A planned concert series next month glorifying the life of controversial Communist Party icon Chairman Mao at the Sydney and Melbourne town halls has sparked outrage among Chinese-Australians, while serving to highlight the widening schism within the local diaspora.

China's rise as an economic superpower has impacted Australian cities beyond trade figures, tourist arrivals and international student enrolments. With mainland Chinese migration sharply increasing in recent years, state-backed political astroturfing has become more pronounced, from pro-Beijing South China Sea demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney, to mobilising cheering, flag-waving crowds to drown out Free Tibet and Falun Gong demonstrators during President Xi Jinping's visit in 2014.

The organisers are typically business, community and patriotic associations with close ties to the Chinese embassy and consulates which harness the local community in an attempt to advance the mainland's strategic interests and have a greater influence on public discussion in Australia.

The key organisers and sponsors of the Maoist remembrance concerts, including the International Cultural Exchange Association Australia and LB Homes Group, were also behind a high-profile commemorative event last year marking the 70th anniversary of China's war against the Japanese, coinciding with a massive military parade in central Beijing.

"[Mao] brought 76 years of peace and stable development for the Chinese people, until today where China has been restored to the status of an international major power," a flyer for the "red songs" concerts reads. The concerts, on September 6 in Sydney and September 9 in Melbourne, mark the 40th anniversary of Mao Zedong's death.

Chongyi Feng, an associate professor in China Studies at the University of Technology Sydney who tracks the activities of local Chinese community groups, said business and cultural groups increasingly staged "patriotic" events to "show their loyalty to the consulate, to the Chinese government back home in order to curry favour", in the hope of receiving preferential treatment for their commercial interests.

But putting on an event to glorify Mao has touched a raw nerve among Chinese-Australians, many of whose families suffered under the leader's brutal legacy, the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward contributing directly to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

"Mao for them is just like Stalin to Russians or Hitler to Germans – he's a mass murderer in their judgment so they're very angry," Dr Feng said.

For some, the Mao concerts are seen as the culmination of a large influx of mainland Chinese migrants in recent years which is reshaping the Chinese community in Australia. A divide has emerged broadly between two camps: naturalised Australians who migrated in the 1980s and 1990s with the spectre of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 fresh in their memories, and more recent emigres who have been enriched by China's economic miracle of the past two decades and are emboldened by their country's rise as a major international power.

Shangxiao Han, 62, arrived in Australia in 1988. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters in June 1989, he was an instrumental figure in lobbying the Hawke government to allow Chinese students to remain in Australia.

Mr Han, who has supported his family as a courier and most recently as a real estate agent, had kept a low profile for more than 20 years but said the Mao concert, as well as the increasing influence of the Chinese government in Australia, had forced many apolitical and moderate Chinese-Australians to take a stand. He is part of a loose collective, the Embrace Australian Values Alliance, which is circulating an online petition calling for the concerts to be cancelled.

"Like me, when we ran away from China we were the majority," Mr Han told Fairfax Media. "Now the pro-Chinese Communist Party, pro-Maoism, they are becoming the majority."

The Communist Party today acknowledges Mao as the founder of modern China while avoiding overt mention of the damage of the disastrous Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward. While Mao's portrait hangs over the Forbidden City and his embalmed corpse lies in a mausoleum overlooking Tiananmen Square, authorities distanced themselves from a concert staged at Beijing's Great Hall of the People which commemorated Cultural Revolution-era "red songs" after a public backlash.