Australian Geographer
ISSN: 0004-9182 (Print) 1465-3311 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cage20
Chinatown dis-oriented: shifting standpoints in the
age of China
Kay Anderson
To cite this article: Kay Anderson (2018) Chinatown dis-oriented: shifting standpoints in the
age of China, Australian Geographer, 49:1, 133-148, DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2017.1327791
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AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHER, 2018
VOL. 49, NO. 1, 133–148
https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2017.1327791
Chinatown dis-oriented: shifting standpoints in the age of
China
Kay Anderson
Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
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.
Chinatown; enclave; interAsian urbanism; alterity;
epistemic standpoint; place
ontology
Introduction
Chinatown, as a distinctive ordering of space in cities the world over, has always been a
richly storied place. Once deemed the stigmatised and closeted ghetto of aliens, it tends
to more often be portrayed today as a valued tourist destination and multicultural asset
to cities as distant from each other as Singapore, London, Port Morseby, Naples, Vancouver, Sydney, Manila and San Francisco. Strewn globally, in the age of China’s so-called
‘rise’, Chinatown has undergone a status-transition: from marginal enclave under
various regimes of imperial and settler colonialism, to ‘positional good’ in a world of circulating symbols and cross-city referencing (Lowry and McCann 2011).
Neither smooth nor universal, however, the shift in Chinatown’s figuration focuses the
historical and spatial imagination. For the philosophical and disciplinary machineries that
categorise time and events as ‘past’ and ‘historical’—and which envisage time as a linear
progression directing and assimilating ‘the past’—seem inadequate to the task of registering the multiplicity of traces that today condense at sites bearing the Chinatown label.
Equally, as Doreen Massey (1991) wrote a number of decades ago in her ‘open’ politics
CONTACT Kay Anderson
k.anderson@westernsydney.edu.au
Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney
University, Building EM, Parramatta campus Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2751, Sydney, Australia
© 2017 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.
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of place, the conventional notion of place as the locus of bounded experience fails to
capture the constitutive entanglement of localities such as Chinatown in wider relationalities and transformations of precisely the kind afforded by China’s ascendancy. What
follows, then, is an attempt to situate Sydney’s Chinatown within a time-space dynamic
that allows consideration of that place’s shifting status into the present. ‘Transition’ will
also be considered in terms of the disruption of paradigm shift, via a contrast to be
drawn between Chinatown’s conceptualisation in the author’s studies undertaken some
25 years—and a hemisphere—apart. With an eye to ‘new horizons of the global’ (Ong
2011, 1), the case will be made for multiplying the epistemic standpoints on a place
whose relentlessly communal scripting, even through the critiques of orientalism, requires
recasting for the present day.
Chinatown re-oriented
The Chinatowns of North American, Australasian and European cities have been the focus
of successive generations of social science research, of which not even a scant review is
intended here. Many Asian cities have also featured Chinatowns, notably Manila,
Bangkok, Nagasaki, Yokahama, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. But until recently
most accounts have focused on the Western context, provoking an increasingly conspicuous asymmetry of global knowledge production (Jazeel 2016) in relation to Chinese diasporic settlement. According to such accounts, and much popular wisdom still today,
these colourful quarters owe their existence to the generations of Chinese migrants who
have made their lives there. Restaurants, pagodas, curio stores, red and gold shopfronts,
ceremonial arches and neon lights are seen as intrinsically connected to the Chinese
and their immigrant experience in the West.
This model of Chinatown—an enclave of the East whose Chineseness shapes an internalised history—spawned a tradition of social science work from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Spanning the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, geography and ethnic studies, it
documented the composition and character of these overseas Chinese districts (e.g. Cho
and Leigh 1972; Burnley 1975). In the early 1970s David Lai summarised the then prevailing conceptualisation of Chinatown in North America as: ‘a concentration of Chinese
people and economic activities in one or more city blocks which forms a unique component of the urban fabric. It is basically an idiosyncratic oriental community amidst
an occidental urban environment’ (Lai 1973, 101). Succinctly, in this model, Chinatown
is a colony of the East in the West. As such, in Kinkead’s (1992) depiction of
New York City’s Chinatown it is a ‘closed society’, isolated from the movement and modernity of the surrounding city as insular, traditional, communal and enigmatic.
Vancouver’s Chinatown (Anderson 1991) inverted the logic of that portrait, turning the
burden of explanation of such enclaves away from an essentialised Chineseness to those
armed with the power to define and manage identity and place. Tuned to Massey’s
(1991) ‘extroverted’ notion of place, and the genealogical method of post-structuralist critique that at the time was destabilising seemingly natural categories (of race and place), the
Vancouver study tracked Chinatown’s production within multiple scales of Canadian governance: from the time Chinatown was marginalised by state practices as Vancouver’s
vice-town, through its 1930s depiction and doctoring as a ‘Little Corner of the Far
East’, to the district’s rendering as a slum fit for renewal in the 1960s, and beyond to its
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figuration and fashioning as Vancouver’s civic asset and ‘contribution’ to multicultural
Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Bringing into a single narrative the often-opposed
periods of pre- and post-war Canadian history, Chinatown’s making was elicited
through mutable guises of racialisation, both classical and contemporary.
Problematising Chinatown within this century-long passage of time had a conceptual
purpose too. After Said’s Orientalism (1979), this was to historicise time, space, place
and ‘race’ in the power-differentiated dynamics that produced Chinatown as a colony
of the West (more so than the East). In the classic vein of identity-politics critique that
was emerging across the social sciences during the 1980s, the study developed the sense
in which the racialisation of identity and place was not cast in stone but constitutively situated within the global vectors of colonial history and migration. Likewise, the critical conceptualisation of Chinatown in the major cities of a settler colony on the other side of the
Pacific, in Australia—where colonial histories of white racism also persisted through a
policy shift to multiculturalism in the 1980s—could be ‘re-oriented’ as Western formations (Anderson 1990). That is, they could be understood as enactments of white racialised regimes, deployed in the interests not only of white domination but also by Chineseorigin people themselves.
Chinatown dis-oriented
The twenty-first century introduces an order of complexity and contradiction to the dualisms of West and East around which conventional and critical accounts of Chinatowns
have been framed. For in the contemporary world of transnational movement and
exchange, as a generation of globalisation scholars by now have amply demonstrated,
global West and global East increasingly converge and diverge in a dialectic that is transforming regions, cities and localities (see, for example, Tum 2014 on globalisation and
localities). Across the transnational field of the Asia-Pacific, ‘gateway’ cities, in particular,
have been transformed as ‘active markets’ (Knight Frank 2015, 5) for Asian investment
(Ley 2010). The intensifying rise since the 1970s of China as a global economic force,
in particular, dates the power coordinates implied by the discrete categories and hierarchies of West vs East. Heavily freighted with fear and fantasy (Pan 2012), China’s ‘ascendancy’ is reconfiguring geographies, as well as possible subject and speaking positions for
enunciating knowledge about them.
These shifts provoke a reappraisal of some unexamined assumptions in previous,
including critical race, analyses of the Chinatown phenomenon. For arguably, even in
the critique of Western cultures of race and racism, it might be possible to discern the
unexamined centring of a white ‘we’ that is ‘us’ and ‘here’ (West) and a ‘they’ that references ‘them’ and ‘there’ (Asia). Not only does this narrative ordering fail to sufficiently
grasp the increasing entanglement of ‘here’ and ‘there’ and ‘us’ and ‘them’ within the historicity and spatiality of global modernity and capitalism—it also imputes an inexhaustibility to a Western racist imaginary, among other problems.
Some years ago, I produced some sympathetic critiques of Vancouver’s Chinatown
(1991) that elicited the complications of gender and class positionings in that work’s
(rather too) tidy account of self/other distinction (Anderson 1996, 1998). One piece highlighted an alliance of white women employees with their Chinatown employers against a
1930s City of Vancouver vendetta on the reputedly morally dubious practices conducted
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inside Chinatown restaurant booths. The other work drew attention to the class alliance of
Chinatown organisations with white building and labour unionists against a City of Melbourne plan to ‘orientalise’ that city’s Chinatown in the 1980s. In each of these cases the
emphasis was less in genealogically denaturalising Chineseness and Western senses of positional superiority than in considering relationships across difference.
Yet arguably those accounts of ‘intersectional identifications’ still upheld the Anglophonic premise that Chinatown could be narrated—critically as well as descriptively—within a
reductive framework of ‘difference’ (whose representations could be read). Alterity—for
all that it was historicised in the routine of critical race theory, and even prised open by
provisional class and gender alliances—continued to figure as an a priori structural marginality, rather than posed as a question for interrogation in each new situation and phase
of encounter. Certain problems for analysis are now more evident, as Derrida (1990) posed
in philosophical terms a number of decades ago: ‘difference’ in relation to whom? Under
which circumstances and conditions? Where? Difference according to what measures?
And equally: what precisely is difference being set against? Is the ‘centre’ that functions
epistemologically as norm and totality itself so coherent? These are questions of scholarly
positioning beyond the scope of this article. Here it is sufficient to note that an unintended
consequence of those 1990s accounts (of relationships across difference) was to continue
to anchor a plot of minority/majority disconnection, even as categories of distinction were
themselves problematised.
Rather than repeat, then, the manoeuvre of critical race analysis that identifies the procedures that make exclusionary discourse possible, an alternative tactic (pursued below) is
to confound the frozen conjurings of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ that risk sustaining stories of
cultural disconnection and disparity. And—beyond a ‘super diversity’ story (Vertovec
2007) that (we shall see) does usefully characterise the complexity of Sydney’s Chinatown
today—the tactic opened up in this article entails an epistemological decentring of Chinatown itself as an object of study. This is an approach that would ‘think’ Chinese diasporic
settlement from the premise of a multiplicity and equality of knowledge-production sites
and standpoints that exist in tension with each other. From the likes of Shanghai and
Sydney, Asian and non-Asian vantage points, and across the generational layers of
Chinese diasporic migration, it would ask: how to conceive the diasporic place called Chinatown within a world of shifting power configurations and hierarchies? How to ‘think’
Chinatown beyond a specific (Western) model of modernity (Ong 1999, 81–82; Eom
2013) according to whose boundary-work the district can only be a space of negation?
Consistent with these revisionings, the Anglophonic concept of Chinatown needs first
to be unhinged from a still widely accepted enclave paradigm that enacts its own iteration
of a ‘there’ and ‘them’ with a settled ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The enclave framing has yet to
sufficiently engage the implications of the now comprehensively established transnational
‘turn’ through which various social sciences conceived the iterative engagements of mobile
subjects across multiple societies. Stuck in a ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and
Glick Schiller 2002) that presumes a discretely given nation/state/society as the unit of
analysis, the enclave model fastens Chinatown to a territory that is internal to a nationstate. It upholds the uncritical distinction of a bounded ethnic space hived off from a normatively conceived national space (Barabantseva 2016). Even studies that acknowledge
‘Chinatown has always been a transnational phenomenon’ (Mayer 2011, 1) tend to
proceed from the presumption that as a ‘node’ or ‘hub’ (in a global network of ideas,
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capital, labour, markets and technologies), it is nonetheless an entity that is anomalous to a
host environment. A ‘communitarian bias’, then, of the kind Glick-Schiller and Caglar
(2016) argue is still evident more generally in urban and migration studies, continues to
date Chinatown’s scholarly conceptualisation.
The rapid diversification of ethnicities, categories of migrant, generational cohorts and
globally distributed links in a number of today’s Chinatowns signals the shifting ground
beneath the enclave model. Of course, there is wide variation in the fortunes of global Chinatowns, from decline and dissolution (especially in US cities), to revival and restoration
in other settings, and instigation from scratch elsewhere, and this article makes no attempt
to compare and contrast their various fates (see Yamashita 2013). There is also a proliferating complexity to Chinese urban settlement itself, as ‘original’ Chinatowns in many
world cities, including Sydney, are supplemented and sometimes surpassed by satellite
Chinatowns and ‘ethnoburbs’ (Li 2009).
In the case of Sydney’s Chinatown, the base of which became the Haymarket district of
the Central Business District (CBD) in the late nineteenth century, a multiplication of
Asian mobilities, hybridities and trans-generational traces is transforming this part of
Australia’s most Asian city. Across Sydney, too, Chinese-origin residential settlement is
increasingly diversified by socio-economic status, age cohort, and education from Strathfield to Hurstville, Eastwood to Chatswood and beyond, in ways that exhibit an interurban dynamic beyond orientalist and colonialist legacies. Multi-lingual, multi-ethnic
and multi-generational, Chinatown today has in a number of senses ‘moved on’. Once
coded as a foreign space—a threat or exotic accessory to what was referentially
assumed to be the white space of the city and nation—today it exceeds all senses of enclosure. It defies the containment and isolation called up by the very term enclave—the sense,
also, in that word, of some ominous potential for ‘contagion’ (Shah 2001). For it is precisely the ambiguity of Sydney Chinatown’s spatiality today that anticipates wider reconfigurings in Australia’s world regional orientation. As the Asian Century (not
unfalteringly) unfolds, ‘Chinatown dis-oriented’, in the title of this article, conjures a
vision of Australian urbanism that is increasingly detached from any essential reference
to Europe. It opens horizons to a terrain of inter-Asian urbanism not just of and for
urban Australia’s diverse Asian constituents but more generally for a national culture
that continues to be made out of a ‘shared history’ in and with Asia (Walker and Sobocinska 2012).
This is not to defer to the thrall of an imaginary of an Asia-led future-to-become. In the
transition to a Trump-led America and a mood of resurgent nationalisms, global alignments are ever more uncertain. And Australia’s border relations, as carved from its Anglospheric past, continue to be notoriously brittle as well as blurred. Moreover, the fates of
global Chinatowns, including Sydney’s, cannot simply or universally be predicted from
a global geopolitics geared to China’s rise (on the ‘failure’ of the recent San Jose project,
see Dehart 2015; and on the ‘complex and variegated’ relationship of global Chinatowns
to China’s rise, see Ang forthcoming). But at the very least, the frayed edges of multiAsian presence at the heart of Australia’s most Asian city unsettle the benchmark that
white colonial and corporate Sydney long presumed for itself. They serve, too, to confound
any singular epistemological standpoint on scholarly conceptions of Chinatown. The following description of the contemporary complexity of Sydney’s Chinatown thus aims to
provide materials1 for precisely such a decentring of perspective—complicating
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Chinatown’s conception beyond a parochial Anglophonic canon that continues, even
through critiques of orientalism, to constitute it as a place of alterity.
Sydney’s Chinatown in the Asian century: displacing the communal script
In 2009, as part of a commitment to improving Sydney’s villages, the City of Sydney and
various Chinatown interests sought together to identify ways of supporting ‘economic and
cultural opportunities’ in the Haymarket area of the southern CBD (City of Sydney 2010b).
Identified as a key ‘activity hub’ within the Sydney 2030 Plan, the area of Haymarket
occupies a strategic location. Taking in the territory from Bathurst Street to the north,
Darling Harbour to the west, Central Railway Station to the south, and Elizabeth Street
to the east, Haymarket includes: World Square retail space and residential tower, the
Midtown entertainment complexes, University of Technology Sydney, Paddy’s Market,
Market City shopping centre and cinema (screening Asian movies), an Asian contemporary art gallery, and a Chinatown which was centred around Campbell Street in the 1920s
and Dixon Street from the 1930s (Fitzgerald 1997). In the 2011 census, about 64 per cent
of Haymarket’s residents were Asia-born (Wong 2014, 22) and since that time the Haymarket has become one of the fastest-growing local government areas in Australia
(Australian Government 2011). The area’s proximity to Central Railway Station, a
number of university campuses, the Frank Gehry-designed Dr Chau Chak Wing Business
School, a mix of creative industries, and Central Park, makes it a bustling space of day- and
night-time activity. A recently completed Goods Line modelled on Manhattan’s High Line
opens up pedestrian and cycle links to Haymarket along Railway Square through Chinatown to Darling Harbour. As well, a new boulevard entry to Chinatown on Quay Street
provides, in the words of the City’s design director, ‘connections beyond the heart of
Chinatown that … ensure its future vitality and connectivity’ (Smyth 2011).
At the same time, Chinatown itself has become an increasingly diverse and open area: it
is a space where large numbers of students, workers, domestic day and night visitors from
across Sydney, and international tourists from especially Asia, and increasingly mainland
China (Collins and Jordan 2009; Destination NSW 2015), frequent, work, live and invest.
Taking Dixon Street alone, this pedestrianised spine of Sydney’s Chinatown has bifurcated
into a vibrant, youthful space to the north, and, to the south, its archetypal oriental streetscape of arches and stone lions that was refurbished by the City of Sydney and the Dixon
Street Chinese Committee in the 1970s and 1980s (Anderson 1990). Coinciding at that
time with a federal government policy of ‘multiculturalism’ that set a dominant culture
and its minority communities within the frame of a bounded nation-state, this Chinesethemed streetscape locked the public conception of Chinatown to a delineated space (a
single street). It also fixed it to a restricted temporality—of traditionalism and communalism—that sits uneasily with the diversity and ambiance of its street life today.
Much more than ‘Chinese’, Chinatown’s Asian character comprises a diversity of
languages and ethnicities: Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Taiwanese, Cantonese,
Mandarin, Singaporean, Hong Kongese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, and other
migration cultures that are themselves striated by the experiences of different generations
and their exchanges within an evolving Australian context. Council-approved signage
makes legible the Korea-town that is consolidating near Chinatown around Pitt and Liverpool Streets. As well, a Thai-Town characterises the vicinity of Campbell Street (Han 2013)
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and a Japan-Town near the new (Singapore-based development of) Central Park. The
flourishing of Korean- and Thai-owned and leased businesses, especially restaurants, groceries, hair salons, fashion boutiques and specialist travel agencies, in turn fostered collaboration with City of Sydney planners (plus the national consulate in the case of ThaiTown) over the introduction of themed cultural events to those precincts. Symptomatic
of this intensifying ethnic differentiation was a—to date unsuccessful—move to change
the name of the immensely popular Chinese New Year Festival, centred in and around
Chinatown for 2 weeks each February, to that of a ‘Lunar’ New Year Festival. In a
request to the City’s Lord Mayor in 2013 that Asian cities beyond China be invited to
sponsor the event, Thang Ngo, an Australian Sydney-sider of Vietnamese background,
claimed ‘the festival, as a name, is divisive because it excludes’ (Ngo 2013).
As for the vast diaspora that calls itself or continues to be called ‘Chinese’, there are
increasingly pronounced variations that defy singular ethnic classification, not to
mention one Asian stereotype (Ang 2014). Against the backdrop of a ‘rising’ China that
raises questions of identification and positioning for diasporic Chinese, there is also the
complexity that Chinese-origin people from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore,
Vietnam and so on may have no immediate experience of China and do not necessarily
see it as an ancestral homeland (Chan 2012). Those, on the other hand, who do directly
hail from China are themselves separated by, in the words of Chinese-Australian artist
Lindy Lee, ‘huge cultural and linguistic differences’ (Lee 2014). Political affiliations, too,
bring varied backgrounds into new forms of interaction and/or estrangement. These intricacies call attention to the increasingly transnational dimension of diaspora across a diversity of identities and associations that are excessive to an outmoded enclave discourse.
They craft Chinatown as a place of new and original social relations. In the words of
one interviewee, intimating the novelty of these relational dynamics, Chinatown today
‘throws the factions of Asia … within walking distance of each other’ (Yap 2015).
Class differentiations also defy the sense of cohesive communalism evoked by the
stereotype of a block settlement. Divisions have been brought into sharp relief in
Sydney (as elsewhere) by the increase of wealthy, Mandarin-speaking migrants from affluent urban areas of mainland China to many parts of the city (Wong 2014). Some 85 per
cent of the 2014 residency visas granted by the New South Wales government as part of
Australia’s Significant Investor Visa scheme went to Chinese nationals (Wen 2014). Upmarket restaurants on Chinatown’s Sussex Street, such as Waitan—a name that references
Shanghai’s waterfront Bund area—is a $10 million joint venture of a China- and Singapore-based restaurant group pursuing this market. For decades prior, from the time the
White Australia policy was lifted in 1973 and especially during the 1990s in anticipation
of Hong Kong’s return to China, investors from Hong Kong and Singapore had targeted
Chinatown’s tightly held property (Leung 2014). By today, Australia is a popular destination for China’s burgeoning outward foreign investment, with Australians of Chinese
ancestry ‘key facilitators’ (Tung and Chung 2010) or ‘authority figures’ (Ong 1998, 155)
of a distinctively new domain of affluence. In Sydney, as for other Pacific Rim cities,
this activity has seen demand ‘grow dramatically’ for residential, retail and commercial
property (Leung 2014), as well as office space with the potential for conversion to apartments for not necessarily ‘traditional, local buyers’ but ‘customers in China’ (Cranston,
Lenaghan, and Harley 2014). Indeed, the level of mainland Chinese interest in Sydney
property has been described as no less than ‘phenomenal’ (Commins 2014), giving rise
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(as elsewhere) to vigorous debate about its impacts and a recent tightening of foreign
investment regulations (Rogers, Wong, and Nelson 2017).
At Haymarket the supply of property is limited, along with the scope for amalgamating
lots, but it continues to be highly coveted (Leung 2014). The intensification of mainland
Chinese presences there, not only as investors, leasees and managers of its commercial,
retail and property markets but also as developers of it, has seen a tall tower boom on
the fringes of Chinatown. Notable among the towers are the Peak, Quay, and the 66storey Greenland Centre ‘sky-homes’. On Dixon, Chinatown’s main street, the first
Chinese-named residential building has been built with a pagoda on top recalling Chinatown’s Cantonese heritage. Named ‘Hing Loong’, meaning ‘prosperity’, it pushes at the
height limit of 50 m set by the City some years ago for the immediate area around
Dixon Street (Johnson 2013)—a limit that looks conspicuously low in relation to new
building heights that are under consideration for Sydney’s CBD (Saulwich and Visentin
2016). At nearby Darling Harbour, a vast property-driven economic development
project of the State government is comprehensively building a city neighbourhood from
scratch. ‘Darling Square’, as this billion-dollar project is called, is set to heighten negotiation over the aesthetics of heritage and modernity that are being configured across
the super-tall tower and low-rise textures of Chinatown’s Cantonese past (McNeill
2014). Not necessarily contradictory, however, idioms of ‘heritage’ and ‘modernity’ are
juxtaposed in a design, that, according to the lead landscape architect, aspires to be as ‘permeable as possible’ in removing ‘awkward level-changes and obstacles that previously
closed the site off from Chinatown and its surrounds’ (cited in Hawken 2015). A
Sydney-born Malaysian UTS lecturer, Chinatown resident, and interviewee anticipated
that: ‘Haymarket is going to open up and thrive even more’ (and now to paraphrase
her) especially after hours, with its shopping rather than alcohol culture (Yap 2015).
Much more, too, than simply a ‘migrant’ enclave, Chinatown’s trans-generational composition adds a density of dimension. Today there are a minority of older Chinese-origin
people—some Australia-born—who profess feelings of alienation from the more plural
Asian inflections that the area exhibits (Ang 2013). For them, Chinatown’s original role
as a meeting- and market-place within an early twentieth-century network of Cantonese-speaking Chinese in Sydney’s inner suburbs, affords it an ongoing cultural and symbolic significance. They remind us (in interview) that, historically, Chinatown was a hub of
employment, offering jobs in the many fish, fruit, and vegetable enterprises that lined
Campbell and George Streets from the Rocks through to Haymarket. And—again
contra the communal spatiality of Chinatown’s long-standing enclave script—such
businesses were themselves sustained by Chinese-operated market gardens connecting
Chinatown, urban agriculture sites across Sydney, and the homelands of (mainly)
southern China and Hong Kong (King Fong 2012; George Wing Kee 2012). To a
greater or lesser extent, even for the most discriminated against, daily life was played
out across a variety of sites and settings (Fitzgerald 1997).
For some members of these (mostly) Cantonese-speaking generations, Chinatown’s
intensifying ‘China-centric’ identity is unsettling, at a time when China becomes Australia’s largest trading partner and both city and nation seek closer strategic links (Australian
Government 2012). The former president of the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce, Australia-born Brad Chan, describes the district’s generational shift with these words: ‘The
next generation of entrepreneurs are not so appealing to the older Chinese’ while ‘more
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members of the chamber are joining in order to do business with China’ (Chan 2013). The
Chamber initiated ‘Asia Panel’ events precisely for this constituency—a generation that is
increasingly setting the terms for the transformation in Chinatown’s public conception
from ethnic accessory to, in the words of the City’s Lord Mayor, ‘pivotal part of
Sydney’s role as a global city’ (City of Sydney 2010b).
Equally excessive to any singular notion of ‘migrant’ or ‘minority’, young tertiary students of varying visa, citizenry and ethnic statuses afford Chinatown a palpable vitality.
The ‘demographic doesn’t change but the turnover is quite amazing’, stated the City’s
public domain strategy manager of an area that ‘stays perpetually young’ (Johnson
2013). It’s the place to get Asian medical treatments, Asian haircuts, fashion and
comics, book flights in Asian travel agencies, meet up with other (especially international)
students and, above all, consume an ever more differentiated and experimental food and
drink culture. Our research team’s 2013 university student survey (of 265 respondents
from a number of Sydney universities, 40 per cent from mainland China) found that 84
per cent went to Chinatown at least once a month; the majority for ‘dining and drinking’
(especially, and notably, at its Japanese restaurants); for ‘meeting friends’; and for ‘the
variety of cheap goods and services’. A significant minority also found fractional employment in Chinatown’s food, drink and retail sectors.
This vibrant student presence—itself embedded in a globalising knowledge-economy
industry (Collins and Ho 2014)—is reflected in the growth of certain businesses in Chinatown, an increasing number of them opened by young Chinese-origin entrepreneurs
(Chan 2013). Between 2007 and 2012, in the nine city blocks that might be considered
core Chinatown, the total internal floor area devoted to ‘retail and personal services’
increased by over a third. There were also significant floorspace as well as employment
figure increases in ‘food and drink’, plus in businesses offering ‘financial and professional
services’ (City of Sydney 2012a). Student housing provision, too, at Urbanest Quay Street
and elsewhere in Haymarket, underlines the sense in which students, however transient,
are also agents of neighbourhood change. Far more than local actors, though, student
lives are made through connections with other parts of the world, especially via digital
media and online sociality. Lines of engagement with ‘elsewhere’ simultaneously weave
together, for each student in their own way, fragments of ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Martin and
Rizvi 2014).
This increasing entanglement of inter-Asian elements—as adapted to an Australian
metropolitan setting that is itself positioned within an Asia-led migration, investment
and trading field—is also registered in a public space project currently nearing completion
in Sydney’s Chinatown. As a place-making initiative, we shall see that its assemblage of
elements evokes openness rather than communitarian closure. It also pluralises the
publics to which Chinatown is oriented and inaugurates what might be considered a
new ontology of place.
New Century Garden: Chinatown unbound
Two public spaces in the area of Sydney’s Chinatown bear the imprint of quite specific
cultural and historical contexts: first, the Chinese Garden of Friendship opening at
Darling Harbour in 1988, and second, the New Century Garden commencing construction at Thomas Street in 2015. Taken together they mark strategic moments in the
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history of Australia’s relation with Asia. As Chinese gardens, they also share symbolic and
material elements in their construction, especially in the use of rocks, water and wood.
Both, too, are art-forms of a kind. Considered separately, however, these civic spaces
could not be more different: the one an introverted enclosure, the other designed as a
space of exchange or what curators of public space today call ‘porosity’; the one abstracted
in time and space from a remote cultural heritage in classical China, the other emerging
organically out of its immediate time/space location in the CBD of a twenty-first-century
city on a semi-arid continent; the one located within the internationally circulating representational mode of traditional ‘Chineseness’ that remade many global Chinatowns in
the twentieth century, the other attuned to precisely the flux of identities and imaginings
that characterise Sydney’s Chinatown today; the one an instance of top-down diplomatic
fiat, the other curated through collaboration across sectors, disciplines and stakeholders.
If the Garden of Friendship is only doubtfully diasporic in adapting the conventions of
classical Chinese garden style to the specificities of a site abroad, the New Century Garden
at Thomas Street in Sydney’s Chinatown is a much more nuanced instance. Attentive to
transnational inheritances as well as the fabric of Australian environments, people and
things, it is syncretically tuned to ‘here’ as well as ‘there’. Likewise, it registers the reciprocal temporalities—of ‘now’ and ‘then’—while projecting forward to a garden (in reality, a
street) for the twenty-first century. For Aaran Seeto, the Sydney-born Chinese-Australian
curator charged with formulating the public art plan for Thomas Street, its ‘context’ was
the ‘layering of different types of social and cultural experiences in Chinatown’ that ‘structure a range of positions around history, tradition and the social and cultural aspirations of
the future’ (Seeto 2011). Paraphrasing him, this mix includes the diversification of ethnicities (including Chinatown’s older Cantonese identity), the emergence of different types
of business and more youthful entrepreneurs, the residential developments catering to students, together with Chinatown’s location at the intersection of key public transport corridors. It was this ‘fluidity’ that Seeto wanted to integrate ‘very early on … to make sure the
artistic role is well and truly embedded within the entire process’ (2011).
The commissioning practices of the City’s artist-led approach reflect its Sustainable
Sydney 2030 Strategy to develop a ‘cultural and creative city’ with more public space. Consistent with this vision, the City’s Chinatown Public Domain Plan (mentioned above) had
a program of street revitalisation projects to ‘enrich the quality of Chinatown’ and resist its
long history of typecasting (City of Sydney 2010a). In the words of the City’s design director, the aim was to mark ‘the diversity of the visual energy that Chinatown has today. We
were absolutely not interested in projects that homogenised Chinatown’ (Smyth 2011).
A number of these Chinatown projects are now complete, notably at Kimber Lane
where street artist Jason Wing extended the district’s frame of intercultural engagement
with his In Between Two Worlds project. Australia-born, of Chinese as well as Aboriginal
ancestry, Jason references both in suspending illuminated spirit figures that are silver by
day and blue by night, plus clouds—representing in Chinese the ‘heavens’ and ‘fortune’—
painted onto the walls and street surface. Reminiscent of his Aboriginal ancestry, Wing
describes his bold laneway work as ‘a journey that each pedestrian goes on’ (Wing
2012), though interestingly it is a journey that some older Chinatown spokespeople—
objecting to the inauspicious use of the colour blue in traditional Cantonese culture—
have not necessarily wanted to take.
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Not even vaguely reminiscent of the representational palette of oriental elements
that characterised Chinatowns the world over in the twentieth century, the Thomas
Street project involved close collaboration between the City of Sydney and
Chinatown businesses, property owners and residents. The project also convened an
intricate (and not necessarily smooth) collaboration of expertise across artists,
designers, architects, engineers, city planners, social and cultural historians, fengshui
practitioners and other disciplinary positions. Succinctly, the $5 million project
entailed: closure of a section of Thomas Street; widened footpaths; seating; street
tree planting; and as its ‘defining element’ at the intersection of Sussex, Thomas
and Hay Streets, a site-specific artwork by Australia-born visual artist Lindy Lee
(City of Sydney 2013).
Lee herself is keenly tuned to the multiple idioms of the Thomas Street centrepiece. And
here they are usefully considered—not in terms of a critique of Chinatown’s contemporary
representation but instead in terms of the practices/doings/actions that convene a new
‘potentiality of place’ (Wolf and Mahaffey 2016). Accordingly, Lee’s Chinatown simultaneously references: the colonial vernacular of the Haymarket area; Buddhist and
Taoist religious values; the historical layers of Chinese-Australian experiences; the wider
Australian landscape; and the Sydney metropolitan setting, with a ‘movement, busyness
and urbanity’ that the project’s landscape architect considers a stark contrast to the ‘set
piece’ of Darling Harbour’s Garden of Friendship (Irwin 2015). Each of these idioms
Lee sets to work in the juxtaposition and remix techniques of her creative practice. Retaining the plurality of styles—as well as the contiguity of temporalities—she oriented Chinatown to variously situated publics across the hybridities of Asian and Australian. In her
words, hers is
a garden which holds ancient Chinese spiritual values as they can be experienced through an
Australian landscape. Fire and water are important elements in Chinese Buddhism and
Taoism—both denoting flow and change—and these symbols are also powerful in Australia
given our predominant experiences of nature are of fire and water, bushfire, flood and
drought. (Cited in City of Sydney 2012b).
Taking account, too, of the ‘urban heat island effect’ at Haymarket (McKenny 2014),
her design for the public meeting place will soon include a suspended set of circular
aluminium shade sculptures (from China) erected above Thomas Street. In interview
she remarked that her sculptures reference ‘heat’, whereas a design for, ‘let’s say,
San Francisco’s Chinatown’ would more likely be inspired ‘from the element of fog’
(Lee 2014). And, once again extending the frame of intercultural engagement at
Chinatown, her concentric circles of granite pavers (sourced from an ACT quarry),
bluestone boulders (from Victorian quarries) with polished tops for seating, plus
Chinese scholar rocks interpreted in black rather than bronze, reference Taoist as
well as Australian ‘forces of nature’ (Irwin 2015). Not interested in preserving
Chinatown as ‘just this yum cha place’, or a static ‘bit of old China’, or, like ‘most
Chinatowns which seem to be generic’, Lee wanted these elements to capture the
specificity and dynamism of an area whose ‘membrane is porous’. For this reason,
too, she opted for a timed (rather than full) closure of Thomas Street that would
enable the continued servicing of its ‘grungy’ market life and modest restaurants
with ‘kitsch laminex tables’.
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Towards an inter-Asian metropolitan culture: a prefiguration from
Sydney’s Chinatown
Against a backdrop of significant cultural change, linked to the intensifying circulations of
people and capital across the Asia-Pacific, a deepening unsettlement is being provoked in
Sydney’s southern CBD of the stale distinction—and hierarchy—between an Australian
‘us’ and an Asian ‘them’. This shift is condensed at Chinatown from where, in the
words of Lindy Lee, it might even be possible to envisage a future in which difference is
no longer ‘other’ to a mainstream but inherent to the very fabric of an evolving metropolitan culture. Just 15 years ago Sydney’s Chinatown could be characterised as ‘the sort of
place a cosmopolite might go as they live a life open to “otherness”’ (cited in Jacobs 2001,
25). In the same vein, Chinatown is ‘interesting—from without’, to use the words from
that time of a Sydney architecture critic (Farrelly 1997, 15).
By today, Sydney’s Chinatown substantially exceeds its stereotype as an enclave of otherness within a multicultural landscape. It may still carry the mark of that distortion for some,
but for many young Asian-origin people it is neither a place of anomaly nor curiosity; more
likely, according to our student survey, ‘it’s a bit dirty’. For them, Chinatown is just ‘a natural
backdrop, nothing special, just there’ (Lee 2014), while for former president of the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce, Chinatown is no longer just ‘part of the city’, but does itself
anticipate ‘a contemporary and future city’ (Chan 2009). Symptomatic of this shift is the
participation (sketched in this article) of multi-generational Australians of diverse Asian
backgrounds shaping not just the form and fabric of contemporary Chinatown but its
public conception no less. The terms of engagement over ‘the power of definition’ (Anderson 1991, 24) are shifting at a place that might be considered—beyond its enclavic scripting
and more generatively—as a key infrastructure of Sydney’s global city-building agenda. It is
one of the city’s strategic platforms for producing trans-Pacific relations of exchange. As for
non-Asian residents and workers of the southern CBD, there is a sense—albeit anecdotal via
our research—that processes of inter-Asian connection do not necessarily imply an
ominous scenario of white decline and loss. For them, too, the southern CBD is a flourishing
contact zone whose flows, paraphrasing Doreen Massey (2005, 111), are always coming
from, and on their way to, many distant ‘elsewheres’.
Behind this projection from Sydney’s Chinatown is no fantasy of cosmopolitan hope and
smooth transformation, according to which migrants on the margins become citizens at the
core. The contours of globalisation are currently being redrawn, perhaps profoundly, and
recent tumultuous political events in Britain, Europe, the Philippines and America
shatter all certainties of simple transition. Nor is there blindness to the instrumentalism
of a growing economic orientation to all things Asian. But in the politics of urban cultural
exchange a reordering is underway—one that at the very least demands a multiplication of
the referential points of Chinatown’s narration beyond the singular one that informed the
writing of Vancouver’s Chinatown a quarter of a century ago. To that end, this article has
begun the task of opening Chinatown’s research orientation beyond its Anglophonic
legacy to more diversely situated publics and territories of commentary and critique.
Note
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
AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHER
145
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.
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.
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].
ORCID
Kay Anderson
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7176-2278
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