ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the efforts of Chinese residents and subjects in Australia seeking equality of treatment with Australians of British descent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to a short-lived student visa program introduced for students from China to study in Australia in the 1920s. The idea of the Unequal Treaties entered China by way of Japan, where Chinese reformers, revolutionaries and students took up residence after the failure of the 1898 palace reforms in Beijing. Despite their discriminatory regulations, the Australian colonies offered a stable legal environment for business, provided a style of civic life conducive to free and open association and supported a system of government that allowed citizens to approach authorities for redress of grievances. The Australian Government’s capacity to limit Chinese entry was circumscribed by Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century treaties with China which assured equal rights of movement and entry between ports in China and British ports elsewhere, including those in Australia.
