ABSTRACT

Beijing’s policy toward ethnic Chinese living outside of China, including the large population in Southeast Asia, was in shambles when the political

radicals began to fade from the scene in late 1976. Condemned as reactionaries or bourgeois-capitalists in one Cultural Revolution bombast after another, yet paradoxically and unsuccessfully urged to rebel against their new homelands, the ‘overseas Chinese’ were, in actual fact, largely ignored by the People’s Republic of China for ten years: one of the best things that could have happened in my opinion. Official attitudes began to change in late 1977, when the first serious efforts at damage control began and, with the four modernizations just underway, the anti-Sinitic outburst in Vietnam further underscored the need for a dramatic reassessment. Although China promised ‘to protect the interests of the Overseas Chinese and help those who return’ (as many as 300,000 as it turned out, quite likely including some refugees from Cambodia), the episode only served to demonstrate the practical limitations to such rhetoric (see Godley, 1980). The first refugees began to arrive just as more-moderate authorities were uncovering the full folly of the previous decade. Not only had Chinese with ‘foreign connections’ (hiaiwai guanxi) - either of overseas origins themselves or merely with relatives abroad - experienced terrible persecution losing positions, property and self respect (Godley, 1989a), their mistreatment threatened other reforms: most notably, the need to attract foreign investment and support.