Introduction
In the aftermath of the Second World War, amid the widespread destruction left behind by the retreating armies, there emerged a shared international challenge: displaced persons (or ‘DPs’) on an heretofore unseen scale. In Europe, 40 million people had been scattered across the continent. In Asia, eight years of continuous warfare in China combined with the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia displaced another 32 million people, all scattered far from their homes, their loved ones, and their pre-war lives.Footnote 1 The size, scope, and complexity of the problem made it quickly evident to government bureaucrats that the wartime refugee crisis would require time, money, and international support to solve. In Asia, this began with resettling 20 million Chinese who had fled the Japanese-occupied coast for the hinterland, and continued with sending remnant Japanese troops back across the water to their own homeland. Across Southeast Asia, similar stories of remnant troops and returning nationals, not to mention returning European colonialists, made for a volatile mix of agendas and no small amount of tension.Footnote 2 Though smaller in numbers, the limited transportation options during the war also meant that thousands of Asians had become stranded in Europe or the United States and Westerners were likewise marooned in Asia, and the slow restart of regular shipping lines further delayed their return. A small cohort of Europeans, many stateless, also found themselves left in China after escaping either the Bolshevik Revolution in the previous war or Nazi Germany in the contemporary conflict, and they often had no homes to which they could return. Added to all of these tangled webs of migrant traffic was another population that posed unique challenges for repatriation efforts: overseas Chinese displaced in China seeking to return to Southeast Asia.
In the context of the time, the term ‘overseas Chinese’ referred to the millions of ethnic Chinese living abroad, mostly in Southeast Asia, and maintaining significant ties to the homeland through family remittances, business investments, and cultural pride. The strength of these connections meant that, just as in Europe, significant numbers of overseas Chinese fled their homes to avoid advancing armies and found themselves after the war back in China hoping to return to their lives and livelihoods across the Asian continent. As refugees, their status was ambivalent; their migrations had been both voluntary and forced, and their post-war right of return ranged from guaranteed to doubtful. The countries they left proved to be anything from broadly ambivalent to downright hostile to allowing them back. The reasons for this were complicated: anti-Chinese immigration policies long pre-dated the war effort and became ensnared in the efforts to secure returns; the position of the overseas Chinese as economic middlemen (and often, colonial collaborators) fed anti-Chinese sentiments among Southeast Asian nationalists; the post-war push for decolonization meant newly arrived post-war refugees could also be an unwanted drain on already strained resources and shaky domestic stability; the activist overseas Chinese policy of the Republic of China raised security concerns in nations worried that their Chinese minority population might prove too connected to China; and the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War meant that there were now not only activist Republic of China policies but also activist Chinese Communist policies to worry about, with many contending governments all demanding diaspora loyalties.Footnote 3 For many caught in this legal limbo, their best chance of repatriation came from being classified as ‘displaced persons’, or Second World War refugees, and to be included under the mandate of one of the three post-war refugee offices created by the United Nations (UN) to help such people.
The organizations to aid refugees emerged out of the UN in rapid succession, but the inclusion of Chinese migrants as part of their mandates was never guaranteed. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration began its effort to aid displaced persons and economic recovery before the war itself had even ended. It spent a majority of its funds on China, but mostly on economic and agricultural recovery projects. In 1946, talks began regarding a new organization to take over refugee programmes from the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and the International Refugee Organization emerged to finish the task of post-war repatriations and start a programme for resettlement. The rise and fall of this Organization and its work on overseas Chinese repatriations is the central focus of this article. By 1952, the International Refugee Organization had wrapped up its work everywhere except in China, and a smaller, more versatile office took over in the form of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The evolution of this post-war international refugee regime has received considerable attention from scholars, dating back to the origins of the crises themselves. To date, the emphasis has unquestionably been on the larger scale efforts in Europe, which scholars have demonstrated had an important role in creating and consolidating Cold War divisions on the continent.Footnote 4 As Jessica Reinisch has shown, however, that impulse came more from the sponsoring governments than the relief workers themselves.Footnote 5 In Asia, post-1949 Chinese refugees and economic migrants in Hong Kong and 1970s-era Vietnam refugees have commanded the most attention.Footnote 6
The displaced overseas Chinese, meanwhile, defied easy categorization and posed unique challenges. As Elaine Ho demonstrates in her article in this Forum, they were not only the product of a forced migration and broadly unwanted as repatriates, but they were also a population that left nominally temporary overseas residencies and returned to their ancestral homeland.Footnote 7 The international response to the refugee crises proved understandably focused on those unable to appeal to their home government, leaving most of China's migrants as people in need of help but without clear status. This article argues that the impetus to aid overseas Chinese as refugees became the most significant factor in convincing the government of the Republic of China to sign up to the International Refugee Organization. It also explains why the People's Republic of China allowed the work to continue on Chinese soil after 1949 despite its own otherwise antagonistic relationship to the UN. Moreover, by focusing on the unique challenges posed by the overseas Chinese displaced persons for the international refugee regime, it becomes apparent that for all that the newly created international refugee regime did in Europe to create and reinforce the Cold War divides, its counterpart structure actually helped to delay and complicate the arrival of the Cold War in Asia. Even after the arrival of UN troops in Korea, UN-affiliated refugee organizations in China cooperated with countries across political lines and prolonged the transition to a full Cold War footing. The evolution from UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to International Refugee Organization to UN High Commissioner for Refugees was vital to this transition.
Beyond the relationship between China and UN refugee programmes, the challenges that emerged in repatriating the overseas Chinese revealed the weaknesses in Chinese regional foreign policy, weaknesses that were inherited by the People's Republic of China when they took over control of mainland China from the Republic of China. Both governments also found that their respective interests in the overseas Chinese as a source of support for the regime helped to reinforce existing anti-Chinese policies in Southeast Asian countries, with repercussions for both the migrants themselves and other foreign policy goals.
The origins of the refugee regime in Asia: UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
The UN—comprising all Second World War Allies—formed the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration before the War had even been won. From its inception, the Administration's purpose included rebuilding war-torn countries and offering immediate assistance to war victims; as a result, the mandate of the Administration when it came to displaced persons focused predominantly on repatriation, not resettlement or new migration. Wartime agreements among the Allies sometimes even dictated the terms of repatriations, especially in Europe where a divide began to emerge between Eastern and Western blocs.
In China, cooperation with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration became both a practical measure for reconstruction and refugee aid, as well as a larger symbol of Chinese sovereignty and status in the international arena. China proved to be the recipient of the largest single-country UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration aid programme, in part because the areas occupied by Japan over the course of an eight-plus year war equalled that overtaken by the German Army in all of Europe. Eventually the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration came to manage a main branch office in the Chinese capital of Nanjing, 15 regional branches, and a number of smaller offices; it employed more than 2,000 people, many from other countries.Footnote 8 To facilitate cooperation between the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and local officials, the Republic of China government created the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration under the supervision of the Executive Yuan.Footnote 9 Given the political schisms leading to the Chinese Civil War, the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration also had a counterpart in the form of the Communist Liberated Areas Relief Administration, responsible for carrying out the required non-discriminatory distribution of funds and goods in the communist-controlled areas.Footnote 10 Together, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration took on a range of projects that mostly focused on economic recovery, including such grand schemes as diverting the flow of the Yellow River back to its pre-war riverbed and restarting agriculture, with American consultants and administrators offering advice. However, these efforts were repeatedly plagued by accusations of mismanagement and graft (not unwarranted) on the part of the Chinese administrators, as well as by China's difficulty in translating the European-oriented agency's ideals into an Asian context.Footnote 11 The transnational partnership also took responsibility, in cooperation with the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the unique task of repatriating the overseas Chinese who had arrived in China during the war.Footnote 12
As the Japanese began their retreat from the Chinese mainland, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission handled an initial effort to register the displaced overseas Chinese, counting close to 1.5 million people from Southeast Asia and Hong Kong languishing in mainland China—around 18 per cent of the total pre-war population of the region.Footnote 13 A wide variety of wartime experiences had brought these potential repatriates back to China in the first place, each of which affected the options available for their return. Many simply escaped advancing armies, especially from countries and territories contiguous to China, like Burma, Vietnam, Korea, and Hong Kong. Others had come before the war to address business concerns or visit family and became trapped as transportation options grew limited as the fighting spread. Others had arrived as students and now wanted to return to their families. Once the war ended and transportation lines reopened, those who were able to simply presented their identification documents, paid for their passage, and returned home. Others who had fled without passports or documents and spent the war destitute needed help, and that is where the work of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration made a difference.
By and large, undocumented repatriates were not welcome in many of their former homes. In part, this was due to the tendency of these countries to group repatriates in with new immigrants, and many local laws governing immigration openly discriminated against the Chinese. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration tried to step in as an intermediary, where possible, to remind world governments that repatriation should be addressed separately from new migration—this point had been made repeatedly, almost desperately, by UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration officials—but that could not prevent receiving countries from erecting new barriers to entry.Footnote 14 The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration defined ‘displaced persons’ as anyone displaced after 1937, when the war began in China, but some of the receiving governments set up other dates that corresponded more closely to when the war came to their country. More specifically, officials from the Chinese Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission reported that Malaya required physical evidence of prior residence or birth, a common and understandable mandate, and that Burma needed more recent documentation. Vietnam requested documents dated after 1937 and proof from the consul, and the Philippines simply denied entry to anyone who had left after 1941 and had not endured some part of the war in the Philippines.Footnote 15 In aggregate, all destinations in Southeast Asia required, at the very least, some sort of proof of former residence. The challenge was that far too many of the overseas Chinese had fled their homes without their paperwork or lost it in the course of the long war that followed, something that Tina Chen details in the case of Burma elsewhere in this Forum.Footnote 16 Even with such proof, every country had different regulations for how to determine whom to accept; without it, the only option was to negotiate with the receiving government in the hope of an exception. Either way, it was a project that in theory would fall under the auspices of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission in cooperation with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but in reality it proved to be something that a weakened China could not accomplish without international assistance.
Despite this, the Chinese government organizations had strong incentives to try. The Chinese abroad had mobilized to offer monetary and physical assistance during the war, but once Japanese forces conquered Southeast Asian nations, these populations faced long, difficult years of occupation without much support from the Republic of China. After the war, Chinese officials hoped to develop plans to try to revitalize the relationship between the homeland and the diaspora. Both for the sake of reconstruction and for the sake of the burgeoning civil war, this effort took on great importance, and aiding returnees with repatriation was one way to ensure their ongoing patriotism and support, as well as to get their remittances flowing back to China once again.Footnote 17 Other post-war plans involved broad-based programmes to reconnect with these communities, offer Nationalist Party leaders abroad more guidance as they began to counter communist influences, bolster overseas Chinese education, and negotiate with countries of immigration in the hope of lifting restrictions for future migrants. Perversely, the very ties that the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission sought to strengthen were a major source of the reluctance of Southeast Asian governments to accept returning Chinese residents. They feared that the Chinese abroad maintained ties that were too close to the Chinese government, failed to assimilate into local national life, and were likely to place their financial and political futures in the hands of the Nationalists—or worse, the Chinese Communist Party.Footnote 18
Past and future ties to China were not the only concerns expressed by the host governments. They also had their own issues to worry about: the combination of decolonization and post-war rebuilding meant that economically, there were real limits to how many immigrants—new or returning—the countries could afford. The Indonesians’ refusal to deal with returnees, given the uncertainty about the future, actually found support from an unusual source: the Chinese consul in Jakarta, who claimed he had more than enough to do simply to protect the Chinese population already there. Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and the rest of the British territories proved more enthusiastic about self-supporting repatriates, a category that included anyone paying their own way home, and automatically found UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration-assisted repatriates suspect. Both Thailand and the Philippines tried to make repatriations subject to revised immigration laws, in the former case as leverage to negotiate for reduced immigration from China, and in the latter, as a way to avoid admitting any repatriates at all. Thailand and French Indochina also expressed scepticism about the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration's ‘group’ repatriations in which the organization screened returnees, then issued a single joint travel document for many at a time in order to expedite the process. Receiving countries expressed fear that the Chinese might take advantage of the chaos to slip former deportees back into their territories.Footnote 19 In the end, Indonesia and the Philippines held out for the longest; the other governments accepted a number of UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration returnees, totalling 20,893 between September 1946 and the end of its efforts in July 1947.Footnote 20 The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration also addressed the issue of small numbers of Chinese nationals scattered abroad—although around 300 in Paris, 11 in Czechoslovakia, or even 1,300 in Calcutta seemed like minor issues in the grand scale of international refugee movements, they added up to more than 15,000 individuals awaiting assistance to return to China.Footnote 21 Despite these successes, there were still nearly 29,000 Chinese waiting to return home when the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration began finishing up its temporary post-war relief mission in 1947, so the rest of the work would be left to its successor, the International Refugee Organization.Footnote 22
Talk about the International Refugee Organization had begun early in the life of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Not only was the massive relief administration intended to be temporary, but its mandate with respect to displaced persons focused only on repatriations and not at all on new migration as a solution to international refugee issues. Much more than its predecessor, the International Refugee Organization was focused on Europe and the complicated entanglements involved in European migrations. At its very inception, however, it was understood that the organization would take over the mandate for helping all of the refugee populations under the care of UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, in Europe and in Asia. Though meant to take advantage of the international cooperation inspired by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, early talks to create the International Refugee Organization proved contentious. The Soviet Union expressed concerns about the idea of ‘traitors’ receiving aid from the organization, a reference to both European refugees refusing repatriation to the Eastern bloc and to post-1917 ‘White Russians’ around the world (including China) who by-and-large had no intention of returning home.Footnote 23 The Soviet Union argued that unless the Organization limited its mandate to repatriations, it would not participate; in the end, it did not, and Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland joined the Soviets in voting against the constitution and refusing to join the Organization.Footnote 24
From the outset, the Republic of China also had no real intention of joining the International Refugee Organization. For one thing, the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration/UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in China had focused most of their attention on rebuilding efforts, not repatriation, and without that incentive, the idea of joining an organization exclusively for refugee relief had less appeal. As Rana Mitter has shown, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration also had a mixed legacy in China. It built a narrative of China as ‘a reluctant partner in a project for its own greater good’ even as the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration tried to use the partnership to build a new, post-colonial, and more independent state.Footnote 25 Beyond that, the newly penned constitution of the International Refugee Organization included concrete financial obligations for all signatories, which in 1946 had already come to seem unmanageable for a Chinese government faced with uncontrollable inflation and chaos at home.Footnote 26 Rather than simply tolerating the negative reply, however, American and British officials involved in shaping the new organization determinedly worked to break down these reservations and convince the Republic of China to sign up. They had a few reasons for doing this. Before the Soviet Union refused to participate, the Western powers saw China as a reliable, but non-Western, vote in favour of their preferred policies.Footnote 27 Moreover, the International Refugee Organization required at least 15 governments whose funding quotas would fill 75 per cent of its operating budget before it could officially begin work. The Chinese contribution had been set at a mere 2.5 per cent, but this was the seventh largest share at the time they signed up.Footnote 28 If China agreed to join it would greatly improve the odds that the International Refugee Organization would meet its quotas by the 30 June 1947 deadline.
According to Katherine Greene, who had been on the staff of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration during the transition to the International Refugee Organization, China and the Organization's founding members also shared an important goal: to find a way to deal with all those displaced persons in China still unaided by the good offices of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.Footnote 29 Here the Eurocentric view of the International Refugee Organization clashed somewhat with local priorities; international attention focused mostly on stateless Jews and Russians in China, while Chinese officials still hoped to complete the repatriations of the overseas Chinese. Chinese officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were as aware as anyone that their government simply did not have the clout to convince Southeast Asian governments to continue or, in some cases, to finally start accepting Chinese repatriates without the strength of an international organization standing behind them.Footnote 30 As Greene notes, the International Refugee Organization ‘was likely to have more success in persuading the recipient countries to readmit Chinese than would China herself’.Footnote 31
The American embassy in China made other appeals to the idea of China's status as a Second World War ‘Great Power’, referencing the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and China. These lacked the persuasiveness of the idea that the overseas Chinese diaspora was increasingly viewed by the Chinese government as its primary source of strength and legitimacy.Footnote 32 Then, of course, there was the basic reality that China would be spending money on displaced persons, especially the overseas Chinese, whether it was a member of the International Refugee Organization or not, which made money as a principle objection to joining less persuasive.Footnote 33 All these avenues of persuasion worked: by the time the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization took over global operations from the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in July 1947, China was already on board.Footnote 34 The Legislative Yuan approved the constitution of the International Refugee Organization with a key reservation: that the Organization would complete the overseas Chinese repatriation project.Footnote 35
Humanitarianism meets pragmatism: the International Refugee Organization and the Republic of China
As a new organization with a fresh mandate to tackle and solve world refugee problems, the International Refugee Organization quickly discovered that the fundamental issues affecting the work of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in China had not gone away. Internecine squabbling, combined with concerns about corruption and graft, had done much to dampen international enthusiasm for the tenuous partnership forged between the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the International Refugee Organization, disagreements emerged on at least three levels: among the country representatives in Geneva, between the main China office of the International Refugee Organization and the head office in Europe, and within China, especially between International Refugee Organization staff and the local officials. In Geneva, debates centred on the fundamental questions of who to aid and how much help to give. In the beginning, at least, the Chinese delegate, Dr Wu Nan-Ju, fulfilled his hoped-for role and willingly voted with UK positions in exchange for support in accessing transport for overseas Chinese repatriations, which was still the main priority of the Chinese government.Footnote 36 The China-based staff of the International Refugee Organization consisted mostly of people with long histories of working in China, either with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration or in other capacities within the Nationalist government. The man who would emerge as the Chinese director, Jennings Wong, had spent years alternating between government service and academia, and his experience navigating both worlds meant he knew how to cultivate strong ties to those in the Republic of China government who held the national purse strings.
The International Refugee Organization's main office in Shanghai would become increasingly consumed with the problem of stateless Europeans, but the Chinese government insisted that efforts to aid overseas Chinese continue unabated. The shift from the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to the International Refugee Organization had little effect on the continued refusals of Southeast Asian governments to accept former Chinese residents, and the problem was complicated in no small part by growing occurrences of forged documents held by increasingly desperate migrants.Footnote 37 Still, by 1948, the International Refugee Organization could claim the work was ‘virtually complete’ save for the recalcitrance of three governments: Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines, causing International Refugee Organization officials to fear that, in the end, less than half of the repatriates waiting for a chance to return to those countries might actually be sent home.Footnote 38
Burma and Indonesia continued to take repatriates in small numbers, but the Philippines proved unusually unwilling. Frustration with the reluctance of the Philippine government to cooperate was compounded by the fact that it had made use of UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration offices to repatriate ‘at considerable cost’ more than 6,500 Chinese nationals stranded in the Philippines, which the UN had done ‘in the full expectancy that the Philippine Government would reciprocate to the extent of allowing overseas Chinese displaced from their homes in the Philippines to return at UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration's expense’. Some 8,600 Philippine-Chinese had returned to China during the war, most either to aid the war effort or to protect their families. Without significant roots or ties to China, though, many felt like their only future was to return to their pre-war homes in the Philippines.Footnote 39 Despite insistent pleas to the contrary, the Philippine government connected the repatriations to larger immigration issues, only accepting a set quota of 500 Chinese migrants per year, preferring those with skills or financial independence. Their rationale was rooted in economics; according to Vice-President Elpidio Quirino, ‘Our people are barely recovering from the effects of the ravages of war and for the government to permit at this time a mass immigration of former Chinese residents would set back whatever progress we have made in our economic rehabilitation.’Footnote 40 Quirino also suggested that ‘after so many years of absence from the Philippines and the loss of business and family ties, the Chinese may find himself more displaced here than in China which, after all, is his own native country’.Footnote 41 UN officials found these excuses implausible, in part because the number of Chinese seeking to return was quite low and Chinese organizations in Manila were committed to aiding their reassimilation.Footnote 42 Problems with official Chinese immigration also undermined efforts at repatriation, as reports of illegal entries made the Philippine government increasingly unwilling to cooperate at all. These collective problems with Chinese repatriations were profound enough that when the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization took over from the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the member governments passed a resolution ‘appealing to Governments in the Far East to readmit to their territories all Chinese refugees displaced by the war’.Footnote 43 Such appeals notwithstanding, repatriation continued to be a contentious issue.
The rest of the International Refugee Organization operation centred on two problems: care and maintenance for repatriates who had not yet been relocated, and the future of Jewish and Russian refugees in China. Both of these problems required international cooperation and ample funds, neither of which proved easy to come by. Though Republic of China officials had more at stake with the overseas Chinese repatriations, they did also have an interest in taking care of the stateless Europeans in China; the latter were a nuisance who required care, funds, and attention at a time when millions of Chinese citizens needed the same, but the foreigners had international voices to speak on their behalf and keep their plight in the forefront of public attention. International efforts campaigned for visas for these individuals, pushing for countries like the United States, Australia, Canada, and many countries in Latin America to agree to accept them as new immigrants, a project that the International Refugee Organization undertook with increasing urgency as the civil war continued and takeover by the Communists appeared more likely. By 1949, they managed to negotiate a temporary refuge for thousands of White Russians on the Philippine island of Samar, though for as long as the camp was in operation it effectively cut off any hope the International Refugee Organization had for bargaining with the Philippines over accepting Chinese repatriates.Footnote 44
The funds were also a challenge unto themselves. At the time that China signed the International Refugee Organization constitution, China's foreign minister, George Yeh, had expressed doubt that China would be able to meet all its financial obligations, and almost immediately it became necessary to begin efforts to negotiate down the Republic of China's contribution. The first adjustment allowed China to pay only for those aspects of the project that took place in China, allowing it both to make use of in-kind donations and to avoid international exchange rates, which were changing faster than the International Refugee Organization could publish them. This agreement also allowed the International Refugee Organization to refund unspent contributions back to China.Footnote 45 While the civil war continued, the Western powers had no real expectation that China would keep up with payments, especially as it became increasingly clear that the Republic of China would lose the war. In fact, the situation grew so bad that British officials proved more impressed when payments continued than surprised when they arrived late or never came at all. Jennings Wong, heading the International Refugee Organization office in Shanghai, frequently made use of his own close ties to Nationalist officials to try to ensure that their continued interest in International Refugee Organization programmes would translate to continued funding, though when Republic of China government officials fled the Communist advance on the mainland (becoming refugees themselves), the Republic of China still had outstanding debts to the International Refugee Organization that were never repaid.Footnote 46
The waning civil war and the subsequent move of the Nationalist government to Taiwan disrupted International Refugee Organization activities, though nowhere near as much as anyone at the time assumed they would. Other than periodic complaints that uninvited armies had occupied International Refugee Organization camps on the coastline and a heated exchange between foreign minister, George Yeh and International Refugee Organization officials over the latter's offhand comment in a report that they could not expect the Chinese government to prioritize international refugee issues while losing the civil war (Yeh protested that, in fact, the Chinese government had done everything in its power to help, war or no war), the war pushed forward efforts to complete repatriations instead of stopping them.Footnote 47 With most overseas Chinese repatriations being wrapped up by 1948 and the International Refugee Organization itself beginning measures to close down its worldwide operations in 1950, the real limits of the work became increasingly clear.
A new government and an old problem
The most remarkable thing about the International Refugee Organization's work in China after 1949 is that it continued at all. Having cleared that bar, however, there were visible lines of continuity between the new People's Republic of China and that of the departing Nationalists. Some of the arguments between the International Refugee Organization and Chinese officials remained, despite the changes in the personnel making them. These tensions centred around issues like funds, priorities, and the greater attention paid to European refugees relative to Chinese, but the repatriation of the overseas Chinese as a foundation of cooperation persisted as well, despite the fact that the opportunities for these repatriations continued to dwindle. In the rest of the world, the International Refugee Organization closed operations in 1952 and transferred its caseload to the care of a more permanent (though initially far less robust) organization, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In the context of a Chinese war against UN forces in Korea and mutual non-recognition between the new government and the international organization, few UN officials thought that the Shanghai office would survive, but they opted to leave it open under the same name and the same staff for as long as People's Republic of China officials were willing to tolerate it. A notable exception was the office's leader, Jennings Wong, whose Nationalist ties caused him to escape to Hong Kong with the blessing of the International Refugee Organization's Geneva office. In his stead, Colonel M. C. Liang took over the office. Liang had the confidence of both the International Refugee Organization/UN High Commissioner for Refugees officials in Hong Kong and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials in Beijing, an act of political tightrope walking that is worthy of some praise, though he found himself frequently torn between the two camps.
There was a deeply pragmatic accounting in Communist Chinese policy-making quarters that assessed the costs and benefits of allowing the International Refugee Organization to continue its work. Actually, at least one line of argument was not about allowing anything: instead, members of the new Chinese government argued that the International Refugee Organization had taken on the responsibility for a certain population in China and that it was obligated to commit the funds and resources needed to complete the work. This reasoning was that China did not fear an International Refugee Organization withdrawal, but instead that it saw the office's continued presence as a way to force Western governments to keep their promises.Footnote 48 This rhetoric notwithstanding, the People's Republic of China had good reason to want to keep the International Refugee Organization in operation. Certainly, as officials from the Organization observed, Chinese officials were anxious for European refugees to leave China and, post-1949, cash payments to support European populations, which sustained them at a higher standard of living than that of indigent Chinese, would quickly prove embarrassing for the Communist government (as indeed it had for even the Nationalists).Footnote 49 As with the Republic of China, the overseas Chinese problem proved to be an important element in making this decision. Assistance from the International Refugee Organization once again proved important because the relatively weak new government lacked the international weight to force Southeast Asian governments to consider opening their doors for re-entry; few of these nations even recognized the new government. Additionally, the overseas Chinese themselves remained important because their support—especially, but not exclusively, financial support once they were back to their homes abroad—was absolutely necessary as a source of investment and foreign exchange for a weak economy and legitimacy for a fledgling government.Footnote 50 International Refugee Organization officials reached the same conclusion, noting that the UN's nonrecognition of the new Chinese government made continuing its work problematic, but that stopping it could be worse, as ‘such action, just at the time the present Government is hoping for UN representation, might be considered hostile. Continuation will enable us to maintain our presentation that our work in the Far East is in the interests of Chinese as well as Foreigners. This may assure the continuance of that unofficial cooperation which we have received in connection with our foreign DP and Refugee Programme.’Footnote 51 So the overseas Chinese repatriations maintained their position as a bargaining chip and was the factor that allowed the International Refugee Organization to continue to represent foreign refugees in China.
Initially, although the People's Republic of China allowed International Refugee Organization work to continue, it also sought to research and understand the situation surrounding potential repatriations. After 1949, International Refugee Organization offices in South China continued to register individuals and help with costs to send them home. The Chinese assumption was that if the new government stopped this work there would be backlash against it in Chinese communities abroad. Until the People's Republic of China could develop a more robust policy toward refugee issues, it operated on a few principles: that repatriations should continue, that those with anti-government opinions needed to register with local overseas Chinese associations before leaving, and that cooperation between the International Refugee Organization and the local overseas Chinese associations should continue with the procedures already in place.Footnote 52 The key change focused on individuals with ‘political problems’, which is to say those who had opposed the Communist Party before or during the civil war. Now the new government began to use the exit permit system to control their departures while maintaining a broad and permissive policy for nearly everyone else.Footnote 53
Though the People's Republic of China proved willing to cooperate on lingering repatriations, the fact of the new government gave some receiving countries new reason to demure. British colonial officials and local authorities blamed much of the upheaval in Malaya and Singapore on the Chinese, and even in French territories ‘a good portion of the trouble in Saigon and other cities in Indo-China is blamed on the Chinese’. In North Borneo and Sarawak, local officials expressed a strong desire for Chinese labourers to come and work the land, but, given the Malayan Emergency (the Chinese-dominated communist insurrection ongoing on the peninsula), these governments preferred new, temporary labour migration to returning pre-war residents.Footnote 54 Burma continued to be reticent, dealing as it was with lingering Nationalist troops and a tumultuous new independent government. In Indonesia, a potential opening to break through the stalemate in repatriations came in the form of a group that International Refugee Organization officers referred to as the ‘ex-Taiwanese’. This was a population of Chinese who had resided in the Dutch East Indies, then were taken from their pre-war homes by the Netherlands and sent to Australia, from where they returned to Taiwan. Most hoped to repatriate to Indonesia, and because their original departure was not at all voluntary, they were the least controversial case that the International Refugee Organization could put before Indonesian officials. The assumption then was that, ‘once the ex-Taiwanese shipments are under way and the new Indonesian Government is satisfied that International Refugee Organization is only returning bona fide pre-war residents, there will be no difficulty in obtaining the Government's approval for the regular Overseas Chinese returnees’.Footnote 55 The ‘no difficulty’ part was somewhat optimistic, but the idea of demonstrating good faith persisted; it was also notable that the growing fear across the region that the returnees might be communist made the ex-Taiwanese, a group with no conceivable connections to communism, the instrument of choice for restarting the work. Finally, the Philippines remained unbending in their refusal to accept repatriates. Not only that, but International Refugee Organization officials observed the government to be now ‘against the entry of all Chinese’, not just the returnees.Footnote 56 And then, of course, there was the added complication of the ongoing International Refugee Organization-sponsored temporary Russian camp in Samar, which led its officials to assume that as long as there were International Refugee Organization registrants in Samar who had not been resettled, any approach to the Philippine government ‘would not only be worthless, but even prejudicial at this time’.Footnote 57 Ultimately, few opportunities would ever emerge to allow former residents of the Philippines to return and attention eventually turned to local integration.
From 1950 all the way through to 1956, there was never a time where the closing of the International Refugee Organization's Shanghai office was not considered by all parties involved to be imminent. Despite this, it remained open. As the dwindling numbers of overseas Chinese repatriations continued in fits and starts, the International Refugee Organization focused its attention on trying to make arrangements for as many Jewish, Russian, and otherwise stateless Europeans as possible to leave China; remaining in place would give them at best an uncertain future, but ‘refugee fatigue’ in the rest of the world had begun to limit the willingness of member countries either to commit funds or visas to the problem. The sheer amount of energy expended on these hapless Europeans raised important issues about the interest of the UN in the plight of refugee Chinese. Though the former UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization could point to their long-standing commitment to repatriating overseas Chinese, the fact that the new organization—the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—took over International Refugee Organization commitments to Europeans in China without adding the growing numbers of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong to its mandate created grounds for criticism. This set off a debate in the British Foreign Office about the status of the Hong Kong refugees, who, a UN survey led by Edvard Hambro had determined, technically fell outside the UN High Commissioner for Refugees mandate, but were ‘de facto refugees’ in all other respects. In the context of the closing of the International Refugee Organization's office, refusing to aid this population proved even more difficult; as one British official noted, ‘in an age when mutual aid in matters of this kind is an accepted principle in the international field it seems reasonable that Hong Kong should be recognized to be as eligible as any other territory for outside assistance in coping with a refugee problem which has resulted not from any fault or actions of her own. . .’.Footnote 58 The primary local obstacle to international aid was the colonial government, which found it politically impossible to distinguish between refugees and impoverished citizens when awarding assistance, a problem that each Chinese government also had with International Refugee Organization aid to destitute Europeans in Shanghai.
The People's Republic of China watched all international efforts to expand the scope of UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Asia with a wary eye; the focus proved to be on the Hong Kong refugee question and that of the growing Tibetan refugee issue at the end of the decade. Despite a frequently apolitical experience with the International Refugee Organization (or, at least, one where most of the politics was bluster and not strategic action), from the Communist Chinese perspective, the work of UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Asia was more and more frequently aimed at supporting anti-People's Republic of China dissidents, quislings, and traitors.Footnote 59 Whereas the work of the International Refugee Organization could still be supported as both practical and humanitarian, aiding political refugees from the new Chinese government revealed an agenda focused on fighting the Cold War against the People's Republic of China, and cooperation proved impossible to sustain. Resentments had been building over the course of the Organization's operations since an ill-fated registration effort in 1952, and the tipping point was reached at the same time as talk of aiding Hong Kong refugees increased and as the UN organizations came to the aid of anti-communist refugees fleeing Hungary in 1956.
In 1956, Beijing facilitated the takeover of the International Refugee Organization office in Shanghai by the Chinese People's Relief Association, a domestic aid organization. For a time, the Chinese People's Relief Association continued the work of the International Refugee Organization in aiding Europeans in China, and by now the overseas Chinese repatriations had long since dried up. When the International Refugee Organization finally ceased its operations in mainland China, the Republic of China delegate to the UN, Cheng Pao-an proposed that the money left over from International Refugee Organization operations be appropriated to aid Chinese refugees in Hong Kong in moving to Taiwan. Of all the reasons why the plan did not move forward—and there were many—perhaps the greatest was that, as far as the International Refugee Organization was concerned, there were no surplus funds for Chinese refugees: the Republic of China had stopped making payments on its International Refugee Organization obligations in 1948, and even though the Organization attempted to send a bill to Taipei in 1952, Chinese contributions ended there.Footnote 60 The actual funds left over when the office closed were held by the People's Republic of China on the grounds that the International Refugee Organization still owed money to China and that the original funds committed by the Nationalist government came illegally out of the sweat and blood of the Chinese people.Footnote 61 There was an element of rancour in the office's closing which, for many of the workhorse years, the International Refugee Organization had managed to avoid.
Conclusion
Though the UN flag came down over the Shanghai International Refugee Organization office in 1956, the legacy of the international project of repatriating overseas Chinese in the wake of the Second World War sheds light on the difficulties of both cooperation between sovereign nations and international organizations and the changing position of China in the region and in world affairs. Despite the fact that at its very root, the project to repatriate post-war displaced persons had a lofty humanitarian aim in mind, the actual means taken to implement the programme were frequently much more practical and self-interested. Both Chinese governments—the one led by the Nationalists and the one led by the Communists—had a deep interest in seeing the work get done: both wanted overseas Chinese repatriated to Southeast Asia for the sake of restarting remittances and investments, and promoting political support in the region, and both wanted European refugees 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 the pragmatic cooperation that spanned the Chinese Civil War and transversed it, continuing on until 1956, despite all the odds.
Part of what is remarkable about this fact is the extent to which the clear origins of the Cold War in Asia were not more of a factor than they were. The rise of a Communist government in China made Southeast Asian governments increasingly reluctant to accept returnees with questionable ties to the new regime, but these governments were by-and-large never enthusiastic about returnees even without that complicating factor. The war in Korea, the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, the Geneva conferences, and determined non-recognition between the UN and the People's Republic of China all also failed to get in the way of the ongoing work of the International Refugee Organization in Shanghai.Footnote 62 Even though Chinese Communist friendship with the Soviet Union would ultimately serve to complicate exit visas for White Russians hoping to immigrate instead of repatriate, even this did not entirely cease. Instead, the pragmatism of the new government ensured that as long as the work of International Refugee Organization was in the interests of the People's Republic of China, it could continue. It continued through protests, angry disputes, and occasional mutual accusations, but continue it did. The potential for cooperation between the People's Republic of China and the UN's international refugee regime did not reach a breaking point until the UN High Commissioner for Refugees began what Beijing officials perceived to be a much more heavily politicized refugee aid agenda. Taken together, the long history of the International Refugee Organization in China on either side of 1949 demonstrates the broader importance of a relatively small group of refugees in a larger story about China's relationship with Southeast Asia, the UN, and the early Cold War.
