If 1947 was a watershed year in Canadian history, 1949 was a cataclysmic one for many Chinese migrants and their families. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it was estimated that one-fifth of the 6.4 million people of Guangdong Province belonged to transnational house-holds with ties to Southeast Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere.7 These fami-lies were often categorized as landlords and capitalists and were subjected to intense scrutiny, surveillance, and even violence.8 The uncertainties of life under Communist rule led to the departures of many returnees as well as family members who sought to join relatives already abroad.
From 1949 until the early 1970s, practically the only way for Chinese from Guangdong to come to Canada was through Hong Kong. The British colony had long been the main port of departure in the region, but since Can-ada still recognized the ROC and had no diplomatic offices in the mainland until it formally recognized the PRC in 1970, would-be migrants had to get to Hong Kong to apply for the requisite visas. In doing so, they became part of a mass movement of people across the border. Before 1949, the border be-tween Hong Kong and the mainland was more or less an open one, and people frequently crossed back and forth. The population of Hong Kong swelled from 1.8 million in 1948 to 2.36 million by 1950, a number that would continue to grow in ensuing years as conditions across the border worsened for many (Mark 1146). By 1951, what had been an open border was closed by both sides, although illegal crossings continued across land, river, and sea.
With a humanitarian crisis on its hands, the British colonial government established border controls that limited the number of new arrivals. However, the colonial authorities made a crucial exception for those from neighboring Guangdong Province (the ability to understand and speak local dialects be-came a key way for border guards to separate “local” migrants from those from other provinces). As a result, large-scale migration would continue, in
“legal” as well as “illegal” forms, even after such allowances were revoked.9 In the early 1950s, this influx turned Hong Kong into a pivotal test case for the newly established international refugee regime. It soon became clear that the very meaning of this category, which had been devised with Europe in mind, was uncertain. While Britain had signed the 1951 Convention Re-lating to the Status of Refugees, its provisions did not apply to its overseas territories. With regard to Hong Kong, Britain’s primary concern was to maintain colonial rule, which meant preserving a working relationship with the PRC (Peterson, “To Be or Not to Be” 174). While the colonial government initially referred to new arrivals as refugees, it soon stopped using the word altogether. By claiming that migrants were motivated by economic not pol-itical concerns, the British colonial government absolved itself of any re-sponsibility as outlined in international law and reserved the right to deport arrivals. In this context, the very notion of a “Chinese refugee” indicated the uneasy intersection between migrant practices and postwar forms of state and colonial power.
In 1954, the United Nations High Commission of Refugees commis-sioned a report that sought to determine whether arrivals in Hong Kong were indeed refugees according to the criteria set out by General Assembly Resolu-tion 428; the commission was also tasked with ascertaining their numbers and living conditions. The resulting Hambro Report, named after Edvard Hambro, the commission’s Norwegian chair, estimated there were 285,000 refugees, another 100,000 refugees “sur place,” and another 282,000 Hong Kong–born dependents of refugees (par. 114). As the Hambro Report reveals,
the Hong Kong refugee crisis lay at the crosshairs of the intense rivalry be-tween the PRC and the ROC. Then as now, formal recognition of one auto-matically precluded recognition of the other, which resulted in an unexpected problem: only states that recognized the existence of the PRC could technic-ally recognize the refugees in Hong Kong as such on the grounds that they had left the territories of the PRC and were afraid of returning. However, countries that recognized the ROC, including Canada, could not make the same admission because arrivals in Hong Kong were technically able to seek protection from the ROC although this was practically impossible (Peterson,
“To Be or Not to Be” 174; Hambro par. 127). In the end, the Hambro Report concluded that Chinese refugees did not fit the strict definitions set out by the UN, but “from a broader and humanitarian point of view” they were “de facto refugees” (par. 156). The report ultimately failed to convince other states to agree to large-scale resettlement (an exception was the United States, but even there, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 only set aside five thousand visas for Asian refugees, of which two thousand were reserved for those who had pass-ports issued by the ROC, a comparatively small amount in comparison with the number of displaced people).10 In the end, the majority of migrants re-mained in Hong Kong and eventually were able to normalize their status.
Canada’s subdued response to the refugee crisis was therefore unexcep-tional. In fact, it had no clear policy toward refugees during this period. Even though its officials were involved in drafting the 1951 UN Convention Relat-ing to the Status of Refugees, Canada would not actually sign the convention until 1969. Until the 1970s, refugee policies tended to be ad hoc and subject to geopolitical as well as humanitarian concerns. In the 1950s, Chinese refu-gees were largely ignored even while refurefu-gees from Eastern European coun-tries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia were embraced. Nevertheless, the refugee crisis impacted Chinese activists and their allies in Canada who sought to liberalize immigration laws and often framed their demands in the emergent terms of global human rights. As Laura Madokoro argues, activists insisted that “full membership in Canadian society involved more than legal formalities: it required that Chinese Canadians be able to enjoy the same rights as others, including family reunification” (“Slotting” 34). The legal strategies adopted by these antiracist movements reflected what Stephanie Bangarth has identified as the postwar “evolution” from an earlier focus on
“‘British liberties’ to [a] human rights approach” based on the “growing rec-ognition . . . of the right not to suffer state discrimination.” Activists ap-pealed to the UN charter to argue that immigration restrictions violated the inherent rights of Chinese to establish a normal family life in Canada. For example, in a widely covered Supreme Court case, Leong Hung Hing, an elderly Canadian citizen of Chinese descent, fought to have his son by his second wife admitted even though Canadian law did not recognize po-lygamous arrangements; by the time the court ruled in his favor in 1952,
Leong had already died, prompting the immigration department to refuse admittance to his son on the basis that he had no sponsor in Canada.11
As the plight of those in Hong Kong began to draw worldwide attention, activists in Canada used the crisis to further their political objectives. As Madokoro succinctly puts it, “While states relied on official categories to delineate the legitimate means of movement and therefore restrict migra-tion, migrants and their families saw these same designations as channels of mobility” (“Unwanted Refugees” 49). Wong Foon Sien, a prominent com-munity leader in Vancouver who made a well-publicized trip to Ottawa every year to lobby for changes to immigration policy, pointed out in 1958 that relatives of Chinese in Canada were among those who had fled to Hong Kong. Wong and his allies demanded that Canada follow the lead of the United States in admitting refugees, with the key stipulation that all refugees admitted should be relatives of those already in Canada. However, immigra-tion officials objected to the “blurring” of these categories and cited concerns about Communist infiltration as well as the honesty of applicants as reasons to reject his suggestions (Madokoro, Elusive Refuge 143–144). In response, Wong wrote, “Families of Chinese Canadians who are refugees in Hong Kong may have to return to China where an alien political philosophy and possibly severe punishment or death awaits them” (qtd. in Madokoro, Elusive Refuge 144). These appeals eventually failed: when the Canadian federal gov-ernment finally approved the resettlement of a small number of refugees in 1962, it explicitly ruled out taking in relatives and actually failed to fulfill its quota based on this restrictive criterion (Madokoro, Elusive Refuge 145).
Labels such as “refugee” and “relative” were thus deployed by different states and colonial authorities to manage, facilitate, and often obstruct mi-gration practices. As we have seen, these labels were incongruent with the complex realities of Chinese migration; more importantly, they demonstrate how migration itself was shaped by the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War. The congealing of these categories occurred at a time when this mi-grant lifeworld was increasingly unsustainable on both sides of the Pacific.
In Canada, the transnational migrant family eventually gave way to another unit, the nuclear immigrant family, which was rare before 1947 due to anti-Asian exclusion and sex-segregated migration patterns. The Chinese popula-tion in Canada would reach gender parity by the 1970s. By then, immigrapopula-tion policies had changed to explicitly attract skilled and educated migrants, de-velopments that further favored the consolidation of the immigrant family.