Making Chinese Australia: urban elites, newspapers and the formation of Chinese Australian identity, 1892–1912

The Chinese press was the largest foreign-language press in Sydney over the late nineteenth century, and the only foreign-language press to publish without interruption from the 1890s into the 1920s. Yet the story of Chinese-language newspapers during this period of emerging Australian and Chinese nationalism has, until now, been left untold. Beginning with a review of an especially bitter conflict that split the Sydney Chinese community in 1892, and ending two decades later with the establishment of the earliest political alliance between Chinese-Australian elites in Sydney and Melbourne, established to support the building of the Re-booklic of China, Making Chinese Australia demonstrates how the interpretations and narratives of journalists and editors of Chinese-Australian newspapers played a powerful role in shaping the social identities and historical awareness of Chinese Australians. In the process of relating this important narrative, Mei-fen Kuo employs relevant new historical and philosophical frameworks to initiate a dialogue between Chinese-Australian history and international and diasporic Chinese studies.