Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888–1988 By Ouyang Yu

Chapter 1

The Chinese Question: A Historical Overview

A look at the history of China in the nineteenth century reveals ‘humiliation and degradation’.¹ From the First Opium War (1838–1842) to the invasion of Peking by Allied forces (1900), China declined from a self-sufficient imperial and feudal power to a war-ridden, poverty-stricken semicolony. It had lost all its wars against invading foreign powers: two opium wars against the British (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), one against the French (1884–1885), and one against the Japanese (1894–1895), not to mention many other smaller wars. By signing a series of unequal treaties at the end of each war, China had lost some 100 billion taels of silver in indemnity (a tael designates a unit of value based on a weight of silver),² vast pieces of territory (500,000 square miles to Russia³), and had suffered heavy losses of human life.⁴ Against this background large numbers of Chinese, particularly people from the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, began going overseas. The Chinese movement overseas to Southeast Asia had begun over 3,000 years before.⁵