I was born and raised in Hong Kong, and my good friend Samuel Pho was born and raised in the former South Vietnam. We have been in Australia for many years and have integrated into the Australian life, both of us believe that we are 100% Australian, and we agree that Australia can develop into a multicultural society, which is the way forward for us and our next generation. However, we have a different view of the society we grew up in. Every October, there are celebrations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC). Before 2016, I was both invited by the Chinese Consulate and the Taiwan Office to attend the official celebrations, which I did my best to do, as both national days are, I believe, important days in Chinese history. However, after 2017, I noticed that I was only invited to attend the celebration on October 10th, which was a bit saddening.
Born and raised in Hong Kong
Hong Kong was a British colony before 1997, but the British were smart enough to realize that Hong Kong could not be governed without material support and supplies from China. Therefore, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), on January 6, 1950, the PRC announced that it recognized the Chinese Communist regime as the ruler of mainland China, and that the two countries would soon establish normal diplomatic relations. However, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) demanded to take over the seat of the ROC in the United Nations and to receive her overseas assets. Subsequently, the Korean War broke out, and the diplomatic relations between China and Britain ceased to progress. It was not until 1971 when the Chinese Communist regime took over the seat of the ROC in the United Nations that China and Britain formally established diplomatic relations and exchanged ambassadors in 1972.
From 1949 to this time in Hong Kong, people celebrated the National Day of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 every year, and some five-star red flags were placed on the streets, but not very loudly. I knew from a very young age that because of the 1967 riots in Hong Kong supported by the Chinese Communist Party, the British Hong Kong government was on high alert for the National Day of the People’s Republic of China, and those in the community who supported the Communist Party of China were not very active in celebrating the National Day in public because of the frequent confrontations between them and people with different political views. In the community and on the streets, there were more and larger celebrations.
Portraits of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China , and President Chiang Kai-shek could be seen on the streets of Hong Kong until 1972, and as a teenager, I felt that there was only one China, but two regimes coexisting at the same time, until today. However, as a resident of a British colony, I believed that whichever China or regime is in my mind, it was only my motherland, meaning that it exists in history, not in the reality of everyday life. To me, China was an imaginary historical existence, and Hong Kong people were more concerned about how they live every day. There were many Hong Kong people who were concerned about how they could help their friends and relatives in China during the Cultural Revolution, as they were having a harder time than Hong Kong people. There were also those who are waiting to reunite with their families in Taiwan, which seemed to be a paradise for the Chinese.
Teenage Dreams
After 1972, the presence of the Republic of China (ROC) faded from Hong Kong society, and the director of the Xinhua News Agency (NHK) had more say in Hong Kong issues. The British also had to think about what they wanted to do in Hong Kong. In 1984, when China and Britain signed the Joint Declaration, the people of Hong Kong were told that Hong Kong would be a part of China in 97 years’ time. The reality at the time was that most Hong Kong people were terrified, but Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” still gave some people confidence, especially those who could not leave and had no choice. To me, who was young and poor and still studying, I had no property to be “shared” with, no job to lose, and no worries. However, at the age of 16, when I read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Engels, I could not help but be moved by their passion, and believed that communism was an epoch-making ideal for mankind.
In the 70’s, my third sister moved to Australia, and later on, more of my brothers and sisters moved to the same country. My third sister told me that I did not have to pay tuition fees to study at a university in Australia, and she hoped that I would come to Australia to study. At that time, I was studying at Queen’s College and got a scholarship to enter the University of Hong Kong. I felt that there was no reason for me to leave my hometown, cross the ocean, and go to a society with a completely different culture just for the sake of free university education, so I stayed in Hong Kong. However, I sometimes thought that being an Australian was not so bad. It’s a vast country with a lot of resources, but when I thought about the fact that I had never lived in the countryside and I didn’t have the confidence to start from scratch, and even though Australia is also headed by Queen Elizabeth, it was better to be still than to make a move, so I didn’t want to change my nationality.
What is even more interesting is that when I was in Hong Kong, I did not feel the exploitation, oppression and bullying that many people said colonialism inflicted on 95% of Hong Kong people at that time. On the contrary, I saw the Hong Kong government’s vigorous social reforms and the economic take-off of Hong Kong, as well as the great improvement in the lives of most Hong Kong people (including my family). I believe that if I left school and worked in the society, and I would have many opportunities to make more contributions to my own society, so staying in Hong Kong for development is the best way out for me. However, the contradiction between my thoughts and my real life experience made me decide to go back to China to see for myself what kind of country I wanted to identify with two years after graduating from university.
I traveled alone in China for six months, and after listening to the opinions of the people I met living in China, I made a decision about where I wanted to go. The lives of the hundreds of millions of Chinese living in China were a problem that no one could solve, but by staying in Hong Kong, I could do what I wanted for the community in which I lived. It didn’t matter whether it was a British colony, or a Republic of China that had no existence, or a China that was beginning to reform and opened up.
The most important thing was that I saw that Hong Kong people were the masters of Hong Kong, and that the Hong Kong government publicized that “Hong Kong is my home”.
China through the eyes of a Vietnamese Chinese
Talking to Samuel Pho, I often found it hard to understand why he could accept that the Chinese, who made up less than 5% of Vietnam’s population, had more than 95% of the country’s wealth and a social status so high as to be discriminatory against the Vietnamese. If this were to happen in Australia today, where less than 5% of the Chinese population discriminate against Australians here, I believe the Australians would have banned the Chinese from immigrating to Australia a long time ago.
I realized that Vietnam had been a vassal state of China for more than 2000 years, sometimes even under China’s direct control, and then became a French colony, and it was only after the Second World War that Vietnam became an independent country. It was only then that I realized that the Chinese in Vietnam had the same high status that the British had in Hong Kong when I was a child. This was due to the strong political influence of the Chinese Empire during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The Chinese in Vietnam did not have to be directly involved in the governance of Vietnam, because the Chinese in Vietnam were only a small minority of the population, but they had all the wealth of the land. Therefore, France could easily become the sovereign state of Vietnam at the end of the Qing Dynasty, because the Qing government simply gave up the rule of Vietnam voluntarily.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese in Vietnam still received a Chinese language education provided by the ROC, and many of them went to Taiwan to study university education. Therefore, today, most of the Vietnamese Chinese in Australia participate in the celebrations of the National Day of the Republic of China (ROC). As a result, the Chinese government rarely invites Chinese leaders from Southeast Asia who are reluctant to give up their ties with Taiwan to attend the annual 11th National Day celebrations.
However, most of the Vietnamese Chinese in Australia today are unwilling to accept the confiscation of all their property and their expulsion to the sea of fury by the Vietcong, and therefore are not enthusiastic about China’s 11th National Day. For many Vietnamese Chinese in Australia, their love of China can only last until their generation, and the next generation of Vietnamese Chinese will all be Australians.
For them, they recognize the Double Ten National Day, but in their heart of hearts, they know that from the development of international politics, there is no telling which year in the future, this national day will disappear from their lives. However, the good news is that Australia values multiculturalism, so they can continue to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival with their community, because these are not just Chinese festivals, but festivals that are shared by all the countries in the East Asian region.
I am glad that both Samuel Pho and I call Australia home. I also believe that our next generation, and the next, and the next, and the next, will still be able to preserve these cultures without having to worry about which Chinese National Day to celebrate.
Mr. Raymond Chow