Hong Kong's Response to the Indochinese Influx,1975-93

Abstract

The changing nature of the population flows from Vietnam to Hong Kong between 1975 and mid-1993 is examined in this article. Hong Kong's population is largely a product of refugee movements from China. Over the period under discussion, official policy toward all arrivals, whether from China or from Vietnam, became much more restrictive. The first wave of Vietnamese to Hong Kong mostly consisted of ethnic Chinese. These were relatively quickly recognized as refugees and resettled. The later waves of ethnic Vietnamese have been held in closed camps; those arriving after 1988 have been subject to screening to determine their refugee status. Those screened out are repatriated either voluntarily or forcibly to Vietnam. The outflows from Vietnam can be fully understood only after a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the origin and destination economies and societies. An economic dimension is usually present in supposedly political flows.

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References

See also Keith St. Cartmail , Exodus Indochina (Auckland: Heinemann, 1983).

2. The figures for 1977 and 1978 come from the official yearbooks published by the Hong Kong government. All figures for 1979 come from the government's Monthly Statistical Reports on Vietnamese (Arrivals and Departures). To give an idea of the importance accorded the influx of the late 1970s, see the official yearbook Hong Kong 1980: A Review of 1979 (Hong Kong: Government Printer, 1980), in which the first chapter is “The Boat Refugees from Vietnam.”

The results of the sample survey referred to here are in ibid., p. 23.

For a discussion of the role of Shanghainese in Hong Kong, see idem , Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988).

See also Pao-min Chang , Beijing, Hanoi and the Overseas Chinese, China Research Monograph, no. 24 (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982), p. 9.

6. Wu and Wu , Economic Development in Southeast Asia, p. 86.

7. The information is contained in the yearbooks for Hong Kong for 1977 and 1978.

See also Ramses Amer , The Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Sino-Vietnamese Relations (Kuala Lumpur: Forum, 1991).

9. See Amer , Ethnic Chinese, p. 86, for an account of the amounts of money involved.

10.

10. The figures are cited in Chang , Beijing, Hanoi and the Overseas Chinese, pp. 56-57.

11.

11. These are recounted in Barry Wain , The Refused: The Agony of the Indochina Refugees (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981).

12.

12. Zolberg , Suhrke , and Aguayo , Escape from Violence, p. 165.

13.

13. Chris Bale , “Vietnamese Boat People,” in The Other Hong Kong Report 1990, ed. Richard Y. C. Wong and Joseph Y. S. Cheng (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990), p. 160.

14.

14. The information on the economy of Vietnam given in this article is taken from the Asia Yearbooks published by the Far Eastern Economic Review. The data in this section come from the 1989 yearbook.

15.

Stephen H. B. Yau , “Vietnamese Boat People,” in The Other Hong Kong Report 1992, ed. Joseph Y. S. Cheng and Paul C. K. Kwong (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1992), pp. 111-125.

16.

16. See Bale , “Vietnamese Boat People,” for a balanced summary of the events.

17.

17. Cited in the Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 Jan. 1992, p. 19.

18.

18. These are discussed in Torgrimson , “Vietnamese Boat People.”

19.

19. For details of the “breakthrough,” although not for the interpretation presented here, see Yau , “Vietnamese Boat People.”

20.

Violence in the camps is a major theme in Leonard Davis , Hong Kong and the Asylum-Seekers from Vietnam (London: Macmillan, 1991).

21.

21. See Chan Kwok Bun , “Hong Kong's Response to the Vietnamese Refugees: A Study in Humanitarianism, Ambivalence and Hostility,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 18(1):94-110 (1990).

22.

22. See Zolberg , Suhrke , and Aguayo , Escape from Violence, chap. 1.

23.

23. See Ronald Skeldon , ed., Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese (New York: M.E. Sharpe; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994).