‘Collateral damage’: How the China debate affects Chinese-Australian voters in crucial seats

Emily Kah doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but the 18-year-old engineering student, who will vote in her first election next month, has heard enough to form the view that the Australian government “just doesn’t like China”.

“It makes me kind of uncomfortable,” she told The Age outside the bustling Box Hill shopping centre.

The marginal seat of Chisholm has a huge population of Australians of Chinese heritage, and is one of the key seats at the coming federal election.Credit: Jason South

Kah, a second-generation member of a migrant family who preferred not to be photographed for this story, is one of the thousands of residents of the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm who lives in a Chinese-speaking household. This cohort makes up more than a quarter of the electorate in the must-win seat for Labor, and they are described by one expert as “collateral damage” in Australia’s diplomatic feud with Beijing.

Like any cohort, they will vote on different issues. Some of the dozen Chinese-Australian voters approached by The Age, are, like Kah, put off the government by suggestions from Coalition ministers that Australia could go to war with China over Taiwan. Alan Qu, who moved from the mainland 15 years ago and now sells apartments in Box Hill, said he’d vote Labor “because the Liberal Party is not friendly to China”.

Others are more interested in hip-pocket issues, although for those whose business interests are tied to Australia’s relationship with China, these are intertwined.

There is little academic research on how Chinese Australians vote. Labor’s review of its 2019 election loss found Australians of Chinese heritage, along with first-generation migrant Christians, with whom there is overlap, swung against Labor. It found anti-Labor sentiment helped the Coalition cling onto the marginal seats of Chisholm in Victoria and Reid in western Sydney. Along with John Howard’s former seat of Bennelong and the Sydney seat of Banks, it means the Liberal Party holds all four federal electorates with the highest proportion of Chinese Australians.

To watchers of history, this might be surprising. Former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke forged a deep attachment with older members of the Chinese diaspora by offering asylum to 42,000 students after the Tiananmen Square massacre. However, later generations have grown closer to the conservatives as their prosperity has increased and fresh waves of migration have followed.

Chisholm, Banks and Reid are key to both parties’ election hopes, and each party will be watching carefully to see if the Morrison government’s hard line on Chinese government influence affects the votes of people with family ties to the superpower. Labor’s policy on China does not substantively differ from the Coalition’s, despite government attempts to paint them as “soft” on Chinese Communist Party influence and the trade relationship, though Labor has occasionally criticised the government’s handling of the relationship, including when it led the push for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.

The Lowy Institute’s annual Being Chinese in Australia survey shows the problems in the relationship might be driving some voters away from the Liberal Party. The 2021 survey showed 42 per cent of Chinese Australians saying they identified with the Liberal Party. This dropped to 28 per cent in the 2022 poll published this month, while those identifying with Labor rose from 21 per cent to 25 per cent in the year when government ministers, including Peter Dutton, raised the prospect of Australian troops joining armed conflict against China if it invaded Taiwan.

Strategists from both major parties, who have spoken to The Age on condition of anonymity, have been surprised at findings from research on Australian-Chinese voters’ attitudes towards the Morrison government. In focus groups, polling and analysis of posts to social media site WeChat, operatives say voters are frustrated at the deteriorating economic relationship between the two countries.

“Are these people f---ing idiots?” asked some voters, according to one party strategist. “Why are they picking a fight with our largest trading partner?”

A smaller portion of the anger stems from a feeling that the government might be racially biased against China or Chinese people, the party strategists said.

Charlie Wu, of the Asian Business Association of Whitehorse (the council area where Box Hill is located), said many businesses in and around Box Hill went broke during the pandemic because international students – who he said brought “heaps of cash” – had left Melbourne.

“How can the government attract them back when they’re saying we might go to war with China,” he asked. “They bring their partners, their parents come to visit and they buy cars and apartments. Businesses are really losing out.”

Others with Chinese heritage have concerns that are indistinguishable from other Australian voters.

Software engineer Vivienne Wang, shopping at Box Hill with her young son, Anson, is one of those focused on finances. She hasn’t read or heard much about Anthony Albanese, but of the nation’s economic recovery said: “I think the government did an OK job.

“I will support them because I don’t think the inflation and cost-of-living pressures are due to their policies. It’s a global-wide issue,” she said.

Technology worker Tim Chong, who spoke to The Age on the streets of Chisholm with his wife Charlene and young child in a pram, said he was not thinking about the federal election because of his hectic work and family life. However, he was relatively satisfied with the Morrison government’s handling of the pandemic and economy.

He also criticised those who have questioned Hong Kong-born Chisholm MP Gladys Liu’s alleged links to the Chinese government.

“I think everybody should be willing to be scrutinised, but I think the fact she is Chinese doesn’t automatically mean she has links to China. We’re Chinese and we don’t,” he said.

Haiqing Yu, an expert on Chinese digital media and communication platforms at RMIT, is a member of Victorian-based WeChat groups and is active in the local Chinese community. She has detected dissatisfaction towards the Coalition’s stance on China among the diaspora in Victoria. However, she said most Chinese people believed the two parties were in lockstep on China policy, while noting some hope that Penny Wong, Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman who is from a Chinese-Malaysian background, would make more measured public comments.

“Lots of people have realised we have gone on a route to no return. Regardless of who is in power, the direction and tone is set, and people would like to see it toned down,” she said.

“It’s not good for the Australian economy and not good for Chinese Australians who are collateral damage.”

While there was some discussion of China-Australia affairs on WeChat, Professor Yu said voters in Chisholm were concerned more by economic issues than foreign policy.

There are a handful of distinct groups in Chinese diaspora areas who may have different feelings about the Coalition’s China stance, according to Andrew Jakubowicz, an expert on Australian race relations and emeritus professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

They include those offered asylum by Hawke after the Tiananmen Square massacre, who tend to be hostile to the Chinese government; mainlanders who immigrated more recently and tend to be more sympathetic to the Chinese leadership; Hongkongers, some of whom were angered with the recent Chinese crackdown in the city; and ethnically Chinese people from countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia who have mixed feelings towards China’s administration.

Jakubowicz said the population of Chinese Australians in Chisholm had surged by 30 per cent between 2011 and 16 – largely driven by mainlanders who recently gained voting rights in Australia.

He said the Chinese community had become more prosperous and entrepreneurial, gradually becoming more strongly tied to the Liberal Party. Younger second generation Chinese people were more likely to feel perturbed at a reported increase in racism resulting from suspicions of Chinese government interference in Australia and the pandemic, the professor argued.

“One of the things that has happened in the last three years has been the intense awareness among all Chinese communities about the persistence and resurrection of Australian racism, which I think they find very confronting,” he said.

Junkers Zhou, a 28-year-old product manager, said explicit racism was uncommon in his experience, but he may “hear things” when he left Box Hill and surrounding areas, which have a very high population of people from Asian backgrounds.

“There isn’t often a lot of thought about how it affects Chinese-Australians in Australia. The government seems to think everyone is just Australian. They forget there are ethnic roots from different countries,” he said.

He draws a distinction between the government, embodied by Morrison and Dutton, and the local member, Gladys Liu.

“It’s tricky [for] her because she’s in a Liberal government and she probably doesn’t want to go against the grain and you need to toe the party line. This election will show more about, I guess, why people vote for who they vote for … ‘Am I voting for my member or am I voting for the prime minister?’”

Zihan Zhang contributed to reporting through translation and assistance with interviews.

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