Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. x, 331 pp. (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97151-6.
This important book on Chinese migrants and refugees in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960 comes out at a time when the issues it discusses are front and centre: anti-migrant/refugee sentiment fanned by right-wing politicians; the line between “legal” and “illegal” migration; handling mass movements of refugees. The book’s publication also coincides with increasing anxiety in Hong Kong over pressure from Mainland China, still ruled by the Communist Party; many in Hong Kong are descendents of refugees from communism. At the same time, Beijing has seen Hong Kong as a haven for opponents of Chinese governments since Sun Yat-sen.
From the late 1940s on there were huge movements of people from Mainland China to tiny Hong Kong. These movements followed mass migrations at the end of the Japanese occupation of much of China (1931–1945). The largest was the “return east in victory” ذ`’Q东،y (1945–1946): millions of wartime exiles returned to eastern and northern China. Simultaneously, several million Japanese were repatriated from China and Taiwan. In 1947 and 1948, millions of peasants were resettled in the Yellow River Valley; they had been driven from their land in 1938 by the flood precipitated by the blowing of the river’s southern dike to stop the Japanese advance. The resettlement project was funded by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, its largest single project worldwide. Then, as the civil war in China drew to a close in 1949 and the Communist victory was assured, came the flight of two to three million supporters of the losing Kuomintang to Taiwan.
Hong Kong, still a British colony, was faced with constant threats from the Mainland. There was no possible military defense, the fresh water supply could be cut at any moment. The territory could be overwhelmed by influxes of people, if conditions on the Mainland worsened; the largest influx came during the famine years in the early 1960s. Still, Hong Kong received huge numbers of people, some part of long-running patterns of family and economic migration, some fleeing from the convulsions of the communist revolution: class warfare, land reform, religious persecution, revenge against the Kuomintang. The authoritarian government in Beijing did not permit emigration. Hong Kong, with its complex topography (a map would show this) became the only exit from Mainland China. Without official permission people could arrive by train, boat, or on foot; they could even swim through shark-infested waters.
The handling of the mass movements into Hong Kong offers examples for receiving newcomers. Hong Kong settled the incomers, and found employment, housing, education, and medical care for them. At its highest, a third of Hong Kong’s population was of refugee origin. These people, energetic and hard-working, helped fuel the economic boom that would not falter for decades. Through the long process of settlement the Hong Kong authorities had to deal, with greater or lesser grace, with issues that parallel current refugee movements into Europe.
Another perennial issue, distinguishing between legal and illegal migration, was beyond a clear distinction in Hong Kong. People had been moving back and forth across a notional border for a century, usually without papers. The post-1949 migrations had a new aspect. Though all the people coming from the Mainland were referred to as “Chinese,” there were real distinctions between them. Cantonese were quite at home in Hong Kong. People from further north in China, from Shanghai or Beijing, were strangers in Hong Kong and could not settle easily.
Getting on to a third country was very difficult for refugees. All Western countries had immigration policies that were race-based, analyzed in considerable detail in the book. These countries took in postwar refugees from Europe but not from Asia. The few exceptions were the Chinese intellectuals and political figures who were allowed in to the USA. And there was “a difference between exclusionary legislation in theory and in practice” (109). The long practice of getting round immigration laws in North America by ingenious devices such as “paper sons,” or the “loan” of legal documents, continued.
Western governments were hostile to Asian refugees, but the refugees had Western sympathizers, in Hong Kong and in host countries. Missionaries and NGOs highlighted the plight of poverty-stricken refugees and called for government action. The sympathy covered Chinese refugees in the 1950s and 1960s, and reached its peak in the flight of Vietnamese in the 1970s and 1980s. The sympathy was particularly strong in churches, as it still is today with the resettlement of Syrians refugees in Canada.
The definition of “refugee” comes up frequently in this book, as it does to this day. The United Nations Refugee Convention (1951) provides a broad definition, that often clashes with the immigration policies of the signatories to the convention. There is no room in the definition for people who are moving for economic reasons. “Refugee” is also a problem, for the recipients of the designation: the negative connotations of desperate, helpless people. Migrants may want to distinguish themselves from “refugees.” Jim Chu, the former police chief of Vancouver, had difficulty seeing his family members, who left Shanghai for Canada in 1962, as refugees. Much of the problem is with the English term. The Chinese term is simpler; refugees are nanmin 难٪ء — people in flight from difficulty or adversity, economic, political, religious, or from a natural disaster.
There is an ironic afterword to the race-based policies of host countries that Madokoro describes so well. Many decades later Western race-based immigration policies have morphed into policies that favour immigrants from Hong Kong and China. Madeleine Hsu’s recent book The Good Immigrant: How the Yellow Peril became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2017) deals with this turnaround. I hope that Madokoro will continue her work to include more recent periods, to show what became of the Cold War refugees.
Diana Lary
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 793-795