![Barry Li, author of 'The New Chinese' has written a book that is exceptional for its insights into the new generation of ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/f/g/w/c/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gxi0gx.png/1501457018490.jpg)
The morning Barry Li woke up with the worst hangover of his life was the moment he realised he no longer belonged in China. It was the day after New Year's Eve 2010, and the young accountant had been pressured into joining colleagues at the Agriculture Bank of China for a formal dinner involving vast quantities of Chinese liquor.
Li does not remember much about that night but he does remember waking late, with scratches on his hands, and that he then almost missed a flight to Hunan to meet his wife's family for the first time. He has not touched alcohol since.
Lavish banquets and endless toasts were part of the corporate culture when Li returned to China after six years studying in Australia, at Macquarie University, to find his world had changed. China's economic miracle meant he was now competing with an army of other international graduates who had come home, could not afford the soaring property prices and felt like the country "no longer needed me".
But when he and his wife Zhen made the decision to return to Sydney to start a family, they were horrified to find another "China miracle" effect – Chinese money was also now fuelling a property boom in their adopted home.
![The number of Australian residents born in China has more than doubled in the past 10 years.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/j/z/1/o/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1501138027137.jpg)
"Australians are wondering why there are so many rich Chinese suddenly appearing ... they feel frustrated by the super-rich Chinese who have raised the property prices. I hate them too," Li says in an interview with AFR Weekend. He's only half joking.
Call it the dilemma of "The New Chinese" and Li has now written a book with that title: The New Chinese - How They Are Changing Australia. Li is just one of thousands of our Chinese immigrants who are living here but are still unable to escape the tumultuous changes taking place in the world's second-largest economy.
The extraordinary thing about Li is that he has decided to tell his story at all. Many Chinese people are notoriously private and are reluctant to open up about their personal feelings.
Changes sweeping China
The 35-year-old accountant and now part-time author calls Australia home but he also wants Australians to understand the changes sweeping his country and producing a generation of Chinese immigrants with completely different world views, beliefs and values from their parents.
![Li Cunxin, the former ballet dancer defected from China in 1981 and now lives in Australia. But he and Barry Li have ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/j/y/r/c/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1501130700639.jpg)
"I got the impression 90 per cent of Australians don't really know what is going on in China," Li says when I ask him what prompted him to write this first book.
"Their image of China was still from Mao's Last Dancer, the Cultural Revolution, a horrible Communist regime. Their knowledge was outdated," he adds, referring to the popular book about ballet dancer Li Cunxin who defected from Mao Zedong's China in 1981 to the United States before settling in Australia.
Li's background is so different from Lu Cunxin's that they may as well have been born in different countries. This vast difference between the generations in China and the impact they are having on Australia is one of the key messages Li conveys in his book. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show 526,000 people from China were living here on June 30, 2016; the number of Australian residents born in China has more than doubled in the past 10 years.
When we catch up for coffee, I find Li to be as modest and mild-mannered as his writing conveys. Now working for the Audit Office of NSW, he lives on Sydney's upper north shore with his wife and two young sons. He was finally able to crack into the housing market and buy a home in Sydney's Normanhurst.
![A reconstructed courtyard house near the trendy Houhai cafe district behind the Forbidden City in Beijing.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/j/y/i/k/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1501136912494.jpg)
Early mid-life crisis
Last year, during what he calls an "early mid-life crisis", Li decided to take a break from his full-time auditing work and channel his love of writing into a book. He decided to write about what he knows and thus offer a rare window into a world he was realising many Australians find mysterious, and often even distrust, given almost everything they read about our powerful Asian neighbour is about real estate or spies.
"I'm not famous or a celebrity or a rich Chinese. I actually represent the middle class inside and outside of China and that is what is really driving the development of China," he says. "A lot of books about China are written by Westerners and experts or scholars who look at the data and do the research but how many of them have actually lived in China for 20 years?"
Like most of his generation, Li was an only-child born under China's One Child policy. He was sent away to live with his mother's aunt in Suzhou near Shanghai at just 10 months old, separated from his parents for most of his childhood so they could focus on work. This sounds shocking to anyone born in Australia but was normal in the years after the Cultural Revolution when China was rebuilding the country after years of starvation and terror.
![The author of 'The New Chinese' admires this nation of hard-working people driving the biggest economic turnaround in ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/a/p/2/a/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1499927636559.jpg)
"It was not until I became a parent myself and understood the reasons why they thought it was the best thing," Li says of his family's decision to send him away. "There are a lot of sacrifices in the family relationship … I am not alone, there are so many children separated from parents [who] grew up with relatives or grandparents."
Li's father, whom he still visits regularly in China, worked in a coal mine as a teenager but later become one of the lucky few in his county to study at university. His engineering degree landed him a "respected" job within the Chinese government's mining bureau and both his parents spent the next decades working hard, which meant they could afford to send their only son to study in Australia.
After six years studying here, Li admits he expected to return to China in glory as his father did when he returned to his home city decades earlier when so few had a university education.
"I could not have been more naïve or wrong," he recalls. Thousands of returning international students had flooded the market during the six years he was away as massive redevelopment took place. "It was no longer the China I knew... it didn't seem like the country needed me at all."
!['The New Chinese - How They Are Changing Australia' by Barry Li is published by Wiley, $29.95. The book has helped mend ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170731124909/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/x/j/t/z/6/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1501124456800.jpg)
Li and Zhen moved back to Sydney in 2011 and have never looked back. Interestingly, Li uses the word "escape" when he talks about leaving China even though he never had to defect like Cunxin did and is still free to come and go.
"I was escaping from my parents ... they wanted to keep their only child close," he explains. "I always wanted the opportunity to prove myself without depending on my parents to have a proper life. That is hard to do in China. Even a lot of Australians now if they want a property they have to borrow from their parents.
"I wanted a clean environment for my children. My parents were furious when I made my decision."
Surprisingly, the publication of The New Chinese helped mend Li's relationship with his parents and he says they are now closer than ever. He says, "They are proud of me now, to write a book in a foreign language is seen as an achievement in China."
An independent view of China
Part autobiography, part textbook, the most refreshing thing about The New Chinese is that it offers a truly independent view of China. Li does not gloss over the negatives such as pollution or events like Tiananmen Square but he also admires this nation of hard-working people driving the biggest economic turnaround in modern history.
"I think a lot of people think the Chinese government funded me to write this book to project a certain image. I wish they did fund me because I would have got some money," he laughs.
Li says when he first came to Australia there was only Cantonese food because most of the Chinese immigrants in the country then were from wealthier cities in southern China or Hong Kong. Now, mainland Chinese food is everywhere and you are more likely to hear Mandarin spoken if you are in Melbourne's Chinatown, Sydney's Chatswood or on any university campus.
Li says his parents' generation were focused on making money. Generation X were more politically active, which was reflected in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. His generation were mostly oblivious to the more negative aspects of China's history, while the Millennials – which includes the growing number of Chinese students now living in Sydney and Melbourne – "have grown up in a China that is prosperous and happy so they have nothing against the country".
Li interviewed dozens of people for the book, which took a challenging six months to write given English is his second language. He says the most surprising story came from a girl he met from the wealthy Chinese city of Wenzhou who told him her family was "poor" because they had only $16 million.
Li says he has never had a negative experience in Australia despite the country's long history of anti-Asian sentiment and casual racism, which in recent years has focused more in the country's growing Muslim population. He jokes you are likely to feel less welcome as a foreigner in China, where he says many people do not know the difference between an Australian and an American.
However, Li says the bamboo ceiling is alive and well, although Asian graduates now have an increasing chance of making partner in a big law firm as companies implement diversity targets. Li blames the lack of Asian senior executives in Australia on China's social attitudes and education system, rather than any kind of xenophobic stereotyping.
"Chinese are not good at expressing opinions, they are more technical. This makes it hard to become partner. I grew up thinking if you talk too much, people think you are shallow. A lot of my friends are good at what they do but they are not good at talking. But you have to talk a lot to be a leader," he explains.
The New Chinese - How They Are Changing Australia is published by Wiley, $29.95