Henry Luo was walking through a park in Sydney with his elderly father and two toddlers when a stranger approached him, kicked a fence and screamed at him about Chinese people hoovering properties in Australia.
Mr Luo was part of study by the University of Technology Sydney, released on Wednesday, which found 70 per cent of the 689 Chinese Australians surveyed believe the local media portray them as objects of suspicion and a risk to national security.
Henry Luo, 40, says negative media reporting about China can have a strong effect on the lives of Chinese Australians. Dion Georgopoulos
He says the incident occurred on the eve of last year’s federal election, when trucks emblazoned with billboards portraying Chinese President Xi Jinping at the ballot box with text saying “CCP vote Labor”, paid for by conservative lobby group Advance Australia, were spotted around the country.
The 40-year-old, who grew up in Shenzhen but now runs an electronics wholesaler in Sydney after moving to Australia in 2009, was completely taken aback as 50 per cent of people in his Sydney suburb of Burwood have Chinese ancestry, according to the 2021 Census.
“We just want a normal life without people screaming at us on the street. We belong here,” Mr Luo told The Australian Financial Review.
“I know lots of people are having a tough time, but you can’t take it out on other communities. If you throw a rock at China, it lands on the head of Chinese Australians. We can and must do better.”
The Reid Business Community president also pointed to an incident in March where one Australian media outlet alleged that three Chinese men taking pictures at an air show in Melbourne had “aroused suspicions” of a security expert.
“Bad stories about China get good clicks in Australia,” Mr Luo, a rank-and-file member of NSW Labor, said.
The UTS study found that 51 per cent of respondents believe Australia’s English-language media were distrustful of Chinese-Australian communities.
More than 60 per cent of respondents said the media was “othering” Chinese Australians, while 53 per cent believe reporting on China by English-language Australian media was too negative.
One respondent said: “Just because I feel unhappy with our mainstream media on China doesn’t mean that I side with China.
“I do so as an Australian who is concerned that our cherished values, such as a fair go, are being undermined.”
Report author Wanning Sun, who is deputy director of the
Australia-China Relations Institute at UTS, said the survey showed many Chinese Australians felt a low level of social acceptance in Australia.
“Our media should realise that most people in this community should not be considered subjects of suspicion and distrust, or merely as voters whose support needs to be wooed during election times, or as naive or unthinking individuals who are likely to be susceptible to state media propaganda from the PRC,” Professor Sun said.
“We need to remind ourselves that most of them are rights-bearing citizens and permanent residents in Australia who are negotiating complex questions of belonging while caught between the two increasingly hostile nations.”
Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at Per Capita think tank, said that while PRC-born migrants had a strong sense of commitment to Australia, they were “deeply worried by media speculation about war with China” and had a “real sense of powerlessness”.
“Simplistic assertions by the media and politicians that they differentiate between the PRC government and Chinese people will not be enough to address genuinely held fears about societal acceptance,” he said.
The top 10 electorates in NSW by Chinese ancestry all swung away from the Liberals at the state election in March, mirroring a trend at last year’s federal election.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton ramped up the Coalition’s hawkish rhetoric ahead of the federal poll when he said Australians should prepare for war, saying the Chinese government was on a “deliberate course” and condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Chinese Australians made to feel unwelcome by local media: study - The Australian Financial Review
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