Chinatown dis-oriented : shifting standpoints in the age of China

This article revisits the author's Vancouver's Chinatown (1991), and an Australian Geographical Studies (1990) piece on Melbourne and Sydney's Chinatown, to extend their genealogical method into the twenty-first century. In a century marked by the rise of China and a proliferation of inter-Asian mobilities, the Haymarket district of Australia's most Asian-inflected city is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Sydney's Chinatown, once a stigmatised ghetto of white colonial making, increasingly sets its own terms as a hub of strategic significance to the City of Sydney and its diverse Asian and non-Asian publics. A closeted enclave of orientalist imagining has become an unbounded and differentiated space that condenses the dynamics of a more interconnected world region. This is an Asia-Pacific in which 'East' and 'West' steadily"”if not always comfortably"”inhabit, rather than stand in opposition and hierarchy to each other. The article elicits a Chinatown increasingly unmoored from any singular (Western) reference point of the kind that has long informed the enclave paradigm of much global Chinatown research, including the author's own.