Page 135 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

The provision of ‘objective’ information such as this is of course well intentioned.
However, the danger of this kind of statistical skirmishing is that it may actually
confirm the assumption that ‘too many’ Asians would be a problem in Australia.
But how much is too many, and who has the authority to determine how much is
too many? Indeed, the constant repetition of the question whether there are ‘too
many’ Asians or not, as in opinion polling practices, for example, only legitimizes
the framing of the issue in this way. As a consequence, the issue of ‘Asians in
Australia’ is reduced to a politics of numbers in which the voice of Asians themselves
is completely absent. In this discourse of reassurance, Asians are reduced to the
status of objects to be counted, they are excluded from active participation in
a conversation which implicitly takes it for granted that the overall whiteness at the
core of Australian identity should not be jeopardized, not now nor in the future.
Asians can come in, but in moderation, because they are never to be allowed to
dilute the nation’s predominantly white racial/cultural identity: Ruddock tacitly
agrees with Hanson on this, just as they are effectively in agreement about their
authority, as white Australians, to speak for the country as a whole.
To illuminate the restrictiveness of the discursive field in which the problematic
of ‘Asians in Australia’ is being debated across the cultural political spectrum,
we can contrast this discursive consensus with the radically oppositional voice of
someone like Eric Rolls, historian of the Chinese in Australia. While Rolls remains
within the discursive frame of economic advantage, he provocatively argues for
more Asians in Australia, because only such an increase of the Asian population
would secure the country’s future:

We need to increase immigration by Chinese and other Asians. They do
not drain our resources, they generate their own businesses to Australia’s
profit. Australia will have little chance in the next century unless we are at
least 30 percent Chinese and Asian. Then we will be able to accept where
we are and prosper accordingly. Our new people will generate our future.
(Rolls 1996: 599)

The question here is not whether Rolls is right or wrong. The question is, how many
Australians today would feel threatened about such an imagined Eurasian future
for the nation? The fact that voices such as Rolls’s are virtually unheard of in the
public discourse, suggests that the issue of ‘(too many) Asians in Australia’ remains
cast as an uncomfortable problem in the national imagination, condensing fears and
anxieties too difficult to contemplate.
As we enter the twenty-first century, however, the nation–state’s power to deter-
mine its racial make-up will become ever more anachronistic. As Alistair Davidson
(1997: 6) remarks, ‘the world becomes increasingly a place of multi-ethnic states,
with up to 30% of the population coming from other societies’. In this light, the
important task here is to deconstruct the very desire for ‘one nation’ – a modernist
ideology which can no longer be sustained in a postmodern, globalized world.
In this context, national unity cannot be based on a sense of common history and

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