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AUSTRALIA'S CHINA: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s. By Lachlan Strahan. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996. xiv, 374 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$64.95, cloth. ISBN 0-521-48001-9.
IN this book, drawing upon a wide range of oral and written records, Lachlan Strahan provides a patchwork quilt picture of how different Australians viewed China as it assumed a changing role in Australia's world between the 1930s and 1990s. Reflecting this change the first section, which covers the period when China was seen as a distant victim of Japanese aggression, deals primarily with Australian travellers, missionaries and early diplomats in China, and the second section which encompasses the cold war and its aftermath when China became central to Australia's worldview, gives greater attention to the domestic debate over China. Even as perceptions changed with time and circumstance, the author shows, perhaps not very surprisingly, that Australians often had conflicting responses to China.
In the early period the Australian image of China oscillated between that of "victim and threat." The valiant ally concept of the wartime years took its place rather uneasily alongside more enduring perceptions of China as a backward, anarchical and exotic country inhabited by "swarming hordes" who lived in a corrupt, cruel and disease-ridden society. And these latter terms, which formed the prevailing view, were not simply descriptions of Chinese life but metaphors for the nature of the Chinese character. Likewise, in the cold war Australian Communists and sympathetic radicals saw in the...