English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

State surveillance is undoubtedly one of the central barriers to open and active political engagement among many students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Australian nationalist discourse rarely acknowledges the existence of Chinese international students except within ethnicised stereotypes—variously, as ‘cash cows’, ‘CCP spies’, and ‘patriotic students brainwashed from birth’ (Four Corners 2019; Hamilton 2018, 4). Daphne Zhao—a pseudonymous Australian-based Chinese graduate student—offers a welcome break from this increasingly paranoid oversimplification in her recent op-ed in this issue of the Made in China Journal. Albeit with its own limitations, her article attempts to complicate the prevailing narrative of a singular ‘Chinese diaspora’ toeing the official Party line. Yet Zhao, who speaks through personal experience of engaging with mainland students about the ongoing Hong Kong protests, elaborates a narrative of victimhood. In her account, overseas Chinese students who hold dissenting views inevitably retreat into a ‘compelled reticence’ in the face of growing Chinese nationalism and an oppressive surveillance state. State surveillance is undoubtedly one of the central barriers to open and active political engagement among many students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And Zhao is certainly not alone in feeling concerned about the current environment (Kwai 2019). But representing overseas mainland students as passive victims of the omnipresent power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offers neither a solution for overcoming this dilemma, nor does it sufficiently capture the actual diversity of political opinion among the students. If anything, it also has the potential to reinforce Australian racial anxieties and CCP authoritarianism, both of which remain committed to removing the political agency of the Chinese students by collapsing the Communist Party-state and ‘the people’ into a homogenous whole. In this response to Zhao, I propose an alternative frame of thinking, one that puts political agency at the foreground as not only desirable but necessary, and one that centres voices of dissent—however fragmentary—among Chinese international students. Although I ground my comments here in an Australian

Can Chinese Students Abroad Speak? Asserting Political Agency amid Australian Nationalist Anxiety