To what extent are different parts of the world exceptional when it comes to the history of forced migration and refugee experiences? For instance, is forced migration in Asia distinct from developments elsewhere? Or is forced migration in Asia part of wider processes of displacement and emplacement so characteristic of the modern world? Over the past few decades, the fields of refugee and forced migration studies have ballooned. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, geography, and history have sought to understand the nature of population displacements in the modern world. Much of the early scholarship in this field focused on Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. Scholars have also sought to understand the nature of protracted refugee situations in Africa.Footnote ¹ More recently, scholars have investigated forced migration within globalized and transnational frameworks.Footnote ² Yet no sooner had scholars started to think of displacement in these terms than critics began to contend that the unique, and localized, dimensions of displaced populations, including refugees, forced migrants, and internally displaced people, were being ignored. Questions about what is gained and what is lost in approaching the study of modern refugee populations from various vantage points now frame much of the work in the fields of refugee and forced migration studies.Footnote ³

The experiences of ethnic Chinese refugees in various countries in Asia and discussions of their resettlement to different parts of the globe are at the heart of this special Modern Asian Studies Forum on Chinese refugees. The five articles in this Forum are drawn from an international workshop held at the National University of Singapore in the autumn of 2012.Footnote ⁴ The two days of discussions covered a range of topics, including the role of the contemporary international refugee regime and its affiliated institutions; post-war repatriation efforts; the experiences of ethnic Chinese who migrated to the People's Republic of China as a result of the political and economic turmoil accompanying decolonization in various Southeast Asian countries; and the nature of movement out of the People's Republic of China during the Cold War. Two central themes that emerged during the workshop's discussions are the focus of this special Forum.

The first theme addresses the changing geopolitical contexts and ideologies that contributed to the way in which the international refugee regime evolved after 1945. The framing of refugee migration affects the extent to which refugees receive international attention and humanitarian assistance. Who are the subjects at risk? Who are the perpetrators? Who is providing humanitarian assistance and on what grounds? The answers to these questions and the resulting outcomes need to be historicized and understood in relation to struggles taking place within the global arena, including the effects of colonialism and decolonization, the Cold War, as well as China's civil war and long-standing claim over its co-ethnics abroad. The articles in this collection demonstrate the profound impact that global politics and ideological struggles have on how refugees are labelled and treated by states and societies both within, and beyond, Asia.

Related to this necessary historicization, our second theme addresses the vocabulary used to frame the refugee experience conceptually, most particularly in popular parlance and in official policy-making circles. The multiple labels used to describe different types of Chinese migrations often have overlapping yet distinct meanings. For example, a migrant in the Chinese language is known generically as ‘yiminzhe’,Footnote ⁵ but the overseas Chinese or Chinese overseasFootnote ⁶ are referred to as ‘huaqiao’, while ethnic Chinese who migrate to China are known as returnees or ‘guiqiao’. The latter two labels, as deployed in Chinese policy discourses towards co-ethnics,Footnote ⁷ have implications for the way in which ethnic Chinese refugees, or ‘nanmin’ (literally, persons in difficulty), arriving in China are treated by the Chinese state and Chinese society. In other words, the very terms and labels we use to describe and analyse the refugee experience need to be historicized in the context of both official and popular attitudes towards migrants. The issue of terminology is especially relevant in discussions of home and belonging and how these notions are interpreted by various groups.

Ideological and geopolitical contexts are the central concern of three of the articles in this Forum. The articles by Glen Peterson, Meredith Oyen, and Laura Madokoro demonstrate how developments around the issue of Chinese refugees in the People's Republic of China and Southeast Asia had a profound influence on the manner in which the international refugee regime developed during the Cold War. Glen Peterson's article directly addresses the extent to which this regime considered and incorporated the experience of refugees in Asia. Peterson describes the international refugee regime as the ‘collective ensemble of international agreements, conventions, and protocols, as well as the institutions, policies, and practices that have appeared since the 1920s to define, address and, ultimately, it is hoped by their creators, to resolve the problem of human displacement across national borders’.

Peterson argues for a global history approach to the study of Chinese refugees so that the history of colonialism and empire can be adequately accounted for in studies of the modern refugee subject. He suggests, in the spirit of legal scholar Antony Anghie's work, that this means thinking seriously about the relationship between colonialism and international law as well as colonialism's role in shaping how certain people came to be labelled as refugees while others were not. In this regard, Peterson observes that refugee movements in Asia occurred not only because of communist oppression (in fact, communist states often sheltered refugee populations) but also in response to colonial ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts, as evidenced by British efforts to quell the uprising led by the ethnic Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party during the period of the Malayan ‘Emergency’ (1948–60). Noting the persistent view of Asian migrants as ‘unfree’ and therefore appropriate subjects for indentured labour schemes well into the 1950s, Peterson deftly demonstrates how colonialism and the racialization of ethnic Chinese populations across Asia were key elements in causing people to move. Perhaps most importantly, these same dynamics contributed to the erasure of these populations from Cold War histories that privilege refugee populations and assistance in terms of the West's generosity.

Meredith Oyen's article builds on Peterson's intervention and recasts Chinese refugees as central to the manner in which the international refugee regime, specifically the operations of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization, evolved in the post-war period. Oyen suggests that the failure to engage the People's Republic of China on refugee issues in the early years of its existence represented a lost opportunity for compromise and collaboration in a world increasingly polarized by the global Cold War. Reflecting the healthy debate around the nature of refugee populations in the post-war period, Peterson and Oyen both engage with, and complicate, the Cold War as a way of explaining the nature of population flows in Asia after 1949. Both historians suggest that the Cold War is not as significant to understanding Chinese refugee populations as some previous scholarship has suggested.Footnote ⁸ Oyen posits that both Chinese governments, Nationalist and Communist alike, had a deep interest in obtaining assistance and were therefore both willing to work with institutions that they recognized were largely directed towards the interests of Western nations. Both the Nationalists and the Communists wanted overseas Chinese who had migrated to China during the war to be repatriated to Southeast Asia for the sake of restarting remittances and investments, and promoting political support in the region. They both wanted European refugees in China (namely, the large Jewish population that had fled the conflict in Europe, the White Russians, and the Old Believers) out of the way before they became a drain on national resources that would raise protests among the domestic poor. At the same time, neither had the ability to achieve these goals without international assistance. This led to a pragmatic cooperation that spanned the Chinese Civil War and transversed it, continuing until 1956, despite all the odds. This element of cooperation, on which Oyen elaborates in detail, sheds new light on the character of the international refugee regime as well as on the instrumental ways in which both the Communist and Nationalist states engaged with refugee populations. Both Chinese governments had to rely on outside assistance to fulfil their ambition to maintain positive ties between the Chinese abroad and the homeland. Refugee issues, and the fact that the Communists as well as the Nationalists were willing to work with international agencies (largely funded and administered by Western governments) in the pursuit of their loyalty objectives, were therefore deeply significant in reshaping the post-war order.

Laura Madokoro's article shares the concerns expressed by both Peterson and Oyen about how to situate the history of Chinese refugees in the distinct historiography of the international refugee regime. Madokoro documents how the Chinese refugee population in Hong Kong was the subject of a variety of surveys by Western and international organizations, including Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals and the United Nations in the early 1950s. The purpose of these surveys was to provide funding organizations with concrete evidence about the character of the refugee population in Hong Kong. The surveys reflected a moment of ‘high science’ in the early years of the post-war international refugee regime. Yet numbers could only convey so much. Motivated by larger political programmes and institutional objectives, organizers of the surveys supplemented their findings with colourful rhetoric to advance their case for Western intervention. As countable bodies, Madokoro argues (much like Peterson and Oyen), the Chinese refugee population in Hong Kong played a critical role in shaping the changing nature of refugee assistance and protection in the post-war period. The surveys took place at a critical juncture, when discussions about who should ultimately be responsible for the care and maintenance of the world's refugees were taking place in national and transnational contexts. Crucially, non-governmental actors and private philanthropic interests were instrumental in producing knowledge about the Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, which shifted the balance towards government intervention in support of refugees. As a result, Madokoro implicitly suggests that the notion of an international refugee regime needs to be broadly conceptualized, expanding beyond the international organizations mandated to provide for refugees and states to consider the range of actors invested in the plight of refugees in the post-war period. By focusing on the manner in which knowledge was produced about refugees in Hong Kong, Madokoro demonstrates how the act of surveying discrete populations provides an opening into thinking through the manner in which refugee situations in diverse parts of the world were connected and mutually constituted, if only at a conceptual level.

The language of refugeehood, to which Madokoro's article alludes, points to the second theme to emerge from the workshop's discussions. This related, but distinct, stream brings to the foreground the importance of interrogating the labels, rhetoric, discourse, and the very vocabulary that describes people as emplaced or displaced during forced migration experiences. Language has also informed subsequent understandings of this experience. The articles by Tina Chen and Elaine Ho examine very different refugee populations (in terms of both spatial and temporal contexts) but together they highlight the critically important role that language and labels (whether they were applied by officials or assumed by individuals) played in fostering notions of home and belonging among various groups of migrants.

Tina Chen's article analyses how, at the time of Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of Chineseness acquired meaning through the cross-border movement of Burmese residents identified as Chinese. Chen's article captures the politics involved in the very naming of migrants to reflect assorted kinds of displacement. Focusing on the terminology of evacuees, refugees or returnees that was used to refer to these individuals (depending on the reporting organization and places of relocation), Chen's article draws out how transnational wartime migration from Burma across the Chinese and Indian borders was understood through competing and evolving notions of home. Chen focuses not only on how home was understood by migrants but also on how territorialized notions of belonging were reflected in the approaches taken by British colonial officials and the International Refugee Organization in developing resettlement solutions for people in the refugee camps on the Indian border. Picking up the theme of the international refugee regime on which Peterson elaborates in his article, Chen argues that the categorization of migrants as part of ‘the governance of forced migration and “return” required making legible through documentation and everyday reiteration specific usages of evacuees, refugee, returnees, and wartime flight’. Through a careful reading of the language employed by various parties, Chen contrasts the territorialized solutions proposed by officials with the reterritorialization of ethnicity pursued by those in motion.Footnote ⁹

Elaine Ho's article shares Chen's concerns about the implications of particular labels and vocabulary in fostering notions of belonging. Ho is concerned with identities as transgressive phenomena and her article draws on qualitative fieldwork to develop an argument on the resettlement experiences and generational transitions of co-ethnics who arrived in China between 1949 and 1979 under forced migration circumstances in Southeast Asia. Ho notes that the refugee-returnees were sent to state-owned farms known as ‘overseas Chinese farms’. She argues that these migrants retained transnational cultural identities that resulted in discrimination by the indigenous Chinese after their return and that some experienced further stigmatization during the Cultural Revolution. Tracing the shifting place of these returnees over three decades, Ho argues that in contemporary times the returnees have capitalized on their (multi)cultural identities to reinvent the farms as tourist sites for economic sustainability in the post-1980s reform period. Yet the identity transitions of second and later generations suggest that the descendants of the refugee-returnees have been assimilated into a prevailing Han Chinese identity and they have little personal identification with their Southeast Asian backgrounds. As a result, Ho queries the extent to which the overseas Chinese farms can be considered multicultural, pointing to the tensions between lived experiences and official intent that figure so prominently in Chen's analysis. Moreover, Ho points to the value of taking a long-term approach to the study of these farms, noting that so much of the refugee-returnees’ experience is dependent on how, and when, they returned, particularly since these factors determined on which farms they were settled. She proposes, in particular, moving beyond the label of ‘returnee’ to focus on the lives of the younger generation with a view that is attuned towards their intersecting forced migration family histories, bi-cultural backgrounds, class subjectivities, and rural identities in order to develop a better understanding of the refugee-returnees’ experience.

Chen and Ho's articles highlight what all of the articles in this Forum point to, either explicitly or implicitly. The labels used to refer to different categories of overseas Chinese, returnees, and refugees suggest the need to examine circumspectly the current language used to frame research on refugee issues. This examination is one that a number of scholars, including Roger Zetter, have urged previously.Footnote ¹⁰ In the context of the refugee experience in Asia, it is all-the-more important as the vocabulary used to describe various migration experiences has often obscured or suppressed the nature of those moving under seemingly forced circumstances and the manner of their reception. As a result, the significance of refugee situations in Asia in terms of informing and influencing the trajectory of the post-war international refugee regime has also been suppressed.

Together, the five articles in this Forum offer insights into refugee experiences in Asia as well as the manner in which these experiences informed, and were connected to, developments around refugee issues more globally. They demonstrate how forced migration in the modern world needs to be investigated at multiple levels and from a range of perspectives. Connecting discussions about how migrations are structured (Peterson, Oyen, and Madokoro's articles) with arguments on how migrants operate within these structures (Chen and Ho's articles) points to the dynamic and multifaceted dimensions of the modern refugee experience in Asia and, indeed, globally. This allows for the possibility of local and global impulses to be simultaneously uncovered and facilitates greater understanding of how seemingly isolated regional events are, in fact, informed by wider currents of change and epistemological thinking. Together, these articles contribute to an emerging body of scholarship on refugees and forced migrants that reaches beyond the traditional focus on the Second World War in Europe and the political refugees of the Cold War to consider how historic processes of migration, colonialism, and decolonization inform contemporary understandings of refugee issues.