Scholars of migration and US international history have begun to explore critical intersections between their fields. Meredith Oyen's The Diplomacy of Migration is a landmark in this cross-pollination. Oyen demonstrates that migration policy was a critical tool in the foreign relations of the United States, the Republic of China (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) from the 1943 repeal of US Chinese Exclusion to President Nixon's 1972 visit. Based on extensive archival work in the United States, Taiwan, the PRC and the United Kingdom, Oyen argues effectively that migration was a useful “low-stakes” vector through which each government's policymakers could show support, exert leverage, claim legitimacy or test new waters as their interests shifted over the Cold War.
Oyen organizes her study into eight chapters grouped in three sections: the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, the height of the Cold War, and the rapprochement era of the late 1960s and 1970s. In the first section, Oyen revisits the repeal of Chinese Exclusion as a byproduct of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Nationalist government (KMT). In so doing, she immediately shows that diplomatic shifts indeed directly impacted the regulation of human movement. In chapter two, Oyen analyses how the wartime crisis accelerated the Nationalists' longstanding perception of the Chinese diaspora as a vital national resource. KMT officials sought “extraterritorial control” over overseas Chinese communities, from demanding better treatment from host countries to extracting financial support for the war effort. At times, such attempts to control Chinese Americans collided with US policies, including disagreements over the drafting of Chinese aliens into the US armed forces. In chapter three, Oyen examines the postwar years as the Chinese civil war led to the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan. As the Communists gained control of the mainland, the KMT became even more determined to buttress its legitimacy by claiming the loyalty of overseas communities. As a result, migration policy became inextricable from the Chinese civil war and emerging Cold War.
In the second section, Chinese migration becomes a shuttlecock in the national security and public diplomacy battles of the three-way US–KMT–PRC relationship. From intensive US scrutiny of potential Chinese migrants as discussed in chapters four and six to the US efforts to curb overseas remittances to the PRC analysed in chapter five, Oyen effectively summarizes the American attitude in this era as: “the Chinese were a wonderful people, as long as they stayed in China” (p. 112). Simultaneously, even individual deportations now elicited serious diplomatic discussion, such as over which China would receive deportee(s). The rival Chinese governments battled for legitimacy by competing for the loyalty of overseas communities, while each government's nominally humanitarian outreach toward refugees in Hong Kong was instead cover to advance foreign policy aims.
In the final section, Oyen demonstrates how changes in migration policy served to test and signal the thaw in US–PRC relations. In chapter seven, she examines the post-1949 negotiations over the repatriation of PRC nationals in the United States and US citizens in China. Both governments accused the other of holding their citizens hostage, but these talks maintained an overlooked line of direct communication between Beijing and Washington from 1955 to 1972. This insight is particularly powerful in demonstrating Oyen's contention that a low-stakes migration issue such as repatriation could become “the forum” for communication between the two giants (p. 188). In chapter eight, Oyen deftly examines the evolution in US visa policies toward Taiwanese independence activists as an illuminating “thorn in the sides of Washington, Taipei, and Beijing as all three governments tried to negotiate a new relationship” (p. 236) during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Oyen's diplomatic research is excellent and her arguments are persuasive, particularly when it comes to the Nationalist government and both the beginning and end of this 30-year period. She convincingly shows that migration policy was a low priority for US officials, but played an outsized role in the foreign policy of the Republic of China. Oyen also makes important efforts to show that “migrants created the policy positions as much as they were affected by them” (p. 7). The evidence for this claim is more scattered, but there are clear examples, such as the fascinating role of defecting Chinese seamen in advancing Exclusion's repeal or the case of Taiwanese independence activist Peng Ming-min who garnered the attention of Chiang Kai-shek, Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai. Not every chapter possesses such direct examples, however.
A more substantive critique revolves around the role of Hong Kong. Oyen's analysis of the US–KMT–PRC relationship by necessity incorporates the British colony as one of the top sources of migrants. Chapter six even focuses exclusively on Hong Kong. Yet, Oyen cites no primary sources from Hong Kong libraries or archives, instead relying on US Foreign Service, UN and UK Colonial Office records. I suspect, however, that the colonial government's significant correspondence with the US Consulate's Refugee and Migration Unit, the extensive Chinese-language press coverage of refugees, and the many missionary interviews with refugees in Hong Kong would shed different light on this story. Indeed, when we consider that more Hong Kong residents achieved permanent legal status in the United States between 1950 and 1989 (310,000) than did immigrants from Taiwan (268,000) (see Madeline Hsu's The Good Immigrants, p. 226), this colony's internal debates and evolving policies toward refugees were likely a primary factor in this history. Although Hong Kong could not formalize its own foreign policy, the three-way dynamic analysed here may well have been a four-way relationship in practice.
Oyen's otherwise excellent study makes contributions across numerous fields and opens possibilities for future research to continue exploring migration as a key piece of foreign policy. This book would be excellent assigned reading for classes on Asia's Cold War, migration and diaspora, or US diplomatic history. Scholars of modern China will find it particularly useful to understand a neglected period in Sino-US relations and to re-examine both the US–KMT alliance and the establishment US–PRC relations.
