The Australian Chinese community reshaped by two historical trends: A dual-embeddedness perspective

With China continuing its policy of reform and opening and Australia strategically turning to Asia, the period since the mid-1980s has witnessed escalating Chinese immigration to Australia. Against this backdrop, the ethnic Chinese community in Australia has changed significantly, particularly in respect of its demographic characteristics, socio-economic activities, and status, and is now widely perceived as a model and middle class ethnic community. Adopting a “dual-embeddedness” framework, this chapter offers a political-economic analysis of the ethnic Chinese community's transformation over the past three decades or so, highlighting the influence of socio-economic and political macro-contexts and ever-increasing inflows of Chinese migrants, students, investors, and tourists. This chapter details the expression and mechanism of Australian Chinese community’s dual embeddedness. It shows that the ethnic Chinese community in Australia has been simultaneously embedded in the nation building processes in both Australia and China and suggests that the community is not merely a beneficiary of these processes, but also an active agent and contributor.