ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a type of continuity in China–Australia relations by telling the story of Chinese Australians in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century. It does so by following the life of Daisy Kwok, who arrived in Shanghai from Sydney in 1917 during the heyday of Chinese Australian travel to that city and stayed after the communist takeover in 1949. As the experience of Australian-born Chinese shows, empire divided people as much as it united them. In the eyes of the Kwoks – carriers of British citizenship due to their Australian birth – these legal categories carried serious economic weight, for any change in their status curtailed their mobility within the British Empire and, therefore, their ability to operate their businesses. Most returned overseas Chinese in Chinese treaty ports were able to draw upon international family ties to assist them in moving between cultures to cross borders.
