Chinatown dis-oriented: shifting standpoints in the age of China

ABSTRACT

This article revisits the author’s Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991), and an Australian Geographical Studies (1990) piece on Melbourne and Sydney’s Chinatown, to extend their genealogical method into the twenty-first century. In a century marked by the rise of China and a proliferation of inter-Asian mobilities, the Haymarket district of Australia’s most Asian-inflected city is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Sydney’s Chinatown, once a stigmatised ghetto of white colonial making, increasingly sets its own terms as a hub of strategic significance to the City of Sydney and its diverse Asian and non-Asian publics. A closeted enclave of orientalist imagining has become an unbounded and differentiated space that condenses the dynamics of a more interconnected world region. This is an Asia-Pacific in which ‘East’ and ‘West’ steadily—if not always comfortably—inhabit, rather than stand in opposition and hierarchy to each other. The article elicits a Chinatown increasingly unmoored from any singular (Western) reference point of the kind that has long informed the enclave paradigm of much global Chinatown research, including the author’s own.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinatown
• enclave
• inter-Asian urbanism
• alterity
• epistemic standpoint
• place ontology

Acknowledgements

The teamwork of Professors Ien Ang, Donald McNeill and Dr Alexandra Wong, together with Steve Hillier of the City of Sydney, is gratefully acknowledged, as are the helpful suggestions of editors Chris Gibson and Andrew Gorman-Murray.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Kay Anderson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7176-2278

Notes

1 This article draws on research undertaken during 2011–14 as part of an Australia Research Council Linkage Grant in collaboration with the City of Sydney (see Funding section). Its multi-dimensional data set included: analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS’s) Census of Population and Housing and other statistical information, including floorspace and employment, tourism, immigration and international student official data; a survey questionnaire completed by 362 international and local students of Asian background; two student focus groups comprising 11 international and local students of Asian background; semi-structured interviews with 80 key informants; participant observation at different Chinatown events, functions and venues; field trips with Chinatown and City of Sydney guides; and media analysis, including content from mainstream newspapers, Chinese newspapers and Chinese social media such as Weibo.

Additional information

Funding

This article has been produced with the support of an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant titled ‘Chinatown in the Asian Century: From Ethnic Enclave to Transnational Hub’ [grant number ARCLP 120200311].