book provides valuable information for both students of migration from China, and specifically to Australia, as well as for those studying migration studies more generally. It provides important contextual material from the China-Australia migration corridor that will help those wrestling with the challenge of how to manage changing transnational flows of people from a national destination country perspective, and hence, of particular interest to readers of this journal of international affairs.

This is a review of Denis Byrne, Ien Ang, Phillip Mar’s The China-Australia Migration Corridor (Melbourne University Publishing Ltd, 2024). ISBN 9780522880229. 

Emeritus Professor Ronald Skeldon lived and worked in Hong Kong 1982-96 and visited regularly until 2015. His edited book, Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese was published in 1994, and his most recent book is Advanced Introduction to Migration Studies, 2021. Ronald Skeldon, Emeritus Professor University of Sussex, and Emeritus Professor, Maastricht University. r.skeldon@sussex.ac.uk

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.