Decades ago, China welcomed refugees
The nation took in hundreds of thousands from Southeast Asia. But door is shut now.
BINCHUAN, China — Nearly four decades ago, Mo Fengyue leaned over the edge of a boat carrying her to China and dumped her Vietnamese identity cards into the river. With a flick of the wrist, Mo sacrificed the land of her birth for an ancestral homeland she’d never known.
“You had to make a choice once you came back, so I became a Chinese citizen,” said Mo, who was 12 when she fled discrimination for her heritage.
Her story is a rare reminder of a time when China opened its borders. In the first three decades of the People’s Republic, through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, leaders welcomed hundreds of thousands escaping persecution and violence in Southeast Asia. Most were ethnic Chinese. Authorities settled them in so-called overseas-Chinese farms and handed out hoes. The government called the population “returnees.” Many never left.
These are China’s forgotten refugees.
Today, China has no refugee resettlement policy or national legislation on asylum. Chinese officials have merely acknowledged the humanitarian crisis in neighboring Myanmar and opted not to shelter Syrians escaping a multi-year war. But it wasn’t always that way.
Mo settled on Taihe farm in 1978, now a scattering of brick houses and grapevines amid the green terraced hills of southern China’s Yunnan province. These faded buildings and dirt roads reveal a piece of history largely overlooked — one that offers insight into China’s diaspora and its current rationale toward refugees amid the world’s worst forced migration in decades.
“The government wanted to bring us back,” said Sai Jie, 59, a neighbor of Mo’s. “It’s different.”
Just off Binchuan’s main road, Sai’s brother runs an outdoor cafe where customers sit in squat, blue plastic chairs. The family serves coffee with sweetened condensed milk and a slice of Vietnam. A mural spread across the far wall reveals the light blues and gray shadows of Vietnam’s most famous landmark, Halong Bay.
Sai was 20 when she left northern Vietnam in 1978 and settled on the farm. It was here she met her husband, who was born in Indonesia and had arrived almost two decades earlier. Sai, who now oversees the production of peppery chicken soup at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, does not consider herself a refugee.
She is, she said, a returning Chinese.
Nearly 300,000 people from Vietnam alone fled to China’s southern provinces around the late 1970s, as the countries turned on each other in a brief border war. Rather than establish temporary refugee camps, the government opted to place them on farms. Some, like Sai, received hukou, an essential household registration that allows people to work and attend school. She now receives a monthly pension of about $300.
Taihe and 83 other farms are dotted across China’s southern provinces. Many original inhabitants moved abroad or died, and the second generation married locals and further scattered. There is no definitive account of the total number who settled on these plots of land, or how many remain. But out of about 2,700 people at Taihe, just over half are returnee-refugees and their descendants.
Many in Dali — a scenic lakeside town an hour-anda-half drive southwest — have never even heard of the farms.
“China did a pretty good job with refugee resettlement,” said Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, who has studied overseas-Chinese farms. They “did go through hardships, but they received care packages, and in terms of subsistence material the government gave it to them … and they have assimilated into Chinese society.”
China ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and a subsequent treaty known as the 1967 Protocol. But the country lacks its own method for assessing asylum claims and restricts the United Nations refugee agency’s access to some populations.
Many Vietnamese are technically still recorded as refugees. Fewer than 800 other displaced people were living in the country as of 2015, mainly from Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq and Liberia, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Chinese officials contend they help people through other means, namely humanitarian assistance and promotion of peace talks.
“When our neighbors have difficulties, we should offer a hand rather than just tighten our fences,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in January. He then pledged $29 million in aid to Syrian refugees. Officials also recently sent 2,000 tents and 3,000 blankets as part of a relief package for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.
But hosting them is another matter. China has a long-standing policy of noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and the acceptance of those fleeing conflict is often perceived as taking sides.
Welcoming refugees is also not a particularly palatable idea to many in the world’s most populous nation, which still struggles with poverty and where Islam is increasingly equated with religious terrorism.
“Other ethnicities would only create instability,” said Zhang Xiaolong, 26, a driver who grew up near the farms. “We’ll give out humanitarian aid but we don’t want to accept refugees. We have our own issues.”
So what led China to make an exception?
The overseas-Chinese farms speak less to a shifting refugee policy than to an entrenched sense of Chinese identity bolstered by the state.
Mo was a city girl from Haiphong, Vietnam, when she tossed her past into the river.
It was tough at first. She despised manual labor. But soon after she arrived, Maoera collectivization gave way to reform, bringing a more open economy and individualized work. She started a Vietnamese restaurant.
Mo said she was always welcomed. But researchers say tensions built with locals envious of the privileges granted overseas Chinese, who received financial assistance and preferential status to attend universities.
Not everyone benefited. Many of the farms lost money in the early 2000s, and living standards plunged. Vietnamese who can’t prove their ethnic ties have found themselves unable to gain citizenship, according to the Global Times newspaper.
In 2004, then-President Hu Jintao vowed to help develop the farms and officials cast them largely as financial opportunities. Some farms now function as manufacturing zones or sugar cane plantations. Others market themselves as destinations for Chinese tourists looking to experience Southeast Asia without leaving the country. Their role, like the people inside them, has changed.
“These farms are going to be a disappearing relic,” Ho, the professor, said. “It no longer has that historical value attached to it.”
Deng Liqun, Mo’s daughter, sees them as something more. A 29-year-old entrepreneur, she is determined to turn her Taihe farm’s open-air restaurant into a premier dining location.
“I want to keep my Vietnamese and Chinese dual heritage,” she said. “It’s our unique identity.”
When her 5-year-old daughter came home from school, Deng scooped her up, burying her in kisses and the tones of Vietnamese.