chinese residents of burma as refugees, evacuees, and returnees

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Chinese Residents of Burma as Refugees,Evacuees, and Returnees: The shared racial logicof territorialization in the regulation of wartimemigration

TINA MAI CHEN

Modern Asian Studies / FirstView Article / November 2014, pp 1 - 24DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X14000353, Published online: 20 November 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X14000353

How to cite this article:TINA MAI CHEN Chinese Residents of Burma as Refugees, Evacuees, andReturnees: The shared racial logic of territorialization in the regulation of wartimemigration. Modern Asian Studies, Available on CJO 2014 doi:10.1017/S0026749X14000353

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FORUM ARTICLE

Chinese Residents of Burma as Refugees,Evacuees, and Returnees: The shared raciallogic of territorialization in the regulation of

wartime migration∗

TINA M AI CHEN

Department of History, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, CanadaEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansionacross Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ andnotions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement acrossChinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese.Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations torefer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we canlearn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about thewartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic ofterritorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concernedwith the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iterationand practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic withrespect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding howthe work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic isimportant because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundationalto the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War worldorder.

∗ Research for this article is supported by the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council, Canada. Many thanks to Yilang Feng for his work as a researchassistant on the project.

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2 T I N A M A I C H E N

Introduction

On 9 September 2012 Chen Zun (��)1 posted on his personal blogthe verses he had composed earlier in the summer to mark 32 yearsof the Xiamen Burma Returned Overseas Chinese Association.2 Withnostalgic phrasing he recalled the tastes and sounds of Myanmar,including a specific reference to the Burmese language. Chen Zun’sother posts include a poem uploaded on 29 August 2012 entitled‘A New Era of Chinese People’ (��). In this poemChen reflects on the relationship between foreigners and foreignness,verbal expression, and Chineseness.3 He juxtaposes foreign dress andEnglish-language colloquial phrases (‘yes, all right’) with continueduse of Chinese as the language of frank expression. When I readthe poem, it took on the cadences of Mandarin because Mandarinis the only Chinese language with which I have any facility. Havingused Mandarin as the language of communication when I met othersassociated with the Xiamen Burma Returned Overseas Chinese in thesummer of 2011, I assume this is the language and dialect used in thecomposition of the poems.

The question of language and Chineseness is immediatelycomplicated by Chen Zun’s nostalgic engagement with the Burmeselanguage in the first poem, and in the joy expressed by members of theXiamen Burma Returned Overseas Chinese Association when, as partof their regular meetings, they sing Burmese songs interspersed withChinese songs. The singing enacts and celebrates a linguistic affinitythat members of the Association connect with a space of previousresidence, namely, Rangoon and Burma. These social interactionsconjoin with the name of the organization to prioritize mutualidentification with migration trajectories from Burma to China, ethnicidentity (that is, Chineseness), and languages spoken. One of the

1 For this article, names are romanized through Mandarin pronunciation, unlessindividuals have indicated another dialect. Place names reflect the internationallyaccepted name at the historical moment under discussion, so that�� (Miandian) isreferred to as Burma rather than Myanmar.

2� � (Chen Zun), ‘� � � � � �1980� � � � � � � �32� �� ,� � � � � �’ (Commemorating 32 Years of the XiamenBurma Returned Overseas Chinese) � 2012.07.18 ��. http://blog.163.com/czf_xm/blog/static/180774159201281010238154/, [accessed 9 September2014].

3�� (Chen Zun), ‘��’ (A New Era for Chinese People),http://blog.163.com/czf_xm/blog/static/180774159201281010238154/, [accessed9 September 2014].

http://blog.163.com/czf_xm/blog/static/180774159201281010238154/





R A C I A L L O G I C O F T E R R I T O R I A L I Z A T I O N 3

notable aspects of the affinity forged through language and space isthat it rests upon eliding or rendering secondary various other waysin which geographical terrain has informed Chineseness through themapping of space to politics. This includes the long history of conflictbetween the Guomindang and Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan/theRepublic of China and the People’s Republic of China.

The migration routes of Burma Returned Overseas Chineseactive in Xiamen and other local organizations in the People’sRepublic of China, however, are intertwined with historical events inwhich political affiliation and support figured prominently. Generallyspeaking, those who left Burma for China in the 1940s wereprimarily associated with the Guomindang, while those who left inthe 1960s were affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. In thecontemporary meetings of the Xiamen Burma Returned OverseasChinese, however, Burmese establishes a linguistic affinity, andhas a significant place in their personal and collective migrationtrajectories—a place beyond the nation-state boundaries of thePeople’s Republic of China and the Republic of China and associatedpolitical divisions. The linguistic affinity that signals past residence inBurma prioritizes territorial identification over political affiliation. Inthis way, language enacts an elision of divergent political associations.

Burmese language also fosters an imagined community of BurmaChinese which includes the Burma Returned Overseas Chinese inXiamen as well as the multi-generational Chinese families still livingin Yangon.4 For this latter group, Burmese rather than Chinese isthe language of everyday expression. The repressive anti-Chinesepolicies of 1960s Burma and changes in the education system generallyresulted in a loss of Chinese language use and the adoption of Burmesenames for a large majority of those living in Yangon with ancestry insouthern China. Depending on age and educational experience, theprimary languages of those Chinese currently residing in Yangon areBurmese and English, with some of the older generation retainingHokkien.

Attention to language as constitutive of networks and identitiesis central to research on Chinese migration and overseas Chinese.

4 The Xiamen Burma Returned Overseas Association was formed in 1980 and isthus a product of the post-Mao period, although other guiqiao (returned overseasChinese) organizations and the terminology have a longer history, dating from the1950s in relation to People’s Republic of China narratives. Significantly, contradominant periodization of guiqiao, the phrase guiqiao was used to refer to BurmaChinese in the 1940s from a variety of political positions.




Chris Vasantkumar has raised these issues with respect to theambiguous place of Tibetan and other minorities in the constructionof overseas Chinese as a legible category. He suggests that: ‘[i]norder to properly understand the intimate relationship between nationand transnational forms of community in the contemporary People’sRepublic of China, we must begin to reconcile ethnic and nationalunderstandings of Chinese-ness’.5 Vasantkumar draws upon RebeccaKarl’s insights into the relations of interiority between articulationsof Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century,deterritorialization, and globally inflected conceptual frameworks.6

My analysis of Burma Returned Overseas Chinese similarlyconsiders the global stage upon which the deterritorialization of‘home’ and reterritorialization of race and ethnicity occurred forthose families from Fujian residing in Burma in the 1930s–1940s.Many of these families went to Burma in the 1910s to pursueeconomic opportunities. With Japanese military expansion acrossAsia, wartime migration ensued and Chinese residents of Rangoonexperienced forced migration to the interior of Burma, to India,and to China. Their lived experiences of a deterritorialized homeoccurred within overlapping colonial, nation-state, and internationalnorms that regulated the movement of peoples. These norms andregulations took form through everyday iterations and practicesthat mapped ethnic and racial genealogies to specific migrationroutes. The result was a reterritorialization of ethnicity and racethat assumed a normalized form. Through analysis of a series ofmoments in which questions about the evacuee or refugee statusof individuals identified as Burma Chinese (or Chinese Burmese)were resolved through discursive reterritorialization, this articletraces out the racial logic at work in documenting, regulating, andmaking sense of the migration of Chinese residents of Yangon inthe 1930s and 1940s. By investigating how bureaucratic practicesproduce categories of identity as well as naturalize discourses andpractices of territorialization, this article seeks to do more than simplyrecognize institutionalized inclusions and exclusions enacted throughstate-sanctioned practices concerning refugees and evacuees. It

5 Chris Vasantkumar, ‘What is this “Chinese” in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Workand the Place of China’s Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness’,Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 71 No. 2 (May), 2012, pp. 423–446.

6 Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).




encourages recognition of the power inherent in everyday practices ofdeterritorialization/reterritorialization. I thus aim to move us towardsa radical deterritorialization that unsettles the normalized racialand ethnic hierarchies at the foundation of combined colonial andpost-colonial, national and international norms concerning migration,refugees, and evacuees.

Creating categories of identity: �� Burma ReturnedOverseas Chinese

The poems and various other posts by Chen Zun with which I beganthis article are indicative of the complex signifiers of place, ethnicity,language, and common lived experience of those who identify as‘Burma Returned Overseas Chinese’ (��). Each of the Chinese-language characters in this phrase carry individual meanings andeach references specific trajectories of migration and experience thatcollectively establish a distinct category of identity.7 The combinedcategory seems to emerge out of a progressive narrowing of asubset of people based on migration routes, languages spoken, andpersonal experiences. In this way, Burma Returned Overseas Chineseappear as a group of people who inhabit the space of intersectionin a Venn diagram with four circles, each of which represents‘Burma’, ‘Returned’, ‘Overseas’, and ‘Chinese’. This article sets outto study Burma Returned Overseas Chinese not from the point(s) ofintersection, however. I argue that Burma Returned Overseas Chineseemerge as a category not because some people inhabit a site of overlapbetween four recognized groups. Rather, Burma Returned OverseasChinese is a category rooted in conceptual, practical, and legal anxietyover forced migration and the racial logic through which institutionsand individuals made sense of this forced migration.

Informed by recent scholarly work on diaspora, migration, andChineseness that interrogates rather than assumes the subject ofanalysis, I examine the historical processes through which BurmaChinese, Overseas Chinese, and Returned Chinese are formed,

7 In this case� stands in for�� and thereby folds the ethnic/racial signifier intothe territorial term. Other scholars have analysed the terminology of huaqiao so I donot address it here, except to note that the phrasing�� supports the analysisin this article about naturalization through the disappearance of ‘Chinese’. In theracialized order of return migration to China, Chineseness is assumed so that� (asshorthand for China) does not need to be stated.




articulated, documented, experienced, and governed.8 To do thisentails analysing the ways in which specific institutional andinstitutionalized practices occasioned by 1940s wartime migrationproduced Burma, Returned, Overseas, and Chinese in ways thatrendered recognizable ‘Burma Returned Overseas Chinese’ as acategory (in the 1940s as well as the present day). The practicesof documentation play a key role in the process. Reading bureaucraticdocumentation produced in relation to wartime migration of BurmaChinese in different geopolitical locations allows us to see a sharedracial logic of territorialization, and the ways in which practices basedin racial territorial logic migrated alongside the people in question.The sub-category of Burma Chinese utilized in the governanceof forced migration and ‘return’ required making legible throughdocumentation and everyday reiteration specific usages of evacuees,refugee, returnees, and wartime flight.

The possibility of existence: the question of a Chinese evacueecamp at Bhamo

The Japanese military occupation of large areas of East and SoutheastAsia from 1937 to 1945, followed by the defeat of the Japanesethrough the combined efforts of anti-Japanese resistance in Chinain the Pacific War and American- and British-led efforts in the China-Burma-India Theater of the Second World War,9 resulted in extensiveforced migration between Burma, China, and India. In 1945 returnmigration, repatriation, and moving home were practices commonly

8 Glen Peterson, China and the Overseas Chinese (London and New York: Routledge,2011); Elena Barabantseva, ‘Who are the “Overseas Chinese Ethnic Minorities?”China’s Search for Transnational Ethnic Unity’, Modern China Vol. 38 No. 1 (January),2012, pp. 78–109.

9 The naming of the war for the purposes of this article is also an issue forconsideration. The China-Burma-India Theater prioritizes experiences and territorialframeworks derived from British colonial, Guomindang, and American geopoliticalperspectives, as well as temporal designations related to these war efforts. For Chineseresidents in Burma, equally important is the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance foughtwithin China, with its distinct dates, experiences, and narratives. Because this articleargues that racial logic increasingly inscribed Chinese residents of Burma into theterritorial spaces of mainland China, thus moving them from one framing of the warto another, we should also approach the terms conventionally used to refer to thewar years in the region as part of the larger processes explored in this article andtherefore also worth critical examination rather than simple reiteration as descriptivecategories.




referred to in personal letters, government documents, and the recordsof refugee and other organizations. The confusion that resulted whenthe location and movement of specific people did not conform tothe expectations of governing bodies sheds light on how certainconstellations of terms acquired saliency over others.

In December 1947 a local colonial official in a city located nearthe Chinese-Burma border—Bhamo—consistently complained to thehead office about the lack of an immigration office in that city.10

Aung Gain, the deputy commissioner at Bhamo, pointed out thatBhamo was a customs station without an immigration department.He argued that surely immigration was as important as customs; and,in the event that no immigration department was established, hewarned that the Chinese would use the route into Burma to theiradvantage. Aung Gain further reiterated the difficulties posed forregulating Chinese migration from Yunnan province when the policewere expected, on top of their other duties, also to control immigration.Less than two months later, on 13 February 1948, the Governmentof Burma declared Bhamo (and a number of other towns along theBhamo-Lashio Road) as land stations.11 Once categorized as ‘landstations’ these towns could then have immigration offices.

The letter written by Aung Gain in December 1947 occasioned aseries of responses that wove together key phrases in a complicatedweb of terminology of inclusion and exclusion. These terms included:evacuees, Chinese nationals, skilled workers, seasonal labour,machinery of diplomatic intercourse, geographic interdependence,and land station.12 The specific concerns of British colonial officialswere: (a) to distinguish legal from illegal Chinese nationals inBurma, and (b) to stop illegal entry in a way that would notupset friendly relations between the bordering countries. While thecorrespondence did not categorically exclude Chinese from havinga legitimate presence in Burma, Aung Gain’s tone and phrasingpresents Chinese migration as demanding of scrutiny and regulation.His comments drew upon the complicated regulation of Chineseimmigration to Burma, beginning with policies established in 1937,

10 Accession No. 264, File No. 48, Office of the Deputy Commissioner Bhamo.Subject: Chinese Immigrants and Immigration of Foreigners, pp. 1–2, NationalArchives of Myanmar.

11 To Deputy Secretary, Government of Burma, Foreign Affairs, Rangoon. Dated 13February 1948. Accession No. 264, File No. 48, p. 15, National Archives of Myanmar.

12 Accession No. 264, File No. 48, especially pp. 1–15, National Archives ofMyanmar.




as well as wartime cooperation between Great Britain, China, andthe United States along the Burma Road(s).13 Notably absent inthe written correspondence involving Aung Gain in 1947 is anydiscussion of what constituted Chinese in this context. The category‘Chinese’ appeared frequently but those documenting evacueesand cross-borders movement did not pause to ask who inhabitedthis category and the criteria used. The use of ‘Chinese’ as acategory for enumerating the wartime migrants, including BurmaChinese who had fled to India or the Republic of China, reiteratedinternalized racialized orders with specific genealogies. In this way thedocumentary practices reterritorialized racial and ethnic difference inorder to make legible deterritorialized existence.

On the one hand, recognition by the deputy commissioner ofBhamo of the interdependence between customs offices (concernedwith the movement of goods) and immigration offices (concernedwith the movement of people) deterritorialized economic practicesand citizenship. That is, each recognized the simple fact that goodsand people regularly moved across borders and that this movementhighlighted the arbitrary and porous nature of the borders. On theother hand, the radical implications of this point were foreclosed by ageneral post-war insistence on distinguishing bona fide migration fromopportunistic migration. That is, bureaucrats enforced an a priorilegitimacy of the border, even as they encountered instances thathighlighted the historical contingency of the border. As the ensuinganalysis demonstrates, in the post-Second World War moment ofarticulation of a new world order based on liberalism (that is, one thatpresumably countered the racial orders of fascism and colonialism),it was easier to speak of territory rather than race. In this context,documentary regimes, bureaucratic practice, and increasingly precisedefinitions of ‘refugee’ and ‘evacuee’ were often premised upon anelision of race as the muted category through which borders andmigration were being understood. The resulting international normsaround ‘return’ were thus based upon an unspoken but foundationalracialized embodiment. The contributors to these norms and theracialized logic include British colonial officers in Burma and India,refugee camp and relief organization workers in India and Xiamen,

13 Tina Mai Chen, ‘The Burma-China Road as Orientalist Intersection: An Analysisof Conceptualizations of the Road in Relation to Immigration Controls on ChineseResidents of Burma, 1937–47’, Unpublished paper delivered at the Orientalism atWar conference, Oxford University, 15–17 June 2010.




border officials, and those who populated the category of BurmaChinese.

In the context of Bhamo and the China-Burma border, the rightof Chinese to be present in Burma and the status accorded to themhinged on the historical moment(s) of original migration and theensuing documentation carried by the individuals. Complicationsarose because restrictions on land entry did not exist prior to the1941 Burma Passport Rules. As a result, Chinese could reside in andtravel to Burma without restriction. This meant that failure to producedocuments in 1947 did not necessarily indicate illegal entry intoBurma. It did affect, however, whether or not those Burma Chinesewho had fled Burma during the war were likely to be consideredbona fide evacuees or wartime refugees. Moreover, the legibility ofChinese as evacuees and refugees with ties to Burma rested uponcomparable/comparative cases of others desiring to return to Burmaafter the war.

As part of the exchange regarding the status of Bhamo andregulation of cross-border movement of peoples, on 29 December1947 the deputy commissioner of Bhamo, Aung Gain, received thefollowing anxiously worded inquiry:

I beg to report that I have made inquiry about the evacuee camps at Bhamofrom the Chinese as well as Burmans, and none of them know anythingabout the existence of evacuee camp. Chinese elder U Yu Hoe gave methe information that the Chinese are going to make joshouse area a Chineserefugees camp in future and the site is now under clearance to build buildings.Submitted for favour of information.14

This inquiry occasioned a handwritten response and draft telegram.The conceptual framing of evacuees and refugees evident in bothresponses is worth reflection. The handwritten response dated30 December 1947 states: ‘There is no evacuee camp in Bhamo—Chinese come in and go away. What exactly evacuee camp is meantis foreign to me.’ The logic of this reply is that an evacuee campcould only exist if there were restrictions on the movement of Chineseand related records of cross-border movement. A condition of beingan evacuee, it seems, entails controlled movement across bordersrather than fleeing a place of residence because of war conditions.The draft telegram dated 31 December further refined the initial

14 Accession No. 264, File No. 48, Office of the Deputy Commissioner Bhamo.Subject: Chinese Immigrants and Immigration of Foreigners, National Archives ofMyanmar.




response, while simultaneously inserting expanded criteria for theexistence of an evacuee camp which could even be investigated. Itstated: ‘There no evacuee camp exists in Bhamo. Seasonal Chineseimmigrants come in and go away without valid passports or identitypapers.’ Here, the conditions for the existence of an evacuee campassociated with Chinese in Bhamo rested upon whether or not thoseChinese crossing the border required passports or identity papers, andif non-seasonal immigrants were present. Notably, neither responseassumed the need to go to the specified area to see if Chinese wereliving there in what could be described as an evacuee or refugee camp,nor to consult with ‘Chinese elder U Yu Hoe’ about his observation.15

The condition of fleeing Burma as a result of Japanese occupation didnot appear in this exchange as relevant to the question of whether ornot Chinese were gathering as evacuees. That is, were there Chinesein Bhamo living in a specific location as a group of people who had leftthe country because of the war and now sought to return to their pre-war places of residence? Instead of asking this question, Aung Gainand other officials associated with the Government of Burma werepreoccupied with the possibility of existence of a Chinese evacuee campin Bhamo. The understanding of ‘evacuee’ mobilized in their exchangemeant dismissing the question about the existence of an evacueecamp populated by Chinese within Burma. Evacuees, in this instance,would be those known to officials through a process of documentationthat classified them as evacuees. Chinese who entered Burma by landwithout documentation in the post-war period and evacuees were thusconstrued as mutually exclusive categories.

This brief exchange appears to foreclose the possibility that Chineseevacuees existed in Bhamo in 1947. Yet it sits uneasily alongside thedocumentation of Chinese crossing from Burma to China by land atthe Yunnan border during the war years. A survey of hundreds ofextant exit/entry forms from the period 1942–194616 indicates thatthe large majority of Chinese leaving Burma during these years didso with the explicitly stated reasons of:�� (fleeing hardship),��(war) or the occupation of Rangoon by the Japanese. The repetition ofthese specific phrases indicates a shared recognition of the legitimacy

15 Notably the ‘Chinese elder’ referred to has a Burmese name and honorific, thussignifying a relation of interiority to Burma.

16 Many thanks to Nick Simon who provided research assistance with these files atthe Yunnan Provincial archives.




of their status as evacuees both by those seeking refuge in Chinaduring the war and by border officials.

As I have analysed elsewhere, once these individuals crossed theBurma-China border and established a physical presence withinthe nation-state borders of the Republic of China, their migrationtrajectory shifted the recognized categories that these individualscould inhabit.17 The success of Sun Yat-sen and others in constitutingthe Chinese diaspora as �� /overseas Chinese, with an ethnicand racial identity rooted in the territorial space of the Republicof China,18 existed alongside international norms about territory,national sovereignty, and domestic governance.

Entry/exit forms further constructed the act of moving across theBurma-China border as one of ‘return’ for those with ancestors inChina. This occurred by instantly inscribing the migration into thetemporal narrative of the Republic of China through the dating ofthe founding of the Republic of China as year 1 (as opposed to thecalendar system used within British-ruled Burma). Moreover, whileanswers for place of birth on the forms varied (including differentlocations in China, Burma, Vietnam, Fiji, and Hong Kong), detailswere recorded in terms of �� (return to country/home). Thisincluded requests for the date one left the country (��)—aspace left blank by many born outside the borders of the Republicof China; date of return (��); accompanying family memberswhen leaving the country and returning; and the reasons for leaving(��) and returning (��). As such, despite occasionalpleas from China-based consular offices which indicated that someChinese from Burma understood themselves as displaced evacuees inwartime China, movement into China enacted an erasure of evacueestatus by cataloguing the migration in terms of ‘return’. This erasureof evacuee status rested upon specific modes of reterritorializationand shared racial logic about the border by British colonial officials,Republic of China government forms, and border agents.

17 Tina Mai Chen, ‘Asian Boundaries, Documentary Regimes, and the PoliticalEconomy of the Personal’, positions: asia critique Vol. 20 No. 1, 2012, pp. 179–207.

18 State policies and infrastructure devoted to the overseas Chinese is also part ofcompeting claims to legitimacy and authority between the Guomindang/Republic ofChina and Chinese Communist Party/People’s Republic of China. See C. Y. Chang,‘Overseas Chinese in China’s Policy’, The China Quarterly No. 82 (June), 1980, pp. 281–303.




The visibility of evacuees: a view from the India-Burma border

An exchange which transpired in 1948 between the Burmese Embassyin Karachi and Burma Immigration and Control provides furthercontextualization of the racial logic that gave meaning to evacueesin Burma. The specific issue for the Burmese Embassy in Karachiconcerned those residents of Burma who had spent the war yearsin India and who found their movement affected because of thepartition of India and Pakistan.19 They inquired into action thatshould be taken to assist between 20 and 25 individuals who lackedthe documents necessary for repatriation because they were en routeat the time of Partition. Caught between systems of documentationprior to Partition and current practices, as well as physically distantfrom offices authorized to issue passports, these individuals existed asdeterritorialized individuals unable to move on.

This particular case was solved through a pragmatic approachthat, in part, rested upon limiting the solution to the very smallnumber of individuals (20 to 25) identified by the Pakistangovernment. Underlying the pragmatism, however, was a palpableanxiety over creating precedents that could enable migrationwithout documentation. Documentation, it seems, gained heightenedimportance as the lack of fixity and arbitrariness of citizenship andidentity status became more evident every day. In the case of thosewho had left Burma for India as a result of war, most had been issuedwith Burma Evacuee Identity Cards. But there still existed some wholacked the required documentation. Similar to the case of Chineseentering Burma via Bhamo, colonial officials acknowledged that theabsence of documentation could reflect historical and/or contemporaryconditions of migration and was not, in itself, evidence of illegalpresence in a country or of false claims to return to Burma. Thisrecognition, however, only made them more anxious to devise ways toconfirm proper territorial claims by individuals on the move.

For colonial officials there existed an urgent need to resolve thestatus of groups of people ‘moving home’, given the uncertaintyassociated with the independence and partition of India, as wellas that of Burma. The changes from colonial rule to independentnation-states in India and Burma existed alongside the institutional

19 File No. 239 FMB48, Accession 2265 (paper file; also available in Microfilm asAccession No. 27). Dated 27 April 1948. From Burma Embassy, Karachi. NationalArchives of Myanmar.




replacement of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency bythe International Refugee Organization. The sense of urgency evidentin colonial office documentation thus was often matched by thatof UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency employees, who sought towrap up details prior to the closure of local offices in 1947 andthe pending termination of funding and closure of refugee camps.The unsettled conditions in Burma and India also included: (a) therecently concluded linked wars in the Pacific, the China-Burma-IndiaTheater, and East Asia; as well as (b) the emerging civil war inChina between the Guomindang and Chinese Communist Party thatsaw Guomindang soldiers taking up positions in Burma.20 All of thiscreated anxiety over migration, citizenship, and legal categories ofbelonging at the individual, institutional, national, and internationallevels. Those working in fields related to migration, refugees, andevacuees tended to make sense of the complicated dynamics thatcompelled people to move across the borders between Burma, China,and India by mobilizing self-referential definitions of evacuees andrefugees. These definitions redirected discussion of migration awayfrom conceptual frameworks that might allow for an alternativeframing of borders rooted in radical deterritorialization. Instead, theirwork in the exigency of the moment reiterated territorialized raciallogic as common sense.

In the case of the Burmese Embassy in Karachi, guidance on howto deal with the 20 to 25 individuals discussed above was provided byclarifying the definition of an evacuee. In March 1948 the followingdefinition was circulated: ‘An evacuee for the purpose of this scheme maybe defined as any person who was obliged to leave Burma as a resultof the war and subsequent Japanese occupation of that country; andany person who was resident in Burma and had left that country priorto the declaration of hostilities and would have returned to Burma ifit had not been for the war and the consequent Japanese occupationof that country.’21

While this definition omits any specific reference to race or ethnicityin defining an evacuee, the practices associated with documenting

20 Charges of misappropriation directed at the Chinese Relief and RehabilitationAgency were also part of the institutional context of aid to Chinese refugees and arerelated to how organizational structures and practices created ‘Chineseness’ at thishistorical moment.

21 Letter dated 27 April 1948 from U Zaw Win, First Secretary, Burmese Embassy,Karachi to Secretary, Min. of Foreign Affairs, Gov’t of Burma, p. 25. National Archivesof Myanmar. Emphasis in original.




evacuees made race and ethnicity a key factor. Enumeration as anevacuee could occur through various routes. One could be enumeratedin the Census of Evacuees in 1943 and/or have received aid asan evacuee. In these cases, no further action was usually requiredto support additional requests for aid and repatriation as evacueesbecause these individuals appeared in the paperwork as ‘evacuees’.For those whose forced migration took place at a different time oralong a route not included in the 1943 enumeration, individuals in‘important’ official or non-official positions were able to vouch forthe person or ‘put intelligent questions to the individual’ to determineprior connection to Burma and therefore bona fide evacuee status. But,as already discussed, existing state borders and their regulation meantthat evacuee status defined and practised in this way applied only tothose Chinese residents of Burma who, when fleeing from Burma,made their way directly to India rather than to China. Burma EvacueeIdentification Cards were part of the colonial governance of wartimemigration, not a generalized condition, nor were they generally issuedto those who came to India via China.

Chinese residents of Burma who went to India, either directly or viaChina, were generally enumerated as evacuees only if the financial andpersonal conditions of wartime flight placed them in refugee camps,or they were otherwise associated with the British government andtherefore part of the British evacuee camps.22 For most Chinese fleeingoverland to India, the camps established along the Burma-India borderimmediately distinguished Indian from non-Indian evacuees. Muchlike the documentation practices at the China-Burma border withrespect to Chinese ‘returning home’, this practice naturalized racialand ethnic difference along territorial lines. Those (self) identified asIndians, regardless of place of birth, had a distinct place within India,even though until 1937 Burma had been governed as a province ofIndia within the structure of the British empire.

Distinctions between Indians and non-Indians were often done forpragmatic economic reasons and reflected the accepted territorialjurisdictions of governments. But these racial and ethnic categories

22 In the case of the British evacuee camps, British Chinese appear as a separatecategory. It is unclear if these people were primarily Chinese with British citizenshipfrom Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. or if those enumerated included Chinese residentsof Burma who held British citizenship. From Office on Special Duty, Government ofIndia, Home Department, New Delhi, to Secretary of State of India, Home Dept, NewDelhi, 13 September 1943. ‘Maintenance of Evacuees Accommodated in India’. IndiaOffice Records (IOR) M/3/1258/B257/42 (British Library).




also reinforced the borders through the application of racial logic.23

Cost allocations for refugees were assigned by enumerating individualsaccording to ethnic or racial categories, maintaining charts withexpenditures on each group, and pressing governments to takeresponsibility for these costs. As a result, even though officials beganarrangements for the four lakhs24 of Indian evacuees from Burmato ‘return home’ at the conclusion of the war, the Government ofIndia took responsibility for the cost of lodging, maintenance, medicaltreatment, education of children, and all personal expenses of theseevacuees.25 No evidence of prior connection to India was requestednor discussed for this arrangement to take place. The responsibilityof the Government of India for those designated as Indian was notchallenged and was given common-sense standing. Yet, the verycategories deployed and their territorial designations clearly restedupon assumptions about racial and ethnic affinity and homogenizationof difference between those designated as Indian.

Examination of the records further shows that the conflationof territorialized nationality with ethnicity and race shaped theexperiences of forced migration of non-Indian evacuees. For example,in January 1947 the principal refugee officer reported to the secretaryof state for India on expenditures at the Assam refugee camp onso-called ‘non-Indian’ evacuees.26 The Assam camp was populatedby those fleeing Burma by land so, if a purely territorial logic wasutilized, these individuals would all have been categorized as non-Indian because they came from a space outside the physical border ofIndia. But the territorial discourse invoked in practices of enumeratingrefugees and evacuees is marked by the continuous reiteration ofracial and ethnic identities to territorial space. The Assam camp,

23 Racial logic is, of course, intrinsic to British colonial governance. The importantpoint in this article is that: (a) racialized logic requires constant reiteration and thusseemingly common-sense bureaucratic iterations are historically significant; and (b)in the linked processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization associated withwartime migration, racial logic continued to be central to the post-war order even asrace as a determination of citizenship was being delegitimated by ideologies mobilizedby Germany and Japan.

24 A lakh is a unit in South Asian counting equal to 100,000.25 B/P&G, 1946, dated 24 June 1947. Letter from Gilchrist. IOR M/3/1258/

B257/42 (British Library).26 POL 6376/47. Government of India, Dept. of Commonwealth Relations, New

Delhi, 22 January 1947. To: HM Under Secretary of State for India. Signed M.Nagar (for Principal Refugee Officer). ‘Expenditure incurred in Assam on Non-Indianevacuees’. IOR M/3/1258/B257/42 (British Library).




maintained by the Burma Refugee Organisation, listed the followingcategories of people: Chinese, Iranese, Gurkhas, Armenians, andWest Africans. A note below the enumeration of individuals and costsstated the following: ‘number of Gurkhas of full Nepalese nationalityinconsiderable and so therefore feel this should all go to Governmentof Burma’.27 In other correspondence, the Government of India wasinstructed to seek reimbursement for costs associated with Chineseand Iranian nationals from the governments of China and Iran.

Arrival at a camp such as this one at Assam thus implicatedindividuals in a practice of racialized territorialization, even if theterritory to which one was being ascribed did not exist as a nation-state(that is, West Africa), or if one’s presence required acknowledgementof the arbitrariness of such allocations (such as, the category ofGurkhas). In the case of Chinese who entered India by land andwere resident in this camp at Assam, once they were categorizedin this manner, further records do not exist that indicate any effortwas made to identify individualized migration trajectories or places ofidentification. It should be noted that individuals identified as Chineseat the Assam camp generally came to India directly overland fromBurma. But, at least based on records produced by the refugee andevacuee camps, whether or not any of the individuals had personalor family ties to China in their lifetimes remains unknown because itwas never considered an issue in either categorization or billing. Thatis, the 394 Chinese evacuees who arrived in 1943–44 were addedto the 72 evacuees who arrived in 1944–45 and the additional twoevacuees who arrived in 1945–46, for an allocated amount of Rs.83,988 to be billed to the government of China. Negotiations for thesepayments could be protracted but what is of interest for the purposesof this article is that governments generally accepted the racial logicunderpinning the financial obligations associated with evacuees. Inother words, they paid the bills.28

For the Chinese government, the notion of an extended familialconnection strengthened by financial contributions was integral tothe structure of the Guomindang, the establishment of the Republicof China, overseas Chinese bureaus, and the continual process ofarticulation of their interconnection. As such, the racial logic of

27 Ibid.28 The payment of bills can also be interpreted as claiming people as part of a

geopolitical strategy in the post-Second World War period. I thank Meredith Oyenfor this point, based on her research on American payment of refugee bills.




refugee economics resonated with other contemporary practices.Neither representatives of the Chinese state nor those involved inthe functioning of evacuee camps along the India-Burma borderwere troubled by the norms of nationality that emerged out ofthese specific practices. Yet, even as evacuees and refugees assumedspecific relations of interiority and exteriority to emerging territorialunits, the everyday lives of Chinese moving across the Burma-China-India borders in the 1940s made these relations ones of constantarticulation and rearticulation. Individuals and groups participated inproducing divergent discursive, institutional, and personal notions of‘home’ and ‘return’. Yet, a naturalized logic of racial territorializationunderpinned the broader framework through which forced migrationand return was understood.

Refugees and return: the case of Xiamen

A return to Xiamen now allows us to consider additional cases ofapparently divergent understandings of return which allow furtheranalysis of how racial logic associated with nation-state boundariesassumed normative hegemonic status. We can identify at least twoexpressions of return operating in Xiamen with respect to BurmaChinese in Xiamen in the 1940s. On the one hand, some whoidentified as Chinese sought the assistance of international refugeeorganizations in Xiamen to return to Burma. On the other hand, thenotion of Burma Chinese returning to China comes into circulation.29

The latter is the migration trajectory embodied by Chen Zun andthose who identify with Burma Returned Overseas Chinese as acategory of identity and who, four decades later, are associated withBurma Returned Overseas Chinese as an institutionalized group.Significantly, the divergent trajectories of return, with one seeingBurma as the place of return, and the other, China as the place of

29 When one meets with the Burma Returned Overseas Chinese in Xiamen today,they interweave into one narrative the idea of ‘returned Chinese’ from the 1940s withthose who returned in the 1950s and later. Given the political dimensions of these twoperiods, this narrative of return that bridges 1949 will be analysed in another article.On the People’s Republic of China’s 1950s policy, see: Glenn Peterson, ‘SocialistChina and the Huaqiao: The Transition to Socialism in the Overseas Chinese Areasof Rural Guangdong, 1949–1956’, Modern China Vol. 14 No. 3, 1988, pp. 309–335;also Michael R. Godley, ‘The Sojourners: Returned Overseas Chinese in the People’sRepublic of China’, Pacific Affairs Vol. 62 No. 3 (Autumn), 1989, pp. 302–306.




return, share the broader racial logic articulated from other locations,as examined in the previous sections of this article.

The correspondence in 1947–48 between the Far East, Amoy Sub-Office of the UN International Refugee Organization, the XiamenMayor’s Office, and the Overseas Affairs Office in Amoy providesanother angle from which we can examine how Burmese, Chinese,Overseas, and Return acquired meaning in relation to each other,and to practices of wartime migration. It also allows us to seehow the racial logic operating in British colonial offices and ‘on-the-ground’ at Assam and the Yunnan-Burma border, finds similarexpression in another context that involves distinct bureaucratic units.Correspondence between the Overseas Chinese offices of the Republicof China, UN International Refugee Organization branch offices, andthe local Xiamen government in 1947 is preoccupied with three issues:first, producing lists of Burmese-Chinese refugees in Xiamen; second,establishing and enforcing institutional parameters for provision of aidto these refugees; third, maintaining accurate financial records of costsassociated with services for these refugees. Informed by the precedinganalysis of moments of bureaucratization of forced migration, wecan also consider the extent to which, in this correspondence, thereterritorialization of those identified as Chinese within the borders ofthe Republic of China created a discursive framework that constituted‘Chinese’ as mutually exclusive from evacuees and/or refugees. Thefirst section of this article argued that this type of logic made theexistence of a Chinese evacuee camp in Bhamo illegible. Yet, Chineserefugees and evacuees did exist in camps on the Indian border (asdiscussed in the second part of this article) and within Chinese citiessuch as Xiamen.

Importantly, the physical existence of refugees did not radicallychallenge the racial logic traced out in the first and second partsof this article. Rather, their existence occasioned a refining of thislogic. In Xiamen, Commissioner Lu Ching Hsien of the local OverseasAffairs Office corresponded regularly with the International RefugeeOrganization in 1947–48. This included submitting a master roll ofBurma Chinese (and supplementary lists of names, as necessary) inorder to expedite aid to this group of people.30 Requests includedmedical supplies, food, and clothing for the cold weather. The sourceof aid and the question of who would make the provisions available

30 Xiamen Municipal Archives, Fond A21, Index 1; File 45. Subnumber 11, 12, 13.




demonstrate the ways in which bureaucratic jurisdiction createdspecific relationships between Burma Chinese, overseas, refugees, andreturn.

With access to a relief fund of 0.5 billion yuan for the approximately2,000 Burma Chinese awaiting return to Burma, the Amoy OverseasAffairs Office became the main point of contact between BurmaChinese and other institutions.31 It was the office to which individualChinese and their families appealed for aid, particularly whenthey believed they had been mistreated by the government or bythe Japanese or British during the course of the war. Why reliefprovided to this group would fall to the Overseas Affairs Officerather than to the UN International Refugee Organization pointsto the ways in which race and ethnicity, territory, and governmentstructures are mapped onto each other. By making this group theresponsibility of the Overseas Affairs Office, the bureaucratic ordersimultaneously placed Burma Chinese under the jurisdiction of thegovernment of the Republic of China, while making this jurisdictioncontingent on places of residence outside the borders of the Republicof China. This jurisdictional authority, interestingly, rests upon racialterritorialization of nation-states in ways that naturalize affiliationsforged through deterritorialized lives. These are processes furthercomplicated by the involvement of international organizations inregulating and documenting wartime migration and return.

All efforts at the repatriation of Burma Chinese in Xiamen requiredcoordination with the UN International Refugee Organization’sbranch office in Amoy. This arrangement indicates the limits ofthe Overseas Affairs Office to regulate and facilitate cross-bordermovement. Moreover, the individuals and families in question wereclearly enumerated in lists of evacuees and refugees through a systemthat authorized their bona fide claims processed by a representativeof the International Refugee Organization sent from Burma onbehalf of the Organization.32 Yet, the Amoy branch office of the UNInternational Refugee Organization made it clear to the OverseasAffairs Office that it was not the responsibility of the UN InternationalRefugee Organization to take care of these refugees when they were

31 Xiamen Municipal Archives, Fond A21, Index 1; File 45. Subnumber 0036–37,No. 827. Lu Ching Hsien letter dated 9 July 1948.

32 See Chen, ‘Asian Boundaries’.




in China. It was only because of the specifics of the situation that theUN International Refugee Organization would be offering aid.33

The jurisdictional arrangements constantly reiterated in theprovision of aid for Burma Chinese while resident in Xiamendemonstrate the racial territorialization of those Burma Chinesewho were recognized as being displaced from home. They were theresponsibility of the Chinese state, not international organizations.Moreover, despite the availability of what appears to be a large sumof money, the high rate of inflation in the late 1940s required theOverseas Affairs Office to make constant requests for support. Inthese requests, the multi-regional and transnational dimensions of theracial logic appear. As commissioner of the Overseas Affairs Officein Xiamen, Lu Ching Hsien requested aid for medical supplies forBurma Chinese from the Zhangzhou Overseas Chinese Hospital(��) and the Fujian Provincial Health Service.34 Lu ChingHsien sought assistance from the main Chinese Overseas AffairsCommission to send a request for aid to the United States China ReliefOrganisation, while he also personally penned a request.35 Finally, LuChing Hsien received appeals from the Overseas Chinese newspaperpublisher and president, Yang Wenrong (��), for aid, explainingthat this would be of benefit to Burma Chinese communities.36 Eachof these requests iterates affinity through racial and ethnic identity. Ineach case, the identity of (overseas) Chinese is given priority over thatof Burma as a place of home. The inscription of Burma Chinese intothe broader category of huaqiao (overseas Chinese) deterritorializedChineseness by privileging Chineseness as ethnic or racial marking.At the same time, wartime forced migration and the experiences ofrefugees and evacuees located huaqiao within institutional structuresand on-the-ground practices that conflated racial and ethnic categorieswith territorial units, such as China, Burma, and India. The tensionbetween deterritorialized existence and racial territorial logic thussits at the heart of naming ‘return’ of/for Burma Chinese.

33 Letter from UN International Refugee Organization, Far East, Amoy Sub-Officeto Overseas Affairs Office in Amoy, dated 26 October 1948. Xiamen MunicipalArchives, File 0075 No. 1251.

34 Xiamen Municipal Archives, Fond A21, Index 1; File 45. Subfiles 0020–21, 003,No. 442. Dated 23 April 1948.

35 Xiamen Municipal Archives, File 0104, No. 0107. Dated 27 May 1948; File 0109,No. 0111. No date.

36 Xiamen Municipal Archives, File 0012, No. 405. Dated 12 April 1948.




This tension is evident in an unexplained trace in the bureaucraticarchive of the Overseas Affairs Office. In addition to letters forassistance discussed above, the Overseas Affairs Office requestedthat the Commission for Aid to Burma Returned Overseas Chinese(��) forward details of the needs of theOverseas Affairs Office to the UN Xiamen office. The namingof the Commission suggests a project-specific mandate aimed atan identifiable sub-group of returned overseas Chinese—those whoarrived in China from Burma. The separation between the OverseasChinese Affairs Office and the Commission for Aid to Burma ReturnedOverseas Chinese is unclear, however. In some correspondence theOverseas Chinese Affairs office used the stationery of the Commissionfor Aid to Burma Returned Overseas.37 This indicates the possibility ofshared office space, and perhaps staff as well. The letterhead anomalydraws our attention to the difficulty of maintaining (or perhaps evenestablishing) a bureaucratic distinction between overseas affairs andthose of returned Chinese. That is because, in practice, once present inChina, those categorized as overseas Chinese were further categorizedas ‘returned’, thus binding into a single category Burma ReturnedOverseas Chinese. Here again, the racial logic of territorialization isat work, even as the main purpose of the Overseas Affairs Office withrespect to Burma Chinese, at this historical moment, was to provideaid to individuals while they awaited passage to Burma and to facilitatethis return to homes outside of the borders of China.

Conclusion

This article has examined, from multiple locations, the racial logicof territorialization that gave meaning to Burma Chinese in theperiod immediately after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 andthe withdrawal of Japanese troops from occupied territory in Asia.The analysis centres on documentation practices, as they relatedto evacuee and refugee status. In this way, I work through whatAristide Zolberg, in his study of the bureaucratic implications of

37 Xiamen Municipal Archives, File 0076, No. 1283. Dated 2 November 1948. Mythanks to Yilang Feng for drawing my attention to the stationery used and for hisresearch assistance on the Xiamen Municipal Archives files.




migration control, calls ‘the history of paperwork’.38 In drawing outthe shared racial logic of territorialization through which bureaucraticjurisdiction and the categorization of people for services was workedout, I aim to historicize the acts of utterance that suture race, ethnicity,and nation-states to each other. Looking at the paperwork from thisperspective encourages us to read the documents not as evidence of themicromanaging—and sometimes mismanaging—of forced migration.Rather, the paperwork produced in Bhamo, Rangoon, Yunnan, Assam,Karachi, and Xiamen is centrally important in ordering Chinesenessso that the deterritorialized realities of wartime migration of thoselabelled as Burma, Chinese, overseas, and/or evacuees did notdestabilize a shared racial logic of territorialization. This racial logicwas important for the British colonial order that was coming to anend, as well as for the nationalist sentiments expressed by a varietyof Chinese organizations. Moreover, despite post-Second World Warinternational rhetoric about the dangers of racial discourse, racialthinking was foundational to the practices and discourse of a post-war international refugee regime. The naturalized racial logic, as isevident from the analysis presented in this article, emerges out ofprocesses of constant rearticulation that must be interrogated if weare to move towards a radical deterritorialization of racialized bordersand hierarchies.

Looking at how Burma Returned Overseas Chinese emerged as arecognizable group across governance structures in the years after1945 helps us to make sense of the centrality of forced migrationand the Japanese occupation of Burma to the identities of BurmaChinese, whether resident in Xiamen, China or Burma. The complexweb of signifiers in Chen Zun’s blog with which I began this article arecomplemented by a shared awareness of personal loss encountered byindividuals in the Xiamen Burma Returned Overseas Organisationwho had family members killed during the war. These members are

38 This approach informs much of Zolberg’s work. See Aristide Zolberg, A Nationby Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 2008). Zolberg’s work has inspired other scholarship inthis vein. For example, Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting IndividualIdentity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001); Nancy L. Green and Francois Weil, (eds), Citizenship andThose who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation (Champaign: University ofIllinois Press, 2007). Also, David Cook Martin, ‘Rules, Red Tape, and Paperwork: TheArchaeology of State Control over Migrants’, Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 21 No.1, 2008, pp. 82–119.




well respected among the group,39 even as their personal experiencesplace them in a prior relationship to the category of Burma ReturnedOverseas Chinese than that which became institutionalized in the1950s in the People’s Republic of China, and which is the precursorfor the Xiamen Burma Returned Overseas Chinese Association thatChen Zun celebrated in his poem.

One could trace the shared identity across the historical momentsof Burma Returned Overseas Chinese to a Chinese CommunistParty narrative of struggle which includes the Anti-Japanese Warof Resistance as a key moment in the formation of the People’sRepublic of China as a nation-state and in the expression of Chinesenationalism. But the members of this Association make no expliciteffort to erase prior political associations, nor to address this specificissue. This, I suggest, is because of the mutual articulation of asimultaneously deterritorialized and territorialized racial logic that isat the foundation of an identity as Burma Returned Overseas Chinese.It is an identity that is constantly rearticulated in specific socio-political conditions—but the racial logic of territorialization throughwhich affinities are imagined is rarely challenged.

The experiences and campaigns in Burma in the 1930s and 1940sare often understood through the efforts of the Allied powers thatwere active in the China-Burma-India Theater, while the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance is confined to wartime experiencesof Chinese living within the borders of China. The very use ofthese distinctions during the war period, as well as by scholarsand institutions as explanatory categories, belies the intersectingand overlapping personal experiences of wartime migration betweenChina, Burma, and India. Not only did people move in and throughthese different war theatres, but the articulation of Chineseness toterritory through practices of bureaucratic management of evacueesand returnees in the late 1940s discursively placed Chinese residentsof Burma not only in the China-Burma-India Theater but also ina prior relationship with the geographic space of China (regardlessof their personal histories). This then allowed for different politicalentities, including the Guomindang and Chinese Communist Party,to take up (in contesting geopolitical directions) the racial logic ofterritorialization associated with Burma Returned Overseas Chinese.A racial logic becomes normative and binds together what, on

39 Interviews with group members in July 2011.




the surface, seem to be competing visions of ‘home’, ‘return’, andChineseness. The bureaucratic documents considered in this article,alongside the poems of Chen Zun, can be understood as modesof stabilizing deterritorialized experiences by tethering them toracialized territorial spaces that give meaning to Burma ReturnedOverseas Chinese as an institutional and personal category ofidentity. There is always an openness to deterritorialization andreterritorialization, but the logic and practices through which eachoccurs are fundamentally important for determining the extent towhich normative orders are reinforced or challenged. The analysisof Chinese wartime migration between Burma, China, and Indiaput forth in this article is one step towards providing necessaryhistorical contextualization for contemporary iterations of nationaland international norms. It does so in the spirit of opening up,rather than foreclosing, alternative possibilities for migration beyonda shared racial logic of territorialization.


chinese residents of burma as refugees, evacuees, and returnees

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