But as of July 1 this year, it is much easier for Australians to travel to soak up Chinese culture.
For the past few weeks, Chinese Singaporeans have been observing the Hungry Ghost Festival, a month-long age-old tradition anchored in Taoist and Buddhist beliefs.
A few feet a way, a giant open-aired steel furnace was white-hot with burning effigies, sending out a radiating wall of heat into the midday Singapore sun, as though we were at the mouth of hell itself.As the only ethnic Chinese-majority country outside of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Singapore provides a window into these fascinating traditions and superstitions that began centuries ago on the mainland and have been handed down for generations to the diaspora.
This overall negative sentiment was also reflected in polling published by American think-tank Pew Research Center in July. It found 85 per cent of Australians had an “unfavourable” view of China, with just 14 per cent holding a positive view.Almost two months into the visa-free scheme, there is little hard data available to gauge interest levels.
More anecdotally, tour company Intrepid Travel says it has seen a boom in demand for their China tours. But it is a pretty safe conclusion that the volatile Australia-China relationship, and extensive media coverage of the ever-tightening authoritarian grip of the Chinese state over its citizens under President Xi Jinping has dampened a few appetites. Not to mention theAustralian citizen Gordon Ng who is jailed in Hong Kong
Far from being part of a conspiracy, Australian journalists remain largely confined to reporting the China story through the lens of geopolitics, due to the Chinese government’s decision to deny them entry – bar a few tightly controlled occasions – to report from within the country. The story of China’s rise, its competition with the United States, and its territorial ambitions, is reshaping global politics. It may well be the biggest story of the 21st century, but it’s not the only one.
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