ABSTRACT
The historiography of the Chinese in Australia and New Zealand has been for too long locked in a paradigm in which the host society’s treatment of its Chinese emigrants has been the dominant concern. A new revisionist historiography of the trans-Tasman Chinese (i.e., Chinese in Australia and New Zealand) is developing in both Australia and New Zealand.2 This new historiography places the emphasis back on the Chinese themselves, and the histories of their families, communities, and institutions. There is need for ethnographic historical research on the trans-Tasman Chinese that takes into account the different qiaoxiang, the emigrant localities, from which they originated, so that the evolving revisionist historiography includes an understanding of the qiaoxiang from which the Chinese in Australia and New Zealand originated (see Chan Min-hsi 1989; Chan 1995; and Chan 1999). A new history of the trans-Tasman Chinese will be trans-national in that it considers the links with, and the interactions between, the immigrant communities and their qiaoxiang in the past and in the present. Those overseas Chinese who seek their Chinese roots realize that eventually these roots can only be found in their qiaoxiang in China. However, qiaoxiang studies since Chen Da have focused on the qiaoxiang and how the emigrants and the overseas communities they constructed have influenced or contributed to the qiaoxiang through trans-national links, particularly in the contemporary age. What I suggest in this chapter is another perspective, that of how studies of the qiaoxiang and understanding its cultural and social forms and practices may help us understand its emigrants and the lives, families, communities, and transnational networks they, the emigrants, constructed overseas. This chapter discusses the differences between the settlement of transTasman Chinese in Australia and New Zealand and suggests that these differences are related to the diversity of qiaoxiang of the trans-Tasman Chinese.
