The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora

Revisiting the boat people

Yuk Wah Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136697623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over three decades have passed since the first wave of Indochinese refugees left their homelands. These refugees, mainly the Vietnamese, fled from war and strife in search of a better life elsewhere. By investigating the Vietnamese diaspora in Asia, this book sheds new light on the Asian refugee era (1975-1991), refugee settlement and different patterns of host-guest interactions that will have implications for refugee studies elsewhere. The book provides:

• 
  
  

• a clearer historical understanding of the group dynamics among refugees - the ethnic Chinese 'Vietnamese refugees' from both the North and South as well as the northern 'Vietnamese refugees'

• 
  
  

• an examination of different aspects of migration including: planning for migration, choices of migration route, and reasons for migration

• 
  
  

• an analysis of the ethnic and refugee politics during the refugee era, the settlement and subsequent resettlement.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, migration, ethnicities, refugee histories and politics.

Part I

Revisiting an era of refugees
and boat people

1 Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era

An Asian perspective from Hong Kong

Yuk Wah Chan

Over three decades have passed since the first Vietnamese refugees left their home-lands. These refugees fled from war and strife in search of a better life elsewhere. The first wave left immediately after Saigon fell to the communists. The second wave occurred after the two Asian communist regimes, Vietnam and China fell out with each other, and the subsequent anti-Chinese atmosphere in Vietnam in the late 1970s. An estimated 70 per cent of these refugees were Chinese-Vietnamese. Unlike the first two exoduses which have been well documented, the third wave of mainly ethnic Vietnamese refugees who fled to Hong Kong and other parts of Asia between 1988 to 1991, has been somewhat neglected.

We were asked why it was worth re-examining the issue of Vietnamese refugees after all these years when the issue seems to have ended and the second generation of the Vietnamese refugees, especially those who had settled in the West, had already grown up, and no longer bear the ‘refugee’ status. Many reasons make us believe that there is a need to revisit the period, one which had alarmed most countries in the West as well as in Asia. It is the ‘missing’ Asian part of the refugee story. Although most refugees had been resettled in the West, many had remained ‘stuck’ or settled in their place of first asylum; their stories never told.

This volume is the result of a concern among academics who felt the need to revisit this era to allow the inclusion of new data and a more-balanced under-standing of events in Vietnam and the many Vietnamese who fled their country. Many reports on the flight of the Indochinese were produced by scholars and journalists during and immediately after the massive exodus from 1975–80 (Cartmail 1983; Benoit 1981; Wain 1981; Grant 1979). These contain stories of policies implemented by communist Vietnam, refugees’ recounting of their political and economic suffering under the communist regime, and their often horrifying journey in rickety boats. In the 1980s and early 1990s, accounts of boat people being locked up in camps began to predominate (Tsamenyi 1983; Oxfam HK 1989 ; Chan 1990, 1995 ; Yuen 1990 ; Sutter 1990 ; Le 1990 ; Chantavanich and Rabe 1990; Hitchcox 1990; Yeung et al. 1991 ; Freeman 1995 ; Chang et al. 2000 ; Freeman and Huu 2003). In the same period, a number of studies were devoted to examining the adaptation of the early refugees who had been resettled in the West (Haines 1989; Caplan, Whitmore and Choy 1989; Viviani 1996; Coughlan and McNamara 1997 ; Zhou 1998 ; Do 1999 ; Valtonen 1999 ; Thomas 1999 ; Bemak, Chung, and Pedersen 2003). More recently, there has been new literature related to the identity changes of ‘overseas Vietnamese’, and to a newly grown-up generation that includes many who return to Vietnam to find their cultural roots and pursue new economic opportunities (Chan and Tran 2011; Chan 2006; Thomas 2004 ; Long 2004 ; Carruthers 2002).

This, then, is how the story goes: refugees from Asia pass through Asian asylum centres briefly and then settle in the West. The sequence seems to fit in the same old story of refugees coming from the poor Third World and ending up happily in the First World. Yet, as a matter of history, the Vietnamese refugee story does not end there. A significant part—the Asian part—is still missing.

In 2009, a workshop was held in Hong Kong to draw attention to this missing part, and to review new data and new ideas of refugee origins and settlement. The initiative for the project sprang from the fact that most current studies are about overseas Vietnamese with ‘refugee’ backgrounds who resettled in the West. We seldom hear about the Vietnamese refugees who failed to go to the West and had been repatriated or were ‘stuck’ in places of first asylum. We start with an attempt in examining refugee settlement stories in Hong Kong, and have resulted in bringing together an international research effort to relate the Hong Kong story to wider concerns of ethnic politics, refugee history and resettlement.

We believe that there is still much untapped space in the Vietnamese refugee story. Thirty years provides sufficient distance to reflect on earlier as well as later events in this story. By investigating the Vietnamese diaspora in Asia, with a particular focus on Hong Kong, we aim to explain some of the confusion remaining about Vietnamese refugees, and shed new light on refugee settlement and different patterns of host-guest interactions that will have implications for refugee studies elsewhere.

This volume will give both the general and academic reader:

(i) a clearer historical view of the group dynamics among refugees—the ethnic ‘Chinese Vietnamese refugees’ from both the North and South as well as the ethnic ‘Vietnamese refugees’;

(ii) a better understanding of the different aspects of migration, including a recounting of the reasons for and meanings of migration, which are some-times durable, but which also shift over time;

(iii) a clearer picture of the intertwined ethnic and refugee politics within the Vietnamese boat people period, less known aspects of refugee camp life, and the subsequent resettlement;

(iv) a new recognition of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora in Asia, hinting at a different model of settlement and home-settlement connections; and

(v) an overall evaluation of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora and its linkage to the continuing Vietnamese migration trajectories.

As suggested by the title, the work distinguishes between Chinese Vietnamese and Vietnamese within the overall Vietnamese refugee diaspora. Hong Kong offers a particularly good case to show how asylum-seeking and ethnicity are intertwined in complex and shifting ways. While the refugees from Vietnam in the 1970s had the sympathy of Hong Kong society (with a large number of Chinese-Vietnamese), the Vietnamese boat people in the 1980s (many are Vietnamese from the north) were depicted as a violent and unscrupulous group. Differences between the Chinese-Vietnamese and the Vietnamese had formed part of the refugee politics within the refugee camps and in the mainstream media. Chinese Vietnamese refugees also found it easier to integrate into the Hong Kong Chinese communities. This work highlights various issues of refugee migration and settlement tactics, and the continuation of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora with chain migration. We understand the concept of diaspora with both subjective and contextual dimensions. Not only is the Vietnamese diaspora in Hong Kong continuously constructing its relation-ships with home in Vietnam as well as other co-diaspora members in other parts of the world (see Vertovec 2005: 3), it is also subject to different institutional and social discrimination distancing it from total integration.

An Asian context of a refugee era

Vietnam and the other two Indochinese countries, Laos and Cambodia, produced millions of refugees in the last few decades of the last century. From 1975 to 1997, there were in total 1.5 million Indochinese refugees and asylum seekers who took temporary asylum in the camps of UNHCR in various Asian places; around 840,000 of these were Vietnamese (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). In that period, Malaysia was the Asian country receiving most Vietnamese asylum seekers, while Hong Kong received the second largest amount, around 200,000 (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). Besides Hong Kong and Malaysia, other Asian countries taking Vietnamese and other Indochinese refugees include Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, Macau and Korea. Hundreds of thousands had escaped on land to China and Burma, but these escapees did not fall into the category of arrivals recorded by the UN.

Most previous literature on Vietnamese refugee settlers have focused on those who settled in the West, without much acknowledgement that there are actually many who have settled in the places of first asylum in Asia. Their plights remain underreported. A popular view of Vietnamese refugees tends to think that after risky boat trips and a few years of asylum detention, the refugees are now either ‘living happily’ in the West, or had been ‘unluckily’ repatriated to Vietnam. Hong Kong people also entertain the thought that the Vietnamese refugee issue had come to an end in 2000 when the last camp closed. Few bother to ask what has happened to the Vietnamese who were repatriated and those who were left behind in Hong Kong. Even less people are aware of the fact that many Vietnamese left the camps before they were repatriated. It was believed that the 67,000 boat people who failed to be screened as ‘refugees’ were repatriated to Vietnam (Panares and Ku 2000: 3). The UNHCR also recorded that the Vietnamese boat people were either resettled to the West or repatriated: around two-thirds of Hong Kong's Vietnamese refugees were resettled in a third country, and the others (around 66,700) were repatriated to Vietnam with backlog cases of slightly over two thousand (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). The fact was that quite a large number of Vietnamese boat people, though classified as non-refugee, were neither resettled, nor repatriated. Many remained in Hong Kong, the place of temporary asylum, by marrying local people.

From the official record, there are only 2,994 Vietnamese in Hong Kong (HKCSD 2009). However, as suggested by our informants, this figure is vastly underestimated. Many believe that the number of migrants from Vietnam (including Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese) should be no less than thirty thousand; among them, the majority are ex-refugee or ‘boat people’. However, Chinese Vietnamese would not usually claim the identity of ‘Vietnamese’ after settling here. The number of boat people that arrived over the years of the refugee era are recorded in Table 1.1.Readers may note that since 1987, the Hong Kong government began to use EXCVII to denote those Vietnamese who had taken the route to China and had stayed in China for a certain period before they went off shore again to arrive in Hong Kong. The government treated EXCVII as illegal immigrants from China and would not allow them to resettle or stay. Our Vietnamese informants from northern Vietnam revealed to us that the fleeing routes of many inevitably led them to China and their stay in China varied from days, to weeks or months before they could leave for Hong Kong. To avoid being classified as EXCVII, many used cover stories. In the following, we recap the three peak times of the Vietnamese arrivals, and explain the constitution of the Vietnamese population in Hong Kong.

Table 1.1 Vietnamese arrivals in Hong Kong

Year	Arrivals	Total Vietnamese boat people population at the end of the year	Left for resettlement	New-born Vietnamese in Hong Kong
1975	3,900	/	/	/
1976	Unclear	/	/	/
1977	1,001	/	/	/
1978	12,406	3,561	/	/
1979	68,784	55,705	/	/
1980	11,173	24,065	37,468	/
1981	18,301	16,027	18,000	/
1982	3,485	9,841	9,000	/
1983	3,651	12,770	4,200	727
1984	2,230	11,896	3,694	553
1985	1,112	9,443	3,953	412
1986	2,087	8,093	3,816	327
1987	9,893	9,530	2,212	319
	(3,393 Vietnamese boat people from Vietnam and 6,500 ex-China Vietnamese illegal immigrants, ECVII)
1988	19,383	26,601	2,772	621
	(7992 refugee, 10,449 boat people and 942 ECVII)
1989	34,347	56,045	4,754	1,665
	(34,116 Vietnamese boat people and 231 ECVII)
1990	6,599	/	/	/
1991	20,207	/	/	/
1992	12	45,387	3,439	421

Sources: Hong Kong Report published by the Hong Kong Government from 1976–93.

1975

Hong Kong received the first group of recorded Vietnamese refugees in May 1975, with the arrival of a Danish vessel which carried over 3,700 Vietnamese men, women and children (Chan 2000: 29–32). These refugees marked the end of the Vietnam War. After this first wave, a few hundred, continued to arrive on Hong Kong's shores in the following two years. Despite the fact that 1975 was the first year Vietnamese refugees were seen, many Vietnamese, especially Chinese Vietnamese, had been sneaking into Hong Kong since the 1960s. Many fled because they feared military draft, while others saw a better future in Hong Kong than in war-torn Vietnam. Over five thousand of them re-surfaced after the arrival of the post-Vietnam War refugees, they were granted Hong Kong identity cards (Hong Kong Government 1977: 135). Most of this group have assimilated into Hong Kong society, though many still have connections to Vietnam.

1978–79

The second peak of Vietnamese arrivals was due to the mounting antagonism between China and Vietnam in 1978, and the outbreak of war on the China– Vietnam border in 1979. The year 1978 brought over 12,000 refugees, mostly Chinese-Vietnamese, while the following year saw several times more. Arrivals in 1980 and 1981 remained high, causing the Hong Kong government to implement a closed-camp policy in 1982, under which all Vietnamese arrivals were no longer allowed to roam freely in Hong Kong. They were kept in these camps to wait for resettlement in a third country. When the US government began to slow down its Orderly Departure Programme in 1986, the ‘refugee bulk’ in Hong Kong increased, and the year 1987 saw a new rise in the number of refugees again.

Although most in the first two waves of refugees had been resettled in a third country in the West, quite a number of them were allowed to settle in Hong Kong. Before the 1988 screening policy, Hong Kong had accepted around 15,000 refugees (Wah Kiu Jat Po 16 August 1988: [1]:1). It was believed that many of these refugees were Chinese Vietnamese who had relatives and families in the territory, and found a better future by settling in Hong Kong.

1988–89

These two years were a time wh...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora
• Routledge Contemporary Asia Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• PART I Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people
• PART II Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement
• PART III Hong Kong and beyond
• Conclusion
• Index