ABSTRACT
Hong Kong has had a long history of association with the Vietnamese asylum seekers. It began with the arrival of a Danish container ship ‘Clara Maersk’ on May 4, 1975, in Hong Kong. This container ship had an unusual cargo of 3,743 Vietnamese refugees who were rescued from the South China Seas. At a short notice camps were set up to house the refugees until they could be resettled abroad (this task was completed only by 1978). By then new asylum seekers began arriving in Hong Kong. The government’s declaration of ‘port of first asylum policy’ in 1979 solemnised the Colony’s initial flirtation and valour with the Vietnamese refugees. This was an open invitation to all Vietnamese seeking refugee status to use Hong Kong as a transit point for resettling in another country. This was an indirect result of USA and it’s allies’ futile war against Vietnam and their subsequent defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese army. This book traces the history of Vietnamese refugee issues in Hong Kong from its initial honeymoon period through various phases. The various stages includes the thawing of relations, chilled tolerance, irritation, separation, segregation, downright hostility, violence, and finally a ‘divorce’, scrapping the 19 year old ‘marriage’ with the first asylum policy for the Vietnamese refugees in 1998 by the Special Administrative Region (SAR) Government of Hong Kong. The core theme of this book is an analysis of the strategies adopted by the refugee managers to clear the so called ‘refugee problem’ in Hong Kong.
