In the 2019 novel Bruny, Tasmanian author Heather Rose proposes a scenario where the entire state is sold to the Chinese. The Tasmanian population is then exiled to Bruny Island, off the southeast coast of Tasmania. Although the author describes this narrative as ‘naughty’ and ‘satirical,’ Bruny is better described as a cruel and irresponsible racist fantasy.

I’m writing this from Bruny Island, or lunawanna-alonnah as it is known in palawa kani, the reclaimed Indigenous language of Tasmania. It’s beautiful here. My window looks across the garden to a lush forest, through which I can catch a glimpse of the ocean. Most evenings a white wallaby visits the yard, and I fall asleep listening to the distant waves.

The privilege that enables me to enjoy this beauty comes from a history of genocide. This history has recently been told by historian Cassandra Pybus in her book Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse. This book tells the story of Truganini, an Indigenous Tasmanian palawa woman born on lunawanna-alonnah around 1812.

Before she had turned 20, colonizers had murdered Truganini’s mother and kidnapped her sisters into slavery. She lived through the most violent period of European aggression against Tasmania’s Indigenous people. It was, as Pybus suggests, an apocalyptic time.

Truganini lived most of her life in exile from lunawanna-alonnah, partly on islands in the Bass Strait, where survivors of the European war against Tasmania’s Indigenous population were resettled. This enforced exile was part of deliberate efforts to destroy the palawa people.

Rose’s novel mirrors this history intentionally. It offers a perverse inversion: a fantasy where the beneficiaries of colonial genocide become its victims. At one point, the protagonist muses, “Is this how the Aborigines had felt? …All these foreigners arriving. Arriving and not leaving again.” And when the Chinese plan to exile Tasmanians to lunawanna-alonnah is revealed, one character speculates that the plan will work because, “The Aborigines got moved [and] the government got away with that.”

This inversion encourages colonisers to think of themselves as victims, but not in a way that creates empathy. Instead it encourages a sense of victimhood that replaces and erases Indigenous history, in the same way settlers attempted to replace Indigenous populations. It is a cruel, anti-Indigenous fantasy, succinctly captured by the author Jinghua Qian: “Colonists are desperate to be invaded.”

But beyond being merely cruel, Rose’s narrative is irresponsible, given the historical moment in which it was written and published. Bruny was released amidst intense public debate in Australia about Chinese political influence, and widespread assertions that this debate was contributing to anti-Asian racism.

Much of this debate was triggered by the book Silent Invasion by Clive Hamilton, published in 2018. The Australian race discrimination commissioner at the time, Tim Soutphommasane, raised concerns that Hamilton’s book was “fanning the flames” of “Sinophobic racial sentiment.”

Chinese foreign interference in Australia is real. I’ve spoken publicly about my own experience of it, due to my research on China’s oppressive policies in Tibet. But the invasion narrative promoted by Hamilton inflates anxieties about foreign interference and converts them into racist yellow peril narratives. Interference is not invasion.

As University of Sydney academic David Brophy remarks, Roses’ novel Bruny is “Silent Invasion in fictional form.” Rose has claimed her novel is not racist, and only addresses Chinese influence as a topic of public concern. But the text is replete with racist stereotypes. The Chinese are inscrutable and greedy. They live in shabby, tiny apartments. They manufacture poor quality junk. They are good at repetitive mechanical tasks and incapable of creative thought.

But even more concerning is the way that Bruny’s narrative ties these Sinophobic anxieties to harmful right-wing ideologies. Why do the Chinese want to buy Tasmania? Rose tells us that it’s because their population is growing too fast. Their country has become overcrowded and dirty. Tasmania, with its clean air, rich soil and pristine environment, is “a sitting duck.”

These ideas—excessive population growth, environmental decay, and population replacement—are the core concepts of ecofascism. They merge effortlessly with white supremacy to suggest that ‘non-white’ populations are an existential environmental threat.

These ideas are bolstered by a pervasive sense in Rose’s book that ‘our’ way of life is under threat. The government has sold us out to commercial interests for a quick buck and a cynical grab for power. Our quietude and community are being torn apart by globalisation. Our culture is threatened by political correctness. And, as one of Rose’s characters tells us, there is “…a fear of speaking out. Of being seen as racist and xenophobic…”

This is a laundry list of right-wing populist ideas. And they are the foundations of the ideologies that motivated the white supremacist terrorists who carried out the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were killed, and the mass shooting in El Paso where 23 people were murdered. Both of these events took place in 2019 in the months prior to the publication of Bruny. And yet the novel’s publisher, Allen and Unwin, still went ahead and published a book that trafficked in these dangerous ideas.

Genocide historian Dirk Moses, writing in the wake of Christchurch massacre, encouraged us to critically reflect on how paranoid narratives of white genocide and population replacement were permitted to circulate publicly. He argued that these narratives promote a ‘genocidal subjectivity.’ This subjectivity is a powerful, but false, sense of being a victim of genocide. For those captivated by this ‘genocidal subjectivity,’ killing can seem like self-defense.

Bruny helps to both spread and legitimise this sort of genocidal subjectivity. As a compelling piece of fiction it is particularly effective at doing this. But its status as fiction shouldn’t excuse it from scrutiny. Indeed, this is part of what has allowed the novel’s dangerous ideologies to bypass critical examination and circulate so widely.

In doing so, the novel appropriates Tasmania’s real history of genocide—the apocalypse that Truginini lived through—to suggest that settler Tasmanians could one day soon be the victims of a genocide, perpetrated by China. This is a cruel and irresponsible narrative.

Australia has a real history of invasion and genocide. Australian settlers continue to fail to confront and address this history. In part, we do this by imaging that we are being invaded and wiped out. This false sense of catastrophic victimhood lies at the heart of the idea that Australia is being invaded by China.

Australia was already invaded once. It is not being invaded again now.

The post Australia is Not Being Invaded appeared first on The China Story.

A rise in anti-Asian attacks followed the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, including Australia, where Asian-Australians have faced slurs, jokes, verbal threats, being spat at, sneezed and coughed on, and physical intimidation. Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions, debates about human rights abuses in the PRC, and concerns about domestic security had already created increasingly polarised discussions around China in the years before the pandemic.

Australia, the racial state

When asked, “Has racism in contemporary Australia entered the political mainstream?” the Munanjahli and South Sea Islander scholar Chelsea Bond, from the University of Queensland, asserted, “Australian history has more than a racial dimension. Race has been foundational to this country; it arrived on the ships in 1788….”. She rejected the premise ‘that racism is an artefact of a bygone era and… is external to Australian political life.’

The issue is not simply that historical racism, including anti-Chinese sentiment, has had a lingering effect in the present. In fact, racism was and continues to be foundational to Australia itself. At its heart, this racism is anti-Indigenous, stripping First Nations peoples of their sovereignty, working to continually subordinate them, and engaging in violence against them. But this foundational racism also targets a range of non-White others, including Asian Australians.

The philosopher Charles W Mills refers to the foundational political role of racism as the ‘racial contract.’ This contract embeds the distinction between white and non-white people in power relations, which ensure the ‘differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.’

Australia is based on a racial contract. The Griffith University-based Kamilaroi and Wonnarua scholar Debbie Bargallie describes Australia as a ‘racial state’ where, ‘since colonisation, race has been integral to the development of the nation-state through the power to exclude and include, in racially ordered terms.’

When considering what is and isn’t racist in conversations about China, we have to start from this point. Australia is a racial state. This is the context of Australia’s speech about China.

Communicating in white public space

For communication, linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics tell us that context, audience, identity, and power all matter as much or more than the speakers’ intentions. Governed by a racial contract, Australia is what linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill calls ‘white public space,’ in which the privilege of white people is normalised and defended, and racialised ‘others’ are marginalised and subordinated. This is often done in everyday language, rather than through explicitly and easily identifiable racist language.

Within white public space, the primary distinction is between white and non-white. The political distinctions between Chinese-Australians and Han Chinese from the PRC are irrelevant, as are distinctions between Han Chinese from the PRC and those from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan or elsewhere, or between Han and non-Han people from the PRC, such as Tibetans or Uyghurs. And as highlighted by the signatories of an Open Letter on National Unity During the Coronavirus Pandemic, the rise in post-COVID ‘anti-Chinese sentiment,’ has also led to the targeting of a wide range of Asian Australians ‘because of their Asian heritage or appearance.’ The attack on the Vietnamese-Australian Do sisters in March demonstrates this. In white public space, there is no difference between Chinese, Han Chinese, and Asian.

Some Australians who comment publicly about China carefully differentiate between the Chinese people and the Party-state. However, the inertia of white public space constantly works to erase these distinctions, meaning that any comments about China or the Chinese government might be applied to any Asian Australian.

Confronting stereotypes of racist speech 

The racist nature of some China commentary therefore emerges in the structures of the racial contract. To see how this produces racist speech, consider three common stereotypes.

To begin with, racism is not limited to individual dispositions, like hatred or disgust, towards people of colour. Speech can be racist by failing to take into account the racialised nature of white public space, or the ways in which speech will be co-opted for explicitly racist purposes. Racist speech does not need to be intentional.

Secondly, racism is not a relic of the past, something that Australia overcame following the rise of multiculturalism. Indeed this idea of a ‘frozen racism’ that does not belong in the present is often used as a way to deny racist behaviour and speech —“How can I be racist if we’re all post-racial?” Racist speech is not anachronistic.

Finally, since racism emerges from the racial contract, it is not limited to any political position. In their recent work on racism across the political spectrum, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter describe how right-wing and left-wing racism are ‘mutually enabling, if not two sides of the same coin: apparently opposed, yet indivisible.’ Opposing authoritarianism or defending democracy does not immunise speakers from racism. Racist speech occurs across the political spectrum.

Towards anti-racism in telling the China story 

Now is a crucial time for Australians to confront and address the ways in which discussing China can fan the flames of racism. We need to remain committed to reasoned criticism of the PRC and its domestic and international practices. But we need to do so in a way that does not further add to the suffering of Asian-Australians, or further encourage explicit racism. Denying the relevance of racism and refusing to discuss it won’t help. Developing ‘racial literacy’ — familiarity with theories and concepts of race — will.

Given that race and the racial contract are techniques of domination that are foundational to our world system, and which therefore crosscut national boundaries, a better understanding of race and racism will also help us develop better critical understandings of the PRC, and to pursue interventions that will help create a more just world, both in Australia and China.

The author would like to thank Shan Windscript and Linda Jaivin for providing helpful feedback on this article.

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