Yugoslav Migrants To Western Australia 1950

[JTW Analysis] The Long March of the Dragon: The Story of China's Transformation

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

By Selcuk Colakoglu, Head of USAK Center for Asia-Pacific Studies

The contest between reformers and conservatives inside the Chinese Communist Party for the soul of China continues at full force. A new generation of Western-educated administrators who want to integrate China more fully into the world is locked in well-concealed but violent competition with a group of conservatives who want to continue in the steps of Mao Zedong.

Viewed in a global political and economic context, China is at a historical turning point full of mysteries.

When Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), died in 1976, China was a socialist country closed to the outside world and still feeling the effects of the Cultural Revolution. The death of Mao’s number two, Zhou Enlai a short time before Mao himself, was followed by a struggle for power in the uppermost echelons of the government. The rule of the so-called “Gang of Four”, a group of radical socialists who included Mrs. Zedong among them, did not last long. By 1978, Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the reformists in the Chinese Communist Party, had succeeded in taking power and liquidating the Gang of Four.


In many ways it would be accurate to describe Deng as the second founder of the PRC. Many specialists would also describe him as the father of modern China. Deng succeeded in opening up China, previously closed off to the outer world, and steering the Chinese economy to the heart of world affairs without disturbing its political stability. In doing this, Deng took inspiration from Singapore. He had been advised by Lee Kuan Yew, the ethnic Chinese founder and prime minister of Singapore who turned it into an important commercial center, that he should undertake structural reforms in China and abandon talk of exporting socialism in order to show that he was not a threat to other countries. Singapore, with its mostly Chinese population and major role in world commerce, was the best country that Deng could have adopted as a model. It had an economy that was extremely open to the outside world, and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew ruled it in an authoritarian fashion that was in tune with its social structure. As long as economic prosperity was growing, an authoritarian political system was not a problem.

A Country of Nations

THEY were six migrants – from Spain, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Greece and France – smiling at the camera on the steps of Canberra's Kurrajong Hotel.

Dressed in their finest threads, they had been brought together, each from a different state, to celebrate Australia's first citizenship ceremony on February 3, 1949.

More pointedly, the government had selected the photo subjects by their European nationalities, in a bid to represent what they perceived as the ``unified, all inclusive'' migration future that Australia aspired to, or – in the view of the day – had been reduced to.

Between the ``all inclusive'' photo of Europeans celebrating their Australian citizenship in 1949 and the present lie 53 years of migration, each journey undertaken with dreams of a safer, brighter and more prosperous future.

Those years have seen Australia open its arms wider than it could ever have anticipated, with the number of nationalities taking citizenship (excluding the fragmentation of some countries) burgeoning from 53 to more than 200 last year.

Today, as Australia marks its 54th year of citizenship ceremonies, more than 7735 people will pledge their allegiance, joining a country which has accepted 10 million people – the fourth largest migrant intake in the world – since the First Fleet sailed into Sydney in 1788 to a place long inhabited by Aborigines. There was an earlier era, stretching from post-world war two to the late 1 960s when economic debate also had little impact on immigration policy. During this period, immigration was largely about nation building. The main objective was population growth in the interests of national defence. While this concern faded by the 1960s, another aspect of the population building process came into focus. This was the role of migrants in helping Australia to build a self-sufficient industrial economy through their contribution to expanding the domestic market base and the industrial workforce. Governments at this time paid little heed to economists' concerns about the resource allocation inefficiencies flowing from the associated protectionist policies. The 1970s and particularly the 1980s were the great era of inquiry into the economics of immigration. One of the reasons was that for the first time since the war immigration became controversial.

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