Creating categories of identity: 缅甸归侨 Burma Returned Overseas Chinese

The poems and various other posts by Chen Zun with which I began this article are indicative of the complex signifiers of place, ethnicity, language, and common lived experience of those who identify as ‘Burma Returned Overseas Chinese’ (缅甸归侨). Each of the Chinese-language characters in this phrase carry individual meanings and each references specific trajectories of migration and experience that collectively establish a distinct category of identity.Footnote ⁷ The combined category seems to emerge out of a progressive narrowing of a subset of people based on migration routes, languages spoken, and personal experiences. In this way, Burma Returned Overseas Chinese appear as a group of people who inhabit the space of intersection in a Venn diagram with four circles, each of which represents ‘Burma’, ‘Returned’, ‘Overseas’, and ‘Chinese’. This article sets out to study Burma Returned Overseas Chinese not from the point(s) of intersection, however. I argue that Burma Returned Overseas Chinese emerge as a category not because some people inhabit a site of overlap between four recognized groups. Rather, Burma Returned Overseas Chinese is a category rooted in conceptual, practical, and legal anxiety over forced migration and the racial logic through which institutions and individuals made sense of this forced migration.

Informed by recent scholarly work on diaspora, migration, and Chineseness that interrogates rather than assumes the subject of analysis, I examine the historical processes through which Burma Chinese, Overseas Chinese, and Returned Chinese are formed, articulated, documented, experienced, and governed.Footnote ⁸ To do this entails analysing the ways in which specific institutional and institutionalized practices occasioned by 1940s wartime migration produced Burma, Returned, Overseas, and Chinese in ways that rendered recognizable ‘Burma Returned Overseas Chinese’ as a category (in the 1940s as well as the present day). The practices of documentation play a key role in the process. Reading bureaucratic documentation produced in relation to wartime migration of Burma Chinese in different geopolitical locations allows us to see a shared racial logic of territorialization, and the ways in which practices based in racial territorial logic migrated alongside the people in question. The sub-category of Burma Chinese utilized in the governance of forced migration and ‘return’ required making legible through documentation and everyday reiteration specific usages of evacuees, refugee, returnees, and wartime flight.

The possibility of existence: the question of a Chinese evacuee camp at Bhamo

The Japanese military occupation of large areas of East and Southeast Asia from 1937 to 1945, followed by the defeat of the Japanese through the combined efforts of anti-Japanese resistance in China in the Pacific War and American- and British-led efforts in the China-Burma-India Theater of the Second World War,Footnote ⁹ resulted in extensive forced migration between Burma, China, and India. In 1945 return migration, repatriation, and moving home were practices commonly referred to in personal letters, government documents, and the records of refugee and other organizations. The confusion that resulted when the location and movement of specific people did not conform to the expectations of governing bodies sheds light on how certain constellations of terms acquired saliency over others.

In December 1947 a local colonial official in a city located near the Chinese-Burma border—Bhamo—consistently complained to the head office about the lack of an immigration office in that city.Footnote ¹⁰ Aung Gain, the deputy commissioner at Bhamo, pointed out that Bhamo was a customs station without an immigration department. He argued that surely immigration was as important as customs; and, in the event that no immigration department was established, he warned that the Chinese would use the route into Burma to their advantage. Aung Gain further reiterated the difficulties posed for regulating Chinese migration from Yunnan province when the police were expected, on top of their other duties, also to control immigration. Less than two months later, on 13 February 1948, the Government of Burma declared Bhamo (and a number of other towns along the Bhamo-Lashio Road) as land stations.Footnote ¹¹ Once categorized as ‘land stations’ these towns could then have immigration offices.

The letter written by Aung Gain in December 1947 occasioned a series of responses that wove together key phrases in a complicated web of terminology of inclusion and exclusion. These terms included: evacuees, Chinese nationals, skilled workers, seasonal labour, machinery of diplomatic intercourse, geographic interdependence, and land station.Footnote ¹² The specific concerns of British colonial officials were: (a) to distinguish legal from illegal Chinese nationals in Burma, and (b) to stop illegal entry in a way that would not upset friendly relations between the bordering countries. While the correspondence did not categorically exclude Chinese from having a legitimate presence in Burma, Aung Gain's tone and phrasing presents Chinese migration as demanding of scrutiny and regulation. His comments drew upon the complicated regulation of Chinese immigration to Burma, beginning with policies established in 1937, as well as wartime cooperation between Great Britain, China, and the United States along the Burma Road(s).Footnote ¹³ Notably absent in the written correspondence involving Aung Gain in 1947 is any discussion of what constituted Chinese in this context. The category ‘Chinese’ appeared frequently but those documenting evacuees and cross-borders movement did not pause to ask who inhabited this category and the criteria used. The use of ‘Chinese’ as a category for enumerating the wartime migrants, including Burma Chinese who had fled to India or the Republic of China, reiterated internalized racialized orders with specific genealogies. In this way the documentary practices reterritorialized racial and ethnic difference in order to make legible deterritorialized existence.

On the one hand, recognition by the deputy commissioner of Bhamo of the interdependence between customs offices (concerned with the movement of goods) and immigration offices (concerned with the movement of people) deterritorialized economic practices and citizenship. That is, each recognized the simple fact that goods and people regularly moved across borders and that this movement highlighted the arbitrary and porous nature of the borders. On the other hand, the radical implications of this point were foreclosed by a general post-war insistence on distinguishing bona fide migration from opportunistic migration. That is, bureaucrats enforced an a priori legitimacy of the border, even as they encountered instances that highlighted the historical contingency of the border. As the ensuing analysis demonstrates, in the post-Second World War moment of articulation of a new world order based on liberalism (that is, one that presumably countered the racial orders of fascism and colonialism), it was easier to speak of territory rather than race. In this context, documentary regimes, bureaucratic practice, and increasingly precise definitions of ‘refugee’ and ‘evacuee’ were often premised upon an elision of race as the muted category through which borders and migration were being understood. The resulting international norms around ‘return’ were thus based upon an unspoken but foundational racialized embodiment. The contributors to these norms and the racialized logic include British colonial officers in Burma and India, refugee camp and relief organization workers in India and Xiamen, border officials, and those who populated the category of Burma Chinese.

In the context of Bhamo and the China-Burma border, the right of Chinese to be present in Burma and the status accorded to them hinged on the historical moment(s) of original migration and the ensuing documentation carried by the individuals. Complications arose because restrictions on land entry did not exist prior to the 1941 Burma Passport Rules. As a result, Chinese could reside in and travel to Burma without restriction. This meant that failure to produce documents in 1947 did not necessarily indicate illegal entry into Burma. It did affect, however, whether or not those Burma Chinese who had fled Burma during the war were likely to be considered bona fide evacuees or wartime refugees. Moreover, the legibility of Chinese as evacuees and refugees with ties to Burma rested upon comparable/comparative cases of others desiring to return to Burma after the war.

As part of the exchange regarding the status of Bhamo and regulation of cross-border movement of peoples, on 29 December 1947 the deputy commissioner of Bhamo, Aung Gain, received the following anxiously worded inquiry:

This inquiry occasioned a handwritten response and draft telegram. The conceptual framing of evacuees and refugees evident in both responses is worth reflection. The handwritten response dated 30 December 1947 states: ‘There is no evacuee camp in Bhamo—Chinese come in and go away. What exactly evacuee camp is meant is foreign to me.’ The logic of this reply is that an evacuee camp could only exist if there were restrictions on the movement of Chinese and related records of cross-border movement. A condition of being an evacuee, it seems, entails controlled movement across borders rather than fleeing a place of residence because of war conditions. The draft telegram dated 31 December further refined the initial response, while simultaneously inserting expanded criteria for the existence of an evacuee camp which could even be investigated. It stated: ‘There no evacuee camp exists in Bhamo. Seasonal Chinese immigrants come in and go away without valid passports or identity papers.’ Here, the conditions for the existence of an evacuee camp associated with Chinese in Bhamo rested upon whether or not those Chinese crossing the border required passports or identity papers, and if non-seasonal immigrants were present. Notably, neither response assumed the need to go to the specified area to see if Chinese were living there in what could be described as an evacuee or refugee camp, nor to consult with ‘Chinese elder U Yu Hoe’ about his observation.Footnote ¹⁵

The condition of fleeing Burma as a result of Japanese occupation did not appear in this exchange as relevant to the question of whether or not Chinese were gathering as evacuees. That is, were there Chinese in Bhamo living in a specific location as a group of people who had left the country because of the war and now sought to return to their pre-war places of residence? Instead of asking this question, Aung Gain and other officials associated with the Government of Burma were preoccupied with the possibility of existence of a Chinese evacuee camp in Bhamo. The understanding of ‘evacuee’ mobilized in their exchange meant dismissing the question about the existence of an evacuee camp populated by Chinese within Burma. Evacuees, in this instance, would be those known to officials through a process of documentation that classified them as evacuees. Chinese who entered Burma by land without documentation in the post-war period and evacuees were thus construed as mutually exclusive categories.

This brief exchange appears to foreclose the possibility that Chinese evacuees existed in Bhamo in 1947. Yet it sits uneasily alongside the documentation of Chinese crossing from Burma to China by land at the Yunnan border during the war years. A survey of hundreds of extant exit/entry forms from the period 1942–1946Footnote ¹⁶ indicates that the large majority of Chinese leaving Burma during these years did so with the explicitly stated reasons of: 逃難 (fleeing hardship), 戰爭 (war) or the occupation of Rangoon by the Japanese. The repetition of these specific phrases indicates a shared recognition of the legitimacy of their status as evacuees both by those seeking refuge in China during the war and by border officials.

As I have analysed elsewhere, once these individuals crossed the Burma-China border and established a physical presence within the nation-state borders of the Republic of China, their migration trajectory shifted the recognized categories that these individuals could inhabit.Footnote ¹⁷ The success of Sun Yat-sen and others in constituting the Chinese diaspora as 華僑 /overseas Chinese, with an ethnic and racial identity rooted in the territorial space of the Republic of China,Footnote ¹⁸ existed alongside international norms about territory, national sovereignty, and domestic governance.

Entry/exit forms further constructed the act of moving across the Burma-China border as one of ‘return’ for those with ancestors in China. This occurred by instantly inscribing the migration into the temporal narrative of the Republic of China through the dating of the founding of the Republic of China as year 1 (as opposed to the calendar system used within British-ruled Burma). Moreover, while answers for place of birth on the forms varied (including different locations in China, Burma, Vietnam, Fiji, and Hong Kong), details were recorded in terms of 回國 (return to country/home). This included requests for the date one left the country (出國日期)—a space left blank by many born outside the borders of the Republic of China; date of return (回國日期); accompanying family members when leaving the country and returning; and the reasons for leaving (出國原因) and returning (回國原因). As such, despite occasional pleas from China-based consular offices which indicated that some Chinese from Burma understood themselves as displaced evacuees in wartime China, movement into China enacted an erasure of evacuee status by cataloguing the migration in terms of ‘return’. This erasure of evacuee status rested upon specific modes of reterritorialization and shared racial logic about the border by British colonial officials, Republic of China government forms, and border agents.

The visibility of evacuees: a view from the India-Burma border

An exchange which transpired in 1948 between the Burmese Embassy in Karachi and Burma Immigration and Control provides further contextualization of the racial logic that gave meaning to evacuees in Burma. The specific issue for the Burmese Embassy in Karachi concerned those residents of Burma who had spent the war years in India and who found their movement affected because of the partition of India and Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁹ They inquired into action that should be taken to assist between 20 and 25 individuals who lacked the documents necessary for repatriation because they were en route at the time of Partition. Caught between systems of documentation prior to Partition and current practices, as well as physically distant from offices authorized to issue passports, these individuals existed as deterritorialized individuals unable to move on.

This particular case was solved through a pragmatic approach that, in part, rested upon limiting the solution to the very small number of individuals (20 to 25) identified by the Pakistan government. Underlying the pragmatism, however, was a palpable anxiety over creating precedents that could enable migration without documentation. Documentation, it seems, gained heightened importance as the lack of fixity and arbitrariness of citizenship and identity status became more evident every day. In the case of those who had left Burma for India as a result of war, most had been issued with Burma Evacuee Identity Cards. But there still existed some who lacked the required documentation. Similar to the case of Chinese entering Burma via Bhamo, colonial officials acknowledged that the absence of documentation could reflect historical and/or contemporary conditions of migration and was not, in itself, evidence of illegal presence in a country or of false claims to return to Burma. This recognition, however, only made them more anxious to devise ways to confirm proper territorial claims by individuals on the move.

For colonial officials there existed an urgent need to resolve the status of groups of people ‘moving home’, given the uncertainty associated with the independence and partition of India, as well as that of Burma. The changes from colonial rule to independent nation-states in India and Burma existed alongside the institutional replacement of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency by the International Refugee Organization. The sense of urgency evident in colonial office documentation thus was often matched by that of UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency employees, who sought to wrap up details prior to the closure of local offices in 1947 and the pending termination of funding and closure of refugee camps. The unsettled conditions in Burma and India also included: (a) the recently concluded linked wars in the Pacific, the China-Burma-India Theater, and East Asia; as well as (b) the emerging civil war in China between the Guomindang and Chinese Communist Party that saw Guomindang soldiers taking up positions in Burma.Footnote ²⁰ All of this created anxiety over migration, citizenship, and legal categories of belonging at the individual, institutional, national, and international levels. Those working in fields related to migration, refugees, and evacuees tended to make sense of the complicated dynamics that compelled people to move across the borders between Burma, China, and India by mobilizing self-referential definitions of evacuees and refugees. These definitions redirected discussion of migration away from conceptual frameworks that might allow for an alternative framing of borders rooted in radical deterritorialization. Instead, their work in the exigency of the moment reiterated territorialized racial logic as common sense.

In the case of the Burmese Embassy in Karachi, guidance on how to deal with the 20 to 25 individuals discussed above was provided by clarifying the definition of an evacuee. In March 1948 the following definition was circulated: ‘An evacuee for the purpose of this scheme may be defined as any person who was obliged to leave Burma as a result of the war and subsequent Japanese occupation of that country; and any person who was resident in Burma and had left that country prior to the declaration of hostilities and would have returned to Burma if it had not been for the war and the consequent Japanese occupation of that country.’Footnote ²¹

While this definition omits any specific reference to race or ethnicity in defining an evacuee, the practices associated with documenting evacuees made race and ethnicity a key factor. Enumeration as an evacuee could occur through various routes. One could be enumerated in the Census of Evacuees in 1943 and/or have received aid as an evacuee. In these cases, no further action was usually required to support additional requests for aid and repatriation as evacuees because these individuals appeared in the paperwork as ‘evacuees’. For those whose forced migration took place at a different time or along a route not included in the 1943 enumeration, individuals in ‘important’ official or non-official positions were able to vouch for the person or ‘put intelligent questions to the individual’ to determine prior connection to Burma and therefore bona fide evacuee status. But, as already discussed, existing state borders and their regulation meant that evacuee status defined and practised in this way applied only to those Chinese residents of Burma who, when fleeing from Burma, made their way directly to India rather than to China. Burma Evacuee Identification Cards were part of the colonial governance of wartime migration, not a generalized condition, nor were they generally issued to those who came to India via China.

Chinese residents of Burma who went to India, either directly or via China, were generally enumerated as evacuees only if the financial and personal conditions of wartime flight placed them in refugee camps, or they were otherwise associated with the British government and therefore part of the British evacuee camps.Footnote ²² For most Chinese fleeing overland to India, the camps established along the Burma-India border immediately distinguished Indian from non-Indian evacuees. Much like the documentation practices at the China-Burma border with respect to Chinese ‘returning home’, this practice naturalized racial and ethnic difference along territorial lines. Those (self) identified as Indians, regardless of place of birth, had a distinct place within India, even though until 1937 Burma had been governed as a province of India within the structure of the British empire.

Distinctions between Indians and non-Indians were often done for pragmatic economic reasons and reflected the accepted territorial jurisdictions of governments. But these racial and ethnic categories also reinforced the borders through the application of racial logic.Footnote ²³ Cost allocations for refugees were assigned by enumerating individuals according to ethnic or racial categories, maintaining charts with expenditures on each group, and pressing governments to take responsibility for these costs. As a result, even though officials began arrangements for the four lakhs Footnote ²⁴ of Indian evacuees from Burma to ‘return home’ at the conclusion of the war, the Government of India took responsibility for the cost of lodging, maintenance, medical treatment, education of children, and all personal expenses of these evacuees.Footnote ²⁵ No evidence of prior connection to India was requested nor discussed for this arrangement to take place. The responsibility of the Government of India for those designated as Indian was not challenged and was given common-sense standing. Yet, the very categories deployed and their territorial designations clearly rested upon assumptions about racial and ethnic affinity and homogenization of difference between those designated as Indian.

Examination of the records further shows that the conflation of territorialized nationality with ethnicity and race shaped the experiences of forced migration of non-Indian evacuees. For example, in January 1947 the principal refugee officer reported to the secretary of state for India on expenditures at the Assam refugee camp on so-called ‘non-Indian’ evacuees.Footnote ²⁶ The Assam camp was populated by those fleeing Burma by land so, if a purely territorial logic was utilized, these individuals would all have been categorized as non-Indian because they came from a space outside the physical border of India. But the territorial discourse invoked in practices of enumerating refugees and evacuees is marked by the continuous reiteration of racial and ethnic identities to territorial space. The Assam camp, maintained by the Burma Refugee Organisation, listed the following categories of people: Chinese, Iranese, Gurkhas, Armenians, and West Africans. A note below the enumeration of individuals and costs stated the following: ‘number of Gurkhas of full Nepalese nationality inconsiderable and so therefore feel this should all go to Government of Burma’.Footnote ²⁷ In other correspondence, the Government of India was instructed to seek reimbursement for costs associated with Chinese and Iranian nationals from the governments of China and Iran.

Arrival at a camp such as this one at Assam thus implicated individuals in a practice of racialized territorialization, even if the territory to which one was being ascribed did not exist as a nation-state (that is, West Africa), or if one's presence required acknowledgement of the arbitrariness of such allocations (such as, the category of Gurkhas). In the case of Chinese who entered India by land and were resident in this camp at Assam, once they were categorized in this manner, further records do not exist that indicate any effort was made to identify individualized migration trajectories or places of identification. It should be noted that individuals identified as Chinese at the Assam camp generally came to India directly overland from Burma. But, at least based on records produced by the refugee and evacuee camps, whether or not any of the individuals had personal or family ties to China in their lifetimes remains unknown because it was never considered an issue in either categorization or billing. That is, the 394 Chinese evacuees who arrived in 1943–44 were added to the 72 evacuees who arrived in 1944–45 and the additional two evacuees who arrived in 1945–46, for an allocated amount of Rs. 83,988 to be billed to the government of China. Negotiations for these payments could be protracted but what is of interest for the purposes of this article is that governments generally accepted the racial logic underpinning the financial obligations associated with evacuees. In other words, they paid the bills.Footnote ²⁸

For the Chinese government, the notion of an extended familial connection strengthened by financial contributions was integral to the structure of the Guomindang, the establishment of the Republic of China, overseas Chinese bureaus, and the continual process of articulation of their interconnection. As such, the racial logic of refugee economics resonated with other contemporary practices. Neither representatives of the Chinese state nor those involved in the functioning of evacuee camps along the India-Burma border were troubled by the norms of nationality that emerged out of these specific practices. Yet, even as evacuees and refugees assumed specific relations of interiority and exteriority to emerging territorial units, the everyday lives of Chinese moving across the Burma-China-India borders in the 1940s made these relations ones of constant articulation and rearticulation. Individuals and groups participated in producing divergent discursive, institutional, and personal notions of ‘home’ and ‘return’. Yet, a naturalized logic of racial territorialization underpinned the broader framework through which forced migration and return was understood.

Refugees and return: the case of Xiamen

A return to Xiamen now allows us to consider additional cases of apparently divergent understandings of return which allow further analysis of how racial logic associated with nation-state boundaries assumed normative hegemonic status. We can identify at least two expressions of return operating in Xiamen with respect to Burma Chinese in Xiamen in the 1940s. On the one hand, some who identified as Chinese sought the assistance of international refugee organizations in Xiamen to return to Burma. On the other hand, the notion of Burma Chinese returning to China comes into circulation.Footnote ²⁹ The latter is the migration trajectory embodied by Chen Zun and those who identify with Burma Returned Overseas Chinese as a category of identity and who, four decades later, are associated with Burma Returned Overseas Chinese as an institutionalized group. Significantly, the divergent trajectories of return, with one seeing Burma as the place of return, and the other, China as the place of return, share the broader racial logic articulated from other locations, as examined in the previous sections of this article.

The correspondence in 1947–48 between the Far East, Amoy Sub-Office of the UN International Refugee Organization, the Xiamen Mayor's Office, and the Overseas Affairs Office in Amoy provides another angle from which we can examine how Burmese, Chinese, Overseas, and Return acquired meaning in relation to each other, and to practices of wartime migration. It also allows us to see how the racial logic operating in British colonial offices and ‘on-the-ground’ at Assam and the Yunnan-Burma border, finds similar expression in another context that involves distinct bureaucratic units. Correspondence between the Overseas Chinese offices of the Republic of China, UN International Refugee Organization branch offices, and the local Xiamen government in 1947 is preoccupied with three issues: first, producing lists of Burmese-Chinese refugees in Xiamen; second, establishing and enforcing institutional parameters for provision of aid to these refugees; third, maintaining accurate financial records of costs associated with services for these refugees. Informed by the preceding analysis of moments of bureaucratization of forced migration, we can also consider the extent to which, in this correspondence, the reterritorialization of those identified as Chinese within the borders of the Republic of China created a discursive framework that constituted ‘Chinese’ as mutually exclusive from evacuees and/or refugees. The first section of this article argued that this type of logic made the existence of a Chinese evacuee camp in Bhamo illegible. Yet, Chinese refugees and evacuees did exist in camps on the Indian border (as discussed in the second part of this article) and within Chinese cities such as Xiamen.

Importantly, the physical existence of refugees did not radically challenge the racial logic traced out in the first and second parts of this article. Rather, their existence occasioned a refining of this logic. In Xiamen, Commissioner Lu Ching Hsien of the local Overseas Affairs Office corresponded regularly with the International Refugee Organization in 1947–48. This included submitting a master roll of Burma Chinese (and supplementary lists of names, as necessary) in order to expedite aid to this group of people.Footnote ³⁰ Requests included medical supplies, food, and clothing for the cold weather. The source of aid and the question of who would make the provisions available demonstrate the ways in which bureaucratic jurisdiction created specific relationships between Burma Chinese, overseas, refugees, and return.

With access to a relief fund of 0.5 billion yuan for the approximately 2,000 Burma Chinese awaiting return to Burma, the Amoy Overseas Affairs Office became the main point of contact between Burma Chinese and other institutions.Footnote ³¹ It was the office to which individual Chinese and their families appealed for aid, particularly when they believed they had been mistreated by the government or by the Japanese or British during the course of the war. Why relief provided to this group would fall to the Overseas Affairs Office rather than to the UN International Refugee Organization points to the ways in which race and ethnicity, territory, and government structures are mapped onto each other. By making this group the responsibility of the Overseas Affairs Office, the bureaucratic order simultaneously placed Burma Chinese under the jurisdiction of the government of the Republic of China, while making this jurisdiction contingent on places of residence outside the borders of the Republic of China. This jurisdictional authority, interestingly, rests upon racial territorialization of nation-states in ways that naturalize affiliations forged through deterritorialized lives. These are processes further complicated by the involvement of international organizations in regulating and documenting wartime migration and return.

All efforts at the repatriation of Burma Chinese in Xiamen required coordination with the UN International Refugee Organization's branch office in Amoy. This arrangement indicates the limits of the Overseas Affairs Office to regulate and facilitate cross-border movement. Moreover, the individuals and families in question were clearly enumerated in lists of evacuees and refugees through a system that authorized their bona fide claims processed by a representative of the International Refugee Organization sent from Burma on behalf of the Organization.Footnote ³² Yet, the Amoy branch office of the UN International Refugee Organization made it clear to the Overseas Affairs Office that it was not the responsibility of the UN International Refugee Organization to take care of these refugees when they were in China. It was only because of the specifics of the situation that the UN International Refugee Organization would be offering aid.Footnote ³³

The jurisdictional arrangements constantly reiterated in the provision of aid for Burma Chinese while resident in Xiamen demonstrate the racial territorialization of those Burma Chinese who were recognized as being displaced from home. They were the responsibility of the Chinese state, not international organizations. Moreover, despite the availability of what appears to be a large sum of money, the high rate of inflation in the late 1940s required the Overseas Affairs Office to make constant requests for support. In these requests, the multi-regional and transnational dimensions of the racial logic appear. As commissioner of the Overseas Affairs Office in Xiamen, Lu Ching Hsien requested aid for medical supplies for Burma Chinese from the Zhangzhou Overseas Chinese Hospital（漳州華僑醫院) and the Fujian Provincial Health Service.Footnote ³⁴ Lu Ching Hsien sought assistance from the main Chinese Overseas Affairs Commission to send a request for aid to the United States China Relief Organisation, while he also personally penned a request.Footnote ³⁵ Finally, Lu Ching Hsien received appeals from the Overseas Chinese newspaper publisher and president, Yang Wenrong (楊文榮), for aid, explaining that this would be of benefit to Burma Chinese communities.Footnote ³⁶ Each of these requests iterates affinity through racial and ethnic identity. In each case, the identity of (overseas) Chinese is given priority over that of Burma as a place of home. The inscription of Burma Chinese into the broader category of huaqiao (overseas Chinese) deterritorialized Chineseness by privileging Chineseness as ethnic or racial marking. At the same time, wartime forced migration and the experiences of refugees and evacuees located huaqiao within institutional structures and on-the-ground practices that conflated racial and ethnic categories with territorial units, such as China, Burma, and India. The tension between deterritorialized existence and racial territorial logic thus sits at the heart of naming ‘return’ of/for Burma Chinese.

This tension is evident in an unexplained trace in the bureaucratic archive of the Overseas Affairs Office. In addition to letters for assistance discussed above, the Overseas Affairs Office requested that the Commission for Aid to Burma Returned Overseas Chinese (緬甸歸僑復原協助委員會) forward details of the needs of the Overseas Affairs Office to the UN Xiamen office. The naming of the Commission suggests a project-specific mandate aimed at an identifiable sub-group of returned overseas Chinese—those who arrived in China from Burma. The separation between the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and the Commission for Aid to Burma Returned Overseas Chinese is unclear, however. In some correspondence the Overseas Chinese Affairs office used the stationery of the Commission for Aid to Burma Returned Overseas.Footnote ³⁷ This indicates the possibility of shared office space, and perhaps staff as well. The letterhead anomaly draws our attention to the difficulty of maintaining (or perhaps even establishing) a bureaucratic distinction between overseas affairs and those of returned Chinese. That is because, in practice, once present in China, those categorized as overseas Chinese were further categorized as ‘returned’, thus binding into a single category Burma Returned Overseas Chinese. Here again, the racial logic of territorialization is at work, even as the main purpose of the Overseas Affairs Office with respect to Burma Chinese, at this historical moment, was to provide aid to individuals while they awaited passage to Burma and to facilitate this return to homes outside of the borders of China.