How to mend our broken Asian heart
Sophie Loy-Wilson on China, Australia and generosity in history
Australia-China relationships have appeared strained the last ten years. At least, it has seemed so on the spotlit public stage of politics and news media. There, these economic partners have acted out a trial separation. But something different has happened away from the old props and tired lines of that political melodrama, which was staged to reassure our great, insecure security partner, the USA. Off stage, deeper connections of culture and emotion have kept Australian and Chinese people together. It is off stage, far from shallow politicians, fawning diplomats, and covetous business leaders, that Australians will mend our broken Asian heart.
“Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.”
― José Ortega y Gasset
When we reflect on Australia-China relationships, or indeed Western-Global Majority relationships, we should pay attention to the deep connections off stage, and not the shallow performances of our vapid political theatre. That way places us in the flow of life and allows us to participate in deep cultural dialogue. That way returns generosity, or even loving kindness, to how we share our diaspora island home, here on the South-East archipelago of Eurasia.
Interview with Sophie Loy-Wilson, historian
I learned this insight from a brilliant historian of Australian Chinese communities, Sophie Loy-Wilson, who I interviewed for the Burning Archive.
Sophie is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and she describes her research interests as Chinese Australians, immigration and economic history, and Australia-Asia ties. She has published an excellent book, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (2017), and she co-edited the latest issue of the History Australia journal that looks at Australia-Asia relationships.
In the interview, Sophie talks in a deeply engaging way about her history writing, how it springs from her firsthand experiences of living in China and Russia in the 1990s, and how history can connect big themes of geopolitics with deeper currents of individual emotions.
The full video interview is now posted on my YouTube channel, and the audio-only version of the interview will be published on the podcast on Monday. I highly recommend watching this interview with Sophie, and I thank Sophie for being so generous with her insights and such a wonderful guest.
Ruptured histories
In the interview Sophie discusses the introductory article she co-authored with Andrew Levidis, an historian of Australia-Japan relations, for the latest issue of the History Australia journal.
This article, “Ruptured histories - Australia, China, Japan”, provides a fresh, insightful perspective on Australia-Asia relationships. It redirects our attention to the emotional terrain and complexity of the connections between people, cultures and empires in Australia and Asia. If we take Sophie and Andrew’s cue, we can develop a positive and generous response to a question haunting many people in Australia, and the West, who do not want war, strategic competition, confrontation or a renewed Cold War with China, nor any other part of Eurasia. It is a question that has informed numerous posts here, and my interviews with Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Sam Roggeveen and Warwick Powell. As Andrew and Sophie wrote,
“the changing pattern of Australian strategic and economic views of Asia since the 2010s naturally had a significant impact. One of the most important structural factors affecting Australian writing on Asia has been the attempt to come to terms with the perceived failure of Australian efforts to forge a post-Cold War order. The impact on Australian public discourse and historical writing has been marked. A question now haunts the Australian imagination. Was the era of Australian engagement with Asia from the 1970s to the 2000s an aberration from a longer historical experience of insecurity, state violence and regional wars?”
(Levidis and Loy-Wilson, “Ruptured Histories”, p. 9)
I recommend you read in this brief, free, accessible article. It gives a fine introduction to the key texts that have shaped academic history-writing on Australia-Asia relationships.
Historical generosity
The article shares the personal experience of the authors, and their hopes that Australia can mend its broken Asian heart.
Sophie discussed her personal experience and how it has shaped her perspective on Asia, history and Australia in more detail in the interview on the Burning Archive. She told me:
I think that if we are going to create a more plural society, a more generous society, it has to be from a place of historical generosity, generosity in storytelling. I think that is the basis of building broader, more generous communities. I would love it if our politicians could do that for us. I think unfortunately, our political system, its relationship to the media, its relationship to party politics, populism and factionalism. It means it's unlikely that those capacious, generous stories will come from our politicians, but they can come from us.
(Sophie Loy-Wilson, Burning Archive interview 2024)
Indeed, we do not need to wait on the state-sanctioned narrative spinners, to mend Australia’s broken heart. We can bring a generous spirit to the way we tell ourselves stories about our intermingled history in this multipolar world.
Recommended books on China and history
Sophie was also generous enough to share three recommendations for history books that help to understand China, including its relationship with Australia.
These three books were:
Yen, Mavis Gock. South Flows the Pearl: Chinese Australian Voices, edited by Siaoman Yen and Richard Horsburgh. (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2022).
Branigan, Tania. Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (2023).
Hessler, Peter. Oracle Bones: A Journey between China’s Past and Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
If you want you can purchase these books through the Amazon affiliate links provided; but they are also available through good public libraries, including online editions.
Do check out Sophie’s commentary on these three books, and next week I will be releasing a separate Youtube video of that section of the interview, together with some extra material.
I also reviewed Red Memory here on Substack and in video form on the YouTube channel. I was more critical than Sophie of the book, but it is a fine introduction to memory and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Sophie’s book, Australians in Shanghai
Sophie was generous with her book recommendations, and modest enough not to recommend her own book. So, please, dear reader, allow me to do that for her.
Loy-Wilson, Sophie. Australians in Shanghai : Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (2017) is available through Amazon here (at university press prices, alas) and through good public or university libraries. I read it through the State Library of Victoria.
Australians in Shanghai is part of the growing scholarship on the centrality of Asia in shaping Australian national culture. This scholarship has blossomed off stage in the academy over the last thirty years, while I have observed the world from a government office block rather than an ivory tower. I am grateful to Sophie for pointing me to this growing literature, and educating me about this history, both in her book and during the interview.
Her book emphasises how Sophie’s firsthand experiences informed the questions she asked in her history writing.
When I returned from China in the year 2000, I began to wonder how Australians in China fitted within this picture. If so much emphasis in Australian history was placed on Chinese arriving in or being excluded from Australia, what of Australians (including Chinese Australians) who travelled the other way? How did the Chinese respond to Australians in their midst? How do we write about Australia from a Chinese point of view?
(Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai)
The book focuses on the Australians who moved to Shanghai and Southern China in the 1920s and 1930s, and so helps craft a new kind of narrative about Australia’s long engagement with Asia.
For historians of Australian perceptions of Asia these new works impel us to reject sharp ‘turning points’ in Australia– Asia relations (the Fall of Singapore, for example) in favour of a new emphasis on the cultural and social forces gradually ‘overturning’ Australian antipathies to the region.
(Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai)
Although I have not read the book in detail, it does echo one of the themes of Sophie’s interview and “Ruptured histories” article. There is more to the rich emotional terrain of Australia-Asia relationships than is dreamt of in a “Red Scare” journalist’s craven mind.
Generosity, Individuals and History
My discussion with Sophie and reading of her work has reminded me that history is not just made of grand themes, big civilizations, dominant empires or identity-prisons of nation, race, gender, or class. It is criss-crossed with interdependent empires, cultures, and networks. Its identities resemble shapeshifters, more than street-marchers. History is lived by individuals who find ways out of every box. As Sophie concludes Australians in Shanghai,
Studying the awkward and uneven ways in which individuals tried to apply these ideas to their personal and professional lives uncovers how individual aspiration motivated transcolonial connections, forging pathways sometimes counter to the wishes of national policymakers.
(Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai)
So, if at times you begin to despair at the rhetoric of conflict that has overtaken Asia-Australia and Western-Eurasia relationships over the last decades, remember these lessons of history. Individuals evade fixed identities. Culture always outlasts politics. Give your attention to those themes, and we may all reclaim the tangled shared history of our common diaspora home, and repair Australia’s broken Asian heart.
I will be returning to this theme in my Wednesday post, and if you would like to read that full essay, and support the work of the Burning Archive, please consider taking out a paid subscription.
Thank you for reading, and until my next letter from the burning archive, remember, what thou lovest well will not be reft from thee.