Vol. 73/No. 32      August 24, 2009

At a July 28 meeting here on “Chinese in Cuba” Chang told of his experiences growing up in Australia and fighting anti-Chinese discrimination. (See accompanying article on this page for report on tour about Chinese-Cuban generals and Chinese diaspora.) He described a little known chapter in the history of the labor movement here and of Chinese seamen in Australia.

“Fred Wong was a founding member of the Chinese Youth League,” Chang said. “I worked with him during the war years.” Chang explained that following the Japanese invasion of China the Youth League organized “aid for Chinese guerrillas [led by the Chinese Communist Party] behind Japanese lines. They needed medical supplies and we didn’t rely on Chiang Kai-shek [the bourgeois nationalist leader].”

Chang described how Wong organized a large rally in the Sydney Town Hall under a big banner with a slogan of support for the Chinese guerrillas, not the nationalist army. The organizers of the rally took advantage of the fact that the Australian rulers were in their own war against Japanese imperialism in the Pacific.

“I was an organizer of Chinese seamen during the war,” Chang said. “I used to tell the wharfies [stevedores] ‘You have to have armed struggle, else how can you make a revolution?’ Without arms you cannot put the opposition down.”

Through the Chinese Seamen’s Union Chang helped seamen get housing and win work contracts. “There was a shortage of labor during the war years,” he explained, “but after the war they wanted to deport all Asians.” Even those who married Australians and had families here were deported, he said.

Under the “White Australia” policy [racist immigration controls from 1901 to 1973] the government “tried to deport me three times,” Chang said, but he successfully fought the attempts “because I came before the war.”

He described how after the war he had been active together with Wong in supporting the struggle for Indonesian independence from Dutch imperialism. The seamen’s union joined the boycott against Dutch shipping. He also opposed Australia’s involvement in the war against the Korean people. “And I’m still struggling—at 88,” Chang said.

A few years ago he took his grandchildren back to visit their ancestral home in China. “Everything was very prosperous,” he noted. “I think Cuba is going the right way—but is China going capitalist? The difference in Cuba is due to leadership,” he concluded.
 
 
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