Australia's Chinese future.(Foreign Affairs)

TWO YEARS AGO, the day after George W. Bush had addressed Australia's parliament (rather uninterestingly), our MPs were regaled by a very different type of speech--from Hu Jintao, the then recently confirmed President, and more importantly Communist Party Secretary, of the People's Republic of China.

Hu intrigued and puzzled his listeners by beginning his address:

 
   Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of 
   China's Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. 
   For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas 
   and settled down in what they called "Southern 
   Land" or today's Australia. They brought Chinese 
   culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the 
   local people, contributing their proud share to 
   Australia's economy, society, and its thriving 
   pluralistic culture. 

Since China's economic opening to the world began twenty-five years ago under Deng Xiaoping, increasing scholarship has been brought to bear--in the great Chinese tradition of seeking historical antecedents for contemporary policies--on the first great expeditions from China to the wider world. The central figure in this saga is Admiral Zheng He, a eunuch who, over twenty-eight years in the early fifteenth century, led eight vast fleets, each comprising about 20,000 people in vessels more than 100 metres long, through South-East Asia and beyond, certainly reaching the east coast of Africa. He brought back giraffes, ostriches and lions, astonishing his imperial Ming patrons and distressing them because of the lack of Chinese words for such beasts, indicating limits to the Middle Kingdom's authority.

Five years ago, retired British submariner Gavin Menzies wrote a book named 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Menzies claimed: "It's virtually impossible to still argue that Columbus discovered America, that Cook found Australia, or that Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the world. You have to be a crank nowadays to believe that." One is tempted to say, it takes one to know one.

A massive exhibition staged by China has recently begun touring South-East Asia, southern Asia and East Africa celebrating Admiral Zheng's achievements and reinforcing the claims made by Menzies.

The Chinese know about the importance of establishing their view of history as the dominant one. I anticipate that it will not take long for the Hu Jintao-Menzies version of the "discovery" of Australia to begin to gain traction in our universities and our high schools. In the pantheon of contemporary historical or cultural studies, Asian eunuchs rate well above English men in credibility.