“Continuities in Forced Migration in Europe and Asia, 1900-1955” (Double Panel) - Part 2: “Managing and Experiencing Asian Displacement”

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E Global History and Decoloniality

"Continuities in Forced Migration in Europe and Asia, 1900-1955" (Double Panel) - Part 2: "Managing and Experiencing Asian Displacement"

Event Details

Date

VI. Friday, 12th September, 11:00-13:00
Location
K1040
Theme
E Global History and Decoloniality

Convenor

Kerstin von Lingen (University of Vienna)

Chair

Raphaela Bollwein (University of Vienna)

Commentator

Kerstin von Lingen (University of Vienna)

Panelists

Lena Christoph (University of Vienna)
Vivian Kong (University of Bristol)
Yuexin Rachel Lin (University of Leeds)
Jiayi Tao (University of Vienna)

Papers

Lena Christoph

Crafting Identities in Exile. Russian Displaced Persons Navigating Resettlement in Post-WWII Asia

Crafting Identities in Exile. Russian Displaced Persons Navigating Resettlement in Post-WWII Asia

The communist triumph in China in late 1948 prompted many anti-communists as well as foreign nationals to flee the country. Amongst them was a group of Russians who had resided in China as exiles since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. With the help of the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) in Shanghai, 5,500 Russian displaced persons (DP) were evacuated to a camp on the small island of Tubabao in the Philippines in early 1949. Over the next four years, the IRO engaged in the challenging effort to find new homes for these refugees, who were resettled in Australia, United States, Latin American countries, and to a lesser extent, Europe. In contrast to other DP camps, the Tubabao camp largely consisted of a pre-selected group of refugees. While a few had been chosen by the IRO, the majority was selected by the Russian Emigrants’ Association (REA) in Shanghai. As existing scholarship has alluded to, REA did not only engage in diplomatic efforts but played a decisive role in the resettlement process. This paper engages with the identity politics employed by REA and other Russian representatives in their efforts to navigate complex migration policies and resettlement regimes. I will highlight the different ways the DP representatives forged a particular image of a morally upright, anti-communist, and economically independent immigrant to enhance their chances of resettlement. This representation, as I will show, was only possible through the exclusion and marginalisation of DPs who did not fit into the image and identity promoted by the REA.
Vivian Kong

Britishness at the Test of War: Hong Kong Refugees in WWII China

Britishness at the Test of War: Hong Kong Refugees in WWII China

After the fall of Hong Kong on 25 December 1941, Hong Kong was no longer British but a Japanese occupied territory until the end of World War II. Deteriorating living conditions prompted many British subjects to flee the city to neighboring regions. The most popular destinations were unoccupied China and the Portuguese enclave of Macau, which remained neutral during the war. In either case, these displaced British subjects were no longer on British land. Yet, they still engaged actively with the British state, as the subject of aid prompted these colonial subjects to interact with British authorities more than ever. This paper draws specifically on the interactions that two groups of Hong Kong refugees made with the British state during World War II – the Portuguese residents who sought refuge in Macau, and the ethnic Chinese students studying at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Existing scholarship has highlighted how World War II played a crucial role in shaping British identities. On one hand, it gave multiracial Britons, at ‘Home’ or abroad, a common purpose to act as part of a national community. On the other, the Japanese occupation of British Asia challenged British prestige at an unprecedented scale, by shattering the notion of British supremacy and disrupting racial hierarchies in the region. This paper takes our attention to consider how wartime assistance provided by the British state (or the lack thereof) determined the extent to which these subjects would identify with Britishness. Whilst the support that HKU students received encouraged them to identify more strongly with Britishness, the discriminations that Hong Kong-Portuguese refugees received from the British state made them question their engagement with Britishness altogether. It argues that the War magnified the unfairness of British imperialism and prompted multiracial Britons to rethink how they define British identities.
Yuexin Rachel Lin

“Repaying Hatred with Kindness”: The Sino-Russian Refugee Crisis, 1916-1922

“Repaying Hatred with Kindness”: The Sino-Russian Refugee Crisis, 1916-1922

At the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921-1922, 150,000 Russian refugees fled to China. This wave of forced migration involved the length of the Sino-Russian frontier, from Xinjiang to the Pacific coast. Not all who escaped were civilians; many were ‘refugee warriors’ from White armies who wished to retain their weapons, regroup in Chinese territory and eventually resume the fight against the Bolsheviks. A large proportion of the emigration in Xinjiang were Turkic Muslims. The resulting humanitarian crisis threatened to destabilise the security and ethno-politics of the frontier. Recent scholarship has examined the activities of Russian émigrés in China, particularly those in Manchuria and Shanghai, but far less is known about the Chinese approach to refugees. This paper examines the attitudes and discourses informing China’s reception of refugees. It argues that Chinese officials, both on the frontier and in Beijing, engaged extensively with humanitarian norms and language when dealing with Russian refugees. Such a policy was, in turn, closely linked to the reframing of Chinese identity as ‘civilised’ and modern, capable of participating as an equal in the nascent refugee regime emerging under the League of Nations. These attitudes already characterised the approach to Turkic Muslim refugees from the 1916 Central Asian Uprising. They extended even to ‘refugee warriors’ – Semenov, Kalmykov, Annenkov and Bakich – whose behaviour towards the Chinese diaspora did not endear them to border officials. In such cases Chinese officials attempted to ‘repay hatred with kindness’, with an eye to bolstering China’s international humanitarian image.
Jiayi Tao

Aliens “at Home”: Overseas Chinese Refugees in South China, 1942-1947

Aliens “at Home”: Overseas Chinese Refugees in South China, 1942-1947

This paper examines how the experience of displacement during World War II shaped the collective identity of overseas Chinese who had pre-war residence in British Asia. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, millions of overseas Chinese fled the Japanese advance and sought refuge in Nationalist-controlled south China. On return to the native villages which they had ancestral links, these refugees often found themselves aliens ‘at home’. This feeling of being out of place was experienced in everyday life, shaped both by the response of the weak Nationalist government to the influx of refugees and by the resilience of refugees themselves (i.e., their self-help pattern). After the war’s end, many struggled to return and never thought of settling in south China. While historians have stressed the centrality of overseas Chinese communities – those Chinese migrants who resided in today’s Southeast Asia – to the rise of Chinese nationalism during the early twentieth century, the Sino-Japanese conflict from 1931 shifted the stage for negotiating ‘Chineseness’ from the periphery to the center, i.e., south China. Although current research has illustrated overseas Chinese leaders’ increasing disappointment with the Nationalist government during wartime, we still have limited knowledge of to what extent the War shattered old meanings and added new ones to the concept of being Chinese among this forced migrant community. This paper argues that the exclusiveness of Chineseness is integral to our understanding of how the War shaped Chinese nationalism.

Abstract

The late 1940s and 1950s brought the construction of resettlement regimes on a global scale. Earlier scholarship on displacement and resettlement has treated post-war experiences in Europe (the aftermath of the Holocaust) and in Asia (the aftermath of Japan’s surrender) as separate domains. This double panel uses a different approach showing the interconnections between the European and the Asian spheres, their longue durée implications, and the trajectories of migrants moving on to Australia and the Americas. This double panel examines the fluidity and complexity of identity – tested, formed, and dissolved by forced migration – through the lens of displacement after conflicts in Europe and Asia. Questions relating to end of empire, forced migration, humanitarian responses, and migrant communities’ strategies play a crucial role Panel 2: Managing and experiencing Asian displacement While historians have illustrated how wars and revolutions in early to mid-twentieth-century Asia shaped today’s political borders and national memories, still much has been left out. The papers of this panel contribute to a recent scholarly trend which brings refugees to the centre of history. Rejecting a Euro-centric approach, the papers seek to understand the fluidity and complexity of identity – tested, formed, and dissolved by forced migration – through the lens of Asian displacement. The cases examined by the panelists – the refugee crisis following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its long aftermath, and overseas Chinese and Portuguese residents displaced by the Pacific War of 1941 from British Asia – are marginalised, overlooked, or even excluded from national/imperial histories, but these cases allow us to rethink the challenges as well as opportunities brought by forced migration. While Vivian Kong, Lena Christoph, and Jiayi Tao’s papers focus on the agency of refugees in negotiation with international organisations, government agencies, and other refugee groups, Rachel Lin and Tao’s work further draws our attention to Chinese official responses to refugee crises, in this way to highlight non-Western actors in forming humanitarian responses. Moreover, all the papers of this panel intentionally situate the cases within a longue durée perspective of Asian displacement since the 1910s. Forced migration was not a new phenomenon in WWII Asia; earlier humanitarian practices and migration patterns left imprints in later decades of war and revolution. All in all, this panel uses Asian cases to stress that there is much more we can learn by transcending national histories.