ABSTRACT
Concerns over human security have long existed among countries in Asia, but the premises for protective measures towards human security may be distinct from a Western-centric agenda mooting freedom from want or fear (Suhrke, 1999). Human security started to feature prominently in international framings of human rights and dignity following a 1994 report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP, 1994). Proponents of human security have focused on two aspects of human vulnerability, namely that arising from underdevelopment or violence. Among them are scholars who argue that states should be responsible for human security, while others contend that states can, in fact, be perpetrators of unjust treatment, thus compromising their ability to take on a custodian role (Bellamy and McDonald, 2002). For the latter group of scholars, international systems of governance such as represented by the international refugee regimes or international humanitarian regimes are more suited to providing for human security. This approach is premised on an internationalist or cosmopolitan orientation towards humanity and notions of shared responsibility. This chapter argues that what we frame now as human security concerns already characterised China’s role as the protector of Chinese co-ethnics abroad during forced migration events in Asia, namely from Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam to China between 1949 and 1979. However, the premises of its intervention lies less on notions of freedom and is motivated rather by, first, the importance placed by China on what it saw as primordial ties with co-ethnics in the Chinese diaspora, and, second, pressing national concerns to regulate the unexpected mass arrival of co-ethnics to the ancestral homeland at that time.
