The Chinese Australian Herald and the Shaping of a Modern ‘Imagined’ Chinese Community in 1890s Colonial Sydney

Abstract

This article discusses the development of the first Sydney Chinese newspaper, the Chinese Australian Herald, showing how it rapidly cultivated an effective place for itself as a technically sophisticated moral, social and organizational nexus linking Chinese daily life with larger-scale systems like the political structure of colonial society. It also argues that two major Chinese ceremonial processions conducted in 1897 illustrate the paper©s power to help shape new leadership and a new social imaginary, and thus to help reconfigure the Chinese© Australian community to partake in the broader Australian colonial community of the time. The narratives and social networks of the Chinese Australian Herald provide insights into the complex process of constructing a modern ©imagined© Chinese community in turn of the twentieth-century Sydney.