This chapter begins with a brief explanation of events during the politically turbulent period covered by the second half of Chapter six and the present chapter. Many readers know that this period includes the 1989 Tiananmen protests, which lasted several months before the military crackdown on 4 June 1989. Historically, this was the PRC's third large-scale crackdown on activist members of the urban educated elite. In 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was carried out by the CCP in response to the widespread and strong criticism voiced by many urban citizens during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Much of this criticism went far beyond what the first generation of PRC leaders were prepared to tolerate, particularly in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As many as half a million Chinese people were persecuted according to official figures. The second major assault was the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976; while this impacted on almost every section of the Chinese population, educated people had always been the key target of class struggle. Millions of educated Chinese were abused in one way or another. What occurred in Beijing, as well as in several other cities, in 1989 and the purge that ensures were a third attack on the new educated elites, with tens of thousands ousted from their posts in the party-state system and forced to seek a living elsewhere.

As noted in previous chapters, the analysis in this chapter is based on this third crackdown, but focuses on the understudied aspects of this historical episode, as well as the problem of laid-off (xiagang) workers, which worsened around the same time. At first glance, the laid-off worker issue caused by SOE reforms after the mid-1980s, notably in 1994 and 1995, was distinct from the trouble facing educated liberals; however, many of those affected by each sought to reposition themselves in the same employment market.

The 1989 Tiananmen protests have been well documented in English, providing readers with ample details about the event; however, the political and social vacuum left by the crackdown has not been clearly explained. The 1989 clampdown was a sudden turn to the political left, quelling the demonstrations and reintroducing various social control measures. It was soon followed, however, by China's unprecedented economic growth. A very clear and sharp zigzag change of political direction emerged before many people had recovered from their anger and sadness of the crackdown on the student rallies.

This section compares three OECD member countries with comparable GDP (total, US dollars per capita) to Australia (USD55,627) in 2021. These OECD member countries are Canada (USD50,722), Germany (USD58,663) and Sweden (USD59,576). This comparison is restricted to paid maternity and parental leave provisions, with particular attention to leave duration, funding and eligibility. For ease of comparison, local currencies were converted to the equivalent Australian dollar amount.

Gross domestic product (‘GDP’) is the standard measure of a country's value created by the production of goods and services in that country for a particular period. GDP also measures the income earned from such production or the total amount spent on final goods and services (less imports). Although GDP is the single most important indicator to capture economic activity, it falls short of providing an appropriate measure of people's material well being for which alternative indicators may be more appropriate. For example, analysing social welfare and employment benefits is not entirely dependent on GDP since GDP substantially focuses on economic growth. Therefore, this comparison will use ‘nominal GDP’ (or GDP at current prices or GDP in value) as an alternative indicator referring to US dollars per capita for the year 2021.

A Canada

As of 01 January 2022, Canadian entitlements available to mothers (maternity and parental leave combined) add to a maximum of 55 weeks paid at a full-time equivalent of CAD638 [AUD682] per week. The duration can be extended to a maximum of 84 weeks with a weekly payment of CAD638 [AUD682] for the first 15 weeks, followed by a weekly payment of CAD383 [AUD409] per week for the remaining 69 weeks.

In Canada, paid parental and maternity leave is administered through the Employee Insurance (‘EI’) program, enshrined in the Employment Insurance Act. The EI Program is managed by the federal Department of Employment and Social Development and is available to all Canadian residents, except Quebec residents, who are covered by Quebec's parental leave program. Under the EI Program, benefits are funded by premiums paid by employers and employees, based on a premium rate that applies to every CAD100 [AUD107] of insurable earnings to the maximum insurable earnings threshold as determined by the Employment Insurance Financing Board annually. The Act defines ‘insurable earnings’ as the total amount of earnings an insured person has from insurable employment.

Introduction

On 5 June 1863, amid spiralling conflict between Māori and settlers in Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), Arthur Samuel Atkinson, White supremacist and immigrant to Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa) from County Durham in England, wrote in his journal that ‘I find one lies in wait to shoot Maoris without any approach to an angry feeling – it is a sort of scientific duty’ (Atkinson 1863, 49). Five years later, in November 1868, John Bryce, White supremacist, politician and immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, led a patrol of volunteer settler cavalry on the Nukumaru flats in south Taranaki. Bryce and his troops chanced upon a group of unarmed Māori children who were chasing pigs and geese near William Handley's woolshed. The soldiers charged at the children killing two young boys and wounding others (Riseborough [1993] 2022). Bryce was henceforth known to local Māori as Bryce Kōhuru or Bryce the murderer, a reputation that can only have been strengthened after he led the invasion of the pacifist settlement at Parihaka (Ray 2018; Riseborough [1993] 2022).

This wave of White-supremacist vitriol and violence carried to Aotearoa by European migrants was not limited to the nineteenth century, nor were Māori the only victims of it. On 24 September 1905, John Terry, White supremacist and recent immigrant from Kent, England, shot and killed an elderly Chinese man, Joe Kum Yung, on Haining Street in Wellington. Terry, who was fervently racist to the point of obsession, committed the murder in hope of raising the profile of his book of White-supremacist verse The Shadow (Ray 2019; Tod 1996). Some years later, on 3 January 1921, White supremacist and immigrant from Limavady, Northern Ireland, then-Prime Minister William F. Massey penned a New Year's message to the people of Aotearoa. In it, Massey wrote that ‘Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such. The strain of Polynesian will be no detriment’ (Massey 1921, 5). Massey also spoke openly of his aversion to Chinese people, telling the House: ‘I am not a lover or admirer of the Chinese race … I should be one of the very first to insist on very drastic legislation to prevent them coming here in any numbers’ (Massey 1910, 402).

Migrant Lives Matter

The Migrant Lives Matter slogan was first used in a 2015 protest against European governments letting asylum seekers die at sea rather than offering them refuge (De Genova 2018). Much like the Black Lives Matter activism the slogan connects to migrant activists and their allies have been calling out state-sanctioned structural violence that treats racialised/migrant bodies as worthless and disposable and consciously puts their lives at risk.

In Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa), migrant activists adopted the Migrant Lives Matter slogan in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to draw attention to the exclusionary and dehumanising effects of the New Zealand Government's Covid-19 response on migrants. As Aotearoa closed its borders to all but permanent residents and returning New Zealand citizens on 19 March 2020, the lives of temporary visa holders were thrown into disarray. Many of those who were in Aotearoa at the time lost jobs and faced financial difficulties, with often little access to the social support available to residents and citizens. For some time, they faced insecurities about their prospects of remaining in Aotearoa as visa processing was curbed or suspended. In addition, temporary visa holders in Aotearoa were immobilised in so far as had they wanted or needed to journey overseas, they would have had to forfeit any possibility of return. Meanwhile, temporary visa holders who happened to be overseas on 19 March 2020 – including those readying themselves to migrate to Aotearoa as well as those already home in Aotearoa but momentarily absent – found, and more than two years later continue to find, themselves in limbo. While Aotearoa's borders were closed, the vast majority of those migrants were unable to return, no matter how long they had previously lived in Aotearoa, no matter whether they had jobs or studies to return to, and no matter whether their family members lived in Aotearoa. Initial short-term blanket extensions of temporary visas, a one-off 2021 Resident Visa and the gradual opening of the border since May 2022 have brought relief to some, though by no means all, of the temporary visa holders in and outside of Aotearoa. Rather than offering a blanket amnesty to all onshore temporary visa holders, the one-off 2021 Resident Visa, for instance, retained a range of exclusions based on the perceived value of migrants centred on a ‘settled, skilled or scarce’ logic.

Diasporic Strategies – From Hostility to Solidarity (and Back Again?)

Many countries re-evaluated their relationship with diasporic communities around the turn of the twenty-first century, with Larner (2007) and Gamlen (2013), among others, noting the early 2000s as an inflection point in diaspora strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa). Gamlen (2013) cites high-profile mainstream media and political comments that expressed hostility to permanent residents and citizens who live outside Aotearoa – including stereotypes that those who emigrate are selfish or disloyal, that they have abandoned their ‘natural’ solidarity with family and nation and that they have betrayed their compatriots in search of economic gain. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, political sentiment and public policy began explicitly to recognise the value of Aotearoa's diaspora, both economically and culturally, as well as the many benefits of internationally connected residents within the country (Gamlen 2013).

The earlier negative attitudes towards the diaspora are striking and in need of some explanation. Lorenzo Veracini's (2010) work on settler colonialism suggests one potential line of analysis. He argues that in settler colonial societies like Aotearoa, there exists

A plausible chain of associations may run from the self-understanding of the settler as someone whose legitimacy is derived from their intention to ‘stay’. From this perspective, those who leave are violating a sort of compact, undermining the claims to legitimacy of those who want to stay, and leading to perceptions of betrayal and associated negative stereotypes that cast aspersions on the loyalties and solidarities of those in the diaspora.

In this context, the turn of the century rise in international mobility (de Haas, Castles, and Miller 2020, 4; Scholte 2005, 104–105) created incentives to positively re-evaluate Aotearoa's large diaspora, as well as internationally connected residents within Aotearoa's borders. As Gamlen suggests, governments increasingly oriented to an interconnected global market began to perceive the value of the international knowledge and connections their diasporic communities could bring (Gamlen 2013).

This study critically examined the current legal landscape of paid parental leave in Australia and compared it with equivalent provisions in other OECD member countries with a nominal GDP similar to Australia’s, namely, Canada, Germany and Sweden. In comparing the legal entitlements of women against the OECD member countries, major discrepancies concerning leave duration and operation were established. This research has analysed the international treaties that have informed parental leave policies, the CEDAW, ICESCR, CRC and the ILO's Conventions and Recommendations. It has explored three variants of feminism, which were applied to analyse current Australian paid parental leave provisions. This analysis led to an observation that paid parental leave provisions are categorical to cultural feminism, whereas unpaid parental leave provisions fall under liberal feminism. These observations appear inconsistent with the parental leave policies of the identified OECD member countries, whose provisions fall under the cultural and reconstructive feminist paragons, championing women's rights as mothers and, equally, as breadwinners for the family.

Further, this monograph has relied on a breadth of social and political research into how Australian paid parental leave laws have developed from their inception to the current period. These social and political findings have effectively demonstrated that not only is Australia lagging in terms of duration and generosity of parental leave, as compared with OECD equivalents, but it has also been stagnant in terms of domestic development, with Australian paid parental leave not introduced until 2010. Employerpaid parental leave was also examined, revealing that, in practice, parental leave payments are viewed as welfare payments instead of a human right, as stipulated by international treaties.

While Australia's statutory paid parental leave aims to address gender inequality, promote women's workforce participation and promote child and maternal health, the 18-week duration falls considerably short compared with other OECD member countries and fails to meet the WHO's 26-week minimum leave duration for optimal child and maternal health. On average, mothers in Canada, Germany and Sweden have up to 74 weeks of statutory paid parental leave, paid at approximately AUD700 per week following childbirth or adoption. Meanwhile, Australian mothers are only entitled to up to 18 weeks of statutory paid leave weeks (less than 25% of the average entitlements of Canada, Germany and Sweden) at AUD754 per week.

Introduction

The 2019 Ōtautahi Christchurch (hereafter, Ōtautahi) terror attacks in Aotearoa New Zealand foregrounded an emergent relationship between Māori and Muslim communities (Andrews 2019; Parahi 2019). In the aftermath of the attacks by a lone gunman who entered two mosques in Ōtautahi and shot unarmed worshippers, killing 51 people, there were numerous gestures of support and care shown by Māori communities towards Muslims. These included marae (Māori tribal meeting places, including a traditional meeting house) opening their doors to Muslim mourners, te reo messages of kia kaha (be strong) and aroha (love) written outside mosques and translated into Arabic, and a joint spiritual cleansing by Ngāi Tahu (the principal Māori iwi/tribe in the South Island) and Muslim leaders of the two mosques that were attacked (Homayun 2020). Immediately following the Ōtautahi attacks, initiatives occurring at the government level included various support and relief efforts led by E Tū Whānau, a ‘by Māori for Māori’ movement affiliated with the Ministry of Social Development (see Khan-Janif this collection).

This chapter unpacks the complex culturally derived value systems characterised by respect, reciprocity and relationality that are central to this budding relationship between Muslim migrants and Māori. We demonstrate that relationships built on such values can be a fruitful avenue for cultivating solidarities through a shared sense of belonging between Muslim communities and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. The bonds that are forming between Muslim migrant and Māori communities further constitute a starting point that may serve as a pathway for developing enduring relationships between migrant communities of Colour and Māori in this nation. For far too long, mana whenua (local Māori authorities) have been side-lined in conversations relating to migrant settlement, to the detriment of these communities (both migrant and Māori). The pervading settler colonial rhetoric that guides migrant settlement strategy in Aotearoa New Zealand does little to create opportunities for building enduring relationships and solidarities between migrant communities of Colour and Māori as tangata whenua (people of the land). In particular, current mainstream settlement strategies and symbolic aspects of settlement (such as the citizenship oath for instance) offer limited guidance on how migrant communities, including Muslims, might build respectful and mutually beneficial connections with Māori. Throughout this chapter, we argue that a focus on culture-centred relationship building can cultivate a relational sense of belonging for both Muslim migrants and Māori by recentring Māori as the hosts of this whenua (land).

It has been widely accepted that the Cultural Revolution was the negation of the post-famine recovery approaches and actions if the personality politics between Mao and his first-line leaders can be set aside. Up to mid-1966, almost all of the newly implemented open and fair social mechanisms were criticised and rejected as the revisionist line defined by Mao and his followers. Chinese politics were once again pushed strongly by Maoists, aided by radical students, to turn to the left of the ideological spectrum. Mao's caution to never forget class struggle and to prevent the restoration of pre-1949 capitalist system unified his followers, making them realise the need to guard their interests and their social status, which they had achieved through the revolution. This was partially the reason why the radical and rebellious student group – initially formed by Tsinghua High School students – was called Red Guards. As a consequence of such political impetuses, the connection between politics and personal behaviour that was already separated to some degree in the post-famine years was once again closely connected. Many confused students had then staged violent acts of destruction in several cities, which was once proudly called the Red Terror (Chan 1982; Unger 1982).

Having demonstrated their mad political shows all over the country from the early summer to the early winter of 1966, the start of another process of negation in post-1949 Chinese history came into view. An internet writer who attended Mao's eighth grand reception of the Red Guards in Beijing wrote the following reflection: in 1967, Mao ‘had clearly disliked the Red Guards and turned to rely on various Workers’ Rebel Command Headquarters to continue with’ his Cultural Revolution (Zhu 2006, n.p.). On the other hand, an online memoir records the following vivid scene at the famous Beijing Railway Station:

Preamble

The conception of this edited collection is inherently tied to the immense challenges to mobility, migration and race relations posed by global phenomena, including the politicisation and securitisation of migration, Islamophobia and the Covid-19 pandemic. In line with our objective of including non-academic perspectives in this book, we invited Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon to contribute his perspective on the key tasks for Aotearoa with regard to countering the structural forces that perpetuate racialised inequities, particularly for migrant communities. In response, Meng Foon kindly granted us, as editors of the collection, an interview. The printed version of this conversation has been edited for brevity.

Jessica Terruhn and Shemana Cassim

Meng Foon: I’ve always been interested in people's well-being. As the mayor of Gisborne for about 24 years, I thoroughly enjoyed the well-being of our community, and it was actually about having a listening ear, doing stuff and participating in [local people’s] lives. Whether it's birthdays, christenings, book launches, funerals, weddings – I think the key thing is actually being part of our community. You can learn about our community, but how do you actually apply that? Applying it means making friends with lots of people, having lots of cups of tea, and it was more a relationship thing. I think having lived in a multicultural community/ society, speaking Māori, my parents were immigrants, I think that all helped as well. So that life experience and the background definitely resonates with a lot of people. And the trials and tribulations of that.

The issues – there are different levels of issues. I think the issue at the top end is the structural, systemic racism which is caused by the Crown. I don't like to say that it’s caused by Pākehā. I don't like to say that it's caused by governments. But it is the Crown that alienated Māori land through various means and also suppressed Māori culture through legislation and through the starvation of resources. And so that was the key issue for tangata whenua.

Since the time when Mao was alive and leading the Cultural Revolution, a widely used narrative suggests that Mao was fighting for his political legacy in Chinese history. This was based on his own logic and the example of the then Soviet Union's leader, Nikita Khrushchev. After taking over leadership of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had strongly condemned Stalin's wrongdoings. Stalin's embalmed remains were even removed and buried elsewhere. This story was awful in the eyes of the Chinese culture of Mao's generation. Mao made strategic use of this case and cautioned his followers of the real danger of China's Khrushchev: Liu Shaoqi, Mao's first successor, who openly criticised Mao for the famine at the 1962 Seven-Thousand Cadres Conference. Obviously, Mao's efforts in his last 10 or so years were not only to place himself in history in the fashion he would have wanted, but also to fight against any form of revisionism or attempt to modify his anticipated position in history. This was a form of competitive repositioning – even if at a different level – aiming at positioning his revolutionary legacy in the world.

Mao had clearly overplayed his repositioning efforts, running against what he would wish to be remembered for. Having put a break to the faction fights between student rebel groups in July 1968, the CCP's Ninth National Congress was finally held in April 1969, almost thirteen years after its Eighth National Congress held in 1956. At the Ninth National Congress, Lin Biao was formally designated as Mao's successor. Mao could in fact stop at this point and avoid more damage to his historical position, but he was offended by Lin's proposal to reinstate the position of the PRC's president at the Lushan Conference held in early autumn 1970.

Lin Biao must have felt deceived by Mao after the 1970 Lushan Conference, so he started to show part of his military man's nature. He had since kept a long distance from Mao for a year, before opting to run away from China on 13 September 1971. His plane crashed in Mongolia on the way to the Soviet Union. The ‘September 13 Incident’ – or the 9/13 Incident as it is called in Chinese – was therefore a conclusion of Lin Biao's historical repositioning. His not-so-glorious relationship with Mao in much of the 1960s ended with his fleeing China and subsequent death. His death earned him a position in Chinese history.

Introduction

This chapter starts by providing a brief introduction to the history of social cohesion in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The deployment of the concept locally draws on a complex and long history of the term (see Schiefer and van der Noll 2017, especially for the history of the term; see also Cheong et al. 2007; Fonseca, Lukosch, and Brazier 2019), although the policy and conceptual work that originated in Canada in the late 1990s was especially influential in local approaches and thinking. This can be seen in the work led by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in 2005 and 2006. By late 2020, MSD was again the lead agency in a further wave of work on social cohesion, largely as a result of a Royal Commission (2020) recommendation. In the meantime, the initial focus on immigrant settlement and affairs surrounding the ethno-cultural diversification of Aotearoa/New Zealand's population had been replaced by vastly different political imperatives: the challenges to social cohesion had been redefined by voices on the political left and right, that is, political movements that either sought justice or challenged the political and social acceptance of diversity in some way. The proliferation of online hate has emphasised these contemporary challenges, especially as the volume of such material (domestically and internationally) has increased significantly since 2015–2016.

If social cohesion is to have any relevance or political acceptability, then it needs to address questions of equity and social justice. We position social cohesion as providing an important political and policy option to ensure an active, engaged and inclusive citizenship which, in turn, requires the reshaping of possibilities and governance (cf. Harris and Johns 2021). Given the context and imperatives of a contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) and the values and principles that underpin it must become critical to a rejuvenated approach towards, and understanding of, social cohesion. Such a re-envisioning of social cohesion represents a political opportunity to reduce or abandon the integrationist and assimilatory approaches of the past and to instead address the long-standing effects of institutional racism and social, educational and economic marginalisation.

A Brief History of Social Cohesion in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Initial approaches: Addressing immigration and diversity

Aotearoa/New Zealand's interest in social cohesion as government policy emerged from a period of changing demographics in the 1990s.