VALKRYIE
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Oct 10th 2015 | QIAOGANG, GUANGXI PROVINCE
IN A restaurant in Qiaogang, a town in the southern province of Guangxi, a large poster of Mao Zedong—entitled “Red Sun”—hangs below one of a Vietnamese island where Wu Guangsui, the restaurant’s owner, was born. He fled to China by boat with his family in 1978 when relations between the once-friendly neighbours soured—resulting, the following year, in a brief but bloody war. Mr Wu (pictured), like some 300,000 other Vietnamese who sought refuge in China at the time, feared persecution in his home country for being a member of China’s ethnic majority.
These refugees are among the very few outsiders who have legally settled in China. Then impoverished, China is now the world’s second-largest economy and aspires to be a global power. Its working-age population is shrinking, yet it remains stubbornly reluctant to accept new entrants; thousands fleeing persecution or conflict in North Korea or Myanmar in recent years have faced deportation by the Chinese authorities. Those sent back to North Korea have often been imprisoned and sometimes executed on their return.
It was different with the Vietnamese. At the height of the exodus, 100,000 people entered China through the border town of Dongxing in Guangxi—ten times the local population (see map). Government buildings, homes and schools were emptied to shelter them. They were later settled in six provinces. In 2006 António Guterres, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, described this as “one of the most successful integration programmes in the world”.
The government gave the new arrivals housing and jobs, many of them in state-run farms or factories set up especially for the Vietnamese. Mr Wu was sent to fish in Qiaogang, which means “overseas Chinese port”. It was built as a new village for immigrants. Within a decade many of the Vietnamese had been issued with identity cards and the household-registration documents that entitle holders to government-subsidised education and welfare. Some were given Chinese passports. Most now have full rights as Chinese citizens. The government, however, still classifies them as refugees. It may believe that this will discourage other would-be migrants who are thinking of fleeing to China from believing they will enjoy the same benefits as those who came from Vietnam.
Even the Vietnamese have had difficulties. Many are poorer than Chinese-born locals whose command of Mandarin and better contacts in southern China’s factory boomtowns have given them a leg up. Qiaogang is scruffy and decaying compared with the nearby city of Beihai, which has a forest of shiny new buildings. Some 50km (30 miles) inland at Liguang, one of the many “overseas Chinese farms” where Vietnamese were sent to work, former refugees now make up around a third of the population, but virtually all local businesses are Chinese-run; most Vietnamese remain on the land.
That Mr Wu and most of his compatriots already spoke Cantonese, a language commonly spoken in Guangxi, helped their integration. They belonged to the same ethnic-Han group that makes up more than 90% of China’s population. But they are often still treated as outsiders, even though they have lived in China far longer than they did in Vietnam, and consider themselves Chinese. People in Guangxi refer to them—and their China-born children—as huaqiao, or overseas Chinese. When there are conflicts, says Su Chungui, a Vietnamese farmer in Liguang, townsfolk call them “Vietnam ghosts”. In 2013 Mr Su and some compatriots planted cassava on wasteland to supplement their tiny income. But Chinese villagers destroyed the whole crop before harvest-time, says Mr Su: “We are outsiders, so when we argue, we compromise.” The immigrants did not retaliate.
The arrival of the Vietnamese was a turning point for a country that had long been shut off from most of the outside world, and that had experienced only outward flows since the Communists came to power: thousands of ethnic-Korean Chinese even fled to North Korea in the 1960s to escape famine. In 1979 the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, set up an office in Beijing. Three years later China signed the UN’s convention on handling refugees.
Yet China has not yet passed its own laws reflecting the requirements of this treaty. It has no legal definition of a refugee. Aside from the Vietnamese, China has only 583 refugees on its books—most of them from Somalia and Nigeria. This year about 60,000 Burmese poured across the border into China to escape fighting between rebels and government forces. The Chinese government denied UNHCR access to the camps where they were briefly housed. Refugees from North Korea never even get shelter. China calls them “criminals” or “illegal economic migrants”—partly because it remains an ally of North Korea, but also because it fears attracting a lot more of them.
This is less about immediate practicalities: the displacement of around 5m people by an earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008 proved that the government can provide emergency shelter and medical care for large numbers. China worries more about the impact on social stability of a large number of jobless immigrants of different ethnicity from the Han majority. It has little appetite (and cash-strapped local governments even less) for longer-term care. It may need to find one. Should North Korea sink into chaos, the exodus could dwarf the one from Vietnam (though if the regime collapses, many refugees would head to South Korea). China’s only visible preparations so far have been to tighten security along the border.
http://www.economist.com/news/china...many-refugees-vietnam-it-ill-prepared-another
IN A restaurant in Qiaogang, a town in the southern province of Guangxi, a large poster of Mao Zedong—entitled “Red Sun”—hangs below one of a Vietnamese island where Wu Guangsui, the restaurant’s owner, was born. He fled to China by boat with his family in 1978 when relations between the once-friendly neighbours soured—resulting, the following year, in a brief but bloody war. Mr Wu (pictured), like some 300,000 other Vietnamese who sought refuge in China at the time, feared persecution in his home country for being a member of China’s ethnic majority.
These refugees are among the very few outsiders who have legally settled in China. Then impoverished, China is now the world’s second-largest economy and aspires to be a global power. Its working-age population is shrinking, yet it remains stubbornly reluctant to accept new entrants; thousands fleeing persecution or conflict in North Korea or Myanmar in recent years have faced deportation by the Chinese authorities. Those sent back to North Korea have often been imprisoned and sometimes executed on their return.
It was different with the Vietnamese. At the height of the exodus, 100,000 people entered China through the border town of Dongxing in Guangxi—ten times the local population (see map). Government buildings, homes and schools were emptied to shelter them. They were later settled in six provinces. In 2006 António Guterres, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, described this as “one of the most successful integration programmes in the world”.
Even the Vietnamese have had difficulties. Many are poorer than Chinese-born locals whose command of Mandarin and better contacts in southern China’s factory boomtowns have given them a leg up. Qiaogang is scruffy and decaying compared with the nearby city of Beihai, which has a forest of shiny new buildings. Some 50km (30 miles) inland at Liguang, one of the many “overseas Chinese farms” where Vietnamese were sent to work, former refugees now make up around a third of the population, but virtually all local businesses are Chinese-run; most Vietnamese remain on the land.
That Mr Wu and most of his compatriots already spoke Cantonese, a language commonly spoken in Guangxi, helped their integration. They belonged to the same ethnic-Han group that makes up more than 90% of China’s population. But they are often still treated as outsiders, even though they have lived in China far longer than they did in Vietnam, and consider themselves Chinese. People in Guangxi refer to them—and their China-born children—as huaqiao, or overseas Chinese. When there are conflicts, says Su Chungui, a Vietnamese farmer in Liguang, townsfolk call them “Vietnam ghosts”. In 2013 Mr Su and some compatriots planted cassava on wasteland to supplement their tiny income. But Chinese villagers destroyed the whole crop before harvest-time, says Mr Su: “We are outsiders, so when we argue, we compromise.” The immigrants did not retaliate.
The arrival of the Vietnamese was a turning point for a country that had long been shut off from most of the outside world, and that had experienced only outward flows since the Communists came to power: thousands of ethnic-Korean Chinese even fled to North Korea in the 1960s to escape famine. In 1979 the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, set up an office in Beijing. Three years later China signed the UN’s convention on handling refugees.
Yet China has not yet passed its own laws reflecting the requirements of this treaty. It has no legal definition of a refugee. Aside from the Vietnamese, China has only 583 refugees on its books—most of them from Somalia and Nigeria. This year about 60,000 Burmese poured across the border into China to escape fighting between rebels and government forces. The Chinese government denied UNHCR access to the camps where they were briefly housed. Refugees from North Korea never even get shelter. China calls them “criminals” or “illegal economic migrants”—partly because it remains an ally of North Korea, but also because it fears attracting a lot more of them.
This is less about immediate practicalities: the displacement of around 5m people by an earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008 proved that the government can provide emergency shelter and medical care for large numbers. China worries more about the impact on social stability of a large number of jobless immigrants of different ethnicity from the Han majority. It has little appetite (and cash-strapped local governments even less) for longer-term care. It may need to find one. Should North Korea sink into chaos, the exodus could dwarf the one from Vietnam (though if the regime collapses, many refugees would head to South Korea). China’s only visible preparations so far have been to tighten security along the border.
http://www.economist.com/news/china...many-refugees-vietnam-it-ill-prepared-another
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