ARCI, the Far East Refugee Program, and the US Response to Hong
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“Thunder without Rain” ARCI, the Far East Refugee Program, and the U.S. Response to Hong Kong Refugees ✣ Meredith Oyen On 9 January 1955, Paul Liu and his wife Priscilla, along with their two children, became the first Chinese refugees to be admitted to the United States under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Paul was not a stranger to American life; he had lived in Ohio in the 1940s, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ohio State University. In 1946, he decided to return home to Shanghai. There he met Priscilla, but two years in a chaotic country torn apart by civil war were more than enough for the young couple, and they fled to Taiwan. Though not engulfed in war, Taiwan was also in disarray, unwillingly absorbing thousands of Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers and officials as the leader of the KMT and the Republic of China (ROC), Chiang Kai-shek, relocated his government to the island. By October 1949, Chiang and the KMT had lost the war and were left to create some semblance of order and a functioning economy on an island that was deeply worried about Communist infiltration. Seeing few prospects, Paul and Pricilla joined thousands of Chinese fleeing to Hong Kong. Although the route for Paul and Priscilla to Hong Kong was unusual among Chinese refugees, their situation was not. As the civil war drew to a close, the British colony off Guangdong Province swelled with increasing numbers of migrants until the population of the city had more than doubled in size. Some were members of the KMT government who had missed the first wave of evacuations to Taiwan but hoped to get there eventually; these people included many members of the ROC’s army and police forces. Others were anti-Communists unwilling to wait to experience life under Chairman Mao Zedong’s newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China (PRC). Inevitably, some were migrants who saw new economic opportunities in Hong Kong and took advantage of the traditionally porous border to establish themselves in the colony. In the 1950s, the number of new and not-yet-integrated arrivals swelled, posing a problem of international scope. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall 2014, pp. 189–221, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00520 C 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 189 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00520 by guest on 27 September 2021 Oyen Elsewhere in the world, the postwar recovery combined with the emerging Cold War had created other crises of refugees or displaced persons. The United Nations (UN), the United States (both through the UN and via its own policies), other traditional countries of immigration, the countries of first asylum, and non-governmental organizations all stepped up to offer assistance, including immediate charity, long-term projects to facilitate integration, and programs to resettle the migrants and refugees elsewhere. The situation in Hong Kong proved to be a fundamentally different problem from the one in Europe for all of these parties, not least the U.S. government. Long accused of caring more for Europeans than about the plight of oppressed or struggling Asians, officials in Harry S. Truman’s administration attempted to formulate a policy for Hong Kong that would promote U.S. interests—U.S. prestige and image in the emerging Cold War and the effort to prevent the newly “Red” Chinese state from spreading Communism further—but at little cost to the American public. Efforts to achieve this goal led to a period of unprecedented cooperation with non-governmental organizations in Asia, but also a good deal of contention. This history of refugee movements and refugee policy has become a subject of increasing interest in scholarship on the Cold War and the relationship between transnational migration and international relations. At the heart of several recent works is the politicization of what is, essentially, a local problem. The Cold War transformed the historically common movement of people between Hong Kong and Guangdong Province into a subject of international attention and created a free world/Communist world debate on who should be considered a refugee.1 Other studies have raised the issue of private voluntary organizations (PVOs) in postwar refugee work in Europe and Hong Kong, noting the extent to which Cold War politics trumped humanitarian concerns in the development of an international response to migration problems, as well as studying how U.S.-based PVOs reflected and interpreted larger U.S. foreign policy goals.2 This work builds on these findings, revealing the bureaucratic 1. Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Chi-Kwan Mark, “The ‘Problem of People’: British Colonials, Cold War Powers, and the Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong, 1949–62,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 6 (2007), pp. 1145–1181; and Michael G. Davis, “Impetus for Immigration Reform: Asian Refugees and the Cold War,” Journal of American–East Asian Relations,Vol.7,No.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1998), pp. 127–156. 2. Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Toward a New International Refugee Regime in the Early Postwar Era (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1991); Grace Ai-Ling Chou, “Cultural Education as Containment of Communism: The Ambivalent Position of American PVOs in Hong Kong in the 1950s,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 2010), pp. 3–28; and Rachel M. McCleary, 190 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00520 by guest on 27 September 2021 “Thunder without Rain” impetus for the close ties between the U.S. government and one PVO in 1950s Hong Kong. The focus of this article is people like the Liu family: Chinese refugees in Hong Kong who relocated via the combined efforts of the U.S. Refugee Relief Program (RRP) and a PVO called Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, Inc. (ARCI). Studying this cooperation highlights the extent to which policy toward refugees in Asia was an important element in U.S. foreign policy, as well as demonstrating how the changing relationship of the U.S. State Department and PVOs affected refugee policy. Beyond their shared love for acronyms, ARCI and the RRP spent the 1950s engaged in a project of shared mythmaking. ARCI worked to bolster the position of the United States as engaged in and concerned for Asia, and the U.S. government supported ARCI long past the point when the interest and support of private citizens had faded. Over the course of the decade, ARCI served a useful purpose for U.S. government projects as both an agent with specialized knowledge and a scapegoat when plans went awry. The article first discusses the nature of the Hong Kong refugee problem and the international response. It then reviews the origins and work of ARCI. It then turns to the history of cooperation between State Department offi- cials and the organization, before finally offering conclusions about the U.S. government-PVO relationship vis-a-visHongKong.` Aiding Refugees in the Early Cold War In early 1949, a trickle of migrants entered the British crown colony of Hong Kong. By late 1950, the trickle had become a deluge. The new population topped 2.1 million people—500,000 more people than had ever lived in the colony, and 1.3 million more than the population at the end of the Second World War six years prior.3 With or without the refugees, the Hong Kong economy would have been struggling, hindered by the effects of the U.S.-led economic boycott against the PRC and by Britain’s struggle with postwar recovery. The combination of these factors and the population increase meant that jobs were in short supply. The city also lacked sufficient housing facilities, Global Compassion: Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3. Edvard Hambro, The Problem of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong (Leyden, Netherlands: A. W. Sijthoff, 1955). 191 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00520 by guest on 27 September 2021 Oyen schools, and hospitals to support the rapid growth in residents.4 Some arrivals had relatives or friends who helped them find work in the city, but most people arrived with few plans and no local contacts. The British government’s limited resources made aggressive economic policies difficult, and it was perpetually torn between the humanitarian drive to provide food and shelter and a fear that wide-scale relief programs would draw in even more refugees. The UK created limited food programs in the ad- hoc squatter camps that sprang up in the New Territories, but most newcomers had no access to these programs, and the food provided was often rice porridge mixed with whatever was available—often including unplanned extras like pebbles or rat droppings.5 Although Hong Kong’s governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and local officials knew the meal programs served only a minority of those in the camps, strict regulations were in place against cooking fires or stoves—on more than one occasion fast-moving fires swept through the camps and destroyed large swaths of homes. This threat was increased because the camps themselves consisted of makeshift shelters, which Grantham described as being “made of beaten-out kerosene tins, old pieces of discarded match- boarding or old sacking .... From a distance they looked quite picturesque, especially those on the hill-sides, with their jumble of buildings. A visit to them, however, soon dispelled sentimentality and revealed the full horror of their squalor.”6 No one doubted that many of the new arrivals to Hong Kong faced questions of basic survival, but debate continued about how to alleviate their plight.