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It hardly needs to be said that Asian migration has revitalized Australia. At the 2001 census, the country's 19 million people included 550,000 of Chinese ancestry; since then, another 30,000 new Chinese-born migrants (or 10% of all migrants) have settled in the country. As well, there are some 70,000 Chinese students living in Australia. Chinese is the second-most spoken language in Australia. "The Chinese have ceased to be a demonized group in Australia," says writer Nicholas Jose, who worked as cultural attach in Australia's Beijing embassy in the 1980s. "Besides, if they do experience discrimination they see it for what it is, and they will stand up to it now." Jose has made many lasting friendships in the Chinese community, particularly with those who were part of the 20,000-strong cohort of students who were living in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989 and whose visas were extended. (After years of reviews, red-tape and court challenges, almost 40,000 students, their families and asylum seekers have been granted permanent residency.) "They were a revolutionary generation that had golden dreams," says Jose. "Their expectations of what they wanted to do here had to be radically adjusted, but they wanted to achieve and move forward." As well, he notes the resilience of Chinese culture and a celebration of family bonds. "At what point does the post-1989 generation become Australian?" says Jose. "The identification with China is still so strong. And this has allowed China to expand at the borders in a way that does not depend on political structures." Jose points to a chain of ethnic-Chinese societies from Beijing to Sydney, along which people move with ease. "There's a real sense of China's proximity" in Australia, he says, "that you just don't experience in Europe."
In multicultural Australia, the chinese, with their tenacity, family and business networks and culture, are writing a variation on the old story of the migrant's progress (work, save, accumulate). Their influence is growing even before they start to crack the political order. "Australian society is very open," says Wang Yiyan, a Chinese studies lecturer at the University of Sydney, who came to Australia in 1988. "But the system is closed." Many migrants are challenging that order through their children. "The Chinese community values education. They are fanatics about it," says Wang. The goal of preparing children for entry into the best government high schools - and keeping them at the top of the class - has given rise to a new neurosis among middle-class non-Chinese parents. It's not uncommon for six-year-old children to attend coaching college for six hours on a Saturday. The objective: to gain a place in an opportunity class or to ace an exam that could be five years away. Chinese names adorn the honor rolls of schools all over the country. "You have to have your kids coached just to keep up," says a father whose daughter attends a Sydney selective school. "Teachers assume that everyone's got a private tutor." Some alumni believe the sheer number of academically gifted but narrowly focused Chinese kids at their old schools has made it difficult for the institutions to field sports teams and to develop other life skills. Changes to the way students are selected (by introducing a creative writing component to the exam), seems only to have created a cottage industry of tutors in this discipline.